Gamer At the first official
AD&D tournament, held in January 1979 at
Winter Fantasy, Lakofka was the second-place finisher. In 1980, he was listed as the 6th-ranked player in national D&D standings; and the same year, as a
dungeon master, he placed third in the Invitational Dungeon Master's Tournament at Gen Con. (
Frank Mentzer was the winner.) Lakofka was also a bridge player. In 2006, he was listed in the Top 500
American Contract Bridge League Masterpoint Winners in Southern California. In 2008, his team from southern California was runner-up in Flight C of the Grand National Teams.
Game designer 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 1975, a year after D&D was published, articles about D&D began to appear in Lakofka's Dippy 'zine
Liaisons Dangereuses. Although the names of both Lakofka and Gygax appeared in the articles' bylines, all of the articles were written by Lakofka alone—he added Gygax's name to preserve Gygax's copyright on
D&D. He also created a
D&D campaign world called Lendore Isle. Gygax passed Lakofka copies of the manuscripts for both the
Players Handbook and the ''
Dungeon Master's Guide''. Lakofka edited the manuscripts and also contributed material to both books. In 1981, Lakofka's first adventure, L1
The Secret of Bone Hill, was published. Reviews were mixed. 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. However,
White Dwarf's
Jim Bambra gave it an 8 out of 10, and liked the roleplaying situations the module afforded. James Maliszewski claimed the module was one of his favorites because it created "a very flexible 'sandbox' framework for a low-level campaign".
Dave Morris in
White Dwarf disagreed, calling it "an entertaining murder mystery for AD&D characters" and scoring it 7 out of 10. In 2004,
Erik Mona and
James Jacobs ranked ''The Assassin's Knot'' as the 29th greatest AD&D adventure ever written. Lakofka also continued to write more articles in
Dragon in addition to his monthly column. When Gygax was creating the World of Greyhawk, Lakofka suggested that, based on the migration patterns of various Greyhawk races as outlined in the campaign setting, "his" Lendore Isles would have been mainly settled by
Suel. When the twelve gods of the Suel pantheon of gods were simply listed in the 1983 edition of the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting, with no details or powers given, Lakofka took it upon himself to flesh out descriptions of each god. In 1984, Lakofka published this information as a major five-part series in
Dragon.
After TSR Lakofka's third Lendore Isles adventure,
L3 Deep Dwarven Delve, was scheduled to be released in 1986, and Lakofka planned to write two more "L" series adventures. However, in a power struggle at TSR at the end of 1985, Lakofka's long-time friend Gary Gygax was ousted from the company. The new company management did not want to do business with friends of Gygax, and plans to publish Lakofka's third adventure were shelved. Lakofka also stopped writing his ''Leomund's Tiny Hut
column for Dragon''; his final column was published in April 1986 (Issue #108). After this, Lakofka moved from Chicago to California and wrote no more
AD&D material for TSR. It was not until TSR was taken over by
Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in 1997 and the World of Greyhawk setting was revived that Lakofka was approached about finally publishing L3
Deep Dwarven Delve as part of the 25th Anniversary Collector's Boxed Set. Because of changes to the
D&D rules over the intervening decade, Lakofka worked with WotC staff to update the adventure. Lakofka stated that WotC lost his final rewrite before publication, but rather than telling him, someone at WotC inserted new material into an older manuscript before it was published. Lakofka claimed as a result that about 20% of the final product was not his own work. 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. Lakofka also created a fifth module,
L5 The Kroten Campaign, which was released in 3 parts by Dragonsfoot.org as a free download. Lakofka mused about writing up to four more "L" adventures, but ultimately these were never created. == Personal life ==