Lenard William Lakofka (January 10, 1944 - October 23, 2020) was an American writer of material for the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Although never a formal employee of TSR, the company that published Dungeons & Dragons, Lakofka was an influential voice in the development of the game.
[3] His increasing interest in Diplomacy led him to join the International Federation of Wargamers, and through the IFW he met its vice-president, game designer Gary Gygax.
In 1968, Gygax convinced the IFW to organize a one-day convention called Gen Con at the Horticultural Hall in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Lakofka was by this time president of the IFW,[4] and travelled to Lake Geneva to help set up, run events and clean up.
At the end of the day, before Gygax took down his sand table and locked up the Hall, he introduced a new set of miniatures rules to Lakofka and a few others.
[1] In 1972, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson began to co-develop a new role-playing game, which eventually led to the formation of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) and the release of the first boxed sets of Dungeons & Dragons.
In 1980, Lakofka submitted three modules to TSR, taken from adventures he had originally created for his home campaign of Lendore Isle: The Secret of Bone Hill, The Assassin's Knot and Deep Dwarven Delve.
In Different Worlds, Anders Swenson complained about the randomness of encounters, and that the monsters and townspeople were unrealistically compressed into too small a geographical area.
Rick Swan, in The Space Gamer, thought the murder mystery of the plot was "a very pedestrian affair", and the adventure was "just plain dull".
[17] Dave Morris in White Dwarf disagreed, calling it "an entertaining murder mystery for AD&D characters" and scoring it 7 out of 10.
However, in a power struggle at TSR at the end of 1985, Lakofka's long-time friend Gary Gygax was ousted from the company.
[22] Lakofka continued to work on further adventures in the "L" series, and in 2009, the fourth installment, L4 Devilspawn, was released by Dragonsfoot.org as a free download.