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.

During the 1960s, Gygax worked as an insurance underwriter for the Firemen's Fund in Chicago.

Sutherland worked with the D & D game's co-inventor, Gary Gygax, as part of a team of illustrators, including Erol Otus, Darlene Pekul, David Trampier, and others.

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 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.

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.

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

In 1967, Gygax organized a 20-person gaming meet in the basement of his home ; this event would go on to be called " Gen Con 0 ".

Gygax also collaborated on Tractics ( WWII to c. 1965, with Mike Reese & Leon Tucker ) and with Dave Arneson on the Napoleonic naval wargame Don't Give Up the Ship!

Basing their work on Arneson's modified version of Chainmail for his Blackmoor campaign, Gygax and Arneson collaborated on The Fantasy Game, the role-playing game that later became Dungeons & Dragons.

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.

When he unexpectedly died of a heart attack in January 1975, his share of TSR passed to his wife, a woman whom Gygax characterized as " less than personable ... After Don died she dumped all the Tactical Studies Rules materials off on my front porch.

Returning to Lake Geneva, Gygax managed to get TSR back on firm financial footing.

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.

Gygax also changed the name of the nearby city to " Yggsburgh ", a play on his initials E. G. G.

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.

Recreating the city was also a challenge ; although Gygax still had his old maps of the original city, all of his previously published work on the city was owned by WotC, so he would have to create most of the city from scratch while maintaining the look and feel of his original.

Under these circumstances, work on the Castle Zagyg project continued even more slowly, although Jeffrey Talanian stepped in to help Gygax.

Gygax decided to concentrate his first efforts on the continent of Oerik and asked TSR's printing house about the maximum size of paper they could handle ; the answer was 34 " x 22 " ( 86 cm x 56 cm ).

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.

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.

While visiting Lake Geneva in 1972, Arneson ran his fantasy game using the new rules, and Gygax immediately saw the potential of role-playing games.

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.

Gygax agreed to develop a set of rules with Arneson and get the game published ; the game eventually became known as " Dungeons & Dragons ".

Gygax designed a set of dungeons underneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk as a testing ground for new rules, character classes and spells.

Tactical Studies Rules ( TSR ) was formed in 1973 as a partnership between Gary Gygax and Don Kaye, who scraped together $ 2, 400 for startup costs, to formally publish and sell the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, one of the first modern role-playing games ( RPG ).

Also in 1974, TSR published Warriors of Mars, a miniatures rules book set in the fantasy world of Barsoom originally imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his series of novels about John Carter of Mars, to which Gygax paid homage in the " Preface " of the first edition of D & D.

" Gygax updated the scenario to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ( AD & D ) rules, hoping it could serve as a primer on how to integrate science into one's fantasy role playing game.

Dungeonland ( EX1 ) is an adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons ( D & D ) roleplaying game, written by Gary Gygax for use with the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ( AD & D ) rules.

The original Oriental Adventures ( ISBN 0-88038-099-3 ) was written by Gary Gygax, David " Zeb " Cook, and François Marcela-Froideval, and published in 1985 by TSR, Inc. as a 144-page hardcover for use with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ( AD & D ) 1st edition rules.

He introduced the rules to Gary Gygax and the LGTSA.

Gygax expanded the rules to sixteen pages and published them in the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society.

For this edition of the game, Gygax added rules for jousting, man-to-man melee, and conducting battles with fantasy creatures.

Gygax intended the Chainmail combat rules to be used in D & D, though he provided an alternative d20 attack option which eventually became standard.

Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragon fantasy game, created a home campaign based in the World of Greyhawk in order to test new rules.

Gygax had recently finished the Player's Handbook ( 1978 ), and according to Gygax, he authored the D series " as sort of a relaxation to get away from writing rules ".

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.

Gygax became active in fandom and became involved in play-by-mail Diplomacy games, for which he designed his own variants.

Gygax learned about H. G. Wells ' Little Wars book for play of military miniatures wargames and Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame book.

Gygax later looked for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and he used not only common, six-sided dice, but dice of all five platonic solid shapes, which he discovered in a school supply catalog.

In 1968, Gygax rented Lake Geneva's vine-covered Horticultural Hall for to hold the first Lake Geneva Convention, also known as the Gen Con gaming convention for short.

Late in October 1970, Gygax lost his job at the insurance company and then became a shoe repairman, which gave him more time for pursuing his interest in game development.

" Gygax wrote the supplements Greyhawk, Eldritch Wizardry, and Swords & Spells for the original D & D game.

Role-playing campaign settings like Greyhawk by Gary Gygax, Dragonlance by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis and Forgotten Realms by Ed Greenwood are a common basis for many fantasy books and many other authors continue to contribute to the settings.

Gygax realized that novels set in Greyhawk could have a similar benefit for his campaign world and wrote Saga of Old City, the first in a series of novels that would be published under the banner Greyhawk Adventures.

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.

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.

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.

In a 1984 interview for Polyhedron Newszine, Gary Gygax revealed several " alternate Oerths " while explaining the setting for his HEROES CHALLENGE game books, co-written with author Flint Dille and published under the aegis of the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation by the Wanderer Book division of Simon & Schuster.