The recent passing of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson saddens me, as did the death last year of Gary Gygax. Though I never met either man, I owe them a debt of gratitude for many hours of entertainment. I also must acknowledge them as creative influences on the Jason Cosmo saga. It is safe to say that without the work of Arneson and Gygax (along with many other creators and authors at TSR and Dragon magazine) there would be no Jason Cosmo!

I was in the 6th grade when I learned about this game called Dungeons & Dragons that apparently involved acting out fantasy adventures with the aid of pencil, paper and oddly shaped dice. I was already a heavy reader of fantasy and science fiction, particularly enjoying Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Howard’s Conan stories, along with reading big helpings of medieval and ancient history and Greek mythology. So my existing interests that led me to D&D, not the other way around.

What most captivated me about D&D was not so much the role-playing, as the world-building. Starting with the D&D Basic Set (the one with the red dragon on the box), I accumulated during my middle and high school years a significant collection of D&D (and AD&D) rule books and modules, more than 100 issues of Dragon, as well as other RPGs like Top Secret, Boot Hill, Star Frontiers, Gangbusters, Villains & Vigilantes, and several more.

But I rarely ever actually played these games. For one thing, I was too young to drive and lived too far away from my friends to get together for regular gaming sessions. For another, I was much more interested in drawing maps, designing characters, and creating elaborate plots and histories for my made-up worlds. Also, most of my friends were of the Monty Haul school of play. They liked to kill monsters and load up on treasure and magic items. I don’t think they much cared about the geopolitical underpinnings of the rivalry between Zingoth and the Purple Empire. (I later majored in political science. Go figure.)

In all my school years, I think I was a player character for maybe three gaming sessions. As DM or GM, I ran a brief V&V campaign and even briefer Top Secret and Star Frontiers campaigns (by brief, I mean maybe 2 or 3 sessions each). So while I was very fluent in the D&D and gaming culture (okay, sub-culture) I wasn’t a very active participant around the gaming table.

Instead, I wrote stories. This is where Jason Cosmo comes in. I missed out on most of the good gaming sessions, so instead I created my own bunch of D&D characters and wrote funny stories about their adventures to share with my friends. Now in they elder days, when the world was young, there was no Internet by which to distribute tales of adventure. There weren’t even personal computers upon which to type them, at least not in my house. ((Not that I knew how to type anyway.))

So the more than 100 episodes of the original Jason Cosmo adventures were all written out longhand, in pencil, on notebook paper and passed around between classes. Fortunately, most episodes were very short — three pages on average. I usually churned out at least one episode a week, sometimes more. Most ended with a cliffhanger. I usually had no idea how to get the characters out of whatever jam I had put them in and couldn’t start the next episode until I figured out some way for them to escape certain death.

Now, had there been no D&D, I still would have written stories and passed them around. I’m pretty sure of that. I just loved writing, and making my friends laugh with the ridiculous situations I invented. But I would not have come up with Jason Cosmo, absent the influence of D&D. Role-playing games provided the milieu and inspiration for the original Jason Cosmo stories — which eventually evolved into my first novel, Jason Cosmo. The D&D emphasis on setting, world-building, and the storytelling role of the Dungeon Master helped me teach myself how to design plots, develop fictional characters, and blend action with exposition. I still consult my 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide or Player’s Handbook from time to time when I’m working on a story.

So a salute and thank you to both Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax for giving me, and gamer geeks everywhere, Dungeons & Dragons!

Best regards,

Dan McGirt