Tim Kask's 2nd Game of D&D - "I'm a lord! Wow, this is too cool!"

Gen Con XII, 1979. From left to right: Tim Kask and the Holmes family - Chris, Sig-Linda and John Eric

It's so easy to forget how - before anyone knew what a "roleplaying" game was, before video games, before Star Wars or modern fantasy or science fiction movies - one's first experience playing Dungeons & Dragons could be so mind blowing.

Here's Tim Kask describing his second game of D&D, played just a few minutes after his first. (This was on the last evening - I think - of the 1974 Gen Con.) Recall that in his first game, the entire party, including a sort of clueless Kask, had been carved up by a laser machine into paperweights.

Joseph Bloch reminds us that this was probably the infamous Machine Level of Gary Gygax's Castle Greyhawk. Bloch's excellent homage to that megadungeon, Castle of the Mad Archmage, can be found here. The entire Grognard Games interview with Kask may be viewed on YouTube.

Note the end of the interview, where Kask describes how, after his first experience with D&D, he then decided to buy the game and infect his friends with it. I always thought of the early game as being spread by what I like to call, evangelization. But perhaps infection is at least as appropriate a metaphor . . . 

Grognard: Did you enjoy that first game or was it just a case of . . .

Tim Kask: I really didn't have any idea what had happened because I couldn't hear half the time. You know, we're in a large hall, and there's games going on all over, and there's movies going on, out in the in the garden area in the center, and I just kept missing snatches of the conversation. So, all right, what the heck . . .

Grognard: Your very next game was with Ron Kuntz who was shouting for volunteers . . .

Tim Kask: I think it was. I believe it was. I'm still sitting there scratching my head, and I'm not ready to leave yet. So a young man comes through, getting players together again. And I said, well, okay. I looked at my watch. I got time - that last one didn't take very long. So I, okay, I signed up.

And this time, I was a dwarf. And I liked that idea. And I had an axe, and I was wearing chain mail. and I had a shield and a helmet. And I'm I'm getting into it now, and I'm up in the front - all right let's do it! you know? So, I'm just telling him what I do. And, of course, none of us had dice so he's doing all the dice rolling and everything. And I'm just, "I'm chopping at em!" And in the course of about, I don't know, maybe two hours that adventure lasted, we rescued a dying dwarven duke or something. And, as I was the only dwarf in the party, he gave me this, like, medallion of office. Now, all I had to do is go find his duchy or dukedom. And I had a hundred fighting men at my disposal. And I had a castle underground (you know, of course, he's a dwarf). And this was the . . . this was like hitting the jackpot, because the whole point of D&D was to adventure up to get enough money to build yourself a keep, go out and carve yourself a kingdom out of the wilderness, build yourself a keep and rule it as a lord. Ha! Second game, I'm a lord! Wow, this is too cool!

So I went back and I bought the game. I bought a box - I bought the box, the little brown box. And I bought a set of dice. And I took them back, and I infected my game group at college, several weeks later. So that's how I started.

Tim Kask's First Experience Playing D&D Was a Bizarre and Befuddling TPK

Elise Gygax and Tim Kask at Gen Con XI, 1978

This is a neat story.

It actually tracks my own first experience of Dungeons & Dragons - being a quasi-anonymous and unimportant character in a large group, and having absolutely no idea what was going on.

I expect others have similar memories.

Is this how you first experienced the game?

Tim Kask was one of the most important figures in early D&D. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, a chance phone call had earned him the friendship of Gary Gygax. And shortly after the events of the following story, he would be hired by Gygax at Tactical Studies Rules (the name of the company was in the process of being changed to "TSR"). Among other things, Kask would edit The Dragon magazine for a number of years.

It may be that Kask's account is told or related elsewhere. But I had never heard it. It is part of a Google+ Hangout interview that Grognard Games did with Tim Kask on February 15, 2013, and that is now available on YouTube. I highly recommend watching or listening to the full conversation.

The topic of the interview was ostensibly Gygax Magazine, which had just been announced, but it ended up being a wide-ranging talk about many things, including the early history of Dungeons & Dragons. This two-minute portion starts at the 18:00 minute mark:

Grognard: Your first ever game of D&D was at Gen Con. Was it 74?

Tim Kask: 1974.

Grognard: 1974. Can you take me through that game, that day. And can you take us through your first game, and then the second game that you had that day?

Tim Kask: Okay, well, I was there because Gary (Gary Gygax) had told us about this get-together at the time. I think he said, man, there's a couple, three hundred of us. Well my biggest gathering of gamers had been my club, which is about 20 strong, and so, I gotta go, I gotta go see 300 gamers in one place, yeah.

And so, he'd been telling me all along about this new game he was working on, because I met him through the context of Chainmail. But he'd been telling me about this new game he was working out. And so I had the rudiments in my head, and naively I thought I'd find a hotel when I got there, and I realized I didn't. So I'm gonna game until I drop, and then I gotta drive four and a half hours. Oh, I figured I would just drive with my head out the window to keep me awake after all, it's gaming (laughs).

Yeah, and so somebody's walking down - it was later in the evening, it's already dark - I remember that somebody was walking down one of the hallways at the Horticultural Hall saying we need some players, need some players. And I said, oh that's that thing Gary was talking about. I've been playing miniatures all day. And so I said, okay, sure I'll go. And I raised my hand.

So okay (the man says), here, you're a fighter, and you got a sword and shield. You know, I'm, okay, cool, this sounds good, you know. And it was about six or seven of us, I guess, and so I got stuck in the back. And they said, watch the back. So that's all I did. Ok, I'm watching the back, and I'd tell them every once while, I'm looking behind us. And I don't know why, but apparently while I was looking behind us, something happened up in front of us, because the next thing I know - and I really don't know what's been going on because I'm also literally sitting in the back of three rows of chairs not catching everything - all of a sudden I find we're encased in some enormous block of gas permeable lucite of some sort, because we're not suffocating but we're completely . . . we can't even blink, we're so immobile.

And I'm just sitting in the back, going, wow what just happened, you know. Yeah, I've completely bewildered and befuddled. And so we're dragged before this enormous bank of what must have been lights and dials and knobs and levers and whatever. And it didn't go well, because - again, I couldn't hear what was going on - but it was announced that we had all been cut up with laser beams into 1-inch cubes and made into paper weights. And I just . . . And this is like 35-40 minutes into the thing, and I'm going, well, that was certainly different than anything I've ever done before . . .

--------------------

Next: Tim Kask's second D&D game.