Before he was TSR’s first full-time employee, before he edited The Dragon and helped turn a homebrew wargame into a living culture, Tim Kask was a married student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIUC). A Saluki. That detail matters more than it might seem. Well. At least to me.
From SIUC, Kask did something that sounds almost mythic now. He found an address for Gary Gygax in the back of Chainmail, picked up the phone, and cold-called Lake Geneva. Late '73 or early '74, depending on whose memory you trust. He got invited up, and the rest is history. Not destiny. Not inevitability. Just a guy deciding to make the call.
Tim and I talked a lot about SIUC. Salukis never really ever forget Carbondale, becomes part of our DNA. He told me about visiting his brother in the Triads, playing D&D there, making space for imagination in cinderblock dorm rooms. He lived in Boomer Hall, I lived in Wright Hall two of the three Triads. About thirteen or fourteen years apart, but close enough that the echoes line up. Same bricks. Same paths. Same sense that something strange and creative could happen there.
I'd love to know how many games were played in those ugly damn dorms. And we all have Tim Kask to thank for this.
Kask refereed what local coverage described as the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign played at SIU, and likely one of the first outside Lake Geneva. The Qualishar campaign, or Kwalishar, depending on which source you read. The spelling drift alone tells you how early this was. This was before canon. Before anyone knew they were making history.
That Carbondale period mattered. It shaped how D&D escaped the gravitational pull of those three little brown books and became something people shared, argued about, wrote letters about, and eventually built communities around. Tim was there when the game stopped being just rules and became culture.
There is also that wonderful bit of apocrypha Tim himself shared over the years. His first player character was named Kwalish. Fans have long connected that, informally, to the Apparatus of Kwalish. Is it provable? No. Is it plausible? Absolutely. And that feels right for Tim. Part fact, part legend, part inside joke, all wrapped up in the living memory of the game.
Tim Kask was never just an editor. He was a bridge. Between Lake Geneva and the rest of the world. Between amateurs and professionals. Between "this is a fun idea" and "this is something worth taking seriously."
Rest well, Tim. The dice are still rolling because you helped get them out of the box. I'll roll some dice in your honor or use a Quatro's cup with some chits, or my SIU cup.
