A Dungeon Master Bows His Head

The news is bouncing around the blogosphere faster than anyone can keep up with it: Gary Gygax, the co-creator and for years the dominant figure in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, has passed away at age 69.

I've told a little of my Dungeons and Dragons tales here before, about how my brothers and I continue to play on occasion, and how much fun we get out of watching our kids pick up on and teach themselves the game today. Gary Gygax was responsible for all that. I was, as I said in that other post, a nerdy nine or ten-year-old boy, who learned about this strange pastime (wait...you're not a piece of plastic on a colored board, but you're a character? Who crosses a map and explores dungeons and fights monsters for glory and gold? And you can get hurt? So you have to, like, make plans and prepare and train? And you play it all out with dice? Show me this game!!) from a strange uncle of mine, and slowly, bit by bit, it took over my young life and the life of my older brother Daniel. (As I said before, my other brothers were sucked in as well, but for me, for the longest time, it was a tight sibling thing, just Daniel and me.) We would ride our bikes down to the White Elephant, this massive discount toy-and-whatever store on the east side of Spokane, WA, and we'd stock up as we slowly earned enough money: starting with classic Basic Set, and on to the original Monster Manual, and the original Dungeon Masters Guide....all that great first edition stuff. And all of it written by Gary Gygax, a man who I later learned had been a different sort of geek, one obsessed with puzzles and strategies and chess and miniature figures, who turned to role-playing gaming after a long apprenticeship with tabletop wargames and in part because of his frustration over the inability of many gamers to appreciate the thrill of breaking with historical recreation and 64-square boards and plain-old ordinary 6-sided dice, and instead get busy doing something which put the whole imagination (or at least, the whole of the imagination insofar as young, nerdy, white American males were concerned) into play. Hence came his innovations: Chainmail, with Jeff Perren, then his involvement with Blackmoor, which was created by Dave Arneson; and then, finally, came his own company, TSR (for "Tactical Studies Rules"--what an awesome geek name!), and his own role-playing game system: D&D. (And then AD&D of course, and all the rest.) This stuff, with its history and its fun, its range and rambunctiousness, its seriousness and silliness, was as essential to the infrastructure of my childhood and teenage imagination as anything that Steven Spielberg or Marvel Comics or J.R.R. Tolkien or Charles Schultz ever managed to produce.

I had neither the money nor the time nor the permission as an adolescent to throw myself into that world the way I wanted to (Dad was suspicious of the game for a long time); there was no chance that Gary Gygax (whom one gamer I knew back in the day simply referred to as "God") and I were ever going to cross paths. But still, I read Dragon Magazine religiously (and don't start--that what it was called back when it was his magazine, back when the "Sage's Advice" column was always written by him), and I bought his modules and I followed the debates and lawsuits and arguments which followed through the gaming world in his wake. I even have to admit that I bought and read his Greyhawk Adventure fantasy novels, or at least the first couple (I wouldn't recommend them today--honestly, they weren't any good). In time, I became a mature enough player, and had a confident enough sense of how I thought one ought to think about and "play out" one's imagination, that I began to disagree with his ideas. But by then TSR was collapsing, and the world the idolized Gygax was fracturing, and I was moving on to other things, and the world changed. Now, with Dungeons and Dragons (up to its 4th edition, coming out this year) and the whole role-playing world having changed hands and changed directions a dozen times over, I recognize that my involvement and affection for it and its original genius has a very dated ring to it. But still, it's my bell (or my blog, or my campaign), and I'll ring it how I want. Tonight, I'm going to pull back out my 2nd edition manuals, and look over again some plans I have for an Against the Giants adventure with my brothers this summer. And I'll the while, this Dungeon Master is going to be busy acknowledging the legacy of the first, and one of the best. Gary, RIP.