Ian Chinich serves as a customer service representative at Automated Health Systems. He takes care of the Affordable Care Act rollout. An avid fan of fantasy and science fiction, Ian Chinich plays Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).
Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game that has been around for nearly 50 years. It was created by Gary Gygax and David Arneson, who met in 1969 to collaborate on the game’s rules. In 1971, Gygax completed the Chainmail, the rules that Arneson used in the Blackmoor fantasy campaign. D&D was officially launched in 1974.
The creation of D&D was inspired by real-life experience. Gygax’s vision of D&D started during his childhood when he and his friend would sneak into an abandoned psychiatric hospital at night. The many hours they spent on the hospital’s giant halls left an indelible impression on the young Gygax’s, from which he drew the setup for the D&D’s scary dungeons.
It was said that Gygax struggled to come up with the physical shape of the monsters in D&D. During his struggles to complete the Monster Manual, Gygax remembered a bag of Hong Kong-made plastic pre-historic animals he bought somewhere. The scary and strange-looking monsters in D&D were all inspired by these toy animals.
Since its creation, D&D has been owned by four different owners. Tactical Studies Rules owned D&D when its first set emerged in 1974. In 1975, Tactical Studies Rules became TSR Hobbies Inc. and continued D&D’s initial publishing partnership. In 1997, TSR Hobbies was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, including all the rights for D&D. In 1999, Hasbro became D&D's fourth owner after Wizards of the Coast became its subsidiary.
