Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

by Ben Riggs

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy game of role-playing which relies upon the imagination of participants, for it is certainly make-believe, yet it is so interesting, so challenging, so mind-unleashing that it comes near reality. —GARY GYGAX,

Guidon Games, which had already published Chainmail, passed on publishing Dungeons & Dragons. Owner Don Lowry didn’t publish the world’s first role-playing game because he believed no gamer would ever want to create their own dungeon.

Ironically, this first publication was not Dungeons & Dragons but rather Cavaliers and Roundheads,

Working in the dungeon of House Gygax was not prestigious, but Kask thought it was damn cool. He described his $100-a-week gig at the newborn company as “the best fucking job in the whole wide world.” (That’s $500 a week today.) And it didn’t hurt that “we were working in a dungeon making things about dungeons!”

The following year saw the release of the Players Handbook, followed by the Dungeon Masters Guide. (Apostrophes weren’t used in the Handbook’s or Guide’s titles because they were thought ugly, grammar be damned. Pity the poor apostrophe, which wasn’t cool enough for AD&D!)

RPGs allow players to step outside of our reality and see it from a different angle. They present a new way of viewing the world.

Art is of vital importance to role-playing games because it is both inspirational and instructive. There are accounts of RPG designers seeing a single work of art and being so roused that they created RPGs based on them. Great art also galvanizes Dungeon Masters and players. Great art creates windows to worlds that have never existed outside the imagination, and the role-playing game says, “Would you like to spend time in that world? Right this way…” It is a powerful pairing of media. Great art can teach people how to play a role-playing game without words.

He recalled that the height of the game’s graphics was that it used pound signs for the walls, and dots for empty spaces. Numbers were used to signify monsters. “It was as old-school as you can get,” he said.

LORRAINE WILLIAMS DID not talk to me for this book, and I don’t much blame her. The assembled hosts of geeks have been straight-up cruel to her in the decades since the fall of TSR. If you can imagine a negative quality, like as not, someone has ascribed it to her in the past decades. She has been portrayed as the schemer who stole the company from Gary Gygax and the fool who plowed it into the ground.

TSR WAS A company that discovered geniuses and paid them to create worlds for the rest of us to live in.

TSR seemed to believe that sort of allegiance from an audience could be replaced. It acted on a theory of interchangeable creativity, as though a novel or adventure would sell equally well irrespective of who produced it. Writers were machines that made words to sell. Other machines would make words if they would not.

To say that someone is a Massachusetts man is to summarize a book’s worth of ideas and principles into two words. The Massachusetts man is unyielding as stone in defense of his values, sometimes even to the point of stubbornness. The Massachusetts man is a loyal and eternal friend, although he will not stand being taken advantage of. Like a street fighter checking the layout of an alley before throwing the first punch, the Massachusetts man sees the world as it truly is and discerns how to move to his advantage.

Audiences don’t lie. They give honest feedback. And TSR West responded by telling the people who were good enough to buy their products that what they wanted was wrong.

The lesson to be learned may be that for the young artist, hard work and persistence are of more value than listening to summative critiques of their work.)

Telling Brom to use more colors in his paintings is like telling J. R. R. Tolkien to make his novels more realistic.

Management consisted almost entirely of businesspeople who didn’t understand how to work with creatives. “If you were managing a cardboard factory, these were the people that could help you with production, but that type of management doesn’t work with creatives,” he said.

An indignity the pair did not manage to remedy was that no TSR fiction writer had their name on the spine of the book while Lorraine Williams was CEO. Management was concerned about how the novels would be shelved in bookstores, so they wanted the line promoted over the writer. But for a writer not to see their name on the side of the book they’d birthed from their own blood, bone, and sinew could be wounding. Lowder said the lack of recognition was “a reminder of what management really valued—the brand, not the people creating the content.”

One cannot escape the feeling of a company flinging product out the door, but it seems to have been effective, at least in the short run. Making more products kept gross sales about flat for years.

TSR WAS NOW trapped in a doom loop of prodigious errors. Sales were down, so the company produced more products. Making more products increased costs, which reduced profits. Furthermore, many products were either not profitable or actually lost the company money with every sale. Like some sort of demonic punishment meted out to lackadaisical CEOs in hell, the company was literally doing more work to make less money.

Magic: The Gathering detonated, and everything everywhere in gaming changed forever. Money undreamed of flooded into the coffers of Wizards of the Coast. This wasn’t good for gaming money or a hit at TSR-level money. No, this was akin to the money that would be generated by a Hollywood film studio. What does one do with all of that money? Go out and buy properties to make even more money, raise the flood until greenbacks are spitting out the chimneys.

So an experiment would be run. There were two upcoming adventures slated for release on the schedule. Wizards would release one with the Forgotten Realms logo, and the other would be released under the AD&D second edition banner. Which would sell better, the generic title or the one explicitly set in the Realms? The adventure for AD&D second edition sold three times as many copies. The lesson was now plain as the glasses on Gary Gygax’s face. The multitudinous settings, no matter how ineffable and luminescent and masterly, were a direct cause of the company’s downfall.