Much like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Dungeons & Dragons all started with a map. Gygax had previously co-authored a miniatures-based war game, Chainmail. This had emerged from the centuries’ long tradition of wargames that encompassed both children’s ‘toy soldiers’ on the carpet to the models and battlefield maps used to plan strategy in military. 
In 1913, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) had published his own set of rule for playing with toy soldiers, Little Wars, describing it as a game for anyone ‘from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty’ and such games developed in the twentieth century as a popular hobby. With the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, 1974, the ‘White Box’ as it came to be called), Gygax and his co-author Dave Arneson (1947–2009) introduced two key innovations: first, they moved away from the recreations of real historical battles, introducing a fantasy setting; second, the dispensed with the need for cumbersome and often expensive paraphernalia of miniature armies and elaborate battlefields.
Concerning the latter, Gygax notes that though setting up a game ‘will cost almost nothing’, it did demand time and effort: the ‘campaign referee’ – now usually referred to as the Dungeon Master, or DM – would have to ‘devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his “dungeons” and upper terrain before the affair begins’. On page 6 of the first volume, Men & Magic, Gygax sets out the basis upon which nearly all role-playing games, both tabletop and digital, have been designed ever since: 'First, the referee must draw out a minimum of half a dozen maps of the levels of his "underworld", people them with monsters of various horrid aspect [and] distribute treasures accordingly.'
Volume 3 of the original edition, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, provides a usable example of such a dungeon, ‘in order to aid the prospective referee in designing his own game’. The dungeon map is crudely drawn, but it is annotated and contains atmospheric details such as false and secret doors, as well as pit traps, transporters and other challenges for the player characters to overcome or fall victim to. In the accompanying explanatory material, Gygax and Arneson explain how the map acts as a catalyst for the action of the game, which is played almost entirely in the participants’ imagination. Miniatures and other physical play aids are often used, but, apart from the famous polyhedral dice, they are optional. The DM knows the map and the details therein, describing the players’ environment to them only to the extent that they would immediately experience it at that point in the game. What is created is a collaborative dramatic narrative, with key moments, such as those involving combat or attempting to dodge a boulder, being decided by the roll of dice according to the rules.

Ex Carta

This first printing of Dungeons & Dragons, designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, introduced a revolutionary form of collaborative fantasy storytelling built around maps of dungeons and imagined landscapes. In play, the Dungeon Master acts as the world’s cartographer, preparing hidden maps of dungeons and wildernesses that players gradually discover through exploration and description.

The iconic game-designer Gary Gygax (1938–2008) gave the following account in the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons of the game’s origins in the foreword of the original edition:

ONCE UPON A TIME, long, long ago there was a little group known as the Castle and Crusade Society. Their fantasy rules were published, and to this writer’s knowledge, brought about much of the current interest in fantasy wargaming. For a time the group grew and prospered, and Dave Arneson decided to begin a medieval fantasy campaign game for his active Twin Cities club. From the map of the ‘land’ of the ‘Great Kingdom’ and environs – the territory of the C & C Society – Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of ‘Blackmoor,’ a spot between the ‘Great Kingdom’ and the fearsome ‘Egg of Coot.’

The first printing of 1,000 copies was produced on a shoestring budget of around $2,000, with only $100 set aside for artwork, for which Gygax sought favours from friends and local contacts. The brown woodgrain box had a cover price of $10 and contained three pamphlets or ‘volumes’: 

, together with reference sheets. The illustrations were provided by local artists, fellow gamers and friends – among them Greg Bell, Don Kaye, ‘Cookie’ Corey and others – often paid just $2–3 per piece, with small royalties on later printings. The result was visually amateurish but conceptually revolutionary.

The fantasy element of the game was drawn from a variety of literary sources. This first printing includes direct references to Tolkien’s work, including Hobbits, Ents, and Balrogs, as well as the author himself. Such licensing infringements were excised from subsequent impressions of the first edition, with the euphemistic Halflings, Treants and Balors being used instead. Tolkien aside, Gygax was also inspired by a host of other authors of fantasy and also horror. The magic system was modelled after the ‘Dying Earth’ stories of Jack Vance, for example, and its atmosphere of tavern intrigues and rascally adventures risking all for glory and fortune draws much from both the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales of Fritz Lieber and the Conan saga of Robert E. Howard. In a later supplement, the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), Gygax included the now legendary Appendix N, which provides a thorough syllabus of reading for those curious about the game’s influences, spanning decades of pulp sword and sorcery, high fantasy, Lovecraftian horror and Arthurian romance.

As Dungeons & Dragons grew in popularity and scope in ensuing decades, a vast amount of game supplements were published, including whole series of pre-created adventures in the form of ‘modules’. Each of these was predicated on maps; wilderness maps, sea charts, archipelagos, mountain kingdoms, and of course dungeons, some vast in scope.

Despite early scepticism that tabletop play would survive the rise of computer games, Dungeons & Dragons has proved remarkably resilient. By the 1990s its influence on video role-playing games was immense, yet the face-to-face social aspect of tabletop gaming endured. In the twenty-first century, aided by online play and streaming, the game is more popular than ever – its once-niche ‘nerdy’ image transformed as celebrities, influencers, and Hollywood actors alike broadcast their campaigns to mass audiences.

Sample level map from Volume III of the Dungeons and Dragons Rules 

Original game manual wrapper for Volume III of the Dungeons and Dragons Rules 

Title page and illustrations for Volume III of the Dungeons and Dragons Rules

Sample map of The Underworld. A digram showing a hypothetical cross-section of the game levels for Dungeons and Dragons

Character illustration and rules

Rules and scenery inspiration

Thus, much like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, 

 all started with a map. Gygax had previously co-authored a miniatures-based war game, 

. This had emerged from the centuries-long tradition of wargames that encompassed both children’s ‘toy soldiers’ on the carpet and the models and battlefield maps used to teach and plan strategy in military contexts, such as the Prussian Army’s 

In 1913, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) had published his own set of rules for playing with toy soldiers, 

, describing it as a game for boys ‘from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty’ (and ‘girls of the better sort’!), and such games developed in the twentieth century as a popular hobby. With the first edition of 

 (TSR, 1974), Gygax and his co-author Dave Arneson (1947–2009) introduced two key innovations: first, they moved away from recreations of real historical battles, introducing a fantasy setting; second, they dispensed with the need for cumbersome and often expensive paraphernalia of miniature armies and elaborate battlefields.

Concerning the latter, Gygax notes that though setting up a game ‘will cost almost nothing’, it did demand time and effort: the ‘campaign referee’ (now usually referred to as the Dungeon Master or DM) will have to ‘devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his ‘dungeons’ and upper terrain before the affair begins’. Volume 3 of the original edition, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, provided a useable examples of such a dungeon, ‘in order to aid the prospective referee in designing his own game’.

The dungeon map is crudely drawn, but is annotated and contains atmospheric details such as false and secret doors, as well as pit traps, transporters and other challenges for the player characters to overcome or fall victim to. In the accompanying explanatory material Gygax and Arneson explain how the maps work as a catalyst for the action of the game, which is played almost entirely in the participants’ imagination (though miniatures and other physical play aids are often used, apart from the famous polyhedral dice they are entirely optional).

The DM knows the map and the details therein, describing the players’ environment to them only to the extent that they would immediately experience it at that point in the game. What is created is a collaborative dramatic narrative, with key moments, such as those involving combat or attempting to dodge a boulder, being decided by the roll of dice according to the rules.

Dungeons & Dragons Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns