Tom Moldvay

Life

Thomas Steven Moldvay was born on November 5, 1948. In the 1970s he was a student at Kent State University in Ohio and an active science-fiction fan who wrote for the fanzine Infinite Dreams. He was also a Dungeons & Dragons player, and when TSR, Inc. expanded rapidly at the end of the decade, Lawrence Schick, its head of design and development, brought him to Lake Geneva.

He worked as a writer and designer through the busiest years of the D&D boom, and continued to write for Dragon magazine and other publishers afterward. He died on March 9, 2007, at the age of 58.

Work

Moldvay's most influential work was his revision of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, published in 1981 (the rulebook carries a 1980 copyright). J. Eric Holmes's 1977 set had been designed as a stepping-stone to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; Moldvay's version instead made Basic D&D a complete game line of its own. His 64-page rulebook, with a cover by Erol Otus, covered levels 1 to 3 with notable clarity, explaining how to create characters, explore dungeons, fight and cast spells, and even how a referee might build an adventure. It was paired with an Expert Set, edited by David "Zeb" Cook and Steve Marsh, which took characters to level 14, and the Basic box included Gary Gygax's The Keep on the Borderlands, one of the most widely circulated modules in the game's history.

He also wrote or co-wrote many of the era's best-loved adventures. The Isle of Dread (1981), co-written with Cook and included in the Expert Set, sent players by ship to a jungle island of dinosaurs, tribal villages and a mysterious central plateau; it introduced wilderness exploration to a vast audience. Castle Amber (1981) was a surreal adventure set in and around a mansion of the decadent Amber family, with journeys into the land of Averoigne borrowed from the stories of Clark Ashton Smith. The Lost City (1982) took players to a desert pyramid concealing an underground civilization. And when TSR destroyed the first printing of Jean Wells's Palace of the Silver Princess, Moldvay rewrote it for the edition published in 1981.

His range extended beyond D&D. He contributed to the Slave Lords adventure series with Secret of the Slavers Stockade (1981), was a co-developer of TSR's gangster RPG Gangbusters, and wrote adventures for the science fiction game Star Frontiers. For Avalon Hill he designed Lords of Creation (1983), an ambitious multi-genre roleplaying game in which characters could rise to godlike power. He wrote articles for Dragon magazine (The Strategic Review & Dragon) through the 1980s. In 1985 he created "The Future King," a one-shot game drawn from Arthurian legend, and in 1986 he returned to the Basic line with Twilight Calling, an adventure for the high-level Master rules, while also publishing The Challenges Game System and its adventure Seren Ironhand.

Legacy

For many players who came to the game in the early 1980s, Moldvay's red-bordered rulebook was D&D. Its brevity and teaching voice, together with the Cook/Marsh Expert rules (often called "B/X"), made it a favorite of the Old-School Renaissance (OSR), and games such as Old-School Essentials are built closely on its rules.

The game world also remembers him: in TSR's Known World, later called Mystara, the city of Yavdlom is his name spelled backward.