Dungeons & Dragons
In November 1972, Arneson and David Megarry traveled to Lake Geneva to meet with Gary Gygax. Arneson thought that Gygax would be interested in Megarry's Dungeon! boardgame, which Megarry had developed as player in Blackmoor, and Gygax had expressed a desire to play a game of Blackmoor itself. After playing in the Blackmoor game Arneson refereed, Gygax almost immediately began a similar campaign of his own which he called Greyhawk and asked Arneson for a draft of his playing rules. The two then collaborated by phone and mail, and playtesting carried out by their various groups and other contacts. Gygax and Arneson wanted to publish the game, but Guidon Games and Avalon Hill rejected it. Arneson could not afford to invest in the venture.
Gygax felt that there was a need to publish the game as soon as possible, since similar projects were being planned elsewhere, so rules were hastily put together and Arneson's own final draft was never used. Despite all this, Brian Blume eventually provided the funding required to publish the original Dungeons & Dragons set in 1974, with the initial print run of 1,000 selling out within a year and sales increasing rapidly in subsequent years. Further rules and a sample dungeon from Arneson's original campaign (the first published RPG scenario in a professional publication) were released in 1975 in the Blackmoor supplement for D&D, named after the campaign setting. The supplement offered little in the way of details from Arneson's actual campaign, however.
Arneson formally joined TSR as their Director of Research at the beginning of 1976 but left at the end of the year to pursue a career as an independent game designer.
Read more about this topic: Dave Arneson