The 'Hamptons of the Midwest' Is Finally Embracing Its Dungeons & Dragons Legacy
"I don't see anything dark, and I don't see anything nerdy."
Paul Stormberg was standing in the basement of 330 Center Street, the nominal “birthplace of Dungeons & Dragons,” giving his 19th tour of the day, when his flip phone rang. A bit of drama unfolding down at Library Park: The live archery demo, where a leather-clad bowyer was helping children fire arrows at rows of plastic orcs, was jangling the nerves of tourists strolling the adjacent Geneva Lake Shore Path. Never mind the safety net and hay-bale backstop—a few were lodging complaints.
Stormberg, a founder and co-chairman of the Dragon Days Fantasy Festival, held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, sighed and told the caller he’d deal with it. Then he hung up and turned, not missing a beat, back to the dozen or so folks watching him from across a gaming table covered in sand and medieval figurines.
“The DNA of D&D is right here in this sand table!” he declared, explaining how Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax had stood in that very spot while remixing dime-store plastic toys to make his first monstrous miniatures: dragons, ogres, owlbears. “All of that fantasy,” Stormberg said, pausing for effect, “was created right here.”
Last month’s second annual Dragon Days marked a turning point in the relationship between the genteel resort town of Lake Geneva and its most famous export: Dungeons & Dragons, the pioneering tabletop role-playing game, multimedia franchise, and geek-culture touchstone that’s currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. Until recently, the town had never made much of its status as the cradle of D&D. Lake Geneva has rarely wanted for visitors—not since the 1870s, anyway, when well-to-do Chicagoans started filling trains to escape the gritty aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire. The lake itself is a big draw, ringed with beaches, marinas, and a 21-mile footpath that cuts through the yards of mansions built by Gilded Age industrialists. (The body of water, confusingly, is “Geneva Lake,” while “Lake Geneva” is the town on its northeast shore.) Those grand estates—named for Maytags, Schwinns, Wrigleys, and others—earned the area its nickname: the Hamptons of the Midwest.
As the story goes, a young Gary Gygax used to sit by the lakeshore, gazing wistfully at the mansions while daydreaming about becoming a rich and famous fantasy novelist. In 1973, he was a 34-year-old shoe cobbler working out of his basement at 330 Center Street, a few blocks and a world away from the tony harborfront. An avid player of military-strategy games, he’d lost his job as an insurance underwriter a few years earlier and decided to give it a go as a freelance game designer. Shoe repair was his side hustle, just barely putting food on the table for him, his wife, and their five kids.
One of Gygax’s projects was a hybrid of a Tolkien-esque battle game he’d designed and a more character-driven, cooperative one made by a friend, a Minnesotan game designer named Dave Arneson. To produce and sell his and Arneson’s new game, Gygax started a company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR. In January 1974, TSR distributed the first thousand copies of a three-booklet rule set with the unruly label Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.
In the decades that followed, TSR rose and fell spectacularly (its tumultuous arc has made for some page-turning corporate histories—see Ben Riggs’s Slaying the Dragon or Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards). But at the outset, the company boomed as D&D made cultural waves, spinning off, among other things, a huge catalog of tie-in novels and a Saturday morning cartoon.
At its early ’80s peak, TSR employed more than 400 people in a town of just 5,600. And by the time the company left Lake Geneva at the end of the 1990s (bought out by Wizards of the Coast, publishers of the Magic: The Gathering card game and today owned by Hasbro), D&D had summoned to the bucolic little lake town a whole microculture of fantasy authors, artists, game designers, and other creative weirdos.
And yet, to hear some of those weirdos tell it, the prospect of a town-wide street fair celebrating D&D’s legacy would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago.
“The local populace and the city fathers were just kind of mystified by it—like, ‘Who are these guys? What is this game?’” recalls Mike Carr, a game designer and early TSR employee. “Gary Gygax was viewed as a little strange.”
That wariness wasn’t helped by the occult stigma that followed D&D out of the 1980s, when sloppy reporting in the wake of a pair of teen suicides set off a nationwide “Satanic panic.” Writer Anne Morrissy, who grew up in Lake Geneva in the ’80s and ’90s, suspects that few around town actually believed their TSR-employed neighbors were demon worshippers. All the same—not great for the Lake Geneva brand.
“Probably no one was actively trying to diminish the Dungeons & Dragons connection,” says Morrissy, now the editor of Lake Geneva’s lifestyle magazine, At the Lake. “But there was a specific image the town was trying to project, which is, you know, ‘the Hamptons of the Midwest.’ So how do you weave a very famous fantasy game into this very elite vacation destination? I think that’s what the town is working towards now.”
The seeds of Dragon Days were sown after Gygax died in 2008. He was 69 and had recently suffered an abdominal aneurysm. In the years that followed, a group of family and friends came together to lobby the city council for a memorial statue. But the council was reluctant and progress stalled until 2019, when Stormberg joined the group’s board.
Stormberg is a genuine fanboy who runs an auction house for D&D memorabilia from his home in Omaha, Nebraska. But he presents like a genial country lawyer who just happens to have a knack for articulating D&D’s significance to those who’ve never rolled a 20-sided die. Now president of the Gygax Memorial Fund, he nudged the group to work with community leaders on a wider slate of more achievable initiatives, including the Dragon Days Fantasy Festival.
After a small-scale soft launch in 2023, this year’s Dragon Days saw an estimated 2,600 people gather in downtown Lake Geneva to celebrate 50 years of D&D. The lakeside park where Gygax once daydreamed was filled with vendors hawking hand-turned wands and leatherware, artisans giving chainmail and blacksmith demos, and an outdoor stage hosting bards, aerialists, and alchemists. Kids gathered in the library for D&D story hour and at the downtown theater for screenings of the ’80s cartoon show. At the Geneva Lake Museum, TSR vets gave talks about the game’s history and impact. Main Street was a carnival of robed elves and tiefling barbarians licking ice cream cones while wandering from venue to venue.
There was gaming, too, with players rolling dice in the same Horticultural Hall where Gygax, in 1968, hosted the first-ever Geneva Convention—Gen Con is now an annual event that attracts 70,000 gamers to a stadium in Indianapolis each August. But unlike Gen Con (or GaryCon, held each spring at a Lake Geneva conference resort), Dragon Days isn’t a gaming convention for die-hards, just a family-friendly civic celebration—and a symbol of how the once-arcane D&D subculture has been demystified and embraced.
“I don't see anything dark, and I don't see anything nerdy,” says Deanna Goodwin, vice president of marketing, communications, and development for Visit Lake Geneva. Three years ago, she and her tourism-bureau colleagues rolled up characters and played a tutorial session at a since-closed local hobby shop—and loved it. “I think there's a new generation of fans and players, and it’s melded with the old. It’s a huge part of pop-culture history. And as a marketer, what I’m looking for is, what would I need to see or touch, as a fan, to make this a destination where I can experience the birthplace of D&D?”
“We know there are millions of gamers worldwide who’d want to make this pilgrimage to Lake Geneva,” says Harold Johnson, a former designer and editor at TSR and chairman of the Dragon Days fest. “But for a long time, there was nothing to do or see here.”
The Adventurer’s Map of Lake Geneva, handed out at Dragon Days, illustrates how much that’s changing. Stormberg’s roster of 42 sites of D&D significance includes 330 Center Street, which Yolanda Frontany, a Chicago bank manager, bought as a vacation home in 2005, never having heard the name Gary Gygax. Now she’s a D&D convert who rents the place out to groups wanting to play on hallowed RPG ground. Vince Vaughn was among the gamers who showed up last year.
The map includes the Geneva Lake Museum, Site #21, which last year opened its Wizard of Lake Geneva permanent exhibit, brimming with memorabilia. Site #25, the Appendix N Alcove at the Lake Geneva Public Library, also dedicated last year, is a fascinating collection of 100 books that influenced the game’s development. There’s #33, the Gygax Memorial Park Bench, where a plaque installed last year marks where the young Gygax once ogled lakeside mansions. And #34, Stone Manor, the eye-popping 1901 Italianate where he did eventually live (albeit in a condo).
Site #22, the map explains, is the Lake Geneva post office, “where TSR received hundreds of thousands of pieces of fan mail, game submissions, catalog orders, and more.” That one may seem like a reach, but not to Stormberg. Not when he thinks about the deep connection that generations of gamers formed with the brand.
“That address was their little anchor,” he says, “the cord that attached them from their small town, where they were ostracized for being different or gay or nerdy, to some magical place: to PO Box 756, in Lake Geneva.”
In March, the Lake Geneva planning commission and city council approved a site plan and voted unanimously to accept the donation of a memorial statue of Gygax. If fundraising is successful, the memorial will feature a bronze Gygax seated at a granite gaming table. His arm will be extended and his cupped hand angled slightly downward, so that visitors can roll their dice from it.