Hello and thank you for downloading this edition of Witness, the History Program from the BBC World Service.

I'm Lucy Burns and today we're going back to January 1974 and the launch of a fantasy role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons. It started in a Wisconsin basement,

but within years it was being played by millions all over the world. There's a door in front of you.

Okay, so I open the door.

All right. You open the door and suddenly something springs out and grabs your

fighter by the face. It seems to be... This is Michael Mornard. In the early 1970s

he was a member of a club in the American Midwest for people

who like playing war games, strategy games, reenacting historic battles with maps and miniature

figures. And he was one of the first people

to play an early version of the game that became

Dungeons and Dragons.

It was after a World War II battle we had played

and then a friend of mine said,

Gary's got this cool new game

called Greyhawk where you're a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned castle

full of monsters and treasures and stuff and I said sounds great.

And so for someone who doesn't know what Dungeons and Dragons looks like,

what does the game look like?

Well, from the outside, it's a bunch of people sitting around a table talking and they have sheets of paper and sometimes they throw dice.

From inside the game you're exploring this old ruined dungeon.

The action in a game of Dungeons and Dragons takes place inside the player's

imaginations as they're led through a fantastical landscape described by the

...