You may have heard that E. Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, lost his final saving throw with the great dungeon master in the sky this morning.
Perhaps I should have called this post “Dungeons & Dragons: An Appreciation,” since I really didn’t know Gary Gygax from Elric of Melniboné. I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak or saw his picture until this afternoon. I may have read an interview or two with him over the years, but they certainly didn’t make any lasting impression.
But to me, Gary Gygax was not primarily the inventor of a popular role-playing game; he was an unparalleled author of fantasy. Gary Gygax wrote three volumes that were highly influential to me as a kid. I speak of the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. I present them below in the editions that will forever be branded in my memory:
My experiences as a player of Dungeons & Dragons have generally been pretty miserable. I played my first game at perhaps the age of eight, with my brother as dungeon master and my older sister serving as co-adventurer. I’m guessing this was 1979, because the module we were playing, In Search of the Unknown, was published that year. I believe we were playing the Basic rules, using the set pictured below. (Gawd, do these pictures bring back memories…)
We made an awful team. My sister and I spent a couple of hours building our characters — I was a dwarf, if I remember correctly — and got into a horrific argument about how we should order our party for the inevitable foray into the dungeon. Tears and screaming ensued. (Hey, I was eight.) Finally, we decided to just put aside our differences in the interest of pursuing adventure, but the adventure proved to be short-lived. We found ourselves shooting arrows at a band of ravenous giant centipedes, which we pictured as these enormous Dune-sized worms with enormous jaws and enormous sharp teeth. Then my brother cheerfully informed us that these giant centipedes were only about a foot long, at which point the game dissolved into a fit of giggles and never resumed.