After TSR
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, including Chainmail, the original 3-book set of D&D, the five D&D supplements (Greyhawk; Blackmoor; Eldritch Wizardry; Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes; and Swords & Spells), and all seven issues of The Strategic Review.
TSR had agreed to pay Arneson royalties on all D&D products, but when the company came out with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) in 1977, it claimed that this was a significantly different product and did not pay him royalties. 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 the packaging of D&D products from that point on, but this did not end the lingering tensions between them. (Twenty years later, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) bought TSR and wanted to drop the word "Advanced" from its planned third edition of D&D. WotC CEO Peter Adkison approached Arneson to resolve the two-decade-old issue and Arneson released all claims to D&D for an undisclosed sum of money.)
In 1979 Arneson and Richard L. Snider, an original Blackmoor player, co-authored Adventures in Fantasy, 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, that produced the miniatures games Johnny Reb and Harpoon, as well as his own Adventures in Fantasy role-playing game. Adventure Games was profitable, but Arneson found the workload to be excessive and finally sold the company to Flying Buffalo.
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, three of which were written by Arneson, detailed Arneson's campaign setting for the first time. When Gygax was forced out of TSR, Arneson was removed 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 stepped into the computer industry and founded 4D Interactive Systems, a computer company in Minnesota that is still in business today. He also did some computer programming and worked on several games. He eventually found himself consulting with computer companies.
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 a professor of computer game design until 2008.
Around 2000, Arneson was working with videographer John Kentner on Dragons in the Basement, 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 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 and Dustin Clingman founded Zeitgeist Games to produce an updated d20 System version of the Blackmoor setting. Goodman Games published and distributed this new Blackmoor in 2004.
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