Although a small adventure entitled ' Temple of the Frog ' was included in the Blackmoor rules supplement in 1975, the first stand-alone D & D module published by TSR was 1978's Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, written by Gygax.

These were expanded by Gary Gygax, whose additions included a fantasy supplement, before the game was published as Chainmail.

Gygax maintained that he was influenced very little by The Lord of the Rings, stating that he included these elements as a marketing move to draw on the popularity of the work.

Ernest Gary Gygax ( ; July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008 ) was an American writer and game designer best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons ( D & D ) with Dave Arneson.

In 2005, Gygax was involved in the Castles & Crusades role-playing game, which was conceived as a hybrid between D & D's third edition and the original version of the game conceived by Gygax.

Gary Gygax was born in Chicago within a few blocks of Wrigley Field on July 27, 1938.

He was the son of Swiss immigrant and Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Ernst Gygax.

Gygax spent his early childhood in Chicago, but in 1946 ( after he was involved in a brawl with a large group of boys ), his father decided to move the family to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Gary's mother's family had settled in the early 19th century.

The Dragon debuted in June 1976, and Gygax commented on its success years later: " When I decided that The Strategic Review was not the right vehicle, hired Tim Kask as a magazine editor for Tactical Studies Rules, and named the new publication he was to produce The Dragon, I thought we would eventually have a great periodical to serve gaming enthusiasts worldwide ... At no time did I ever contemplate so great a success or so long a lifespan.

Barker was a Professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota during the period when David Arneson, Gary Gygax and a handful of others were developing the first role-playing games in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Before Saga of Old City was released in November 1985, Gygax wrote a sequel, Artifact of Evil.

Gygax then provided some errata for the boxed set in the September 1985 issue, which was the last mention of the Greyhawk world in Dragon for almost two years.

However, different visions of TSR's future caused a power struggle within the company, and Gygax was forced out of TSR on December 31, 1985.

However, this adventure was canceled after Gygax left TSR, and the catalog number WG7 was reassigned to a new adventure, Castle Greyhawk, released in 1988.

Written by Carl Sargent and Rik Rose, this was not the city created by Gygax and Kuntz, but a new plan built from references made in previously published material.

Although this was not the Castle Greyhawk of Gygax and Kuntz, it was the first serious attempt to publish details of the castle.

Although TSR and WotC had each in turn owned the official rights to the World of Greyhawk since the first folio edition was published in 1980, the two people most responsible for its early development, Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, still had most of their original notes regarding the fifty levels of dungeons under Castle Greyhawk.

Early that same year, Gygax published Chainmail, a miniatures wargame that simulated medieval-era tactical combat, which he had originally written with hobby-shop owner Jeff Perren.

In 1975, Gygax and Kaye were only 36 years old, and Kaye had not made any specific provision in his will regarding his one-third share of the company.

" Neither Gygax nor Blume had the money to buy the shares owned by Kaye's wife, and Blume persuaded Gygax to allow his father, Melvin Blume, to buy the shares and take Kaye's place as an equal partner.

In the December 1984 issue, Gygax mentioned clerics of non-human races and indicated that the twenty four demihuman and humanoid deities that had been published in the February – June 1982 issues of Dragon were now permitted in Greyhawk ; this increased the number of Greyhawk deities from fifty to seventy four.

Shortly after the release of the boxed set, Gygax discovered that while he had been in Hollywood, TSR had run into serious financial difficulties.

According to Gygax, TSR's stewardship turned Greyhawk into something very different from what he had envisioned.

Gygax's novel Saga of Old City, released in November 1985, and Artifact of Evil, released two months after Gygax's departure from TSR, proved to be popular titles, and in 1987, TSR hired Rose Estes to continue the series, albeit without Gord the Rogue, to whom Gygax had retained all rights.

In its 1986 Summer Mail Order Hobby Shop catalog, TSR had listed a new Greyhawk adventure called WG7 Shadowlords, a high-level adventure to be written by Gary Gygax and Skip Williams.

In the time since Gygax had left TSR, no original Greyhawk material had been published, and many letter writers had requested ideas for new adventures.

As Gygax had done ten years before, Sargent also used the pages of Dragon to promote his new world.

Gygax also had his old maps of the city of Greyhawk, and still owned the rights to Gord the Rogue.

Although Gygax had given glimpses into the dungeons in his magazine columns and articles, the dungeons themselves had never been released to the public.

This project proved to be much more work than Gygax and Kuntz had envisioned.

By the time Gygax and Kuntz had stopped working on the original home campaign, the castle dungeons had encompassed fifty levels of maze-like passages and thousands of rooms and traps.

However, neither Gygax nor Kuntz had kept careful or comprehensive plans.

For wizards, Gygax included six spells that could be used to affect a battle, plus two " missiles " ( fire ball and lightning bolt ).

However, in 2003, Gygax announced that he was working with Rob Kuntz to publish the original castle and city in six volumes, although the project would use the rules for Castles and Crusades rather than Dungeons & Dragons.

After fiddling with this structure for some time, Gygax decided ( as described in the same article in Dragon # 73 ) to change the structure from a tetrahedron to a cube in which four of the six faces were the " Inner Planes " described in the Players Handbook: Earth, Fire, Air, Water, and the Negative and Positive Material Planes.

* E. Gary Gygax

Dungeons & Dragons ( abbreviated as D & D or DnD ) is a fantasy role-playing game ( RPG ) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. ( TSR ).

Having partnered previously with Gygax on Don't Give Up the Ship !, Arneson introduced Gygax to his Blackmoor game and the two then collaborated on developing " The Fantasy Game ", the role-playing game ( RPG ) that became Dungeons & Dragons, with the final writing and preparation of the text being done by Gygax.

* Gygax, Gary.

* Gygax, Gary.

Gygax has been described as the father of Dungeons & Dragons.

In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention.

In 1977, Gygax began work on a more comprehensive version of the game, called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Gygax designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called " modules " that gave a person running a D & D game ( the " Dungeon Master ") a rough script and ideas on how to run a particular gaming scenario.

After leaving TSR in 1985 over issues with its new majority owner, Gygax continued to create role-playing game titles independently, beginning with the multi-genre Dangerous Journeys in 1992.

His interest in games, combined with an appreciation of history, eventually led Gygax to begin playing miniature war games in 1953 with his best friend Don Kaye.

As teenagers Gygax and Kaye designed their own miniatures rules for toy soldiers with a large collection of and figures, and they used " ladyfingers " ( small firecrackers ) to simulate explosions.

Gygax dropped out of high school in his junior year and worked at odd jobs for a while, but he moved back to Chicago at age 19 to attend night classes in junior college.