D&D Co-Creator Robert J. Kuntz Says Wizards’ Own History Book Permanently Stigmatized Him And “A Whole Generation”

Robert J. Kuntz is one of the handful of people who actually built Dungeons & Dragons from nothing in 1972, and this week he told the company that now owns his creation exactly what he thinks of how it’s treated him and his late collaborators.

Kuntz’s credentials aren’t in dispute. At 17, in 1972, he lived a few blocks from Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and played in the second-ever session of what would become D&D, running a character named Robilar who became the first to successfully complete the legendary Tomb of Horrors. Gygax made him co-Dungeon Master of the original Greyhawk campaign by 1974, when the play group had grown past twenty people. Kuntz went on to co-author Supplement I: Greyhawk, the first Deities & Demigods, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes, and Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure, and he built his own Kalibruhn setting, the third D&D campaign world ever created. Along with Gygax, Dave Arneson, Don Kaye, and Brian Blume, Kuntz is one of the small circle of people who were physically present at the game’s creation and spent years building it for free before it became a commercial product, let alone a billion-dollar industry.