Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who

by Ewalt, David M.

  “I really didn’t particularly have career goals,” Williams says. “I took things on as individual challenges. So I went from the newspaper syndicate to a not-for-profit voluntary health agency, to a hospital, to another voluntary health agency, to a trade association.”

  Williams didn’t know or even particularly care about fantasy role-playing, but she sensed that working for TSR would be an interesting job. “I looked upon it as another great experience,” she says. “When it started out, I was going to go in and help Gary get the ship righted.”

  The amicable partnership lasted only a few months. Williams says that once she took on the job of TSR’s general manager in the spring of 1985, she learned the true extent of the company’s financial problems—and Gygax’s complicity. “The whole structure of the place was that they had all sorts of offshore operations, and they had integrated profit-sharing plans that only benefited the shareholders, which were Gary, Kevin and Brian Blume, and some family members,” she says. “I mean, [TSR UK] owned a house in the Isle of Man. You wouldn’t have believed [Gygax’s] temper tantrum when we told them that had to be sold.”

  According to Williams, even though the company was operating under a debt covenant that restricted its spending, Gygax wanted to keep pulling money out to fund his Hollywood projects and lifestyle. “The bank was so upset with us,” she says. “We finally said, ‘Gary, we can’t advance a dollar. If we go in violation of the bank covenant, we have no line of credit. We’re dead.’ And Gary went ballistic.”

  Gygax remembered the falling-out differently. “I began to become uneasy about her after two incidents,” he wrote in 2002. “In one she stated that she held gamers in contempt, that they were socially beneath her. In the other, when I stated that I planned to see that the employees gained share ownership when the corporate crises were passed in recognition of their loyalty, Lorraine had turned to my personal assistant Gail Carpenter (now Gail Gygax, my wife) and said: ‘Over my dead body!’ ”

  Either way, one thing is clear: Lorraine Williams got mad and decided to take over the company. “I had grown to really like the people, and I had a lot of respect for the product,” she says. “I may not have understood it one hundred percent, but I understood intellectually that it was the right product for the right time.”

  That spring, Gygax had taken control of the company from the Blumes by exercising stock options that gave him a majority of TSR’s shares. In the summer, Williams convinced Brian Blume to exercise his own options—and then she bought all of his shares. Shortly afterward, she bought all of Kevin Blume’s stock too. Only a few months after arriving in Lake Geneva, Lorraine Williams was the new majority owner of TSR.

  Gygax tried to fight back. He filed a lawsuit against Williams, hoping a judge would rule that the sale of stock was illegal, but the judge ruled against him. Before the year was over, Gygax gave up and sold Williams his remaining shares in TSR.

  “I was so sick of the fucking company at that point, I was glad to get rid of it,” Gygax said in a 2008 interview. “It was getting more and more screwed up all the time.”

  One night about halfway through our trip home, we made camp on a quiet hill, surrounded by forest. The journey had been blessedly quiet so far—except for Ganubi’s constant chatter. I hoped he was making progress winning the illithids to our cause, but the continual preaching was getting on my nerves. I set up my bedroll at the opposite side of the fire from his nightly theology lesson and went to sleep early.

  I woke abruptly a few hours later and opened my eyes to see Jhaden crouched next to me in the dark. He looked at me and held a finger in front of his lips. “There’s something out in the woods,” he whispered. “Smell it?”

  I may not be a ranger, but this didn’t require trained senses. There was a rotting stench in the air, like spoiled meat. I sat up and looked around, but by the light of our small campfire, I could only see Ganubi, Graeme, and the illithids, all asleep.

  Jhaden, still crouching, moved to wake them. But he only took a few quiet steps before he drew his sword and broke into a run. As he passed Ganubi’s bedroll, he gave him a kick and shouted loud enough to wake the dead: “We’re under attack!”

  Gary Gygax didn’t give up on role-playing games after departing TSR. Immediately after leaving the business, he started another publishing company, New Infinities Productions, with TSR veterans Frank Mentzer and Kim Mohan. The company published just one full game, 1987’s sci-fi-themed Cyborg Commando, and a few adventures and novels. It went out of business after an investor failed to deliver necessary funding.

  Next Gygax took a job writing a new fantasy game, Dangerous Dimensions, for his old competitor Game Designers’ Workshop. When it was still in development, TSR threatened a copyright-infringement lawsuit over the game’s too-similar “DD” initials, so Gygax changed the name of the game to Dangerous Journeys. When it was published, TSR sued anyway. Tiny Game Designers’ Workshop couldn’t compete with TSR’s lawyers and sold TSR the game as part of an out-of-court settlement. Dangerous Journeys disappeared into a back room somewhere in Lake Geneva, never to be seen again.

  TSR wouldn’t let Gary Gygax publish fantasy games, so he spent most of the next decade writing novels—fantasy potboilers with titles like Sea of Death, Dance of Demons, and The Anubis Murders. They met with a lukewarm reception. In the late nineties Gygax started work on a fantasy-themed video game called Lejendary Adventure, but that didn’t work out as planned either: In 1999, Hekaforge Productions released the game as an old-fashioned pen-and-paper role-playing game. By that point, TSR had no objection.

  Nothing Gary Gygax ever did after TSR approached the level of success of Dungeons & Dragons—but, of course, that’s kind of like pointing out that J. D. Salinger peaked with The Catcher in the Rye. While he was at TSR, Gygax earned lifetime membership in the pantheon of geek gods; after departing, he enjoyed his deserved celebrity. He wrote articles, he performed interviews, he talked with fans on gaming websites. In 2000, he even voiced himself on the animated TV show Futurama: The plot of the episode explained that Gygax, as part of a superteam including Al Gore and Stephen Hawking, was responsible for protecting the entire universe’s space-time continuum. At the end of the episode, they all sat down to play Dungeons & Dragons.

  In 2003, Gygax announced that with the help of his former assistant-DM Rob Kuntz, he was compiling a massive six-volume guide to Greyhawk, using details that TSR had never published. In order to get around copyright-infringement claims, they’d call Greyhawk “Zagyg,” an anagram of Gygax. But an April 2004 stroke slowed the old grognard down considerably, and only two volumes were published.

  On the morning of March 4, 2008, Gary Gygax died at his home in Lake Geneva. He was sixty-nine years old.

  Hideous creatures came running out of the darkness and into the light of our fire. They looked like men, but warped and terrible, with scaly skin and fingers that twisted into long, daggerlike claws. I could see three of them racing toward the center of our camp, and then Jhaden closed the distance and speared one on his sword.

  Ganubi and Graeme were still waking up, so I took a step toward them, hoping to provide some cover until they could arm themselves. But then I heard a noise behind me, and when I turned, I saw another of the ghouls sprinting toward me, only seconds away. Its mouth opened impossibly wide, and a long black tongue snaked past inch-long teeth, flicking at the air.

  Fads always fade, and D&D’s downturn began right around the time Lorraine Williams bought the company. In the late eighties and early nineties, enthusiasm for tabletop gaming waned. While the game held on to a core group of rabid fans, demand for rule books and related products decreased: In 1989, TSR tried to inject some life into the game with the publication of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, but it didn’t do much to excite fans—aside from removing Gary Gygax as D&D’s primary author.

  Instead, the attention of gamers went elsewhere. Video games and D&D had already coexisted for a decade, and TSR had made go
od money licensing the property to video game makers. More than a dozen different D&D video games were published between 1980 and 1990, on eight different game platforms. But by the early nineties the video game business had matured, and TSR wasn’t competing against small hobby companies—it was squaring off against international giants like Sony and Nintendo.

  Computer technology had also evolved to a point where video games were easier, cheaper, and better looking than any tabletop competitor. When video games were played on a computer and consisted entirely of text, they weren’t much of a threat. But when you could play them on your TV and they looked like real life, companies like TSR were suddenly in deep trouble.

  Video games even began to take the place of Dungeons & Dragons as the enemy of overanxious parents. By the mid-1990s, no one was blaming D&D for corrupting children—they were worried about violent video games like Doom.

  New competitors also appeared in the tabletop game world. In 1993, Seattle-based game publisher Wizards of the Coast published Magic: The Gathering, a collectible card game set in a D&D-like fantasy world. The game requires players to construct a deck of cards, each one a different spell or creature, in order to wage war against a friend. Since good cards are mixed randomly with bad ones in expensive “booster packs,” hard-core players might spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to construct their perfect deck. The game fed gamers’ hunger for fantasy combat and exploited the nerdy impulse to collect and complete. Magic was an instant hit; two months after its debut, Wizards of the Coast sold out the first printing of 2.5 million cards.

  TSR tried to capitalize on the trend by releasing their own collectible games, including a Magic: The Gathering knockoff called Spellfire: Master the Magic and a dice game called Dragon Dice. They were both expensive to produce, and neither sold very well.

  Then things got worse. TSR had increasingly come to rely on the revenues from publishing fantasy fiction books to keep the company afloat. But at the end of 1996, the market collapsed, and TSR’s distributor, Random House, returned millions of dollars’ worth of unsold hardcover books. On the hook to refund Random House, TSR entered 1997 over $30 million in debt, and with no cash to publish or ship new products. Operations ground to a halt.

  If Dungeons & Dragons could have been represented by a character in its own game, it would have been out of spells, had only one hit point left, and been cursed with blindness. D&D was on its deathbed.

  The enemy had caught us unready but not defenseless. I don’t need a weapon in hand when I can channel magical energy at will. As the ghoul pounced, I hit it with a ray of searing light, and it collapsed to the ground in a sizzling pile of flesh.

  There were more in the woods. Many more. As I fired off spell after spell just to keep them at bay, I heard the sounds of fighting behind me: Jhaden shouting war cries, running feet, the twang of a bow. Normally, we’d try to regroup and take a defensible position, but the ghouls were on us so quickly, it was all I could do to stand my ground, cast spell after spell, and try not to be overrun.

  The melee probably lasted half a minute, but it felt like an hour. I had just dispatched my final target when I heard—well, not heard, exactly, more like felt—a voice in my head. “Save us!” it cried. “Help!”

  I turned to see what was happening and found the campsite in chaos. Jhaden was fighting at least two of the ghouls at once. Graeme I couldn’t see. One of the illithids was on the ground, covered in blood, while the others cowered a few feet away. A ghoul—probably the one that had killed their companion—was bearing down on them, about to attack.

  I remember thinking to myself, “I guess psychic powers don’t affect ghouls.”

  But then Ganubi was there, throwing himself between the monster and his new friends. His sword was in hand, but in his rush to get between them, he had let his guard down.

  The ghoul ran into Ganubi, knocking him to the ground. Then it tore at his flesh with its terrible claws.

  Morgan rolled a die and checked the results. “First attack on Ganubi is a miss,” he said. “Oh, no, wait—you’re on the ground. What’s your armor class when you are prone?”

  “I . . . I think it’s a plus four or a negative four,” Phil said. “Whatever. It’s four in his favor.”

  “But what is your actual AC?”

  “That would be sixteen.”

  “Oh boy. You are in trouble.”

  As soon as I saw Ganubi fall, I ran to help him. But I couldn’t get there in time to stop the ghoul from attacking again.

  As Ganubi struggled to get up, the ghoul stood over him and slashed with its claws, frenzied, hitting him again and again.

  I watched as Ganubi collapsed to the ground. I saw the light go from his eyes. I saw my friend die.

  “I feel bad about this,” Morgan said. “I really do. But I play by the rules, and that’s fifty-five points of damage.”

  “Oh wow.” Phil stared at his character sheet.

  We all froze, silent, waiting for him to react.

  “Yeah. Well, make sure you guys tell the illithids that I was going in there to help them.”

  12

  RESURRECTION

  Adventuring is a high-risk enterprise. Characters in your campaign will die, sometimes because they were reckless and sometimes because luck was against them. Fortunately, D&D is a game, and death doesn’t have to be the end.

  —DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE, PAGE 41

  Do we know how to preserve a body?” Alex asked. We’d finished the ghouls off without further casualties, but now had to face an even worse problem. “A week of walking around dragging Ganubi’s corpse sounds like a bad idea.”

  “Actually, you know, I was thinking about that,” Phil said. He turned to Morgan. “Would you allow me to convert one of the illithids to the Church of Ganubi and have me take them over as a player character? Because I wouldn’t mind giving up Ganubi for that.”

  “I don’t think so,” Morgan said. “That would open up a great big can of worms.”

  Phil sighed. And then I had a flash of inspiration.

  “No, Phil, wait.” I pounded on the table in excitement. “Ganubi’s been preaching to these guys for a week, and then he got killed trying to protect them. I’m going to spend the rest of the trip home telling the illithids, ‘He died for you guys, he saved you!’ ”

  Alex saw it coming. “Oh man, you’re going to turn Ganubi into Jesus.” He laughed. “Come on.”

  “No, seriously. If we can get some illithids to be Ganubi’s followers, how awesome would that be?”

  “That would be pretty cool,” Alex said. “This could be the catalyst that turns their whole civilization to good instead of evil.”

  “He died for them, man! Every day, on the way back, I am going to cast . . . what’s that spell you cast on a dead body so it doesn’t decay?”

  “Gentle Repose,” Morgan said.

  “Yes, Gentle Repose. Every day I will secretly cast that on Ganubi’s body, and then I will remark on the miracle that his body is not decaying. The illithids don’t know I’ve got these spells. I’m going to pretend to be shocked and tell them, ‘Perhaps this is a sign! Perhaps Ganubi is too great to be destroyed in this manner! He may yet return to us!’ ”

  Morgan shook his head, but he was smiling. “Make a Bluff check,” he said.

  I picked up my favorite d20, shook it in my hand, and tossed it onto the table. We all held our breath as it rolled to a stop.

  Twenty.

  Alex roared. “It was meant to be!”

  “You have been remarkably convincing on this subject,” Morgan deadpanned. “All right, so eventually you reach the walls of San Francisco and you have got three tentacled monsters with you. Now what are you going to do?”

  We live in a dangerous world. Death lurks around every corner. But sometimes, if you have enough gold, you can tell him to take a hike.

  When we got back to San Francisco, Jhaden and Graeme went to sell all the trade goods we’d brought from Las Vegas. I broug
ht the illithids back to our docked ship and placed Ganubi’s body at rest on the deck.

  “This is the ship that carried Ganubi’s life force across the great ocean,” I told them. “Now that he’s back on the vessel of his soul, we have to wait and see if he returns to us. I am praying for a miracle.”

  The concept of an afterlife was still confusing to the illithids, but they were perfectly familiar with the concept of death. So when we sold our trade goods and used the cash to hire a high-level cleric to secretly cast the spell True Resurrection,1 I knew they would be suitably impressed.

  The illithids were watching as Ganubi’s motionless form stirred, sat up, and looked around.

  “He has returned from the dead!” I shouted. “It’s a miracle!”

  Ganubi stared at me, perplexed, and then at the stunned illithids, and then back at me again. I saw a twinkle in his eye.

  “Yes!” he said, standing and raising his arms toward the heavens. “I have returned!”

  “Oh boy, we are all going to hell,” Alex said, laughing. “See, this is the shit that they talk about when they say that D&D is the devil’s game.”

  “I think we’ll end on that note,” Morgan said.

  Phil laughed. “And that is how you gain a level in the evangelist class,” he said.

  * * *

  Just like Ganubi, Dungeons & Dragons lived to fight another day. In 1997, Lorraine Williams sold TSR and all its gaming properties to Wizards of the Coast for $25 million and retired to become a full-time mother. Then in 1999, Wizards was bought by gaming giant Hasbro for $325 million.

  As part of the same corporate family as brands including Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe, Monopoly, and Scrabble, Dungeons & Dragons could have been relegated to an afterthought. But credit Wizards of the Coast for helping revive the franchise with clever marketing. In 2000, after sales of the game nearly flatlined, Wizards released Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, a major revision of the rules that was well received by fans. But the third edition was more than another attempt to update the core rule books; the game was released as the centerpiece of the “d20 System,” an entire universe of role-playing game rules covered by an open-source content license. Inspired by the up-and-coming Linux computer operating system, these documents were free to download, copy, distribute, and use—and they quickly found their way into the hands of players around the world.