In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created the world’s first role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. D&D offered an entirely new avenue for readers to interact with fantasy literature; instead of simply reading fantastic novels, players were welcome to inhabit their worlds. This thesis provides both a contextualization of D&D within our literary history—as a narrative-creating game which relies on performance for its actualization—and an analysis of two of the primary texts responsible for its game world diegesis: Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser cycle of stories. This analysis offers a generative method for examining artistic influences on the nascent medium of tabletop roleplaying, a new ergodic form of literature. Through an analysis of Anderson’s novel and Leiber’s short stories, we are able to understand how Gygax constructed a new post-modern mythological canon, by interpellating literary elements, perspectives, and narrative decisions, from the popular fictions of early 20th century pulp fiction that he catalogued in D&D’s Appendix N. This investigation illuminates the importance of literary tradition for creating new legends for our games, in our classic analog field and in our emerging digital landscape, and argues for the necessity of encouraging further curiosity into how our literary traditions shape the imaginations of our present and future game designers, developers, and artists.
