Made in Wisconsin: Dungeons and Dragons!

Original D&D Set, 1974

Yes, you heard right! Mirabile dictu, the original Dungeons and Dragons game was created and published in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. 

Dungeons and Dragons was a collaboration between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc (TSR), a brand created by Gygax and friend Donald Kaye.

I have fond memories from my youth of playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends. This was back in the days when it was all in the air, so to speak, just words being spoken and multi-sided dice being thrown.

We would later get two different Dungeons and Dragons games for our Intellevision console and have hundreds of hours of fun with D&D as an audio-visual experience.

But the original game still has a charm that kids raised only on video games don't always understand.

"I take my +5 mace and hit the dragon," he says, rolling a twenty-sided die. 
 Classic...

Keith Massey was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He has his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Biblical Hebrew, with a minor in Arabic. After 9/11, he served as an Arabic linguist at the NSA. He is currently a Latin teacher at a public high school in New Jersey.

Keith is the author of Intermediate Arabic for Dummies. His fiction novels follow the adventures of Andrew Valquist, roughly patterned after himself--a man born and raised in Wisconsin who gets pulled into the world of international intrigue. 


Keith's novels are A Place of Brightness, Amor Vincit Omnia: An Andrew Valquist Adventure, Next Stop: Spanish, and In Saecula Saeculorum.