Dave Arneson and a New Kind of Game

While I remain focused on finishing the second edition of Thousand Suns – hence my continued absence from posting here regularly – I was nevertheless determined that I would not forget to commemorate the birthday of Dave Arneson this year, as I have too often in the past. Rather than rehearse why I keep erring in this particular fashion, I thought it might instead be more fruitful to look at just one of the many reasons that Arneson deserves to be remembered not only on this, the 79th anniversary of his birth.Whereas Gary Gygax left behind an enormous body of writing through which we can directly encounter his ideas and contributions to the hobby, Arneson's legacy is more elusive. He wrote and published, of course, but I would argue that, rather than what he wrote, his greatest contributions to the history of the hobby happened before any rules had been written down. They happened at his table, refereeing Blackmoor and many other games with his friends in the Twin Cities. In fact,…