The Room Where It Happened

In November 1972, Dave Arneson drove from the Twin Cities to Lake Geneva with a new kind of game. He ran it in Gary Gygax’s basement for the local gamers — Gygax, his son Ernie, Terry Kuntz, and seventeen-year-old Rob Kuntz. That session was the first demonstration of Blackmoor. Within months, it became Dungeons & Dragons.

Rob Kuntz was in the room. Not as a spectator. As a participant in the moment that invented the role-playing game. By the second-ever session in the World of Greyhawk, he had rolled up a fighter named Robilar — the first character to complete Tomb of Horrors. By 1973, at age eighteen, he was running his own dungeon, Castle El Raja Key, for Gygax, who played as Mordenkainen. By 1974, he and Gygax were co-Dungeon Masters of the expanding Greyhawk campaign, managing twenty-plus players across a shared world. By 1975, he was the sixth employee at TSR and co-author of Supplement I: Greyhawk — the book that turned D&D from a curiosity into a game system.

He was twenty years old.

Fifty years later, with Gygax dead in 2008, Arneson in 2009, and James M. Ward in 2024, Kuntz called himself “the last designer standing” from D&D’s creation. The claim was essentially accurate. He was the last active designer who had been in the room for the Blackmoor demonstration, the Greyhawk campaign, and TSR’s founding. He published his final adventure — Into the Wild Blue Yonder — in 2024.