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125-600: The World of Greyhawk is located on a planet called Oerth. Oerth has an axial tilt of 30 degrees, which causes greater seasonal temperature variation than on Earth and is controlled by wizardly and divine magic that shifts weather patterns to be more favorable to the populace. Castle Greyhawk was the most famous dungeon in Oerth, the home campaign world of Gary Gygax. Players in the earliest days of this campaign mostly stayed within Castle Greyhawk's dungeons, but Gygax envisioned

250-484: A cameo appearance in the Dungeons & Dragons movie as one of many mages throwing fireballs at a dragon , although the scene was deleted from the completed movie. Arneson married Frankie Ann Morneau in 1984; they had one daughter, Malia, and two grandchildren. Arneson died on April 7, 2009, after battling cancer for two years. According to his daughter, Malia Weinhagen, "The biggest thing about my dad's world

375-639: A military history buff and pulp fantasy fan, was a central, founding figure in the Castle & Crusade Society . The C&C Society, as it was known, served enthusiasts of miniature wargaming in the Middle Ages and published an occasional newsletter known as the Domesday Book . Following up on a promise he made in Domesday Book #5, Gygax presented the "Great Kingdom" map c. June 1971 in Domesday #9, to be used as

500-497: A 34" x 44" (86 cm x 112 cm) two-piece color map of the Flanaess. Reviewers were generally impressed, but some remarked on the lack of a pantheon of Greyhawk-specific deities, as well as the lack of any mention of the infamous dungeons of Castle Greyhawk. Game designer Jim Bambra found the original set "disappointing", because "there is only so much information you can cram into a 32-page booklet, particularly when covering such

625-575: A demonstration of Blackmoor and Dungeon! While meeting at Gygax's house, Dave Arneson ran the Lake Geneva gamers through their first session of Blackmoor . Rob Kuntz describes Dave Arneson as the referee, and the Lake Geneva players as being Gary Gygax, Ernie Gygax, Terry Kuntz , and himself. Kuntz describes Dave Megarry as the de facto leader of the group, as he understood the Blackmoor game and campaign world. In Wargaming magazine, Rob Kuntz wrote

750-602: A dungeon setting. He and Arneson agreed to co-develop a set of rules, and Gygax quickly developed a castle and dungeon of his own, "Castle Greyhawk", set within his portion of the Great Kingdom map. Castle Greyhawk is sometimes considered the first dungeon in Dungeons & Dragons and pioneered the roots of the mega-dungeon format of gaming. Two of his children, Ernie and Elise, were the first players, and during their first session, as Tenser and Ahlissa , they fought and destroyed

875-579: A fantasy supplement for the Chainmail ruleset for medieval miniatures that he was co-writing with Jeff Perren . Released in the late spring of 1971, this booklet included rules for fantasy monsters, wizards and magical weapons. Around the same time, in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dave Arneson , impressed by the " Braunstein " role-playing games of fellow wargamer David Wesely , developed the Barony of Blackmoor as

1000-448: A few evil deities to provide some villainy. In Chapter 2 of The Gnome Cache , which appeared in the second issue of The Dragon , a shrine to St. Cuthbert (spelled St. Cuthburt ) was mentioned, which was the first published reference to a Greyhawk deity. In 1976, Gygax invited the science fiction/fantasy writer Andre Norton to play Dungeons & Dragons in his Greyhawk world. Norton subsequently wrote Quag Keep , which involved

1125-525: A few of the adventure modules, were published by TSR. Although Gygax originally intended to immediately publish more details of Greyhawk in Dragon on a regular basis, other projects intervened, and it was not until the August 1981 issue of Dragon that Len Lakofka , in his column "Leomund's Tiny Hut", outlined methods for determining a character's place of birth and languages spoken. Gygax added an addendum concerning

1250-503: A fractious place where chaos and evil were in the ascendant and courageous champions would be needed. In order to explain how his world had arrived at this state, he wrote an outline of a thousand years of history. As a military history buff, he was very familiar with the concept of waves of cultural invasions, such the Picts of Great Britain being invaded by the Celts , who were in turn invaded by

1375-419: A freelance artist in Lake Geneva, developed a full color map on a hex grid. Gygax was so pleased with the result that he quickly switched his home Greyhawk campaign over to the new world he had created. Ultimately, the original Castle Greyhawk was never published for public play, instead with many of the elements of Gygax's original campaign becoming the seed for other adventures. In the late 1960s, Gary Gygax ,

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1500-585: A game setting for the Society. Members thereafter began claiming territories, including member Dave Arneson , who was an officer of the organization, and frequent contributor to the newsletter. Arneson claimed a territory he named Blackmoor , a setting he had already begun developing in his home campaign, and Gygax reserved for himself a territory on lake Nyr Div. In addition to historically-based medieval wargaming, both Gygax and Arneson were enthusiasts of adding fantasy elements to their games. To this end, Gygax created

1625-526: A group of gamers who travel from the real world to Greyhawk. It was the first novel to be set, at least partially, in the Greyhawk setting, and according to Alternative Worlds , the first to be based on D&D . Quag Keep was excerpted in issue #12 of The Dragon (February 1978) just prior to the book's release. From 1976 to 1979, Gygax also shared some glimpses of his home campaign with other gamers when he set several TSR Dungeons & Dragons adventures in

1750-426: A land inhabited in part by fantastic monsters. As the game quickly grew and characters developed, Arneson devised scenarios where they would quest for magic and gold, escort caravans, lead armies for or against the forces of evil, and delve into the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor (which was represented by a Kibri kit model of Branzoll Castle ). To explain his inspiration for the game, Arneson said: I had spent

1875-554: A large area". Before the folio edition was released, Gygax planned to publish supplementary information, using his column "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" that appeared on a semi-regular basis in TSR's Dragon Magazine . In the May 1980 issue, Gygax gave a quick overview of the development of his new The World of Greyhawk folio. For players who planned to use large scale army tactics, he gave details of

2000-765: A manner similar to "what if" scenarios recreated in wargames. In the late 1960s Arneson joined the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group , a group of miniature wargamers and military figurine collectors in the Minneapolis - St. Paul area that included among its ranks future game designer David Wesely . Wesely asserts that it was during the Braunstein games he created and refereed, and in which other Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group members participated, that Arneson helped develop

2125-471: A map to sixteen ogres and destroyed them with a wish from a sword we had procured from the hapless troll earlier. After playing in the Blackmoor game Arneson refereed, Gygax almost immediately began a similar campaign of his own, which he called " Greyhawk ", and asked Arneson for a draft of his playing-rules. The two then collaborated by phone and mail, and playtesting was carried out by their various groups and other contacts. Gygax and Arneson wanted to have

2250-443: A month after his first session, Gygax created the nearby city of Greyhawk, where the players' characters could sell their treasure and find a place to rest. As Gygax and Arneson worked to develop and publish the rules for Dungeons & Dragons through TSR , Gygax continued to design and present the dungeons and environs of Castle Greyhawk to his circle of friends and family, using them as playtesters for new rules and concepts. As

2375-525: A new edition of his own Adventures in Fantasy role-playing game (1981). The company also published several Tékumel related books, owing to Arneson's friendship with author M. A. R. Barker . Adventure Games was profitable, but Arneson found the workload to be excessive and finally sold the company to Flying Buffalo . Arneson sold the rights to Adventure Games to Flying Buffalo in 1985; because Arneson owned part of Flying Buffalo, he wanted to let them handle

2500-511: A new magical spell for the game, he would sometimes use the name of a wizard character from his home campaign to add verisimilitude to the spell name, such as Melf's acid arrow , Melf being a character created by his son Luke. Some of the characters who became synonymous with Greyhawk at that time included: Gary Gygax wrote a short story titled "The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir", subtitled "A Dungeon Adventure at Greyhawk Castle", which

2625-468: A new world for them afterward. With the release of the AD&;D Players Handbook in 1978, many players were intrigued by the connection of Greyhawk characters to magical spells such as Tenser's floating disc , Bigby's crushing hand , and Mordenkainen's faithful hound . The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide , released the following year, also made references to the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk. Players' curiosity

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2750-406: A pantheon of deities custom-made for humans in the world of Greyhawk. In addition to his original Greyhawk deities, St. Cuthbert and Pholtus, Gygax added seventeen more deities. Although later versions of the campaign setting would assign most of these deities to worship by specific races of humans, at this time they were generally worshiped by all humans of the Flanaess. Shortly after the release of

2875-470: A part of an evil country; and still others might take a neutral stance and simply try to collect gold and treasure from both sides. TSR originally intended to publish The World of Greyhawk (TSR 9025) early in 1979, but it was not released until August 1980. The World of Greyhawk consisted of a 32-page folio (the first edition is often called the World of Greyhawk folio to distinguish it from later editions) and

3000-449: A period of several million years, long-term changes in Earth's orbit , and hence its obliquity, have been investigated. For the past 5 million years, Earth's obliquity has varied between 22°2′33″ and 24°30′16″ , with a mean period of 41,040 years. This cycle is a combination of precession and the largest term in the motion of the ecliptic . For the next 1 million years, the cycle will carry

3125-510: A place named 'Blackmoor'." On October 30, 2010, Full Sail University dedicated the student game development studio space as "Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Studios" in Arneson's honor. Since the release of the history of Braunstein in 2008 and Playing at the World in 2012, a scholarly work by Jon Petersen, the role of Dave Wesely and Dave Arneson was restored in the broad conversation on the origins of

3250-400: A planet's tilt. One way is based on the planet's north pole , defined in relation to the direction of Earth's north pole, and the other way is based on the planet's positive pole , defined by the right-hand rule : Earth 's orbital plane is known as the ecliptic plane, and Earth's tilt is known to astronomers as the obliquity of the ecliptic , being the angle between the ecliptic and

3375-434: A player, and appointed Rob to be co- Dungeon Master of Greyhawk. This freed up Gygax to work on other projects, and also gave him an opportunity to participate as a player, creating characters like Yrag and Mordenkainen . In order to make room for Rob Kuntz's dungeons, Gygax scrapped his bottom level and integrated Rob's work into the Greyhawk dungeons. Gygax and Kuntz continued to develop new levels for their players, and by

3500-405: A player, often going one-on-one with Rob Kuntz as Dungeon Master, Gygax immersed his own characters in politics and large-scale battles. Knowing that there would be some players looking for a town in which to base their campaign, and others interested in politics or warfare, Gygax tried to include as much detail as possible about each region, including a short description of the region and its people,

3625-538: A role-playing game that attempted to recapture the "original spirit of the Role Playing Fantasy Game" that Arneson had envisioned in the early 1970s, instead of what D&D had become. In the early 1980s he established his own game company, Adventure Games – staffed largely by Arneson's friends, most of whom were involved in an American Civil War reenactment group – that published the miniatures games Harpoon (1981) and Johnny Reb (1983), as well as

3750-466: A setting for Braunstein style games. Arneson based his game around the village, castle and dungeons of Blackmoor. The castle itself was represented on the table by an actual plastic kit model of a medieval castle. Arneson informed the players that instead of controlling regiments, they would each take one individual character into the castle of the Barony of Blackmoor to explore its dangerous dungeons. Arneson drew from numerous sources but quickly incorporated

3875-500: A short summary of their first Blackmoor session: Gary, myself and a few other local wargamers were the first "lucky" fellows from Lake Geneva to experience the rigors of Blackmoor. This idea caught on deeply with Gary after an exciting adventure in which our party of heroes fought a troll , were fireballed by a magic-user, then fled to the outdoors (being chased by the Magic-user and his minions), fought four (gulp!) Balrogs , followed

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4000-582: A single volume in 1972 by Guidon Games with a revised edition by TSR Hobbies in 1975. Following the departure of David Wesely to service in the Army Reserves in October 1970, Arneson and his fellow players in the Twin Cities began to imagine alternate settings for "Braunstein" games. Arneson developed a Braunstein in which his players played fantasy versions of themselves in the medieval Barony of Blackmoor,

4125-604: Is decreasing at a rate of about 46.8″ per century (see details in Short term below) . The ancient Greeks had good measurements of the obliquity since about 350 BCE, when Pytheas of Marseilles measured the shadow of a gnomon at the summer solstice. About 830 CE, the Caliph Al-Mamun of Baghdad directed his astronomers to measure the obliquity, and the result was used in the Arab world for many years. In 1437, Ulugh Beg determined

4250-551: Is he wanted people to have fun in life." Arneson received numerous industry awards for his part in creating Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. In 1984 he was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design's Hall of Fame (also known as the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame ) and in 1999 was named by Pyramid magazine as one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons , "at least in

4375-415: Is quite variable over millions of years and may be in a chaotic state; it varies as much as 0° to 60° over some millions of years, depending on perturbations of the planets. Some authors dispute that Mars's obliquity is chaotic, and show that tidal dissipation and viscous core-mantle coupling are adequate for it to have reached a fully damped state, similar to Mercury and Venus. The occasional shifts in

4500-480: Is the angle between these two lines. Over the course of an orbital period , the obliquity usually does not change considerably, and the orientation of the axis remains the same relative to the background of stars . This causes one pole to be pointed more toward the Sun on one side of the orbit, and more away from the Sun on the other side—the cause of the seasons on Earth. There are two standard methods of specifying

4625-660: Is the obliquity and T is tropical centuries from B1900.0 to the date in question. From 1984, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's DE series of computer-generated ephemerides took over as the fundamental ephemeris of the Astronomical Almanac . Obliquity based on DE200, which analyzed observations from 1911 to 1979, was calculated: where hereafter T is Julian centuries from J2000.0 . JPL's fundamental ephemerides have been continually updated. For instance, according to IAU resolution in 2006 in favor of

4750-624: The Drow series and the Giant series respectively. Numerous projects were planned to add more depth and detail to the setting after the publication of the initial folio, but many of these projects never appeared for various reasons. In 1983, TSR published an expanded boxed set of the campaign world, World of Greyhawk , which is usually called the Greyhawk boxed set to differentiate it from other editions. According to game designer Jim Bambra , "the second edition

4875-745: The Blackmoor setting. Goodman Games published and distributed Dave Arneson's Blackmoor in 2004, and Goodman published additional products for Blackmoor over the next year. Code Monkey Publishing released Dave Arneson's Blackmoor: The First Campaign (2009) for 4th edition D&D . In 1988, Arneson stated his belief that RPGs, whether paper or computer, were still "hack and slash" and did not teach novices how to play, and that games like Ultima IV "have stood pretty much alone as quirks instead of trend setters" as others did not follow their innovations. He hoped that computer RPGs would teach newcomers how to role play while offering interesting campaigns and said that SSI 's Gold Box games did not innovate on

5000-493: The Northern hemisphere when the north pole is directed toward the Sun. Variations in Earth's axial tilt can influence the seasons and is likely a factor in long-term climatic change (also see Milankovitch cycles ) . The exact angular value of the obliquity is found by observation of the motions of Earth and planets over many years. Astronomers produce new fundamental ephemerides as the accuracy of observation improves and as

5125-606: The Romans . In creating a similar pattern of history for his world, Gygax decided that a thousand years before his campaign began, the northeast corner of the continent had been occupied by a peaceful but primitive people called the Flannae, whose name was the root for the name of that part of Oerik, the Flanaess . At that time, far to the west of the Flanaess, two peoples were at war, the Bakluni and

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5250-411: The board wargame Gettysburg by Avalon Hill . After Arneson taught his friends how to play, the group began to design their own games, and tried out new ways to play existing games. Arneson was especially fond of naval wargames . Exposure to role-playing influenced his later game designs. In college history classes he role-played historical events and preferred to deviate from recorded history in

5375-475: The celestial equator on the celestial sphere . It is denoted by the Greek letter Epsilon ε . Earth currently has an axial tilt of about 23.44°. This value remains about the same relative to a stationary orbital plane throughout the cycles of axial precession . But the ecliptic (i.e., Earth's orbit) moves due to planetary perturbations , and the obliquity of the ecliptic is not a fixed quantity. At present, it

5500-572: The original Dungeons & Dragons set in 1974, with the initial print run of 1,000 selling out within a year and sales increasing rapidly in subsequent years. Further rules and a sample dungeon from Arneson's original campaign (the first published RPG scenario in a professional publication) were released in 1975 in the Blackmoor supplement for D&D , named after the campaign-setting. Blackmoor presented new character classes for monks and assassins , additional new monsters, and "The Temple of

5625-490: The player characters . Arneson discovered wargaming as a teenager in the 1960s, and he began combining these games with the concept of role-playing . He was a University of Minnesota student when he met Gygax at the Gen Con gaming convention in the late 1960s. In 1971, Arneson created the game and fictional world that became Blackmoor , writing his own rules and basing the setting on medieval fantasy elements. Arneson took

5750-546: The 1990s, he was invited to Brazil by Devir, a game publisher. He became friends with the owner of the publishing company and he gave him his D&D woodgrain box and some of his books as a gift. In 1997, after Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, Peter Adkison paid Arneson an undisclosed sum to free up D&D from royalties that were still owed to Arneson; this allowed Wizards to retitle Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to simply Dungeons & Dragons . Around 2000, Arneson

5875-657: The Braunsteins after Wesely was drafted into the Army, and he often ran these scenarios using different eras and settings. Arneson had also become a member of the International Federation of Wargamers by this time. In 1969 Arneson was a history student attending the University of Minnesota and working part-time as a security guard. He attended the second Gen Con gaming convention in August 1969 (at which time wargaming

6000-454: The Earth's axial tilt as 23°30′17″ (23.5047°). During the Middle Ages , it was widely believed that both precession and Earth's obliquity oscillated around a mean value, with a period of 672 years, an idea known as trepidation of the equinoxes. Perhaps the first to realize this was incorrect (during historic time) was Ibn al-Shatir in the fourteenth century and the first to realize that

6125-560: The European fanzine Europa in 1975: Anyone who made it to the bottom level alive met Zagyg, the insane architect of the dungeons. Zagyg is a reverse homophone of Gygax , and it was Gygax's inside joke that the person who had designed the dungeon—himself—must be insane. Only three players ever made it to the bottom level and met Zagyg, all of them during solo adventures: Rob Kuntz (playing Robilar ), Gygax's son Ernie (playing Tenser ), and Rob's brother Terry (playing Terik). Their reward

6250-586: The Frog", the first published role-playing adventure scenario intended for other people to run. Arneson formally joined TSR as their Director of Research at the beginning of 1976, but left at the end of the year to pursue a career as an independent game-designer. In 1977, despite the fact that he was no longer at TSR, Arneson published Dungeonmaster's Index , a 38-page booklet that indexed all of TSR's D&D properties to that point in time. TSR had agreed to pay Arneson royalties on all D&D products, but when

6375-419: The Great Kingdom map, which included local areas based on real-world maps, Gygax decided to create an entirely new and greatly expanded version of Oerth . Needing many more original names for all of the geographical and political places on his map for the new and expanded areas, Gygax sometimes resorted to wordplay. He had previously used Perrenland on the Great Kingdom map, named after Jeff Perren , who co-wrote

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6500-688: The Greyhawk campaign. Although it detailed new spells and character classes that had been developed in the dungeons of Greyhawk, it did not contain any details of their Greyhawk campaign world. The only two references to Greyhawk were an illustration of a large stone head in a dungeon corridor titled The Great Stone Face, Enigma of Greyhawk and mention of a fountain on the second level of the dungeons that continuously issued an endless number of snakes. The 2004 publication 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons suggested that details of Gygax's Greyhawk campaign were published in this booklet, but Gygax had no plans in 1975 to publish details of

6625-423: The Greyhawk world, since he believed that new players of Dungeons & Dragons would rather create their own worlds than use someone else's. In addition, he did not want to publish all the material he had created for his players; he thought he would be unlikely to recoup a fair investment for the thousands of hours he had spent on it. Since his secrets would be revealed to his players, he would be forced to recreate

6750-637: The Oeridians, the Aerdi, began to set up an empire. Several centuries later, the Aerdi's Great Kingdom ruled most of the Flanaess. The Aerdi overkings marked the beginning of what they believed would be perpetual peace with Year 1 of a new calendar, the Common Year (CY) Reckoning . However, several centuries later, the Empire became decadent, with their rulers losing their sanity, turning to evil, and enslaving their people. When

6875-490: The P03 astronomical model, the Astronomical Almanac for 2010 specifies: These expressions for the obliquity are intended for high precision over a relatively short time span, perhaps ± several centuries. Jacques Laskar computed an expression to order T good to 0.02″ over 1000 years and several arcseconds over 10,000 years. where here t is multiples of 10,000 Julian years from J2000.0 . These expressions are for

7000-509: The Stick #644, and Dork Tower for April 8, 2009. Video game publisher Activision Blizzard posted a tribute to Arneson on their website and on April 14, 2009, released patch 3.1 of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft , The Secrets of Ulduar , dedicated to Arneson. Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online added an in-game memorial altar to Arneson in the Ruins of Threnal location in

7125-536: The Suloise. The war reached its climax when both sides used powerful magic to obliterate each other, in an event called the Twin Cataclysms. Refugees of these disasters were forced out of their lands, and the Suloise invaded the Flanaess, forcing the Flannae to flee to the outer edges of the continent. Several centuries later, a new invader appeared, the Oeridians, and they in turn forced the Suloise southward. One tribe of

7250-456: The Sun on a planet's equatorial bulge. Like Earth, all of the rocky planets show axial precession. If the precession rate were very fast the obliquity would actually remain fairly constant even as the orbital plane changes. The rate varies due to tidal dissipation and core - mantle interaction, among other things. When a planet's precession rate approaches certain values, orbital resonances may cause large changes in obliquity. The amplitude of

7375-541: The absence of the Moon, Earth's obliquity might not be quite so unstable; varying only by about 20–25°. To resolve this contradiction, diffusion rate of obliquity has been calculated, and it was found that it takes more than billions of years for Earth's obliquity to reach near 90°. The Moon's stabilizing effect will continue for less than two billion years. As the Moon continues to recede from Earth due to tidal acceleration , resonances may occur which will cause large oscillations of

7500-433: The axial tilt of Mars have been suggested as an explanation for the appearance and disappearance of rivers and lakes over the course of the existence of Mars. A shift could cause a burst of methane into the atmosphere, causing warming, but then the methane would be destroyed and the climate would become arid again. The obliquities of the outer planets are considered relatively stable. The stellar obliquity ψ s , i.e.

7625-520: The axial tilt of a star with respect to the orbital plane of one of its planets, has been determined for only a few systems. By 2012, 49 stars have had sky-projected spin-orbit misalignment λ has been observed, which serves as a lower limit to ψ s . Most of these measurements rely on the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect . Since the launch of space-based telescopes such as Kepler space telescope , it has been made possible to determine and estimate

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7750-470: The class "Rules of the Game", a class in which students learned how to accurately document and create rule sets for games that were balanced between mental challenges for the players and "physical" ones for the characters. He retired from the position on June 19, 2008. Arneson continued to play games his entire life, including D&D and military miniature games, and regularly attended an annual meeting to play

7875-441: The company came out with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ( AD&D ) in 1977, it claimed that AD&D was a significantly different product and so did not pay him royalties for it. In response, Arneson filed the first of five lawsuits against Gygax and TSR in 1979. In March 1981, as part of a confidential agreement, Arneson and Gygax resolved the suits out of court by agreeing that they would both be credited as "co-creators" on

8000-431: The contribution having one of the resonant rates is divided by the difference between the resonant rate and the precession rate, so it becomes large when the two are similar. Mercury and Venus have most likely been stabilized by the tidal dissipation of the Sun. Earth was stabilized by the Moon, as mentioned above, but before its formation , Earth, too, could have passed through times of instability. Mars 's obliquity

8125-408: The early 1970s. Arneson's early work was fundamental to the role-playing game (RPG) genre, pioneering devices now considered to be archetypical, such as cooperative play to develop a storyline instead of individual competitive play to "win" and adventuring in dungeon , town, and wilderness settings as presented by a neutral judge who doubles as the voice and consciousness of all characters aside from

8250-408: The early to mid-1970s in the original campaign and parallel and intertwined games run by John Snider , whose ruleset developed from these adventures and was intended for publication by TSR from 1974 as the first science fiction RPG. Arneson described Blackmoor as "roleplaying in a non-traditional medieval setting. I have such things as steam power, gunpowder, and submarines in limited numbers. There

8375-513: The fact that Gygax was increasingly involved in other areas of the company, meant that of the seventeen Greyhawk adventures published in the two years after the folio edition, only four were written or co-written by Gygax: In 1981, TSR also published the super-modules D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth and G1-2-3 Against the Giants , both being compilations of previously published modules from

8500-550: The fantasy material in the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren and published in the spring of 1971, but after a short and unsatisfactory trial of the Fantasy Combat table found therein, he developed his own mix of rules, including adapted elements from his revision of Civil War Ironclad game. The gameplay would be recognizable to modern D&D players, featuring the use of hit points , armor class , character development, and dungeon crawls . This setting

8625-517: The fantasy supplement of Chainmail into his games. After about a year and half of play, Arneson (Blackmoor) and fellow gamer David Megarry ( Dungeon! boardgame) traveled to Lake Geneva in November or December 1972 to pitch their respective games to Gygax, who at that time was a representative of the Guidon Games company. Gygax was immediately intrigued by the concept of individual characters exploring

8750-513: The first monsters of the Greyhawk dungeon; Gygax recalled them as being either giant centipedes or a nest of scorpions. During the same session, Ernie and Elise also found the first treasure, a chest of 3,000 copper coins which was too heavy to carry, much to the children's chagrin. After his children had gone to bed, Gygax immediately began working on a second level for the dungeon. At the next play session, Ernie and Elise were joined by Gygax's friends: Don Kaye , Rob Kuntz , and Terry Kuntz . About

8875-650: The first time. When Gygax was forced out of TSR, Arneson's projects were dropped from the company before a planned fifth module could be published. Gygax and Arneson again went their separate ways. In 1986 Arneson wrote a new D&D module set in Blackmoor called "The Garbage Pits of Despair", which was published in two parts in Different Worlds magazine issues #42 and #43. Arneson and Dustin Clingman founded Zeitgeist Games to produce an updated d20 System version of

9000-602: The folio edition, TSR released the adventure module C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan , designed to familiarize players with the Olman race of the Amedio Jungle . Largely based on Aztec and Incan cultures, this adventure introduced the first published deities of the Greyhawk campaign: Mictlantecuhtli , god of death, darkness, murder and the underworld; Tezcatlipoca , god of sun, moon, night, scheming, betrayals and lightning; and Quetzalcoatl , god of air, birds and snakes. This area

9125-531: The foundations of modern role-playing games on a 1:1 scale basis by focusing on non-combat objectives—a step away from wargaming towards the more individual play and varied challenges of later RPGs. Arneson was a participant in Wesely's wargame scenarios and, as Arneson continued to run his own scenarios, he eventually began to include ideas from sources such as The Lord of the Rings and Dark Shadows . Arneson took over

9250-419: The game published, but Guidon Games and Avalon Hill rejected it. Arneson could not afford to invest in the venture. Gygax felt that there was a need to publish the game as soon as possible, since similar projects were being planned elsewhere, so rules were hastily put together, and Arneson's own final draft was never used. Despite all this, Brian Blume eventually provided the funding required to publish

9375-403: The game to Gygax as the representative for game publisher Guidon Games , and the pair co-developed a set of rules that became Dungeons & Dragons ( D&D ). Gygax and Donald Kaye subsequently founded Tactical Studies Rules in 1973, which published Dungeons & Dragons the next year. Arneson moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to work for TSR Hobbies in 1976, but left before the end of

9500-514: The game. They also created an in-game item named the "Mantle of the Worldshaper" that is a reward for finishing the Threnal quest chain that is narrated by Arneson himself. The Mantle's description reads: "A comforting and inspiring presence surrounds you as you hold this cloak. Arcane runes run along the edges of the fine cape, and masterfully drawn on the silken lining is an incredibly detailed map of

9625-540: The genre as much as he had hoped. Arneson stepped into the computer industry and founded 4D Interactive Systems, a computer company in Minnesota that has since dissolved. He also did some computer programming and worked on several games. He eventually found himself consulting with computer companies. Arneson wrote the 1989 adventure DNA / DOA , the first adventure published for the FASA fantasy/cyberpunk game Shadowrun , which

9750-438: The lands within a radius of approximately 500 miles were in outline form. Following yet more work, in 1978 Gygax agreed to publish his world and decided to redevelop Oerth from scratch. Once he had sketched out the entire planet to his satisfaction, one hemisphere of Oerth was dominated by a massive continent called Oerik. Gygax decided to concentrate his first efforts on the continent of Oerik and asked TSR's printing house about

9875-417: The locales from his original world of Oerth but with new geography. Gygax also connected Dave Arneson 's Blackmoor to his world by including a country by that name in Oerth. In his later novel Dance of Demons (1988), Gygax destroyed Greyhawk's Oerth and replaced it with a new fantasy world of Yarth. The Flanaess is the eastern part of the continent of Oerik, one of the four continents of Oerth, acting as

10000-489: The maximum size of paper they could handle; the answer was 34 x 22 inches (86 cm x 56 cm). He found that, using the scale he desired, he could fit only the northeast corner of Oerik on two of the sheets. This corner of Oerik became known as "the Flanaess", so named in Gygax's mind because of the peaceful people known as the Flannae who had once lived there. Gygax also added many more new regions, countries and cities, bringing

10125-518: The number of Greyhawk deities to an even fifty. For the next eight years, Greyhawk would be primarily defined by the information in this publication. Axial tilt In astronomy , axial tilt , also known as obliquity , is the angle between an object's rotational axis and its orbital axis, which is the line perpendicular to its orbital plane ; equivalently, it is the angle between its equatorial plane and orbital plane. It differs from orbital inclination . At an obliquity of 0 degrees,

10250-487: The number of political states to 60. Needing original placenames for all of the geographical and political places on his map, Gygax sometimes resorted to wordplay based on the names of friends and acquaintances. For instance, Perrenland was named after Jeff Perren , who co-wrote the rules for Chainmail with Gygax; Urnst was a homophone of Ernst (his son Ernie); and Sunndi was a near-homophone of Cindy, another of Gygax's children. From Gygax's prototype map, Darlene Pekul ,

10375-463: The obliquities of exoplanets in the habitable zone around low-mass stars tend to be eroded in less than 10 years, which means that they would not have tilt-induced seasons as Earth has. Dave Arneson David Lance Arneson ( / ˈ ɑːr n ɪ s ən / ; October 1, 1947 – April 7, 2009) was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game (RPG), Dungeons & Dragons , with Gary Gygax , in

10500-534: The obliquity between 22°13′44″ and 24°20′50″ . The Moon has a stabilizing effect on Earth's obliquity. Frequency map analysis conducted in 1993 suggested that, in the absence of the Moon, the obliquity could change rapidly due to orbital resonances and chaotic behavior of the Solar System , reaching as high as 90° in as little as a few million years ( also see Orbit of the Moon ). However, more recent numerical simulations made in 2011 indicated that even in

10625-411: The obliquity is decreasing at a relatively constant rate was Fracastoro in 1538. The first accurate, modern, western observations of the obliquity were probably those of Tycho Brahe from Denmark , about 1584, although observations by several others, including al-Ma'mun , al-Tusi , Purbach , Regiomontanus , and Walther , could have provided similar information. Earth 's axis remains tilted in

10750-450: The obliquity of an extrasolar planet. The rotational flattening of the planet and the entourage of moons and/or rings, which are traceable with high-precision photometry provide access to planetary obliquity, ψ p . Many extrasolar planets have since had their obliquity determined, such as Kepler-186f and Kepler-413b . Astrophysicists have applied tidal theories to predict the obliquity of extrasolar planets . It has been shown that

10875-473: The obliquity. All four of the innermost, rocky planets of the Solar System may have had large variations of their obliquity in the past. Since obliquity is the angle between the axis of rotation and the direction perpendicular to the orbital plane, it changes as the orbital plane changes due to the influence of other planets. But the axis of rotation can also move ( axial precession ), due to torque exerted by

11000-543: The original Blackmoor in Minnesota. Arneson wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s. He wrote columns on his opinion of the role-playing game genre and reviews of computer games such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1985), Zork Zero (1988), Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989), Uncharted Waters (1990), and Renegade Legion: Interceptor (1990). During

11125-431: The overking Ivid V came to the throne, the oppressed peoples rebelled. It was at this point, in the year 576 CY, that Gygax set the world of Greyhawk. As Gygax wrote in his World of Greyhawk folio: "The current state of affairs in the Flanaess is confused indeed. Humankind is fragmented into isolationist realms, indifferent nations, evil lands, and states striving for good". Gygax did not issue monthly or yearly updates to

11250-583: The packaging of D&D products from that point on, and Arneson would receive a 2.5% royalty on all AD&D products. This provided him with a comfortable six-figure annual income for the next twenty years. This did not end the lingering tensions between them. Arneson wrote a new version of the Blackmoor setting for publication by Judges Guild in The First Fantasy Campaign (1977). In 1979 Arneson and Richard L. Snider , an original Blackmoor player, co-authored Adventures in Fantasy ,

11375-552: The physical appearances of the main Greyhawk races. In the November 1981 issue, Gygax gave further details of racial characteristics and modes of dress. In the December 1982 issue, David Axler contributed a system for determining weather in the world of Greyhawk. Gygax later said he thought a system of fourteen charts for determining the weather was too cumbersome, and he personally did not use it in his home campaign. The folio edition had thirty two pages, and information about each region

11500-456: The players began to explore more of the world outside of the castle and city, Gygax developed other regions and cities for them. With play sessions occurring seven or more times a week, Gygax did not have the time or inclination to create the map for a whole new world; he simply drew his world over a map of North America, adding new cities and regions as his world slowly grew through ongoing adventures. The city and castle of Greyhawk were placed near

11625-467: The players wanted Gygax to create and customize a specific deity so that cleric characters could receive their powers from someone less ambiguous than the gods . Gygax jokingly created two gods: Saint Cuthbert —who brought non-believers around to his point of view with whacks of his cudgel —and Pholtus , whose fanatical followers refused to believe that any other gods existed. Because both of these deities represented aspects of Good, Gygax eventually created

11750-435: The previous two days watching about five monster movies on channel 5's 'Creature Feature' weekend, reading several Conan books (I cannot recall which ones, but I always thought they were all pretty much the same), and stuffing myself with popcorn, doodling on a piece of graph paper. At the time, I was quite tired of my Nappy ( Napoleonic ) campaign with all its rigid rules and was rebelling against it. Arneson drew heavily upon

11875-503: The private armies that were commanded by some prominent Greyhawk characters from his original home game: Bigby , Mordenkainen , Robilar , Tenser and Erac's Cousin . Gygax also mentioned some of the planned Greyhawk publications he was overseeing: a large-scale map of the city of Greyhawk; some adventure modules set in Greyhawk; a supplementary map of lands outside the Flanaess; all fifty levels of Castle Greyhawk's dungeon; and miniatures army combat rules. None of these projects, other than

12000-574: The real-world position of Chicago, his birthplace; various other places were clustered around it. For instance, the rival city of Dyvers he placed in the area of real-world Milwaukee. Gygax also continued to develop the dungeons underneath the castle. By the time he was finished, the complex labyrinth encompassed thirteen levels filled with devious traps, secret passageways, hungry monsters, and glittering treasure. Although details of these original Greyhawk dungeons have never been published in detail, Gygax gave some glimpses of them in an article he wrote for

12125-469: The realm of adventure gaming". He was honored as a "famous game designer" by being featured on the king of hearts in Flying Buffalo's 2008 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck. Three days after his death, Wizards of the Coast temporarily replaced the front page of the Dungeons & Dragons section of their web site with a tribute to Arneson. Other tributes in the gaming world included Order of

12250-455: The remaining forty three regions in the March, July and September 1982 issues. In the August 1982 issue of Dragon , Gygax gave advice on how to adapt deities from the previously published Deities and Demigods for worship by non-human races in the Greyhawk world. A few months later, he published a five-part series of articles in the November 1982 through March 1983 issues of Dragon that outlined

12375-430: The rest of his company's stock and intellectual property after shutting down Adventure Games. While Gary Gygax was president of TSR in the mid-1980s, he and Arneson reconnected, and Arneson briefly relinked Blackmoor to D&D with the "DA" (Dave Arneson) series of modules set in Blackmoor (1986–1987). The four modules in the series, three of which were written by Arneson, detailed Arneson's campaign setting for

12500-407: The rest of his world as a sort of parallel Earth, and the original Oerth (pronounced 'Oith', as with a Brooklyn accent) looked much like the real-world Earth but filled with imaginary cities and countries. Several years later, when TSR produced the original World of Greyhawk folio (1980), Gygax was asked to produce a map of the world and decided to create something new which still featured many of

12625-415: The ruins of Castle Greyhawk as a testing ground for new rules, character classes and spells. In those early days, there was no Flanaess; the world map of Oerth was developed by Gygax as circumstances dictated, the new cities and lands simply drawn over a map of North America. Gygax and Kuntz further developed this campaign setting, and by 1976, the lands within a radius of 50 miles had been mapped in depth, and

12750-620: The rules for Chainmail with Gygax, but for the new Greyhawk map he added many more such names of friends and acquaintances. For instance, Urnst was a homophone of Ernst (his son Ernie) and Sunndi was a near-homophone of Cindy, another of Gygax's children. Gygax gave only the most basic descriptions of each state; he expected that DMs would customize the setting in order to make it an integral part of their own individual campaigns. His map included arctic wastes, desert, temperate forests, tropical jungles, mountainous cordillera, seas and oceans, rivers, archipelagos and volcanoes. Gygax set out to create

12875-425: The same direction with reference to the background stars throughout a year (regardless of where it is in its orbit ) due to the gyroscope effect . This means that one pole (and the associated hemisphere of Earth ) will be directed away from the Sun at one side of the orbit, and half an orbit later (half a year later) this pole will be directed towards the Sun. This is the cause of Earth's seasons . Summer occurs in

13000-400: The setting of dozens of adventures published between the 1970s and 2000s. In late 1972, Dave Arneson demonstrated a new type of game to a group of gamers in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, including game designer Gygax. 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

13125-464: The so-called mean obliquity, that is, the obliquity free from short-term variations. Periodic motions of the Moon and of Earth in its orbit cause much smaller (9.2 arcseconds ) short-period (about 18.6 years) oscillations of the rotation axis of Earth, known as nutation , which add a periodic component to Earth's obliquity. The true or instantaneous obliquity includes this nutation. Using numerical methods to simulate Solar System behavior over

13250-592: The state of affairs as presented in the folio since he saw 576 CY as a common starting point for every home campaign; because each would be moving forward at its own pace, there would be no practical way to issue updates that would be relevant to every Dungeon Master. Gygax was also aware that different players would be using his world for different reasons. When he was the Dungeon Master of his home campaign, he found that his players were more interested in dungeon-delving than politics, but when he switched roles and became

13375-576: The time the Greyhawk home campaign drew to a close in 1985, the castle dungeons encompassed more than fifty levels. While many players participating in the Gygax and Kuntz home campaign were occasional players, sometimes not even naming their characters, others played far more frequently, and several of their characters became well known to the general gaming world before publication of the Greyhawk campaign setting. Some of these characters became known when Gygax mentioned them in his various columns, interviews, and publications. In other cases, when Gygax created

13500-452: The title of its ruler, the racial makeup of its people, its resources and major cities, and its allies and enemies. For the same reason that he had created a variety of geographical, political and racial settings, he also strove to create a world with some good, some evil, and some undecided areas. He felt that some players would be happiest playing in a mainly good country and fighting the evil that arose to threaten it; others might want to be

13625-519: The two axes point in the same direction; that is, the rotational axis is perpendicular to the orbital plane. The rotational axis of Earth , for example, is the imaginary line that passes through both the North Pole and South Pole , whereas the Earth's orbital axis is the line perpendicular to the imaginary plane through which the Earth moves as it revolves around the Sun ; the Earth's obliquity or axial tilt

13750-426: The understanding of the dynamics increases, and from these ephemerides various astronomical values, including the obliquity, are derived. Annual almanacs are published listing the derived values and methods of use. Until 1983, the Astronomical Almanac 's angular value of the mean obliquity for any date was calculated based on the work of Newcomb , who analyzed positions of the planets until about 1895: where ε

13875-414: The world of Greyhawk: In addition, Lawrence Schick set his 1979 TSR adventure S2 White Plume Mountain in Greyhawk. Despite fan curiosity, the original Castle Greyhawk was never officially published outside of Gygax's home campaign. In 1975, Gygax and Kuntz published a booklet called Supplement I: Greyhawk , an expansion of the rules for Dungeons & Dragons based on their play experiences in

14000-523: The year. In 1979 Arneson filed suit to retain credits and royalties on the game. He continued to work as an independent game designer, including work submitted to TSR in the 1980s, and continued to play games for his entire life. Arneson also did some work in computer programming, and he taught computer game design and game rules design at Full Sail University from the 1990s until shortly before his death in 2009. Arneson's role-playing game design work grew from his interest in wargames . His parents bought him

14125-574: Was a character that had been created by Gygax's childhood friend Don Kaye before Kaye's untimely death in 1975. The fourth, a hero-deity named Kelanen , was developed to illustrate the "principle of advancement of power". Of the ten adventures set in Greyhawk published by TSR before the folio edition, all but one had been written by Gygax. However, the new availability of information about Gygax's campaign world and TSR's desire to make it central to Dungeons & Dragons encouraged many new writers to set their adventures in Greyhawk. This, combined with

14250-563: Was condensed into a short paragraph or two. Gygax realized that some players needed more in-depth information about the motivations and aspirations of each region, and the history of interactions with surrounding regions. With this in mind, Gygax decided to publish a much longer description of each region in Dragon . The first two articles, covering seventeen regions, appeared in the December 1981 and January 1982 issues. Due to his involvement in many other TSR projects, Gygax handed responsibility for completion of this project to Rob Kuntz, who covered

14375-630: Was even a tank running around for a while. The emphasis is on the story and the roleplaying." Details of Blackmoor and the original campaign, established on the map of the Castle & Crusade Society 's "Great Kingdom", were first brought to print briefly in issue #13 of the Domesday Book , the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society in July 1972, and later in much-expanded form as The First Fantasy Campaign , published by Judges Guild in 1977. In November 1972, Dave Arneson and Dave Megarry traveled to Lake Geneva to meet with Gary Gygax, to provide

14500-503: Was fleshed out over time and continues to be played to the present day. Many of the fantasy medieval foundations of D&D , as well as the concept of adventuring in "dungeons" originated with Blackmoor , which also incorporated time travel and science fiction elements. These are visible much later in the DA module series published by TSR (particularly City of the Gods ), but were also present from

14625-564: Was further explored in The Scarlet Brotherhood (1999), which expanded the Olman pantheon, and newly introduced the Touv people, including their nine gods. Also included in the March 1983 issue of Dragon was an article detailing four unique Greyhawk characters. The first two quasi-deities — Heward and Keoghtom—had been created by Gygax as non-player characters (NPCs). The third, Murlynd ,

14750-400: Was further piqued by the ten Dungeons & Dragons modules set in Greyhawk that were published between 1976 and 1979. Several of Gygax's regular columns in Dragon magazine also mentioned details of his home campaign and characters that inhabited his world. Gygax was surprised when he found out that players wanted to use Greyhawk as their campaign world. Rather than using his own version of

14875-500: Was much larger than the first and addressed itself to making the World of Greyhawk setting a more detailed and vibrant place". This edition quadrupled the number of pages from the original edition to 128, adding significantly greater detail. One major addition was a pantheon of deities: in addition to the nineteen deities outlined by Gygax in his Dragon article, another thirty-one new deities were added, though only three received full write-ups of their abilities and worshipers. This brought

15000-417: Was organized religion. Since his campaign was largely built around the needs of lower-level characters, he did not think specific deities were necessary, since direct interaction between a god and a low-level character was very unlikely. Some of his players took matters into their own hands, calling upon Norse or Greek gods such as Odin or Zeus , or even Conan's Crom in times of dire need. However, some of

15125-462: Was published in the August 1974 issue of Chicago small press magazine El Conquistador . In the first issue of The Dragon published in June 1976, Gygax prefaced Chapter 1 of his serialized novella The Gnome Cache with a note that the story's setting, Oerth , was very similar to Earth in terms of geography. One facet of culture that Gygax did not address during the first few years of his home campaign

15250-564: Was released the same year. Living in California in the late 1980s, Arneson had a chance to work with special education children. Upon returning to Minnesota, he pursued teaching and began speaking at schools about educational uses of role-playing and using multi-sided dice to teach math. In the 1990s, he began working at Full Sail , a private university that teaches multimedia subjects, and continued there as an instructor of computer game design until 2008. At Full Sail University he taught

15375-568: Was still the primary focus) and it was at this event that he met Gary Gygax , who had founded the Castle & Crusade Society within the International Federation of Wargamers in the 1960s at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin . Arneson and Gygax also shared an interest in sailing ship games and they co-authored the Don't Give Up the Ship naval battle rules, serialized from June 1971 and later published as

15500-495: Was to be instantly transported to the far side of the world, where they each faced a long solo trek back to the city of Greyhawk. Terik and Tenser managed to catch up to Robilar along the way, and the three journeyed back to Greyhawk together. By this time, a dozen players crowded Gygax's basement every night, with over 20 at times on weekends and the effort needed to plan their adventures took up much of Gygax's spare time. He had been very impressed with Rob Kuntz's imaginative play as

15625-525: Was working with videographer John Kentner on Dragons in the Basement (unreleased), a video documentary on the early history of role-playing games. Arneson describes the documentary: "Basically it is a series of interviews with original players ('How did D&D affect your life?') and original RPG designers like Marc Miller ( Traveller ) and M.A.R. Barker ( Empire of the Petal Throne )." He also made

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