Why Quasqueton shows up in Dungeon & Dragons

QUASQUETON — Residents of Eastern Iowa are well aware of Quasqueton’s unique name — and its Native American origin — but the town also is renowned in the fictional world of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.

That connection will be underscored Saturday when the author of a classic Dungeons & Dragons text — the one that fixed Quasqueton in the D&D lexicon — will visit the Quasqueton Area Historical Society Museum.

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Mike Carr, who published the “In Search of the Unknown” module in 1979, is scheduled to be at the museum at 2:30 p.m. disseminating bright yellow bumper stickers heralding the town’s place in Dungeons & Dragons lore.

The museum recently added a display celebrating this surprising connection between fiction and reality.

“We were delighted when we learned that avid players of the D&D game have long known the name of Quasqueton, even though most of them were not aware that it was a real place,” said Corinne Love, the museum’s director. “When a gentleman named Tim Wadzinski from Goodman Games came to the museum, told us the back story and showed us the game materials, it was an enjoyable surprise.”

The place named Quasqueton entered popular culture when game publisher TSR published Carr’s B1 game module, which features a fictional stronghold within a rocky promontory that its builders and former residents — a warrior named Rogahn and a wizard named Zelligar — had named Quasqueton.

The bumper stickers to be handed out feature bold black type over a yellow background and proclaim: “Quasqueton — Former Home of Rogahn & Zelligar.”

Before creating that work, Carr, now 72 and living north of Milwaukee, lived in Cedar Rapids from 1974 to 1975, working at the Ground Round restaurant on First Avenue East. That’s when he first heard the name Quasqueton that he would incorporate in his fictional setting when he was in his 20s.

Before the internet, few people outside of Eastern Iowa had heard of the Buchanan County town, population 573. But after the advent of online search engines, the actual source of the name was revealed to the curious.

In 2018, Goodman Games published “Into the Borderlands,” a hard-bound volume that reprinted the first two B series modules released by TSR — B1 "In Search of the Unknown" and B2 "Keep on the Borderlands" by Gary Gygax — presenting them as originally released for Basic Dungeons & Dragons and in updated versions for the fifth edition of the D&D game.

After Wadzinski’s 2022 visit to Quasqueton, Carr thought of creating the bumper stickers, which he printed at his own expense for the Quasqueton museum and Goodman Games to give to gamers and others.

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“I thought it would be a fun idea to create a whimsical item that would promote the legend that ties the two fictional characters to this mystical — yet real — place,” Carr said.

“The simple wording stands on its own, which will make the sticker a bit of a curiosity to most who see it, but that’s part of the fun behind the idea. If they happen to discover the real Quasqueton and the B1 module republished by Goodman Games, all the better.”

Wadzinski and Carr are both scheduled to visit the Quasqueton museum, 103 N. Water St., Saturday. Admission to the museum is free.