After a false alarm earlier this week, I wake up this morning to read that sadly Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (along with Gary Gygax), passed away late on April 7th, at 61 years old, falling victim to cancer.

In another part of America, Aaron Allston, who I raved about just the other day as author of many Star Wars novels, plus Champions 5th Edition and my personal all-time favourite RPG book, Strike Force, suffered a heart attack while on his latest book tour. He required a quadruple bypass operation – not exactly an easy procedure – but I’m thankful to say, is on the mend.

After hearing about those two roleplaying icons, it felt slightly spooky to read a blog entry from Jeff Grubb (designer of Marvel Super Heroes, amongst many other things, and now a designer for Guild Wars 2) talking about his health, which in his words is “pretty sound”, but “could be better in many ways”. I’m sure Jeff’s going to be designing for many years to come, but all of this reminds me how far the roleplaying hobby, along with everything that span off from it, has come.

Dave Arneson was born in 1947, so he was approaching 30 when Dungeons & Dragons began to really take off. Thirty odd years later the roleplaying hobby has been an industry, and is now shrinking and maybe changing back into hobby it was, but it gave birth to something else: the computer-based descendants of RPGs, both single and multiplayer.

Those games, I’d argue, are struggling to find their defining moment, when they’ll break out of the original mold roleplaying formed for them. They’ll get there, but it might take a while. After all, today’s independent RPGs are fairly radically different from the original dungeon delvers.

Today though, there’s time for some reflection. I’ve never met Arneson, Allston or Grubb, and of course never will meet Arneson now, but all three of them have had a huge impact on my life. Perhaps I should start acknowledging that with more than a blog entry.

There are plenty of kind words for Dave Arneson around the web, by people who knew him and some who didn’t. I’ll list a few below, but this quote from Jeff Grubb summed up Arneson and Gygax’s legacy for me:

Gary and Dave were the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of our hobby, the names by which later generations would conjure. They created what would be modern roleplaying, and the rest of us are caught up in their wake.

More on Dave Arneson:

Ken Hite: “Dave Arneson invented role-playing games.”

Grognardia: In Memoriam: “It was Dave, after all, who created the concept of the dungeon, without which D&D as we know it would not have been possible.”

RPGBlog II: “Just as you cannot have D&D without Gygax, you cannot have it without Arneson.”

The Escapist: “The game industry would not be the same today without his work.”

GameSpy Interview in 2004: On what he’d like on his tombstone: “I don’t know, ‘Father of role-playing games?’ I got a sign that says that somewhere.”

Grognardia on The First Fantasy Campaign: “… this is an invaluable document, not just for the information it provides about the earliest campaign setting in the history of the hobby, but also for the way it presents another way to play OD&D, making Arneson the patron saint of rules modders and home brewers.”