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.

 

[Charlaquin]

Why were people like that back then? Were they just questionable people or a product of the times?

The thing is, it doesn’t really make a difference. The things that were said were the same, whatever the person’s motivations were for saying them. We can never truly know another person’s internal thoughts and feelings, we can only go by their actions.

For example, if I were born back then, would I be the same? Or would I think as I do now, ie. that everyone deserves equal respect regardless of gender, race, etc. and everyone has a place in gaming?

I think most people who say such things do think that everyone deserves equal respect regardless of gender, race, etc. It’s just that they had warped ideas about what “equal respect” looked like, due in part to the social context that influenced them.

Just trying to grapple with how much resentment to feel towards the creators of the hobby.

I don’t think there’s much use in resentment towards them. What we should do is recognize what they did, why it was wrong, and learn from it. Remember the mistakes of the past and try not to repeat them going forward; reserve moral judgment about the people who made them and focus on the actions and their impact instead.

 

[wizard71]

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.

Your argument would make more sense if other D&D leadership was included warts and all. Is there a section on Lorraine Williams and her disastrous tenure as owner of TSR?

 

[Staffan]

Taking the choice of using Tiamat in the game as the Dragon of Chaos as a sign of misogyny and making it a centerpiece of the argument seems weak. Assuming Gygax was myth and thesaurus loving, what names show up in a thesaurus or myth book that would make good choices to base a dragon of Chaos on? The oldest Myth book I have, the Oxford Paperback Reference Dictionary of World Mythology from 1979 seems to fit in with what Google spits out today for Tiamat: "Tiamat is a Babylonian goddess who personifies the salt sea and is associated with primordial chaos. She is often depicted as a dragon or female serpent and is said to have created the first gods with her union to Apsu, the personification of freshwater."

If it was just Tiamat vs Bahamut, sure. That's just one thing, and there's mythological precedence. But you also have Random Harlot tables, stat limits on human women, evil matriarchal (and dark-skinned) elves, "goodwives" who throw around false accusations, and so on. And that's just using the stuff that's actually in the game, not writings outside it.

 

[Lanefan]

Your argument would make more sense if other D&D leadership was included warts and all. Is there a section on Lorraine Williams and her disastrous tenure as owner of TSR?

Maybe there will be someday, but the book in question only covers up to 1977 i.e. long before LW entered the scene.

 

[jerryrice4949]

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 don’t recall WoTC sanctioning the AI art. I thought the artist in question did it without their knowledge. Also, most companies have laid off people at some point. If the bar to be an ethical company is to never lay off staff almost no company meets that bar.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

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.

Their shiny black skin was also supposed to represent the shiny black of…black widows. They are not white widows, afterall. Their black was not human black but shiny obsidian like the spiders.

I assumed that was the point?

Oh well.

 

[Parmandur]

I don’t recall WoTC sanctioning the AI art. I thought the artist in question did it without their knowledge. Also, most companies have laid off people at some point. If the bar to be an ethical company is to never lay off staff almost no company meets that bar.

Hell, Gary Gygax doesn't meet that bar.

 

[Staffan]

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.

Note that the book in question are by Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro. They received some amount of criticism for their descriptions of aspects of early D&D/TSR/Gygax, and Ben Riggs wrote the above Twitter thread in their defense.

 

[Arilyn]

Why were people like that back then? Were they just questionable people or a product of the times?

For example, if I were born back then, would I be the same? Or would I think as I do now, ie. that everyone deserves equal respect regardless of gender, race, etc. and everyone has a place in gaming?

Just trying to grapple with how much resentment to feel towards the creators of the hobby.

I grew up in the 70s. And yes, definitely more awful attitudes. But it wasn't everyone. My grandparents, for example, who were born in the early 1900s, genuinely treated everyone with respect. My parents also raised me with attitudes only slightly different from today. I did have to learn how to curtsy and my brother had to practice pulling out my chair for me. Something he still grumbles about.

So you probably would not have shared those bad attitudes. It was known to be wrong, even back then. The "different times" argument doesn't really sit well. I was there and a lot of it was really grating. And we did know better, just ignored too much.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Yeah, there's piles of sexism and misogyny in OD&D and AD&D. It's weird to see people claiming there isn't any. Did you read the books? If you did and still claim it's not there, you're willfully ignorant.

Ignoring the stuff in D&D you don't like is peak D&D.

Srubbing out the sexism in D&D is no problem for the average Enworlder. Why we're so empowered, we're immune to the inherent sexism/racism/etc. of our society. We rise above it and create games and environments where all gamers are welcomed.