D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism

The recent book The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 talks about the early years of D&D. In the book, authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro talk about the way the game, and its writers, approached certain issues. Not surprisingly, this revelation received aggressive "pushback" on social media because, well, that sort of thing does--in fact, one designer who worked with Gygax at the time labelled it "slanderous".

D&D historian Ben Riggs--author of Slaying the Dragon--delved into the facts. Note that the below was posted on Twitter, in that format, not as an article.

D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.

The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.

Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit points. They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which states:"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and early D&D?

Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character class. It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)

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It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for another example.)

Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.

(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)

Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading politics into D&D. Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.

The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.”

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The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.

Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any other interpretation.

The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.

Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:“I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."

"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room."

"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”

So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.

The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases...

Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy....it is also directly harming the legacies of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.

How? Let me show you.The D&D player base is getting more diverse in every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis men of middle European descent...

...the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human vegetable garden ...

find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization forward, even if only by a few feet.

So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game we love? We could pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no **** and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is naughty word on your sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.

I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know **** when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so great after all…

We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past, it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own mistakes from them?

Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. Or maybe when someone tells you there is **** on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it off, and move on.

We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024. Something like...

“Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others. So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.”

Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those old PDFs on DriveThruRPG. And when we see something bigoted in old D&D, we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the entire human family into the hobby.To do anything less is to damn D&D to darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are kinda ****** up. So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators.

Appendix 1: Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D.

But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book 1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading, along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.

Ben Riggs​

Look, folks, we know how a conversation like this goes on the internet. Because, internet. Read the rules you agreed to before replying. The banhammer will be used on those who don't do what they agreed to.

 

[Morrus]

I don’t know why this virtue signaling needs to be raised from the dead so much. It’s fantasy and most fantasy has tropes. If you read fantasy by Bob TSR authors there is a lot of this present and there are A LOT more women devoted to fantasy reading than men. I never had an issue with the female drow dominated society being evil because female spiders are larger than male spiders. They will also attack them on sight. It also made me more thoughtful of how women are treated in our society by encountering a society where the norms are turned upside down and my male character is treated in a demeaning manner because I am a man. This can lead to critical thinking and be a force for change. I felt the skin color of drow being described as jet black was much more egregious because the high melamine count is to protect from sun damage. Living for centuries I. The under dark would cause almost albino complexions in my opinion as no melanin is needed for sun block. Most fish found deep in the water tend to be bone white for this reason. D&D has made real strides and I see no reason to constantly bring up poor judgements from the past.

Well, it’s a book about the past. It would be weird not to bring up the past in a history book.

 

[Charlaquin]

Gary is what I like to call “grandpa sexist”

It was a different time and that doesn’t make it okay but people believed stupid stuff back then. Different time and place.

If he was alive today and shared these views I’d have mor of an issue with it but he’s dead and I can’t walk a mile in his shoes.

Grandpa says old timey bad stuff. We learned better and move on

We can understand and acknowledge that these words were written in a different social context than that of today, without excusing the words that were written. There’s an element of “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” here - part of making social progress is looking at the things that used to be socially accepted and saying “let’s all agree that wasn’t great and we shouldn’t do that again.”

It’s also important to recognize and acknowledge that some of the things EGG wrote were considered sexist at the time. So as much as “those were different times” already is meant to explain but not excuse, it doesn’t do either in some of these cases.

 

[wizard71]

Well, it’s a book about the past. The word “History” gives it away.

It would be weird not to bring up the past in a history book,

That depends on the context Morris. If your reason for bringing it up is to virtue signal how wonderful D&D is now compared to its start I am not buying it. Especially as Hasbro has fumbled the ball repeatedly with firing staff, giving their departing CEo unearned severance packages, using AI art after the community said they don’t want it and doing harm to the brand with the whole OGL debacle. But hey at least we don’t have a harlot table…. Yeah whatever Hasbro

 

[mamba]

If you read fantasy by Bob TSR authors there is a lot of this present and there are A LOT more women devoted to fantasy reading than men. I never had an issue with the female drow dominated society being evil because female spiders are larger than male spiders. They will also attack them on sight.

one example by itself can look pretty innocent and justified, the aggregate here not so much

You could also create a different example for a female dominated culture, it did not have to be an evil one. There is one where the line of succession and inheritance runs through the female side, not the male, because they figured out that it is much less clear who someone’s father is than who the mother is… could have used that as a basis too

 

[ezo]

As with playing the game, itself, such experiences also vastly differ...

When I started college in the 90s, I wanted to start up a D&D gaming group. I was in a larger city now, not my tiny rural Oklahoma backwater hometown, and the "satanic panic" had been over for years...I figured it would be easy to find new players.

I started college in 91. Although I wasn't from a tiny rule backwater town, I was from a large town, maybe some would call it a small city? I never experienced any of the "satanic panic" when I played during the late 70's or 80s, either.

I was wrong--it was a real challenge. Everyone had heard of Dungeons & Dragons by the time I got to university, and it already had a reputation for sexism, misogyny, and racism. Every woman and AFAB person in my geeky social circle had a story about D&D, ranging from "I was the only girl," and "guys at the table kept hitting on me," to "the DM killed my character because I wouldn't date him." And much worse, all the way down the toilet to Boys' Club attitudes and graphic descriptions of sexual assault. And I asked dozens of people, from all over.

My group during community college has two women in it, and five guys. Some inter-dating happened, but nothing like you describe ever came up. When I went to undergrad, I had 3-4 women in a large group of about a dozen. Again, some dating, etc. but nothing crazy. Finally, in graduate school I had 3 women (and 6 men) at varies times. Two were a couple who later got married (and continued to play as a married couple).

As for the dating, the worst thing was when someone dated and broke up. Sometimes both continued to play, but more often than not the woman would be the one to stop playing... Once we even had to manage the group splintering into two separate groups.

Somehow, this misogynistic behavior became allowable, acceptable, and even normal for D&D players. There are jokes about it, there's a whole stereotype. I'm not a psychologist or sociologist--I can't say for certain how these attitudes and biases were formed, or why some people treat other people the way they do. But even a layperson like me can look at some of the artwork and physical descriptions in D&D and draw parallel lines.

As a teenage boy growing up with D&D in the 80s, yeah, that stuff appealed to me then. Now I laugh at it. The other day I was doing AI portraits with my friend online and lo-and-behold the "dreaded" bikini armor popped up! I haven't seen that in hundreds and hundreds of AI images, but it snuck in.

I know people like to pretend that this issue doesn't exist, or that it doesn't affect them, or that it's harmless. And I think they're full of bull. Nobody is that obtuse. Nobody looks at the image of a woman tied up by her own hair being tortured, and seriously thinks women shouldn't be offended by it. They know better, they knew better in 1980 when "Palace of the Silver Princess" was written. They just don't care.

As harsh as it sounds, a lot of people IME just don't care--- not until it affects them personally (or someone close to them). But that is generally the same with just about everything.

Oddly, what bothers me personally is that people bring up issues from decades ago, but those things already happened-- they can't be changed. Now, that isn't to say people can't learn from those things, obviously, and work to prevent similar issues in the present. I am also not a fan of when people try to "rewrite" the past to remove those issues. The past is part of who we are, for better or worse, and if we don't like the past, the best thing we should do (IMO) is learn from it and not repeat it.

My two cents.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I see no reason to constantly bring up poor judgements from the past.

I mean, it's a history book.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If your reason for bringing it up is to virtue signal how wonderful D&D is now compared to its start I am not buying it.

You have successfully knocked down an argument that no one was proffering.

It's a history book. It's talking about early D&D history, warts and all.

If that's the kind of stuff that upsets you, don't read history books.

 

[DarkCrisis]

That depends on the context Morris. If your reason for bringing it up is to virtue signal how wonderful D&D is now compared to its start I am not buying it. Especially as Hasbro has fumbled the ball repeatedly with firing staff, giving their departing CEo unearned severance packages, using AI art after the community said they don’t want it and doing harm to the brand with the whole OGL debacle. But hey at least we don’t have a harlot table…. Yeah whatever Hasbro

I’d funny how Hasbro/WotC keeps getting forgiven for its transgressions.

We forgive you, king. When’s that next adventure book due out?

 

[wizard71]

I mean, it's a history book.

Yes but what purpose does it serve? Obviously it was not so offensive to you that you did not quit the hobby. I just am not interested in buying a history of the game I love to read about Ben going out of his way to trash it. Don’t elaborate on the positives Ben. Just talk about how enlightened we all are compared to the Neanderthals from the 70’s. I love the old TST work and I have enjoyed D&D for its ride and I feel that what Has to had done in the past year has done more damage and fostered more ill will currently than anything Gygax did? Why do I say that? Because I get so many YouTube clips from angry creators about the newest WOTC scandal. You can read on forums like this people bashing D&D as old hat and that there are better alternatives. We can be better and adjust more as we realize that things portrayed previously might be problematic today. But to demonize the past and extoll everything today as so enlightened is very hypocritical and in that regard I side with Rob Kuntz in that matter.

 

[CandyLaser]

So, EGG most likely wasn't an extreme example of sexist man FOR THAT PERIOD, and probably wouldn't have been tagged with the label by many people DURING THAT PERIOD. By today's standards, hoo boy. But not back then. The men who did get tagged as sexist back then would be nigh-unimaginable caricatures now, and probably couldn't even be written as bad guys in modern fiction.

I take some issue with this. Return to one of the more odious quotes from Gygax:

I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."

"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room.

I've bolded the beginning for emphasis, as it shows that Gygax was in fact being called a sexist in his day. This was in 1975, only ten or so years from the first uses of "sexism" in its modern form. Given the culture of the time, the people who were called out for sexism tending to be of the particularly appalling and obvious variety. That's strong evidence that Gygax would have been considered sexist even by the standards of the time. This is all in Rigg's article, of course, but I thought it was worth highlighting it.