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Dungeons & Dragons

An elaborate D&D game in progress. Among the gaming aids shown here are dice, a variety of miniatures, and a dungeon diorama.

Dungeons & Dragons (commonly abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). It has been published by Wizards of the Coast, later a subsidiary of Hasbro, since 1997. The game was derived from miniature wargames, with a variation of the 1971 game Chainmail serving as the initial rule system. D&D's publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry, which also deeply influenced video games, especially the role-playing video game genre.

In 2004, D&D remained the best-known, and best-selling, role-playing game in the US, with an estimated 20 million people having played the game and more than US$1 billion in book and equipment sales worldwide. The year 2017 had "the most number of players in its history—12 million to 15 million in North America alone". D&D 5th edition sales "were up 41 percent in 2017 from the year before, and soared another 52 percent in 2018, the game's biggest sales year yet". The game has been supplemented by many premade adventures, as well as commercial campaign settings suitable for use by regular gaming groups. D&D is known beyond the game itself for other D&D-branded products, references in popular culture, and some of the controversies that have surrounded it, particularly a moral panic in the 1980s that attempted to associate it with Satanism and suicide. The game has won multiple awards and has been translated into many languages. (Full article...)

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Gygax at Gen Con Indy 2007

Ernest Gary Gygax (/ˈɡaɪɡæks/ GHY-gaks; July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson.

In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he co-developed Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare with Jeff Perren. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The next year, TSR published D&D, created by Gygax and Arneson the year before. In 1976, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, he began work on a more comprehensive version of the game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game (the "Dungeon Master") a rough script and ideas. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series. (Full article...)

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WikiProjects

The Dungeons & Dragon WikiProject collaborates on improving all D&D-related articles on Wikipedia. WikiProject Role-Playing Games, its parent project, has a larger scope and covers all role-playing games. The Video games project also has a task force dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons-related video games.

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The following are images from various Dungeons & Dragons-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Fan art depicting a hobbit (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 2The Great Wheel cosmology as presented in the Players Handbook (1978):
- Inner Planes: Material Plane (1), Positive (2) and Negative (3) Planes, Elemental Planes (4–7);
- Ethereal (8) and Astral (9) Planes;
- Outer Planes (10–25)
(from Plane (Dungeons & Dragons))
Image 3Orcs were popularized by fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien and are found in many fantasy games. (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 4D&D uses polyhedral dice to resolve in-game events. These are abbreviated by a 'd' followed by the number of sides. Shown from left to right are a d20, d12, d%, d10, d8, d6, and a d4. A d% and d10 can be rolled together to produce a number between 1 and 100. (from Dungeons & Dragons)
Image 5TSR, Inc. logo (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 6A Dungeon Master's notebook with a custom design adventure (from Dungeons & Dragons)
Image 7The "World Axis" model of the planes, as described in the 4th edition Manual of the Planes (from Plane (Dungeons & Dragons))
Image 8Waupun State Prison in 1895 (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 9The 'Great Wheel' model of the planes, as described in the 5th edition Player's Handbook (from Plane (Dungeons & Dragons))