Alarums and Excursions: how zines remade D&D and the web

Lee Gold was 33 when she played her first game of Dungeons and Dragons. She and her husband, Barry, were hosting friends, Owen and Eclare Hannifen, in their Los Angeles home. Eclare Hannifen was DMing. The party encountered “a six foot tall creature that was a cross between a kidney bean and a shmoo”. They befriended it and it helped them kill a vampire. They also fought some evil cultists and got a magic sword. All in all, a perfectly ordinary 4-hour session of dungeoneering. Except this was early 1975 and it would’ve been one of the first games of D&D played in LA ever. It would lead to Alarums and Excursions (A&E), a zine that would change the history of roleplaying games forever. 

Looking for Gold

Lee Gold (born Klingstein) was always a bookish person. Her childhood home was full of them, mostly bought by her mother, an activist who belonged to the League of Women Voters and gave members speaking lessons. When she was 16, she read all of Shakespeare's history plays in one afternoon. She was avoiding her grandmother’s friends and sat in the guest room with her fingers in her ears, only taking them out to turn the page. “For two days afterwards I involuntarily spoke blank verse”, Gold wrote in A&E.

But the thread that led her to games was her love for science fiction and fantasy. She bought her first science fiction magazine on the ferry to Vancouver island at the age of 11 and read her first novel, Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov, soon after. She later used her father’s library card to check out 1984, even though it was marked “for adults”. She quickly transitioned from reader to fan, making a place for herself in science fiction fandom. With some friends, she put together a scifi fiction fanzine called The Third Foundation. Despite being the first issue, it was numbered 77 and contained references and responses to the non-existing previous issues—an elaborate joke and art-piece at the same time. 

 She would take that inaugural issue to her first meeting at the LA Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) in 1967. There was a lot of singing (or rather, filking) in these meetings and so she put forth her own parody called “Oh What A Beautiful Martian”. Barry Gold, a computer engineer who had attended CalTech at the age of 16, would sing her song out loud that night in a charming, mellow voice. They would get married two years later. 

LASFS had a weekly zine associated with it, started by Bruce Pelz and then-wife Dian Girard. As D&D came to Los Angeles and infected the members of the science fiction fandom, it began to show up in the pages of the LASFS’ zine. But Pelz had little interest in this new game and seemed to be disheartened by its growing presence in their fan spaces. “[A]s more and more people began discussing D&D, Bruce's zine became shorter and shorter, discussing less and less”, said Lee Gold to Rascal, over email. Unlike Pelz, Gold saw the potential for this strange and magical new hobby. She knew people were dying to talk about it. They just needed the space to do so. So she started Alarums and Excursions.