By the end of 1979, it was trading over 30,000 copies per month, and only going up from there. Right before the steam tunnel incident, the Basic Set might have sold 5,000 copies a month. And with that, sales of the Basic Set rose dramatically. In September, the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, who famously was believed to have become lost in the steam tunnels beneath a Michigan university, would suddenly catapult D&D to mainstream notoriety. But surprisingly, that legal case would not be the biggest D&D news of 1979. If anyone hoped this would alter Arneson’s calculus, it came too late: Arneson’s lawsuit would drop in February 1979. Carr had negotiated a 2% royalty on the $5.50 cover price of all copies of In Search of the Unknown sold, either in the Basic Set or sold separately. Now, he would instead be asking for money earmarked for his friend Mike Carr. Previously, when Arneson sought a 5% royalty on the whole contents of the Basic Set, he was effectively asking for money that was going into Gygax’s pocket. It was a good idea to target a module at beginning dungeon masters - but it also had clear implications for the legal situation. In it, adventurers would seek to learn the fate of Rogahn and Zelligar, powerful heroes of years past, and the vast treasure they supposedly squirreled away in the Caverns of Quasqueton. Carr volunteered to write In Search of the Unknown to help beginning players learn the ropes of D&D. Carr, an old friend of Arneson’s (and a player in his original Blackmoor campaign), had remained on staff after Arneson’s 1976 departure, and was now TSR’s general manager. His subsequent dispute over whether the Advanced D&D game was the same game as original D&D is more famous, but it was really just tacked on to his original complaints about the Basic Set.Īs Arneson’s lawsuit loomed, TSR made a very pointed substitution to the contents of the Basic Set: they rotated out the Dungeon Geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortment booklets, replacing them with Mike Carr’s In Search of the Unknown module. But it was enough for Arneson to seek legal recourse. TSR was still a small business back in 1977, and the Basic Set was only selling one or two thousand copies a month-the amount of money at stake wasn’t all that much. So effectively, Gygax was being paid something much closer to a 5% royalty on the $10 cover price of the Basic Set than Arneson was. And with that credit would come royalties. There was one wrinkle, though, which is that the Dungeon Geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortment then shipping in the Basic Set were credited to Arneson’s D&D co-author, Gary Gygax, who was President of TSR. TSR felt that the contract Arneson had signed for the “game or game rules called Dungeons & Dragons” applied only to the rules themselves. As TSR would argue, Arneson had never previously received royalties for dice sales, accessories, or supplements created by other people, and it was unclear what about packaging those things in a set with the D&D rules in a box suddenly entitled Arneson to a cut. The situation came to a head with the initial publication of the Basic Set in the summer of 1977: soon thereafter, Arneson learned that he was not being paid his expected 5% royalty on the $10 cover price of the whole Basic Set, but instead only on the copy of the Basic D&D rulebook that shipped in the box, which then sold separately for $5.Īt the time, the other items shipping in the Basic Set were a set of polyhedral dice, a few pages of dungeon “geomorph” tiles that could be quickly arranged into a suitable underground, and a slender booklet of pre-generated monster encounters for beginner dungeon levels. Ever since Arneson left the company late in 1976, he had repeatedly questioned whether he was being paid his fair share of the royalties for D&D, which he had co-authored back in 1974. The thing is, at the end of 1978, Dave Arneson was about to sue TSR, and TSR knew it. How that module came to be included in the Basic Set, and why would only stay there for a year, is an interesting story. It contained a lot of useful starting guidance on running an adventure that you wouldn’t find in the D&D books available at the time. Modules only started to become a business for TSR in the summer of 1978, and it would be just months later that the first copies of a Holmes D&D Basic Set would ship with a special introductory module: In Search of the Unknown (B1) by Mike Carr.
#Dungeons and dragons logo how to
Dungeon Masters can use these pre-designed adventures to run sessions without a lot of experience or preparation, and also learn from them how to design their own adventures. Photo: Jon Peterson From the Unknown to the BorderlandsĪdventure “modules” have long been an important way for new players to learn games like Dungeons & Dragons.