Gary Gygax

Dungeons and Dragons emerged from a Wisconsin basement in 1974, built by Gary Gygax with Dave Arneson, who had brought the idea of playing a single character through a continuing story to the wargames Gygax was already designing. The rules invented an industry. Gygax ran TSR from Lake Geneva, wrote the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons manuals through the late seventies, and built the world of Greyhawk as the setting for his own games. Artifact of Evil, published in 1985, is a novel in that world, the second about Gord the Rogue, a street thief of the City of Greyhawk pulled into a search for pieces of an artefact that should stay in pieces. He lost control of TSR the following year in a boardroom fight and spent his remaining working years designing games for other companies. Born in Chicago in 1938, he died at Lake Geneva in 2008.