R.I.P. Gary Gygax (1938-2008)

I was very saddened to hear that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, possibly the greatest game ever, died yesterday. He was 69. Some shoddy business deals cheated Gary out of much of the financial success of his work, but the gaming world never failed to give him his proper respect, and that’s more important in many ways. He will go down in history as the father of the RPG.

AD&D Player's HandbookI started playing D&D (technically AD&D) the same way I started just about everything in my early life; my brother was doing it and I wanted in.

Johnny was three years older than me, and like any dutiful younger brother, I followed him everywhere, and looked on with wonder at the “big kid” stuff he got to do. So when he and his friends started playing Dungeons and Dragons, I was there like a mosquito, buzzing around and annoying them as they ate junk food and rolled dice.

“You’re too young to play,” they all said, and I guess technically they were right. The game was for “players aged 10 and up” and I was maybe 7. But I ignored them, sneaking into Johnny’s room when he wasn’t home and reading the rule books.

I don’t think I ever got to play with the big boys, but they soon tired of the game and stopped playing anyway. Johnny was never one for book-learnin’, and you’ve got to do a lot of homework to play D&D.

You’d think I could have acquired the rule books as a hand-me-down from a loving sibling, but things never worked that way in the Brett household. Even toys that Johnny didn’t play with anymore were his until I traded him something of equal value, and he knew I wanted those books BAD. In the end, I traded the little color TV I had in my room for the black and white one in his. It was a hard bargain, but in all honesty, I never regretted it. I treasured those books and still do.

Soon after, I was playing D&D games at lunch in 3rd grade with my friends Brett Erenberg and Russell Whalen. We would leave the school grounds (!) and go to Russell’s house which was right across the street, playing until we were late for class. I smoked my first cigarette during one of those sessions; Russell swiped one from his grandfather, and we all puffed on it until we were sick.

Then I got my first taste of being Dungeon Master in summer camp, and won a little plaque for it.

In high school I played with the stock boys at the grocery store where I worked (express lane cashier, feh). They were in college, so we would go to their campus and play in the rec hall. After that I played in college with my friend Myke and this guy he introduced me to named Garrick. Garrick was the DM, and really raised my game because he refused to use adventure modules, as I had always done. Garrick wrote his own stories, and put the players through that. He inspired me greatly.

After that, I was hooked. I went out and spent much of my modest college stipend on all the second edition hardcover rule books, which had a lot of new rules and options for players and dungeon masters. I found a new group to play with (Randy, Ryan, Myke, Jay, Cobie, Meredith and some other rotating players), and took over as Dungeon Master, running adventures in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

I used to spend hours and hours in my college dorm room writing plots and creating characters, studying monsters and maps and magical items. A lot more time than I spent studying schoolwork, to be sure. I would spend hours designing an innkeep or a town guardsman, creating a huge backstory and motivation for them, only to have my players kill them before any of it came out, and then try to have conversation with some other person in the room that I had just thrown in as background. Argh.

But that was okay. Not knowing what the players were going to do was what made the game so great. You had to be an agile storyteller, ready to react to the unpredicatble, and prepared to let your hard-created characters die.

Even after college, I kept on with the D&D, playing with Matt and Jeremy and Randy and Jen and Eric and Nikki and Ivan and Mike and Mcallen and Bhudda and Dani and probably a dozen other people. I even got a game going with my sister’s boyfriend Kevin. She HATED that.

I owe a great debt to authors like Tolkien, Brooks, Salvatore, Jordan, Martin, Eddings, Friedman and the like for fostering my love of fantasy and helping me on my path to becoming a writer myself, but I doubt all of them together have had half the influence on my storytelling style as the game that Gary Gygax created, not to mention all the personal joy it gave me and so many others over the years.

Rest in peace, Gary. I owe you more than I could ever repay. You’ll be missed deeply.

Posted on March 5, 2008 at 10:54 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Life, Musings, Writing
8 Comments »

8 responses to “R.I.P. Gary Gygax (1938-2008)”

  1. Gary Gygax is the reason I became an armorer, learned to sword fight, developed an interest in literary erudition as well as military capacity, and became fascinated by ancient/medieval history. It is not an overstatement to credit him largely with the man I am today.

    Hmm. . . I’m pretty sure I didn’t intend that as an insult.

    I always knew you were a writer, even in those early days. I’d never seen anyone put that much effort into developing a D&D campaign. The goblin king I had to fight as a Wemic and the Elf statue-body switch scenario were real glimmers of something special.

    Posted by Myke, on March 5th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
  2. I won’t deny that I took great pleasure in seeing you get your ass kicked by a goblin. That’s what you get for wandering down dark tunnels alone instead of waiting for your companions to catch up.

    Posted by PeatB, on March 5th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
  3. You forgot the most important thing of all: Gary Gygax is the reason our child is being created! If Jay had never introduced us with, “Peat, this is Dani. You both play D&D. Discuss.” we never would have gotten together, and Squirmy wouldn’t even exist!

    Posted by dani, on March 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
  4. (Tears welling up in my eyes). Dani is correct you know, and although amazingly I’ve never played any form of D&D with Pete, it was part of our friendship as we both acknowledge it as a big part of our pasts and credit it as making us into the fine nerdy fantasy writer/editor we are today.
    And as I respond in sadness on the passing of the man with one of the coolest last names, I’m reminded I took Peat as a guest to the publishing party launching the anniversary book about D&D called: 30 Years of Adventure. We did leave with a game starter set, D&D tote bag…and most importantly a black velvety sack full of various-sided dice.

    Posted by Jay, on March 5th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
  5. Man oh man. D&D. It was a refuge for a long time and, just like Myke, it lead me to identify the interests and philosophies that define me today. I will definately send nice thoughts towards the Gygax family.
    It is am awfully cool name. Some guys in Upstate had a technical heavy metal band witht he name “Gygax.” All their songs were fantasy based too. Bad Ass.

    Posted by A.J. L, on March 5th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
  6. You should name your daughter Gary.

    Posted by matt, on March 6th, 2008 at 8:40 am
  7. Dude. I was half LION. That made me 50% King of the Jungle.

    You expected me to wait for slow ass humans?

    The worst part was when the goblins shaved my head. We Wemics pride ourselves on our long hair. It’s a mark of status.

    Sweet hopping Christ. I just reread that paragraph. I really am a completely hopeless dork.

    Posted by Myke, on March 6th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
  8. Wow, you’re even a bigger dork than I am, and I’ve played as a Wookiee, a half-elf chaotic good necromage, and a sverfneblin. The Wookiee and necromage figures I played with are on our bookcase. (Besides introducing me to my husband, Jay painted the mage for me. I painted the Wookiee; it’s really just a grey Chewbacca with lipstick.)

    Posted by dani, on March 6th, 2008 at 7:34 pm