Frank Mentzer

Life

Jacob Franklin Mentzer III was born in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia; reliable sources do not agree on his birth year. An enthusiastic D&D player and referee, he was hired by TSR, Inc. as an editor in January 1980, after a telephone interview, and moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He spent six busy years at the company during its peak, becoming one of Gary Gygax's closest collaborators.

When Gygax lost control of TSR at the end of 1985, Mentzer followed him out in 1986. After their joint venture failed at the end of the decade, he stepped away from the industry for a time, managing a bakery in Minocqua, Wisconsin, before returning to game design. In 2010 he co-founded Eldritch Enterprises with fellow TSR veterans Jim Ward and Tim Kask and with Chris Clark.

Work

Mentzer's first mark on the hobby was organizational. At Gen Con in 1980 he won the first Dungeon Master Invitational tournament, and that year he formed the Role Playing Game Association, TSR's club for players and referees. The RPGA ran tournaments, sanctioned events and a newsletter, Polyhedron, and it laid the foundations of organized play, the system of shared, ranked convention adventures that later grew into programs such as the Living campaigns and D&D Adventurers League.

His most enduring work was his revision of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. Starting in 1983, TSR released his rules as a series of five boxed sets, remembered by their initials as BECMI: Basic (red box), Expert (blue), Companion (teal), Master (black) and Immortals (gold). The Basic box, with its famous Larry Elmore cover of a warrior confronting a red dragon, used a programmed, step-by-step approach, including a solo adventure, to teach new players without a referee. The later boxes took characters to level 36 and beyond, adding rules for dominions, mass combat and, finally, play as immortal beings. The series was eventually translated into eleven languages, and the red box in particular became one of the most recognizable game boxes of the decade.

Mentzer wrote many adventures as well. He expanded Gygax's The Village of Hommlet into The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), a large campaign module long promised to fans. He wrote a series of RPGA tournament modules (R1–R4) set in his own campaign world of Aquaria, which he had run since 1976; these were later revised with Jennell Jaquays into the super-module Egg of the Phoenix. Other work included The Immortal Storm (1986) and Needle (1987).

After leaving TSR he joined Gygax's new company, New Infinities Productions, as its design executive, working on the science-fiction RPG Cyborg Commando (1987) and writing the adventure The Convert (1987), originally created for D&D, which TSR successfully blocked with an injunction. The company went bankrupt in 1989.

Legacy

For a large share of the players who took up D&D in the mid-1980s, the Mentzer red box was the first contact with the game, and his programmed-learning approach set a standard for how to teach roleplaying on the page. The BECMI line, much of which was later compiled into the Rules Cyclopedia (1991), remains one of the best-loved versions of classic D&D, and it is a key reference for the Old-School Renaissance (OSR).

Organized play is his other legacy. The RPGA he founded ran for decades as the backbone of convention D&D, and its descendants still shape how people play official adventures together at conventions and in stores.