Hail adventurer! If you’ve come to this ancient, hallowed mountain top article seeking hidden knowledge, travel no further. Back in the 1970’s a man, nay, a legend named Gary Gygax created a table top role playing game called Dungeons & Dragons. Since then the game has changed and grown into a cultural juggernaut. There are hundreds of D&D Twitch streams, podcasts, even an animated show on Amazon Prime. The world and many of the characters (like Hobbits for example) were inspired by classic works of Western high fantasy, which were themselves inspired by the myths and legends from ancient Europe. The famous works of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jack Vance were all used (or ripped off depending on your perspective) to craft D&D. But other origins of the game are not so lofty. So today dear heroic reader, using our dark magics, we’ve stuffed 5 of the most unexpected inspirations Gygax used to craft the original game into this bag of holding listicle. Soldier on brave one, for knowledge is the greatest weapon of all.
New Line
The United States Army
Dungeons & Dragons was by no means the first role-playing strategy game. Many of the early predecessors to the game that inspired Stranger Things, weren’t fantasy games at all. They were usually military games, sometimes based off of real battle scenarios. One game, Strategos, was actually developed as a training tool for the actual, honest to god United States Army all the way back in 1880. Almost 100 years later, the game had made its way into the hands of some teenagers in Minnesota. Dave Arneson was a member of the Midwest Military Simulation Association, a wargaming group in the St. Paul area. He got introduced to the game and then in turn introduced it to, you guessed it, Gary Gygax. The two used the wargame as a jumping off point for crafting rules and stats for the game they would develop together, D&D.