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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In other news, Andrew Garfield will be playing Jesus for Martin Scorsese in his second Jesus movie.

Man, maybe one day someone from the Middle-East will get to play a character who is, there can be no doubt, Middle-Eastern. I like Andrew Garfield but goddamn. I guess at least he's kinda-Jewish by his own account, but he looks like a guy you'd find tilling a field in Wessex in 894 AD.

 

[Parmandur]

The worst thing about this whole thread is how it has completely moved away from the actual point.

The actual point was a couple of lines of a disclaimer in a history book that essentially says, "Look some of the stuff in this book is icky. We know it's icky. We do not in any way condone the icky parts. But, since this is a history book, we are going to include the icky bits because it's part of the historical record."

And a bunch of people jumped up and down about how that's disrespectful, lies, and whatnot.

And THEN we have about 1300 posts trying to sideline and blur the conversation by any means possible in order to argue stuff THAT WAS NEVER CLAIMED.

The other 150 posts are actually on topic, or attempts, like this one, to try to wrench the topic back on course.

Well, about a thread having a point, you have to understand that in the 20s it was normal for threads to go completely off the rails, we need to judge it by the standard of that time.

 

[Parmandur]

Man, maybe one day someone from the Middle-East will get to play a character who is, there can be no doubt, Middle-Eastern. I like Andrew Garfield but goddamn. I guess at least he's kinda-Jewish by his own account, but he looks like a guy you'd find tilling a field in Wessex in 894 AD.

Malick's upcoming Jesus movie, alas, also has a European Jesus...but Géza Röhrig is at least Jewish, too.

 

[Umbran]

Where I want to go is against the forum rules is why. People are already going there it seems without consequences.

Mod Note:
Yes, like you - with your repeated comments about moderation, and your steps into politics, and not a consequence has befallen you, yet.

You speak as if moderators are waiting, 24 hours a day to fall like a hammer on anyone and everyone who steps a smidgen over the line. As if we can't take some time on a weekend and do some housework, or go on a picnic, or anything.

Let us see what happens to this discussion if you aren't in it.

 

[payn]

Jesus 2: the revenge

 

[Umbran]

Folks, I just ejected someone from the thread.
This thread most certainly is not about Jesus.
And continuing with religious jokes is... contraindicated for you at this time.

 

[MGibster]

The actual point was a couple of lines of a disclaimer in a history book that essentially says, "Look some of the stuff in this book is icky. We know it's icky. We do not in any way condone the icky parts. But, since this is a history book, we are going to include the icky bits because it's part of the historical record."

I don't think anyone has asked, and this might be a little weird, but does a history book really need a disclaimer? I ask because I don't know if I've ever actually seen one in a history book. In graduate school I wrote and lectured about prohibition and lynching, but I never felt the need to specifically tell anyone lynching was icky at the beginning. I just let the evidence supporting my thesis speak for itself.
On the flip side, when people learned my thesis was on prohibition they would often assume I was a teetotaler. So maybe someone was afraid they needed the disclaimer so readers would know they weren't just glorifying Gygax they were showing the warts as well.

Maybe we don't need disclaimers on everything.

 

[Steampunkette]

I don't think anyone has asked, and this might be a little weird, but does a history book really need a disclaimer? I ask because I don't know if I've ever actually seen one in a history book. In graduate school I wrote and lectured about prohibition and lynching, but I never felt the need to specifically tell anyone lynching was icky at the beginning. I just let the evidence supporting my thesis speak for itself.
On the flip side, when people learned my thesis was on prohibition they would often assume I was a teetotaler. So maybe someone was afraid they needed the disclaimer so readers would know they weren't just glorifying Gygax they were showing the warts as well.

Maybe we don't need disclaimers on everything.

We don't -need- disclaimers on everything...

The issue lies in that historians in fandom tend to gloss over the less shiny details. So a disclaimer of "And also he was sexist" is the closest we get to an honest accounting alongside 500+ pages of blowing smoke up Gygax's backside.

I'd prefer a history that actually includes all the ugly stuff. That keeps things in the context of "Yes. He did this. And also he did this. And then he did this" without glossing over the positives or the negatives.

But we're not -allowed- to have history like that, and haven't been since before any of us were born. Only the negative aspects for the villains and positive aspects for the heroes.

And it's neither new nor special. Hell, Anne Frank's dad released an edited version of her diary that included none of her lesbian interests in her best friend who she wrote about, extensively. Why? 'Cause he wanted to remember only the "Good" and share that "Good" with the world.

Most every piece of history we've ever read has been sanitized for consumption.

Hell. It's said that so long as your name is remembered in Ancient Egyptian faith that you exist in the afterlife. Hatshepsut was a powerful female Pharaoh who ushered in a massive artistic renaissance to ancient Egypt, but 20 years after her death there was a MASSIVE campaign to erase her name from everything and deface all of the statues in her honor so that she would be forgotten.

I kinda love the idea that 3,000 years later she strolled back into heaven going

Anyway... yeah. We wouldn't need disclaimers if we'd just tell the TRUTH about our history, rather than perpetuating comforting myths for decades and erasing the aspects, or entire people, we'd rather not acknowledge.

 

[Dire Bare]

I don't think anyone has asked, and this might be a little weird, but does a history book really need a disclaimer? I ask because I don't know if I've ever actually seen one in a history book. In graduate school I wrote and lectured about prohibition and lynching, but I never felt the need to specifically tell anyone lynching was icky at the beginning. I just let the evidence supporting my thesis speak for itself.
On the flip side, when people learned my thesis was on prohibition they would often assume I was a teetotaler. So maybe someone was afraid they needed the disclaimer so readers would know they weren't just glorifying Gygax they were showing the warts as well.

Maybe we don't need disclaimers on everything.

We don't need disclaimers on everything, but the one on this book is a wise choice.

This is a history book, but it is also a fan book for a game.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't think anyone has asked, and this might be a little weird, but does a history book really need a disclaimer? I ask because I don't know if I've ever actually seen one in a history book. In graduate school I wrote and lectured about prohibition and lynching, but I never felt the need to specifically tell anyone lynching was icky at the beginning. I just let the evidence supporting my thesis speak for itself.
On the flip side, when people learned my thesis was on prohibition they would often assume I was a teetotaler. So maybe someone was afraid they needed the disclaimer so readers would know they weren't just glorifying Gygax they were showing the warts as well.

Maybe we don't need disclaimers on everything.

Well, in this case, it's a reprinting of historical game documents by a game company. The disclaimer is "we as a game companybin 2024 would not publish a Crack about woman's love, and don't think that was cool in the 70s either". Just to be clear for people that it is not an endorsement of all historical attitudes presented in the original documents, just an honest reprint.