hn-classics/_stories/2006/15103743.md

---
created_at: '2017-08-26T02:33:03.000Z'
title: 'Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons (2006)'
url: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_lafarge
author: smacktoward
points: 147
story_text: 
comment_text: 
num_comments: 49
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1503714783
_tags:
- story
- author_smacktoward
- story_15103743
objectID: '15103743'
year: 2006

---
PAUL LA FARGE

DISCUSSED: Basements as Dungeons, Middle-earth, War Games, Moral
Clarity, Vin Diesel, Biological Determinism, Death by Misadventure,
Freaks & Geeks, Tom Hanks, Castration Anxiety, Satanism, The Pantheon of
Cool Dangers, The Buck Rogers Fortune, Cthulhu Calamari, Tom Waits, The
Holy Scriptures, Orson Welles

# NOTE TO THE READER

This article is divided into two parts: a manual and a scenario. The
first part, the manual, is an exposition of the game Dungeons & Dragons:
what it is, how it’s played, how it came to be, and how it came to be
popular, at least, in certain circles. If you once played D\&D yourself
(no need to admit that you played a lot, or that you still play), you
may want to skim the [manual](#manual), or turn directly to the
[scenario](#scenario), which is an account of a trip my friend Wayne and
I took last spring to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in order to fulfill a wild
and uncool dream: to play D\&D with E. Gary Gygax, the man who invented
the game (more or less: see below). If it isn’t immediately clear why
this would be an interesting, or, to be frank, a fantastically exciting
and at the same time a curiously sad thing to do: well then, you’d
better start with the manual.

**THE MANUAL**

# 1.0 OUTSIDE THE CAVE

You are standing outside the entrance to a dark and gloomy cave. If you
are anything like me, you have been here many, many times before. It
isn’t always the same cave: Once it was a “cave-like opening, somewhat
obscured by vegetation,” which led to the mystical Caverns of
Quasqueton; another time it was the Wizard’s Mouth, a fissure in the
side of an active volcano (“This cave actually seems to breathe,
exhaling a cloud of steam and then slowly inhaling, like a man breathing
on a cold day”). Once it was a passage from the throne room of Snurre,
the Fire Giant King, “extending endlessly under the earth.” Once,
memorably, the “cave” was made of metal: it was the outer airlock of a
spaceship which had crash-landed in the crags of the Barrier
Peaks.\[[1](#footnote1)\] You don’t know what lies in that darkness, but
you have heard rumors: there are troglodytes, dark elves, a long-dead
wizard, terrible creatures, treasure. You are here to learn the truth.
So strike a light: you’re going in.

If you are not between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, or if you
happen to be a woman, you may not know what Dungeons & Dragons is,
exactly, or why you would want to get involved with it, even in the
context of an essay in a respectable magazine such as this one. This
introduction is for you, although, as it turns out, neither question is
easy to answer from outside the cave. TSR Hobbies, the company that used
to make D\&D,\[[2](#footnote2)\] once wrote a brochure for hobby-store
owners, in which they tried to explain what they were selling:

> While one of the participants creates the whole world in which the
> adventures are to take place, the balance of the players—as few as two
> or as many as a dozen or more—create “characters” who will travel
> about in this make-believe world, interact with its peoples, and seek
> the fabulous treasures of magic and precious items guarded by dragons,
> giants, werewolves, and hundreds of other fearsome things. The game
> organizer, the participant who creates the whole and moderates these
> adventures, is known as the Dungeon Master, or DM. The other players
> have personae—fighters, magic-users, thieves, clerics, elves, dwarves,
> or what have you—who are known as player characters. Player characters
> have known attributes which are initially determined by rolling the
> dice… These attributes help to define the role and limits of each
> character… There is neither an end to the game nor any winner. Each
> session of play is merely an episode in an ongoing
> “world.”\[[3](#footnote3)\]

This is what the cave sounds like when it speaks to outsiders: its
diction is erudite and occasionally awkward (“treasures of magic”); it
uses game terms as though their meaning will be obvious (what are
attributes?); it raises as many questions as it answers. You who have
never played could be forgiven for asking, what are the rules of D\&D?
If no one wins, how do you know if you’re playing well? Where’s the
board? OK, listen up: there is no board. You play a character, as in
theater, though you don’t usually act out your character’s words or
deeds. Rather, you communicate about your character with other players
and with the Dungeon Master, whose job is to speak for the world. You
tell the Dungeon Master what you do; someone rolls some dice; the DM
tells you what happens. Together you tell a story: a fantasy epic à la
Tolkien or whomever you will; or rather, given that the game has no
natural end, maybe we should call it a fantasy soap opera. Imagine for a
moment that Adam and Brian are players, and Charlie is the DM. Their
story might go like this:

> CHARLIE: OK, you guys have just entered the mystical Caverns of
> Quasqueton. You’re in a 10-foot-wide corridor, which leads to a large
> wooden door.
> 
> ADAM: I’m going to open the door.
> 
> CHARLIE: Just like that?
> 
> ADAM: OK, maybe not. Brian, have your elf check the door.
> 
> BRIAN: Don’t tell my elf what to do. \[Pause.\] My elf checks the
> door.
> 
> CHARLIE: \[Rolls dice.\] It appears to be a normal door.

What may remain obscure, even now, is why people would choose to play
D\&D, all night, night after night, for years.\[[4](#footnote4)\] Why
intelligent human beings would find the actions of imaginary fighters,
thieves, dwarves, elves, etc., as they move through a space that exists
only notionally, and consists more often than not of dimly lit
corridors, ruined halls, and big, damp caves, more compelling than books
or movies or television, or sleep, or social acceptance, or sex. In
short, what’s so great about Dungeons & Dragons?

# 2.0 THE HARLOT  
ENCOUNTER TABLE

The appeal of D\&D is superficially not very different from the appeal
of reading. You start outside something (Middle Earth; Dickens’s London;
the fascinating world of mosses and lichens), and you go in, bit by bit.
You forget where you are, what time it is, and what you were doing.
Along the way, you may have occasion to think, to doubt, or even to
learn. Then you come back; your work has piled up; it’s past your
bedtime; people may wonder what you have been doing.

Once you set foot inside the cave, however, you see very quickly that
D\&D is quite different from a book, or movie, or soap opera. For one
thing, there are a lot more rules. I remember opening the Basic D\&D
rulebook—I was eight years old—and coming to the “Table of Bonus and
Penalties Due to Abilities,” which begins,

Prime requisite 15 or more add 10% to earned experience Prime requisite
13-14 add 5% to earned experience Prime requisite 9-12 no bonus

By reading the accompanying text, I figured out that my character’s
abilities—his strength, his intelligence, his wisdom or lack thereof,
and so on—were each determined by rolling three six-sided dice, and that
the “prime requisite” was the ability my character needed to do what he
did (a fighter’s prime requisite is strength; a magic-user’s is
intelligence, etc.). It would be several pages before I understood that
“earned experience” referred to the experience points a character
earns for killing monsters and amassing treasure, and which regulate his
promotion to ever-greater levels of power and ability. And I remember
how, as the meaning of these terms became clear, my bewilderment yielded
to delight. The rules guaranteed the reality of the game-world (how
could anything with so many rules not be real?), and, if they were hard
to understand, at least they were written out, guessable and debatable,
unlike the implicit, arbitrary, and often malign rules that people live
by in the actual world.

D\&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the
basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of
instructions, which cover everything from “Adjusting Ability Scores”
(“Magic-users and clerics can reduce their strength scores by 3 points
and add 1 to their prime requisite”) to “Who Gets the First Blow?” (“The
character with the highest dexterity strikes first”). In fact, as I
wandered farther into the cave, and acquired the rulebooks for Advanced
Dungeons & Dragons, I found that there were rules for everything: what
kind of monsters you could meet in fresh water, what kind you could meet
in salt water, what wise men knew, what happened when you mixed two
magic potions together. If you happened to meet a harlot in the game,
you could roll two twenty-sided dice and consult a table which told you
what kind of harlot it was.\[[5](#footnote5)\] It would be a mistake to
think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the
rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true
whether you play by them or not. The rules induct you into the world of
D\&D; they are the long, difficult scramble from the mouth of the cave
to the first point where you can stand up and look
around.\[[6](#footnote6)\]

# 2.1 THE INVENTION OF  
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

D\&D gets its appetite for rules from wargames, which have been around
for thousands of years. The modern war game began in the late eighteenth
century, when a certain Helwig, the Master of Pages to the German Duke
of Brunswick, invented something called “War Chess”: instead of rooks
and knights and pawns it featured cavalry, artillery and infantry;
instead of castling it had rules for entrenchment and pontoons. The
Prussians adapted Helwig’s game to train their officers; the French
learned the value of wargames the hard way in 1870. In 1913, when the
Prussians were again rattling their sabers, the British writer H. G.
Wells came up with a game called Little Wars, which was played on a
tabletop, with miniature lead or tin soldiers. Then, in 1958, a fellow
named Charles Roberts founded the Avalon Hill game company, and
published a board game based on the battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg and
its successors were wildly popular; all over America, college students
and other maladjusted types began to recreate, in their dorms and
basements and family rooms, the great battles of history.

One of these enthusiasts was a high-school dropout named Ernest Gary
Gygax. In the late 1960s, Gygax was living in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,
where he worked as an insurance underwriter. He was married to a Lake
Geneva girl and had four children, but he remained an active gamer:
together with a couple of friends, Gygax founded the grandly named
International Federation of Wargaming, the Castles & Crusades Society,
for medieval war gamers, and the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies
Association, which met weekly in his basement. In the course of these
meetings, he became friendly with a hobby-shop owner named Jeff Perren,
and they co-authored a set of rules for medieval miniatures
combat,\[[7](#footnote7)\] called Chainmail, which was published in
1971.

Meanwhile, up in Minneapolis, a student named Dave Arneson was running
Napoleonic miniatures games in his parents’ basement.\[[8](#footnote8)\]
Arneson got a copy of the Chainmail rules; only it turned out that
medieval miniatures combat wasn’t very exciting,\[[9](#footnote9)\] and
Arneson and his fellow gamers looked for a way to spice it up. A fellow
named Dave Wesley gave each player a personal goal: now the figurine on
the table represented Sir So-and-So, and he had a rudimentary
personality. This was the dawn of tabletop role-playing. Then Arneson
issued a Star Trek phaser to a druid, much to the disgust of the other
players: this was the dawn of tabletop fantasy role-playing, although no
one seemed to realize it yet.\[[10](#footnote10)\] The phaser wasn’t
enough; Arneson spent a weekend eating popcorn and reading Conan novels,
and at the end of it, he had an idea. The next time the Napoleonic
miniatures people showed up in the Arnesons’ basement, they found a
model of a castle on the sand table. They thought it was going to be
some place in Poland, which they would storm or defend. Then Arneson
told them that they were looking at the ruined castle of the Barony of
Blackmoor, and that they were going to have to go into the dungeons and
poke around. The Napoleonic miniatures people weren’t thrilled; they
would have preferred to storm the castle. But they agreed to poke
around. And around, and around.

In the fall of 1972, Arneson visited Lake Geneva and introduced Gygax to
Blackmoor. Gygax liked the game, and he and Arneson worked together to
develop a publishable version of the rules. The first edition of
Dungeons & Dragons appeared in 1974. Gygax and his business partners,
Don Kaye and Brian Blume, assembled the sets by hand in Gygax’s
basement:\[[11](#footnote11)\] they put stickers on the boxes, collated
the rulebooks, folded the reference sheets. Even so, they didn’t know
what they had on their hands. They called D\&D “rules for fantastic
medieval wargames,” and Gygax hoped to sell 50,000 copies, that being
the approximate size of the wargaming market. At first, D\&D seemed
unlikely to meet even these modest expectations. It took eleven months
for Tactical Studies Rules, which is what Gygax, Kaye and Blume called
their partnership, to sell out the first thousand copies. But news of
the game was traveling by word of mouth, from hobby shops to college
dorms, from dorms to high schools. People called Gygax in the middle of
the night to quiz him about the rules. The second thousand copies, also
hand-assembled, sold in six months, and from then on sales increased
exponentially. In 1975, Tactical Studies Rules incorporated and changed
its name to TSR Hobbies; in 1979, the company sold 7,000 copies of the
D\&D Basic Set each month. Their gross income for 1980 was $4.2 million.

# 3.0 I’M A FIFTH-LEVEL  
DARK ELF WITH A  
\+2 SWORD.\[[12](#footnote12)\]

What set D\&D apart from its cousins, the war games, was, first of all,
the thrill of “being” someone else. In 30 Years of Adventure: A
Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, a volume published in 2004 by Wizards
of the Coast, celebrity gamer Vin Diesel remembers his twin brother
selling him on D\&D with the line that “\[it’s\] a game that allows you
to be anyone you want to be….” Games designer Harold Johnson heard from
a friend: “It’s a fantasy game. You get to play knights and wizards,
clerics and thieves.” The appeal isn’t hard to understand, especially if
“being” yourself isn’t all that much fun: if you are, say, a bookish
adolescent male with few social skills and no magical powers to speak
of.\[[13](#footnote13)\] What’s more, D\&D offers its players a moral
clarity rarely found in the real world: your character has an alignment;
he or she can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Most players choose
good; the paladin, a virtuous knight with magical powers, is a perennial
favorite, although the evil-leaning dark elf is also popular.

In practice, though, the transformation of player into character often
turns out to be cosmetic: the fearless paladin and the sexy dark elf
both sound and act a lot like a thirteen-year-old boy named Ted. And
what Ted likes to do, mostly, is kill anything that crosses his path.
It’s little wonder that Dungeons & Dragons was uncool in the 1970s and
’80s. Under the guise of role-playing, the game condoned behaviors that
would get you ostracized (or worse) if you tried them in the real world.
The dungeon adventures which were the game’s mainstay in the early ’70s
had only two objectives: destroy all the monsters, and get all the
treasure.\[[14](#footnote14)\] Circa 1978, Gary Gygax wrote and
published a series of adventures with a narrative arc: the characters
begin by taking on a hill giant, and they are gradually drawn into the
underground world of the Drow, or dark elves, one of Gygax’s best-loved
creations. The story was compelling to the people who played the
adventures, but this may have had less to do with its complexity than
with the fact that there was a story at all. In any case, the ins and
outs of Drow society only slightly mitigated the game’s
bloody-mindedness; instead of destroying all monsters, the wise course
now was to destroy some monsters.\[[15](#footnote15)\]

Women in the game—female players, female “non-player characters” who
turned up in bars and dungeon cells—fared little better. Gary Alan Fine,
a sociologist who published a book-length study of fantasy role-playing
games in 1983, reported that “in theory, female characters can be as
powerful as males; in practice, they are often treated as chattels.”
Indeed, one of the players Fine observed\[[16](#footnote16)\] reported
that he didn’t like playing with women, because they inhibited his
friends’ natural tendency to rape the (imaginary) women they met
in-game:

> Because a lot of people I know go in and pick up a woman and just walk
> off…. Some people get a little carried away and rape other people….
> Well, I’ve seen a lot of players just calm down because of
> \[females\].\[[17](#footnote17)\]

You will not be surprised to learn that, in one 1978 survey of fantasy
role-playing gamers, only 2.3 percent of respondents were female; in
another, only 0.4 percent. Nor did TSR, in the early days, do much to
remedy this situation (I recall a print ad for D\&D, in which a tweenage
girl is pictured playing with some boys, and enjoying herself: now that
was a fantasy, I thought), perhaps because Gygax is a self-avowed
biological determinist who believes that “women’s brains are wired
differently… the reason they don’t play is that they’re not interested
in playing.”

# 3.1 THIS IS B.A.D.D.

In 1979, an average of 6,839 young men were picking up Dungeons &
Dragons each month: sooner or later there was bound to be trouble. And
sure enough, that same year, a Michigan State student named James Dallas
Egbert III disappeared after a game of D\&D. The thing was, Egbert and
his friends weren’t just rolling dice and moving lead miniatures around
on a card table; they had been acting out their characters’ exploits in
the university’s steam tunnels. It seemed possible that the game had
gone too far, and that Egbert had been killed, or died by misadventure.
A few weeks later, Egbert turned up in Morgan City, Louisiana, and
revealed that D\&D had nothing to do with his disappearance, but the
case caused a sensation. The private investigator hired to find Egbert
published a faintly lurid book called The Dungeon Master, which inspired
a lurid novel called Mazes and Monsters, which inspired a made-for-TV
movie of the same name, starring Tom Hanks. Meanwhile, in Washington
state, a seventeen-year-old boy shot himself in the head. Witnesses said
that he had been trying to summon “D\&D demons” just minutes before his
death. Was Dungeons & Dragons a blood sport? Was it a gateway to
Satanism? A woman named Pat Pulling, whose son, a D\&D player, had also
committed suicide, started an organization called Bothered About
Dungeons and Dragons, or, yes, B.A.D.D., and before long D\&D had joined
a pantheon of mostly cooler or at least more authentically dangerous
phenomena which were said to be corrupting America’s youth: marijuana,
rock and roll, free love, LSD, heavy metal.

Even from the point of view of a teenage boy who would have liked
nothing better than to be corrupted by any of the phenomena listed
above, if corrupted meant meeting girls or even just getting out of the
house, the furore over D\&D was hard to understand. Didn’t the grown-ups
understand what losers we were? That all we did was roll dice and shout
and stuff our faces with snacks? Evidently not: in 1989, Bill
Schnoebelen, a reformed Milwaukee Satanist, wrote an article called
“Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons,” which can still be found on
Chick Ministries’ website.\[[18](#footnote18)\] He listed the
“brainwashing techniques” which D\&D uses to lure its players into the
devil’s world, among which are:

> 1.  Fear generation—via spells and mental imaging about fear-filled,
>     emotional scenes, and threats to survival of FRP \[fantasy
>     role-playing\] characters.  
>       
> 2.  Isolation—psychological removal from traditional support
>     structures (family, church, etc.) into an imaginary world.
>     Physical isolation due to extremely time-consuming play activities
>     outside the family atmosphere.  
>       
> 3.  Physical torture and killings—images in the mind can be almost as
>     real as the actual experiences. Focus of the games is upon
>     killings and torture for power, acquisition of wealth, and
>     survival of characters.  
>       
> 4.  Erosion of family values—the Dungeon Master (DM) demands an
>     all-encompassing and total loyalty, control and allegiance.

Most of which is, of course, true, though I’d quibble at Schnoebelen’s
emphasis on torture—usually it was enough for us to kill the monsters
without torturing them first—and at the logic of No. 4: the DM could
demand total loyalty as much as he wanted, but he was unlikely to get it
from us; we were too busy finding ways to reduce his creation to rubble,
or eating ice cream. But the mention of “spells” in No. 1 is bizarre.
Did Schnoebelen think that the players were actually capable of working
magic? Further study of his article suggests that he did. “Just because
the people playing D\&D think they are playing a game doesn’t mean that
the evil spirits (who ARE very real) will regard it as a game. If you
are doing rituals or saying spells that invite them into your life, then
they will come—believe me\!”\[[19](#footnote19)\] This was every
player’s fantasy: that the magic in the game would work, that we would
become our characters, for real, and be rid once and for all of our
lowball ability scores, our pathetic skills, our humdrum real-life
equipment. If wishing, or talking, or even praying could have made it
so, then there would have been a lot of dark elves out there,
brandishing their +2 swords, and—perhaps the people at Chick Ministries
will find this reassuring—a lot of paladins, too, curing us of our
diseases, protecting us from evil within a ten-foot radius.

Despite a near-total absence of evidence linking D\&D to Satanism, or
magic, or anything, really, except obesity and lower-back pain, Pat
Pulling and Gary Gygax appeared on a special investigative episode of 60
Minutes, which left viewers with the impression that there was “strong
evidence” that Dungeons & Dragons could inspire teenagers to kill
themselves, or each other. Gygax started getting death threats in the
mail, and he hired a bodyguard. Yet notoriety had its advantages: in
1981, with the Egbert case still fresh in the public’s mind, TSR’s
revenues quadrupled, to $16.5 million.

# 3.1.1 A FURTHER  
NOTE ON RITUAL

As silly as Schnoebelen’s fears may sound to us now, he did get one
thing right: Dungeons & Dragons is not a game. The French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss notes that “Games… appear to have a disjunctive
effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual
players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality.
And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and
losers.” Which is, as noted above, not true of D\&D: “there is neither
an end to the game nor any winner.” But if D\&D isn’t a game, then what
is it, exactly? One theorist of fantasy role-playing games proposes,
following Lévi-Strauss, that D\&D is, in the strict sense of the term, a
ritual. “Ritual, on the other hand,” this is Lévi-Strauss again, “is the
exact inverse: it conjoins, for it brings about a union... or in any
case an organic relation between two initially separate
groups….”\[[20](#footnote20)\] D\&D conjoins: this is not the first
thing you notice when you enter the cave; nor is it mentioned very often
by the game’s recruiters (or by its detractors), who prefer to talk
about killing and money and other things the uninitiated can understand.
And yet it is an essential feature of the game—ritual—whatever you want
to call it. Adam’s fighter may be more powerful than Brian’s elf, but if
the fighter kills the elf, or even pisses him off seriously, who will
find the secret door? In order to get very far in the cave, the players
need to work together.\[[21](#footnote21)\] Which would make D\&D not
very different from any other team sport, if there were another team;
but there isn’t. The remarkable thing about D\&D is that everyone has to
play together. Even the DM, who plays all the monsters and villains, has
to cooperate; if he doesn’t—if he kills the entire party of adventurers,
or requires players not to cheat on life-or-death dice rolls—the chances
that he will be invited to run another session are small.

Here I am tempted to advance a wild argument. It goes like this: in a
society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete
successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural; its project, when
you think about it in these terms, is almost
utopian.\[[22](#footnote22)\] Show people how to have a good time, a
mind-blowing, life-changing, all-night-long good
time,\[[23](#footnote23)\] by cooperating with each other\! And perhaps
D\&D is socially unacceptable because it encourages its players to drop
out of the world of competition, in which the popular people win, and to
tune in to another world, where things work differently, and everyone
wins (or dies) together. You will object that a group of teenage boys
slaughtering orcs and raping women doesn’t sound like utopia. Granted.
But among teenage boys whose opportunities for social interaction were
otherwise not great, D\&D was like a door opening. Forget for a moment
that behind the door there were mostly monsters and darkness. For us,
for the people who played, what waited behind that door was a world, and
the world belonged to us. We could live in it as we really were; we
could argue about its rules; we could learn how, by working together, to
get the better of it. For some of us it was a lesson: the real world
could, on occasion, and by similar means, be bested. For others of us,
who never really left the game: at least we had a world.

In fact, the ability to function in another world may be the game’s most
important legacy. D\&D provided a conceptual framework for some of the
most popular computer games of the 1980s: Wizardry, Ultima, and Zork all
involve poking around in dungeons and slaying monsters. Wizardry begat
Wolfenstein 3D, Wolfenstein begat Doom, Doom begat Quake, and Quake
begat Halo: it may be an exaggeration to say that these games could
never have existed without Dungeons & Dragons, but D\&D certainly showed
a lot of people what kind of fun they could have by participating in a
virtual reality. The game’s influence is even clearer on the massively
multiplayer online role-playing games: Everquest, Ultima Online, World
of Warcraft, and D\&D Online, which made its début early this year.
Almost every aspect of the old tabletop game has been recreated in these
pretty, expensive beasts, except the pleasure of being in the same room
with other human beings. Perhaps the people who spend thirty hours a
week playing World of Warcraft, the people who used to buy and sell
Everquest magic items for real dollars on eBay, and the people who buy
online characters that have been “leveled up” by workers in the Third
World, don’t miss the companionship. D\&D taught us to live in an
imaginary place—a literal utopia—and if that place is engrossing enough,
what does it matter if there are other people in your living room or
not? And yet it sounds lonely to me. The great thing about
old-fashioned, paper-and-pencil D\&D was that it straddled the virtual
world and the real one: when the game was over, the dungeons and dragons
went back to their notebooks, but you got to keep your friends.

# 4.0 DADDY NEEDS A NEW  
SWORD OF WOUNDING

Even now, more than thirty years after its invention, people are still
playing Dungeons & Dragons. Not quite the game I played as a child: a
Second Edition appeared in 1989; it tidied up the hodgepodge of rules
which Advanced D\&D had become, stripped the paladin of many of his
powers, and was duly reviled by most old-school players. By then, Gygax
had lost control of TSR; he was replaced by Lorraine Dille Williams, the
heiress to the Buck Rogers fortune.\[[24](#footnote24)\] Williams was
not generally beloved by those who worked under her; nonetheless, the
company managed to publish some good material: the Goth-y Ravenloft
campaign setting, the killer Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and a number
of successful fantasy novels. But the market for the game had stopped
growing. Everyone who was going to buy the rulebooks had already done
so; in order to keep selling its products to gamers, TSR had to come up
with new rulebooks. Thus we got, among other things, The Complete Book
of Gnomes & Halflings, 127 pages on “The Myths of the Halflings,” “A
Typical Gnomish Village,” etc.

Meanwhile, TSR spent a lot of money pursuing licensing deals and
starting lawsuits, several of them against Gygax, to protect its
copyrights. Changes in the bookselling industry further eroded the
company’s revenues; TSR went deeply into debt, and in 1997 Williams sold
the company to Wizards of the Coast, which was best known for a
collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering. In 2000, Wizards
published a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which systematized what
had been erratic or arbitrary in the first two editions. Reactions to
the Third Edition have generally been positive, although some players
grumble that the rules are now too consistent. William Connors, a
designer for TSR and, briefly, for Wizards, says that with the Third
Edition, “the heart and soul of the game was gone. To me, it wasn’t all
that much more exciting than playing with an Excel
spreadsheet.”\[[25](#footnote25)\] A gamer I talked to in a Manhattan
hobby shop says that he’s afraid the Third Edition is for “power
campaigners”: people who exploit the rules to make their characters as
powerful as possible, at the expense of role-playing plausibility or
narrative interest. Nor has the proliferation of rulebooks been checked.
Wizards of the Coast publishes about two dozen official rulebooks for
D\&D, not counting dozens of supplementary books by other publishers;
and the Third Edition rulebooks have already been superceded by Edition
3.5.

Meanwhile, a stranger transformation has taken place: D\&D is no longer
uncool. In part, this is because the game has become more sophisticated,
more narrative-based, less single-mindedly devoted to the destruction of
monsters. A live-action role-playing game\[[26](#footnote26)\] called
Vampire: The Masquerade introduced members of the Goth subculture to
gaming; some of them switched over to D\&D, with the result that there
are more women gamers now, and they are in a position to make their own
version of the game.\[[27](#footnote27)\] Also, some of the people who
create mass culture now were once themselves gamers. There are graphic
depictions of D\&D in The X-Files and Freaks & Geeks and Buffy the
Vampire Slayer; Gary Gygax has even made a cameo appearance on Futurama.
Vin Diesel admits happily to being a gamer; Steven Colbert admits to
having been one. Mostly, though, D\&D has become acceptable because
people get used to things. As John Rateliff, who has worked on the game
since the early ’90s, puts it, “It’s kind of like rock music. All it
takes is time for people to get over their fear of the new and find out
whether it’s something they might actually enjoy trying themselves.”

The question is, are new people joining the game? According to a recent
survey, there are four million D\&D players in the United States, and
that number hasn’t changed much in the last few years. The majority of
the players are between eighteen and twenty-four years old, then you
have the twelve- to seventeen-year-olds and the twenty-five- to
thirty-four-year-olds, who play in roughly equal numbers; then the
thirty-five to forty-five-year-olds, and finally the eight- to
eleven-year-olds, very few of whom play D\&D, or have even heard of the
game. The survey notes cheerily that a third of these tweenagers
expressed interest in learning about D\&D, but whether Wizards of the
Coast can translate this interest into sales—and players—remains to be
seen. Last summer I visited Gen Con, a gaming convention that has been
held annually since 1968 when Gary Gygax and his friends rented out the
Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall.\[[28](#footnote28)\] The convention has
grown to about 26,000 attendees annually, and it has moved, from Lake
Geneva to Milwaukee and now to Indianapolis, where it occupies the
convention center downtown, between the state house and the football
stadium. I didn’t see many twelve- to seventeen-year-olds, and the ones
I did see were gathered in the Xbox area, blowing each other away in
Halo 2. The people who filled the gaming rooms and prowled the Exhibit
Hall were men and women in their twenties and thirties, some of them in
doublets and hose, some in Goth regalia, most in shorts and T-shirts and
jeans and sneakers and sandals. If they had dispersed into the streets
of Indianapolis no one would have known them for anything but citizens,
if it weren’t for their convention badges and the fervent light in their
eyes. Of course, these were the people who loved gaming enough to travel
to central Indiana and spend several hundred dollars on entrance fees,
game tickets, hotels and restaurants, which, incidentally, were serving
special game-themed meals: whatever else gamers may be, they are
apparently willing to spend money on almost anything
game-related.\[[29](#footnote29)\] You wouldn’t expect a
fifteen-year-old to turn up here on his own—except that in the early
days of Gen Con, you heard stories about kids who did just that. They
came by bus and hitchhiked to the convention center; they gamed all day
and slept in the hallways at night because they couldn’t afford hotel
rooms.

I didn’t play much D\&D while I was at Gen Con, in part because the
Third Edition rules are too different from the rules I grew up with, and
in part because tournament play isn’t my cup of tea: it’s goal-directed,
without much emphasis on role-playing.\[[30](#footnote30)\] However,
according to the same survey, the largest group of D\&D players are just
my age: thirty-five-year-old men make up almost 10 percent of the
D\&D-playing population (twenty-two-year-olds are next, at 7 percent,
then thirty-two-year-olds, at 5.5 percent). These are the people whose
adolescence corresponds to the peak of D\&D’s popularity, the ones who
were in college when Second Edition came out and the game’s popularity
surged again. At the risk of drawing false conclusions, I will venture
to speak for my demographic: we were hooked early, and the hooks went
deep into us. Few of the people I talked to or read about, who have been
involved with gaming since the early ’90s or longer, show any sign of
wanting to quit. John Rateliff says, “If I’m still alive \[at
seventy-five\], I’ll still be playing. Why not? I intend to still be
listening to the music I like and reading the books I like at \[that
age\], if I’m still able. Why shouldn’t I still be enjoying my favorite
hobby?” Skip Williams, who has been working on D\&D since First Edition
days, has left Wizards of the Coast, but he can’t seem to leave gaming;
right now he’s sprucing up a bunch of “classic monsters” for a new
monster book. Even Brian Blume, who left TSR after a bitter struggle
with Gary Gygax, and seems unlikely to have fond memories of those days,
was recently roped into a game of Boot Hill, the Wild-West-era
role-playing game he co-wrote in 1975. “I was at a games convention in
Des Moines, and a fellow was running a big barroom shootout, and I got
involved. It was a big nostalgic moment.” Apparently the referee begged
Blume to play the sheriff, the toughest role, because usually in those
situations the sheriff is the first one to be shot. “Were you shot?” I
asked. “I role-played it a little,” Blume said, and chuckled. “I got
about halfway through, and I’m happy with that.”

If Wizards of the Coast can’t find a way to make Dungeons & Dragons
compelling to children, then the day will come when D\&D is the
equivalent of bingo or shuffleboard, played by forgetful old men in
retirement homes, community centers, and, yes, church basements. “I’m an
elf of some sort,” one of the players will say. “Where did I put that
character sheet?” But the best hope for D\&D’s future currency may be
that we thirty-five-year-olds will overcome our geekdom for at least
long enough to start families. “My kids are coming tomorrow,” said one
Gen Con visitor, a thirty-six-year-old man who had been playing D\&D for
twenty-four years. “They’ve never played before, but I thought I’d give
them the chance to try it out.” There’s no reason to think that children
have lost the desire to become elves, warriors, wizards, and thieves. If
we’re lucky, they’ll be willing to play with their parents.

**THE SCENARIO, OR,  
WAYNE AND I MEET  
THE WIZARD**

# BACKGROUND INFORMATION

We are far enough into the cave now that I can tell you that I have
mixed feelings about Dungeons & Dragons. I played fantasy role-playing
games more or less incessantly from 1978, when my father brought home
the D\&D Basic Set, until 1985, when I changed high schools and fell out
of constant contact with my gamer friends. I played so much that it’s
hard for me to understand in retrospect how I managed to do anything
else, and the truth is that I didn’t do anything else. I was a mediocre
student; I didn’t see hardly any of New York City, where I lived; I knew
less about girls than I did about the Gelatinous Cube (immune to cold
and sleep; takes normal damage from fire). I played at friends’ houses;
I played in the school cafeteria; I played in the hallway between
classes; I cut class to play in whispers in the library. I hesitate to
say that I was addicted to role-playing games only because I never knew
what it was like to go without them; in D\&D I had found something I
loved more than life itself. Then a number of things happened, and for
fifteen years I didn’t think about D\&D at all. I was living in San
Francisco, where dungeon referred to something entirely different, and
life seemed mutable and good, like a game. In December 2001, I moved
back to New York, and soon afterward I began to think about D\&D again.
It turned out that my agent’s office was a block from the Compleat
Strategist, the hobby shop where I used to buy my role-playing games. I
wasn’t eager to revisit that part of my life, which I thought of as a
dangerous mire from which I had miraculously escaped, but I slunk into
the store. Nothing had changed: nothing. The same pads of hex
paper\[[31](#footnote31)\] stood in the same racks by the door, their
covers bleached by twenty years of sunlight. It was as if the place had
been preserved as a museum to the heyday of tabletop role-playing games;
it was as if someone had set out to demonstrate that you could go home
again. Maybe I wanted to come home; maybe I had never really left that
mire; maybe I needed to own up to an old love—an old habit—in order to
make my life whole. This thing of dorkness I acknowledge mine. All I
knew was that I had to do something about Dungeons & Dragons: put it
behind me once and for all, or return to its warm, embarrassing embrace.
For a long time I did neither. Then one day, when my friend Wayne and I
were talking about our gaming days, he said, why don’t you interview E.
Gary Gygax? It made sense. Gygax was the source of Dungeons & Dragons,
the wizard who cast the original spell.\[[32](#footnote32)\] Perhaps by
going to see him I could get the spell lifted at last. And besides, as
Wayne was quick to point out, how cool would it be to meet Gary Gygax?
Not to mention, he said, the possibility that we could convince him
somehow to play D\&D with us. We, he said, because of course it had to
be both of us. You need three people to play D\&D; besides, Wayne was
under the spell, too.

# LAKE GENEVA

Gary Gygax still lives in Lake Geneva, a resort town about two hours
northeast of Chicago. Incorporated in 1844, it has a cutesified little
downtown and a historical museum in which a street from Old Lake Geneva
is haphazardly recreated, down to the Indian arrowheads, barber poles,
and photographs of former firemen. There’s an excellent video arcade,
with a vintage Robotron console still in good working order. There’s a
place that sells Frozen Custard Butterburgers, two distinct Midwestern
delicacies, I hope. There’s a big lake, which freezes in winter; people
build a shantytown on the ice and go fishing for bass and cisco. Gygax
was born in Chicago, but he grew up here, and he returned to Lake Geneva
in his mid-twenties to raise his family. It’s not hard to see how
Dungeons & Dragons would come out of a place like this, a place where,
on a fine spring night, you can find the town’s youthful population
walking up and down Main Street, from the ice cream parlor to the
arcade, from the arcade to the lake. If you grew up here, you would need
to dream of something.

Gygax and I agreed to meet on a Saturday in May. I said I’d come at
eleven; he said, come at nine, I’ll make you breakfast. So Wayne and I
found ourselves outside his big yellow house one gray morning, wondering
if we were worthy to meet the Wizard. Then he let us in. Gygax does not
look un-wizardly: he has a long white ponytail, a white beard and fierce
black eyebrows, like Gandalf. He is shorter than Gandalf, however, and
stouter, and more cheerful: picture him as a cross between Gandalf and
Bilbo Baggins.\[[33](#footnote33)\] A lifelong smoker, Gygax sounds a
bit like Tom Waits, especially when he laughs, and he laughs often. He
had a mild stroke in 2004, and his doctor ordered him to quit
cigarettes; now he smokes Monterrey Black and Mild cigarillos, one after
the other. He led us to a table at the corner of the screened porch,
which was cluttered with a long life’s worth of wicker furniture and
floor lamps. In the center of the table lay a big pleather-bound copy of
the Holy Scriptures: maybe it was there by accident, or maybe Gygax
wanted to reassure us that he wasn’t a Satanist. I had told him that I
was writing for a magazine called the Believer, after all. As we sat
down, his wife appeared from within the house, saw us, and cried,
“They’re two hours early\!” Gygax excused himself and conferred
within. Then he came out as if nothing had happened; he lit a cigarillo
and began to speak.

E. Gary Gygax was born in 1938. His father, Ernst Gygax, came to America
from Switzerland; he settled in Chicago, and one summer he went to a
dance in Lake Geneva. There he met Almina Emilie Burdick, the daughter
of an old Lake Geneva family, married her, and returned to Chicago, not
necessarily in that order. Ernst wanted to play the violin, he put
himself through music school and for a time he played with the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, but when he saw that he would never make first chair
he gave it up and sold clothes instead. He was, Gygax says, an attentive
father, and he must have been a permissive father also, because Gygax’s
childhood was marked by a disregard for rules and obligations. He went
to school half a block from his childhood house in Lake Geneva, but he
was rarely to be found there. “It was just dull and stupid,” he says,
“and you know, I had so many other things I wanted to do. I had a day
full of active going out with my friends, playing chess, hanging around,
trying to pick up girls, usually without any success whatsoever. What?
Sit home? Do school work? Unthinkable.” Instead he threw firecrackers at
the chief of the waterworks, shot .22s down empty streets, and haunted
the abandoned Oak Hill Sanatorium, a five-story brick building that
overlooked Lake Geneva. He played make-believe with the kids next door:
he was a cowboy named Jim Slade, and he got the drop on his friends so
often that they quit in disgust.

Easygoing as he sounds, Gygax likes to win; there is in him more than a
little of the Ernst who would be first violin or nothing. You can hear
it in the way that he talks about the invention of Dungeons & Dragons.
Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited equally as authors of the original
game, but as Gygax tells it, Arneson had at most a minor role in the
process. When I asked him whether Arneson ran his Blackmoor campaign
before the D\&D rules were written—a fact which seems beyond doubt, and
which establishes Arneson’s involvement in the creation of the
game—Gygax answered evasively, “Um, he was up in Minneapolis, and he
ran a lot of game campaigns. He was using my Chainmail rules for a
campaign and I think that was called Blackmoor.” Arneson, for his part,
claims that he scrapped the Chainmail rules early on, in favor of a more
complex system derived from Civil War–era naval
simulations.\[[34](#footnote34)\] And the gloom thickens: Arneson sued
TSR more than once for royalties and a co-authorship credit on the
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks; the court decided in his favor,
but as far as I know he never got the credit.\[[35](#footnote35)\]
Arneson is legally enjoined from discussing the matter, and Gygax
doesn’t like to talk about it either, perhaps because it reflects
badly on him, or perhaps because he is at heart a Midwesterner, and so
not disposed to speak ill of his fellow man. As we talked, though, it
became clear that Gygax thinks strategically about more or less
everything. He mentioned that his son Luke had served in the first Gulf
War: “I told him when he was over there for Desert Shield, I said,
‘Well, here’s what’s going to happen. The \[Coalition’s\] left flank
is gonna come around and pocket all those dummies\!’ And that’s exactly
what they did. I couldn’t believe it, you know? Boy, Saddam Hussein’s
not a general.” Wayne asked Gygax what he would have done in Saddam’s
place. Gygax thought about it, then answered, “I would have gotten right
out of Kuwait…. You’d have to slow ’em up and you’d try to fight a
guerilla war.” He conceded that against Allied airpower, the Iraqis
would have lost anyhow. But it didn’t stop him from figuring out how to
make the best of a weak position.

Gygax’s own position at TSR had become weak by 1982. In order to finance
the publication of D\&D in 1974, he and his partner Don Kaye had brought
in a friend named Brian Blume, whose father, Melvin, was willing to
invest money in the company. Kaye died in 1976, and Brian got his
brother Kevin named to TSR’s board. Gygax was the president of TSR, but
the Blumes effectively controlled the company; to keep Gygax further in
check they brought in three outside directors, a lawyer and two
businessmen who knew nothing about gaming but always voted with the
Blumes. So Gygax moved to Los Angeles, and became president of Dungeons
& Dragons Entertainment, which produced a successful D\&D cartoon, and
set out to produce a D\&D movie. This was, to put it mildly, a strategic
retreat. Gygax rented King Vidor’s mansion, high up in Beverly Hills,
with a bar, a pool table, and a hot tub with a view of everything from
Hollywood to Catalina. He had a Cadillac and a driver; he had lunch with
Orson Welles, though he mentions with Gygaxian modesty that “I find no
greatness through association.”\[[36](#footnote36)\] Here a whiff of
scandal enters the story. Gygax had separated from his first wife, the
mother of five of his six children; he had not yet married his second
wife, Gail.\[[37](#footnote37)\] In the interim, well, it was Hollywood,
and Gygax was in possession of a desirable hot tub. Gygax refers to the
girlfriends who used to drive him around—he doesn’t drive; never has—and
to a certain party attended by the contestants of the Miss Beverly Hills
International Beauty Pageant. But he also mentions that he had a sand
table set up in the barn, where he and the screenwriters for the D\&D
cartoon used to play Chainmail miniatures. This is perhaps why Gygax,
unlike other men who leave their wives and run off to L.A., is not
odious: his love of winning is tempered by an even greater love of
playing, and of getting others to play along. He ends the story about
the beauty pageant girls with the observation that Luke, who was living
with him at the time, was in heaven, seated between Miss Germany and
Miss Finland.

Gygax spent a lot of money in Hollywood. According to Brian Blume, he
paid the screenwriter James Goldman, best known for A Lion in Winter,
$500,000 for the script of the would-be D\&D movie, but a movie deal
remained elusive. Meanwhile, TSR had other problems: believing that it
would continue to grow indefinitely, the Blumes had overstaffed the
company; they invested in expensive computer equipment, office
furniture, a fleet of company cars. But TSR’s growth spurt was over. By
1984, the company was $1.5 million in debt, and the bank was ready to
perfect its liens on TSR’s trademarks: in effect, to repossess Dungeons
& Dragons. Gygax got word that the Blumes were trying to sell TSR, and
he returned to Lake Geneva, where he persuaded the board of directors to
fire Kevin Blume and published a new D\&D rulebook to raise
cash.\[[38](#footnote38)\] At the same time, Gygax looked for people to
invest in the company. While he was living in Los Angeles, he’d become
friends with a writer named Flint Dille, with whom he collaborated on a
series of choose-your-own-adventure-type novels. Flint arranged for
Gygax to meet his sister, Lorraine Dille Williams, who, in addition to
the Buck Rogers fortune, had experience in hospital and not-for-profit
administration. Gygax asked Williams to invest in TSR; Williams
demurred, but agreed to advise Gygax on how to get the company back on
its feet.

In May, 1985, Gygax exercised a stock option which gave him a
controlling interest in TSR; he named himself CEO, and hired Williams as
a general manager. And here the darkness of the cave becomes so great
that almost nothing can be seen. Some time in the summer of 1985,
Williams, impressed by the potential value of TSR’s intellectual
property, decided to take control of the company. She bought out the
Blume brothers, who wanted to quit anyway; but first she got Brian Blume
to exercise his stock option, which meant that Williams ended up with a
majority of the shares of TSR. At this point, Brian Blume says, “ugly
things happened.” Blume says that Gygax tried to fire Williams and hire
Gail Carpenter (the future Mrs. E. Gary Gygax) in her place. Gygax says
that he wanted to fire Williams when she was still only a manager, but
was advised not to, and didn’t, until it was too late. Flint Dille
speculates that Gygax wanted the company for himself. “Gary was
interested in running TSR again. He was going to replace the board with
his then-girlfriend, family members, and pets. And Lorraine said, you
can’t do that. We don’t want to replace one tyranny with another.”

For nearly a year after we met Gygax, Wayne and I entertained various
wild theories about what had really happened, and why. Then I found
Lorraine Williams. She has kept silent about TSR since she left the
company, in 1997, but she agreed to talk with me for some reason,
perhaps because I didn’t sound like a hard-core gamer, or because even
keeping silent no longer seems important to her after all these years. I
hoped for something extraordinary from our conversation: a revelation, a
glimmer of light in the dark heart of the cave. I was disappointed.
“There’s no great, hidden story,” Williams told me, “as much as people
would like there to be one.” She saw the potential for TSR to move
beyond the sluggish market for role-playing games: “If you look at the
track record of what has been published by TSR, and how many people in
the fantasy and science fiction area got their start publishing with
TSR, it’s impressive. And I found that exciting. I also saw an
opportunity that we were never really able to capitalize on, and that
was the ability to go in and develop intellectual property.” She moved
in. “And it was my intention at that time,” she said, “and I really
thought that Gary and I had actually worked out the deal, that he would
continue to have a very strong role, a leading role in the creative
process, and I would take over the management. But that didn’t work for
a bunch of really extraneous reasons.” Williams declined to say what
those reasons were, but her brother speculates, plausibly, that they had
to do with the Los Angeles operation: basically, Gygax didn’t want to
give up King Vidor’s mansion, not when a movie deal could come through
any day, not when he was having so much fun.\[[39](#footnote39)\] Gloom,
gloom.

When Gygax learned that Williams had bought the Blumes’ shares, he tried
to block the sale in court. He lost. Lorraine Williams had outmaneuvered
him, and she would continue to do so through the 1980s and ’90s,
thwarting his attempts to create games which were, in her eyes,
infringements on TSR’s intellectual property.\[[40](#footnote40)\] Gygax
succumbed to the business equivalent of air superiority. In 1986, he
became the chairman of the board of directors of a company called New
Infinities Productions, which published the Cyborg Commando role-playing
game, which has been utterly lost, like most of the role-playing games
published in the 1980s. Not even the Compleat Strategist stocks it
anymore.

King Vidor’s mansion has been torn down; Gary Gygax is back in an old,
cluttered house a few blocks from where he grew up. He has sold or
renounced his rights to Dungeons & Dragons, and the money he made in
TSR’s fat years seems mostly to be gone, too. He continues to write
D\&D supplements with names like Gary Gygax’s Fantasy Fortifications,
but the market for such work is small: a third-party D\&D title is doing
well if it sells 5,000 copies. Gygax is still designing his own games,
too. He worked for a while on a fantasy role-playing game called
Dangerous Journeys, and now he’s working on one called Lejendary
Adventures, a rules-lite alternative to the behemoth that Dungeons &
Dragons has become. I haven’t played Lejendary Adventures, but to judge
from the rulebook the game seems to be haunted by the specter of
copyright infringement: characters are called avatars; classes are
called orders; experience points are called merits; the elf has been
renamed the Ilf. This despite the fact that elf is uncopyrightable: it’s
as if Gygax were still dodging Lorraine Williams after all these years.
And yet he doesn’t seem to feel much rancor, or much regret. Perhaps
that’s because, win or lose, Gygax has made a whole life of playing
games; and he is still playing. He has a weekly game of Metamorphosis
Alpha, a science-fiction RPG, with Jim Ward, the game’s author. He plays
old-fashioned D\&D regularly with his son, Alex, and Ward, and sometimes
with fans who make pilgrimages to Lake Geneva. And no one ever comes to
ask why he isn’t in school\! No wonder he laughs so often.

# THE TEETH OF  
BARKASH-NOUR

Wayne and I took Gygax to lunch at an Italian restaurant on the
outskirts of Lake Geneva: an expensive place, Gygax warned us. Our
sandwiches cost six or seven dollars each. After lunch, we returned to
his house to play some Dungeons & Dragons. Wayne and I felt curiously
listless; it had already been a long day of talking; Wayne wasn’t sure
he remembered how to play; I would have been happy to go back to our
motel room and sleep. This happens to me often: I decide that I want
something; I work and work at it; and just as the object of my quest
comes into view, it suddenly comes to seem less valuable, not valuable
at all. I can find no compelling reason to seize it and often I don’t.
(This has never been the case, curiously, in role-playing games, where
my excitement increases in a normal way as the end of the adventure
approaches. Which is probably another reason why I like the games more
than the life that goes on around them, and between them.) I wonder if
we would have turned back, if Gygax hadn’t already gone into the house
and come back with his purple velvet dice bag and a black binder, a
module he wrote for a tournament in 1975. This was before the Tolkien
estate threatened to sue TSR, and halflings were still called hobbits.
So I got to play a hobbit thief and a magic-user and Wayne played a
cleric and a fighter, and for four and a half hours we struggled through
a wilderness adventure in a looking-glass world of carnivorous plants,
invisible terrain, breathable water, and so on. All of which Gygax
presented with a minimum of fuss. The author of Dungeons & Dragons
doesn’t much care for role-playing: “If I want to do that,” he said,
“I’ll join an amateur theater group.” In fact, D\&D, as DM’ed by E.
Gary Gygax, is not unlike a miniatures combat game. We spent a lot of
time just moving around, looking for the fabled Teeth of Barkash-Nour,
which were supposed to lie in a direction indicated by the “tail of the
Great Bear’s pointing.” Our confusion at first was pitiable, almost
Beckettian.

> GYGAX: You run down northeast along the ridge, and you can see the
> river to your north and to your northeast. So which way do you want to
> go?
> 
> PAUL: The river is flowing south.
> 
> WAYNE: Which is the direction we ultimately want to go, right?
> 
> PAUL: We have to wend in the direction of the tail of the…
> 
> PAUL, WAYNE: “Great Bear’s pointing.”
> 
> PAUL: But we have no idea which way that is.
> 
> WAYNE: Tail of the Great Bear’s pointing. Maybe we should go north.

The sky clouds over; raindrops fall; the clouds part and the light turns
rich yellow. The screen porch smells of cigar smoke. I want to go
outside, to walk by Lake Geneva in early May, to follow the beautiful
woman Wayne and I saw walking by the shore, to meet a stranger, to live.
But I can’t get up. I roll the dice. I’m not tired anymore; I’m not
worried about making a fool of myself in front of Gygax, who obviously
couldn’t care less. And something strange is happening: Wayne and I are
starting to play well. We climb a cliff by means of a magic carpet; we
bargain with invisible creatures in an invisible lake. We steal eggs
from a hippogriff’s nest; we chase away giant crabs by threatening them
with the illusion of a giant, angry lobster.\[[41](#footnote41)\] The
scenario was designed for a group of six or eight characters, but by
dint of cooperation and sound tactics (basically, we avoid fighting any
monster that isn’t directly in our path) we make it through, from one
page of Gygax’s black binder to the next. So we come to the final foe,
the Slimy Horror, which turns our two spellcasters into vegetables; my
hobbit thief and Wayne’s fighter don’t stand a chance against it. “That
was pretty good,” Gygax says. He lets us read through the scenario,
noting all the monsters we didn’t kill, all the treasure that was never
ours. The Teeth of Barkash-Nour are very powerful: one of them increases
your character’s strength permanently; another transports you to a
different plane of existence. We were so close\! So close, Wayne and I
tell each other. We did better than we ever expected to; in fact, we
almost won.

# POSTSCRIPT

I would like to tell you that playing D\&D with Gary Gygax lifted
whatever spell I was under, and that when we left Lake Geneva, I
embarked on a new life, unhaunted by the past. But here, outside the
cave, things are rarely so simple. I still eye my weatherbeaten copy of
the Players Handbook, with Gygax’s face all over the cover, and think
about how much fun it would be to go in one more time. Wayne has moved
to another city, but he and I are talking about meeting up at Gen Con
this summer. In the meantime, we both have work to do. Maybe that’s all
the peace you can make with the past: you agree that it can come back,
but you make it meet you for just a weekend, at a convention center in a
city far from your home. Or maybe that’s just my way of making peace.

I talked to Gary Gygax again in March of this year, to ask, among other
things, if there was any truth to the rumor that he was diagnosed with
stomach cancer in the early 1980s, and that he moved to L.A. because he
didn’t want to spend the last six months of his life fighting with the
Blume brothers in Lake Geneva. “No,” he said. “I have an abdominal
aortic aneurysm, though.” He told me that he’d found out about it in
January; the doctors tell him it’s inoperable. One day it will rupture
and that will be the end. “I’m in no hurry,” he said. And indeed, here
he was, telling me about Elastolin plastic miniatures, and a hobby-shop
owner named Harry Bodenstadt, who used to run a game called the Siege of
Bodenburg, in order to sell miniature castles to war gamers in Wisconsin
in the 1960s. From which you could conclude, I guess, that games are
everything for Gygax, or that everything is a game; but I don’t think
that would be quite right. I think that he has found a way to live.

> Thanks to Michelle Vuckovich and Jennifer Estaris for their help
> researching this article, and of course to Wayne, for being a part of
> it.