From satanic panic to billion-dollar business: how Dungeons & Dragons conquered the world
‘We didn’t mean to unleash the greatest evil the world has ever known,” says Chris Pine’s voiceover. “But we’re gonna fix it.” In the forthcoming movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Pine plays Edgin, a lutenist bard who, according to the blurb, leads a band of medieval misfits with special powers who undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry. Their enemy is played by Hugh Grant, hopefully channelling his villain from Paddington 2.
The release of the Dungeons & Dragons movie, next March, will be the culmination of a story more improbable than anything spawned by a Hollywood hack. As Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) approaches its half-century, the game, first played in a Wisconsin basement by a handful of geeks, is the most successful and popular role-playing game in the world, with a fanbase extending to the likes of Stephen King, Drew Barrymore, Dwayne Johnson, Elon Musk and, yes, Michael Gove.
It’s a tale that begins in 1970 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, when a Jehovah’s Witness and high-school dropout named Gary Gygax lost his job as an insurance underwriter. Taking solace in playing war games with friends in family basements, Gygax made tabletop recreations of famous battlefields, using protractors and rulers, with toys representing battalions of infantry, cavalry and artillery emplacements.
Those basement battles evolved into something more medieval, namely D&D. The idea is simple. Each player chooses to be a character in a quest. There is also a dungeon master, who creates obstacles, challenges and monsters during players’ journeys. There are dice to introduce an element of chance, some with as many as 20 sides.
In early games, Gygax was dungeon master. In one interview, he
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