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.)

​

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.

 

[MGibster]

Even The Muppet Show has them.

The show featuring a romance between a pig and a frog? Can you believe those perverts got away with that in a children's show?

 

[FrogReaver]

not a good case for a harlot table being needed, you can find inspiration in just about anything

Need is such a strong word. D&d itself isn’t needed. No single thing in d&d is needed.

I could care less about the harlot table being included or not, but this kind of logic is a bigger problem IMO.

 

[Eric V]

I’d tread carefully. To some, any context you provide is no different than excusing those actions.

I suppose theoretically that's true, but I haven't seen any people like that in this thread.

 

[FrogReaver]

I suppose theoretically that's true, but I haven't seen any people like that in this thread.

I have.

 

[Justice and Rule]

A "visceral, inexplicable need to pass judgement" is one among several, but yes - as it is a rather common feature among recent history commentators, and in line with what (sorry, can't remember who posted it, but its back in this thread) the notion that all history writing is political speech.

I'm sorry, but you continue to avoid my question and haven't actually told me what in the book falls under the idea of "visceral, inexplicable need to pass judgement" other than putting in a disclaimer. This whole thing reads as a deflection without any sort of proof, and given that you've done it twice, I think it's safe to say that you don't actually have anything from the book that would justify this sort of backlash.

And also it's not a "notion" that all history writing is political: as someone who teaches it, all history writing is political. What you include, what you don't, how you cover something... it all shows you bias in some way. You don't need to be Howard Zinn to put politics into history, and while Shelby Foote or Douglas Southall Freeman might not have thought their writings were political, they definitely were. That's just the nature of things. The idea that history can be apolitical is actually a political stance unto itself, put out there with such consistency that it is basically associated with a single party/ideology at this point. At this point I don't even think some of my more conservative colleagues would argue about works being political.

"...put into context" and direct readers to your own judgements rather than allowing them to make up their own minds.

There's a fine line between directing the attention of someone and feeding them your own opinion, and good historians are very careful about that.

All historians are directing you whether they want to or not because it's simply impossible to write something with everything in it and let someone decide on their own: you can't fully contextualize everything, include everything, reference everything that might be useful.

In this case, Riggs' response is in the context of people who are denying that this disclaimer is not necessary. What he picks out is perfectly contextualized, the problem is that you are trying to excuse Gygax through weak arguments about "the times", which multiple people have shown to be a poor argument to begin with.

"...Gary held some incredibly regressive beliefs, even for his time." That's hard to say. The quotes I have read, read more like a rather pedestrian average for his age, and his time.

It's not. People love trying to make the past more conservative than it actually is as a sort of excuse for bad views, but as has been brought up extensively by multiple people (though credit to @Steampunkette in particular), Gary's views weren't mainstream and even other people from that time could agree on that.

Really, the whole "he was of the times" argument is this weak attempt to pardon someone who was out of line with the mainstream back in 1975 and didn't change up through 2005. Gary was a flawed person, honestly kind of a dick given all his history. But what he managed to do successfully is groom his image to be something of the Stan Lee of the RPG space, sort of a grandpa mascot... which is why this sort of thing should be brought up.

I have.

You gonna link to them or just declare it so you don't have to do any of the work?

 

[Umbran]

Sesame Street too .

Yeah, and because someone might not see the point...

Both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show are still awesome! There is still a positive legacy there!

Noting that Mr. Gygax had some flaws doesn't relegate the entirety of the work to the dustbin. It merely shows us the places where we can do better. There is no need to defend or "excuse" - this merely a lesson to be learned.

Doing better in the future is largely the point.

 

[Steampunkette]

Just to add some context; the US campaign to pass an Equal Rights Amendment largely happened in the 1970s, a movement that involved countless American women and men during the same time period when D&D was being created. Gygax was a "product of his times," certainly, but he also took sides on the debates of his times, and major movements disagreed with what his actions represented then, as now.

Mostly...

The US campaign to pass the ERA started in 1923. It built momentum for almost 50 years before it passed, -overwhelmingly-, in Congress in 1972.

But one could -easily- argue that while the ERA was first introduced in 1923, the change in political climate began -decades- earlier and was a slow but notable progress to that point, and a slow but notable progress to the 70s, and a slow but noticeable progress to the modern day.

The 70s were a big push for the ERA, but the social tenor on whether it was acceptable to treat women in a sexist manner had been shifting for a long time and has continued afterward.

Making the general "Product of the time" argument generally ahistorical revisionism that ignores both that there are always bad actors that go beyond what is socially acceptable in a given time frame and the cultural context of the change in tolerance of sexism that had been going on for at least 15 years before Gygax was born.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Yeah, and because someone might not see the point...

Both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show are still awesome! There is still a positive legacy there!

Noting that Mr. Gygax had some flaws doesn't relegate the entirety of the work to the dustbin. It merely shows us the places where we can do better. There is no need to defend or "excuse" - this merely a lesson to be learned.

Doing better in the future is largely the point.

Well, "some" might be understating it a bit, but I think we should probably move beyond looking him as fans and more towards him a historical figure: the former is what creates these backlashes, while the latter allows us to look at his flaws and understand him and his work as a person.

 

[Morrus]

A former boss of mine, an African American man from Memphis, said the only place he was ever truly nervous to travel through as a Black man was Wisconsin. This would have been when he was younger in the 90s and early 2000s. The South has a... legacy, for sure. But oftentimes that legacy has been a focal point allowing Americans to ignore the problems in other parts of the country. New Yorkers in the 1950s might have bragged they didn't have segregation laws like Alabama did, but they sure did a great job of making sure their white children weren't going to schools with Black or Puerto Rican children. When the Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915, at the height of its popularity Indiana had more members than any other state in the union. It wasn't racist officials in the South who came up with the stop & frisk program it implemented in more liberal New York City. In 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb, a BOMB, from a helicopter onto a house with members of MOVE, a Black liberation organization, killing 6 adults, 5 children, and destroying 61 homes, and leaving 250 people homeless. Philadelphia not Little Rock, Memphis, or Atlanta.

I'm not defending or apologizing for the legacy of the South. I'm not even interested in arguing which one is worse as far as race relations are concerned. Just that we shouldn't ignore the serious problems with various bigotries we have in other parts of the country as well.

Texas and Tennessee both ratified the ERA before Wisconsin. Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi never did.

I listed off those three states not because they're "More Racist" or "Less Enlightened" than Wisconsin, but because it shows that the politicians in Wisconsin were bouyed by popular vote and consent of the people to sign the ratification. California, which was brought up as an example of "The most progressive" states which are way more progressive than Wisconsin didn't ratify it 'til 9 months later.

There were southern states that signed on, there were southern states that didn't, and there were northern states that rescinded their ratification years later (Like Idaho).

It wasn't meant to be "South Bad, North Good."

OK, folks. You really are on the wrong forum here. Please take the debates about historical racism issues in the United States elsewhere. Thanks.

 

[Krachek]

I try to solve the King and Queen of dragons case.

Swap gender, swap alignement, multi genders, multi alignements, on each scenario I just find more arguments being sexist or not enough inclusive.
On the extreme scenario both are all genders, all alignements, all color and metal at the same time. Which don’t solve anything.

I fail to solve that case.