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.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Why can't it be both a history -and- a facsimile of history to promote a game?

Because it's either history or it's propaganda. You can't have something be entirely accurate to reality -and- be a facsimile (or fake/manufactured story) designed to promote a more positive perspective of the past.

I think Pemerton's point is any book put out by a company about itself or about one of its products, isn't going to be a real history book. It is going to be more like marketing or propaganda in that they are going to lay out a narrative of the game they want people to believe. There will be things that they can be critical of (like designers of the past) but they aren't going to be critical of other things (like WOTC business practices: unless it is something they feel they have to address in some way like the OGL). I real history book isn't going to be about promoting D&D, promoting a particular point of view within the fandom, it is going to be written outside of that. A real history book would probably not make any of the 'teams' in these discussions happy because it frankly wouldn't care about those conversations, except as a matter of trying to study and analyze them.

 

[TiQuinn]

I think Pemerton's point is any book put out by a company about itself or about one of its products, isn't going to be a real history book. It is going to be more like marketing or propaganda in that they are going to lay out a narrative of the game they want people to believe. There will be things that they can be critical of (like designers of the past) but they aren't going to be critical of other things (like WOTC business practices: unless it is something they feel they have to address in some way like the OGL). I real history book isn't going to be about promoting D&D, promoting a particular point of view within the fandom, it is going to be written outside of that. A real history book would probably not make any of the 'teams' in these discussions happy because it frankly wouldn't care about those conversations, except as a matter of trying to study and analyze them.

I think people are getting a little wrapped around the axle of the term "history book". This is a book put out by WotC that contains history, but is not an independent book on the history of the game. It's very much a corporate product, not an academic product. That doesn't meant what history that it discusses isn't accurate, but it may not be complete, in as much as any book about the history of a subject can be complete - there's always another layer of the onion to peel back, and new material or information to process.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I am very firmly of the view that this books is not a history. It is a curated set of facsimiles with the function of promoting the game.

This is how I view the book as well. One reason I am being a stickler for raising the bar on this, is I think things like the peer review process and a trained historian operating within the academic system is very important for creating a more objective final product. I honestly do wish I hadn't raised the issue in this particular thread, because it is so contentious like I said before. But I have felt this way for at least two years in these conversations when someone brings up a book about D&D and calls it a history source. I am not saying any of the books are bad. Nor am I saying they contain incorrect information. But it seems like all for the books we have so far are written by people who are actively participating in the hobby and aren't publishing histories of D&D inside that history department system. And that means their views within the hobby are probably going to have more influence on their analysis and conclusions than other people realize. I am not saying that to attack points being made on this specific issue, but it would be like if I wrote a history of RPGs or D&D. Clearly my bias in favor of Sandbox style play and living worlds would be a major issue. One of the things I learned studying history was how hard it can be to control our own biases. I doubt Pemerton is going to be comfortable with a narrative of the hobby written by me, that covers things like the emergence and influence of the Forge (and quite rightly, because the coverage of that shouldn't be skewed by personal taste and personal experience in the hobby). Peer review is something that helps constrain that. The academic system helps constrain that by its expectations. I would almost rather see histories of D&D written by people who have zero interest in the game itself (or at least, not dog in any of our arguments). But if you are going to have people involved in the hobby doing histories, it would be nice if some were written using the peer review process. Again, nothing wrong with people writing a history outside of that. But I made the distinction because there is a massive difference between research on a topic that comes out of the university versus research that comes from within the fandom and is written outside that system

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think people are getting a little wrapped around the axle of the term "history book". This is a book put out by WotC that contains history, but is not an independent book on the history of the game. It's very much a corporate product. That doesn't meant what history that it discusses isn't accurate, but it may not be complete, in as much as any book about the history of a subject can be complete - there's always another layer of the onion to peel back, and new material or information to process.

I get that. The only reason I started the whole 'history' conversation, was because I saw people use the term 'historian' in reference to some of the writers and the term 'history' as if this were a typical secondary history source. I have seen this in previous conversations as well and it makes me feel like stepping in and asking why we are using the term in this way when it is a touch misleading

 

[TiQuinn]

I get that. The only reason I started the whole 'history' conversation, was because I saw people use the term 'historian' in reference to some of the writers and the term 'history' as if this were a typical secondary history source. I have seen this in previous conversations as well and it makes me feel like stepping in and asking why we are using the term in this way when it is a touch misleading

Yes, you've made that abundantly clear.

Did you ever address this person's post?

For what's it's worth, I was trained as a historian and teach history. I've read Peterson's earlier book "Game Wizards" about the conflist between Arneson and Gygax. He is a very good historian who is careful to document and report his sources. It's an excellent early history of D&D.

Is anyone going to satisfy your need for exhaustive qualifications of Jon Peterson in this thread? Have you actually done any checking into his work, credentials, or reviews independently of this thread?

I'm sorry if this is blunt, but this has been an axe you've been grinding for several pages, and it appears that rather than being interested in the answer to your question, you want people to simply nod in affirmation, when in fact, Peterson is recognized as an authority on the game's history. Yes, this particular book is a coffee table corporate product book. However, he has written multiple books that do go into exhaustive depth on role playing games and Dungeons and Dragons in particular, enough that MIT Press listed "Playing at the World" as an academic resource.

 

[Clint_L]

I get that. The only reason I started the whole 'history' conversation, was because I saw people use the term 'historian' in reference to some of the writers and the term 'history' as if this were a typical secondary history source. I have seen this in previous conversations as well and it makes me feel like stepping in and asking why we are using the term in this way when it is a touch misleading

It’s in a bit of a funny category. It’s not a history in the conventional sense (e.g. Peterson’s own Game Wizards), it’s basically a collection of historical primary documents. But it’s also a republication of a (more or less) playable game. And a mass market tribute to the founders of this game and hobby.

If it was just a small publication for historians you might not get the disclaimer aspect of the introduction, as such things are already understood. But in some ways this is more like a monument than a book.

 

[Mannahnin]

This is how I view the book as well. One reason I am being a stickler for raising the bar on this, is I think things like the peer review process and a trained historian operating within the academic system is very important for creating a more objective final product. I honestly do wish I hadn't raised the issue in this particular thread, because it is so contentious like I said before. But I have felt this way for at least two years in these conversations when someone brings up a book about D&D and calls it a history source.

Have you actually read the books, though? This one is mostly a collection of direct reproductions of primary source materials. What better fits the description of "history source" than such a collection?

I am not saying any of the books are bad. Nor am I saying they contain incorrect information. But it seems like all for the books we have so far are written by people who are actively participating in the hobby and aren't publishing histories of D&D inside that history department system. And that means their views within the hobby are probably going to have more influence on their analysis and conclusions than other people realize.

Which specific analyses and conclusions do you take issue with? From whom?

There's not a lot of that kind of thing in this particular book.

 

[Umbran]

I am very firmly of the view that this books is not a history.

Insofar as it contains some study of the past, it is a history.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think Pemerton's point is any book put out by a company about itself or about one of its products, isn't going to be a real history book. It is going to be more like marketing or propaganda in that they are going to lay out a narrative of the game they want people to believe. There will be things that they can be critical of (like designers of the past) but they aren't going to be critical of other things (like WOTC business practices: unless it is something they feel they have to address in some way like the OGL). I real history book isn't going to be about promoting D&D, promoting a particular point of view within the fandom, it is going to be written outside of that. A real history book would probably not make any of the 'teams' in these discussions happy because it frankly wouldn't care about those conversations, except as a matter of trying to study and analyze them.

This whole comment seems to be arguing/warning against a book that doesn't exist.

Peterson in particular* wasn't going to get involved with a book that was selling a narrative. To get him involved they had to let him put a bunch of cool primary source materials into print which are relatively rare and inaccessible to the general D&D playing public.

*(no slight intended to Tondro; I just don't know his prior work and haven't watched multiple interviews with him so can't venture an opinion)

 

[Bedrockgames]

Did you ever address this person's post?

I thanked them for weighing in and providing information. That doesn't mean I agree with everything they said on the topic

Is anyone going to satisfy your need for exhaustive qualifications of Jon Peterson in this thread? Have you actually done any checking into his work, credentials, or reviews independently of this thread?

Like I said before, there is nothing wrong with Peterson writing that book. He doesn't need to prove anything to me. And the book may even be useful for professional historians writing inside the academic system. My concern is more about our language around these sources. You wouldn't call someone a scientist because they wrote a book on gravity if they also didn't have the credentials. You might consider their works to be more like popular science. I feel the same way about history and history books.

I'm sorry if this is blunt, but this has been an axe you've been grinding for several pages, and it appears that rather than being interested in the answer to your question, you want people to simply nod in affirmation, when in fact, Peterson is recognized as an authority on the game's history. Yes, this particular book is a coffee table corporate product book. However, he has written multiple books that do go into exhaustive depth on role playing games and Dungeons and Dragons in particular, enough that MIT Press listed "Playing at the World" as an academic resource.

Sometimes popular history books get listed as sources. Especially when there aren't sufficient academic sources. And his methods and research might be very good. When I was as student for example doing my research and methods paper, there was only so much written about the topic within the field of history itself. So I sometimes had to go to other academic fields for sources and also had to go to popular books to get information. Also there were books by journalists who weren't operating within academia that were still considered reliable but you had to take into a account they were written without peer review, often without the same kind of footnoting you have in history books, etc.

Is playing at the World peer reviewed? If it is, I say, fair enough that seems like a valid academic historical resource to me. If it is isn't it might still be a reliable source, but I would not file it under the same category as a book by a historian from a university press. But peer review, being written from within a history department operating under all the expectations that entrails, that is what I am talking about. Doesn't mean it can't be used as a source of information (clearly it contains primary source material that can be valuable). I just think books written about the hobby by people from within the hobby that don't have all the features I have mentioned are the same as books coming out of a history department. I will say Playing at the World seems more like an actual history book than the one we are discussing here though