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.

 

[Maxperson]

The contemporaneous textual evidence is that he created The Queen of the Chaotic Dragons and first described her with the dig about Women's Lib as part of her description. That a sexist dig was part of her from her inception.

Your "perhaps" needs supporting before we can give it any credit as a plausible alternative explanation. Right now there is no evidence that he was reacting to criticism about her.

And there is also no evidence showing that it is certain that he created the dragon rulers with sexism in mind. The evidence is that it is certain that he printed the rules with the dig in them, but he created the two dragon rulers prior to the printing.

Where is your 100% absolute proof that he created them with the sexism in mind? You need 100% absolute proof for it to be certain.

Going back to the hunting rifle analogy, just because he used the hunting rifle(chaotic female dragon ruler) to shoot his neighbor(make a dig about Women's Lib), doesn't mean that he bought the hunting rifle(created the chaotic female dragon rule) for the purpose of shooting his neighbor(making that dig at Women's Lib).

You are making a connection that may or may not be there and then claiming that it is 100% absolutely true that the connection exists and he created the chaotic female dragon ruler with sexism in mind.

 

[Mannahnin]

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

Playing at the World is a history book by any definition. There is no more exhaustively researched and detailed history of the development of simulation games and the various elements and precursors which predated and influenced the creation of D&D in existence. No book has come close to equaling it since it was published in 2012. That being said, more sources and data have come to light since, so Jon has done the second edition and is going to top his own work.

 

[Bedrockgames]

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

I haven't read this one. But I have read part of Playing at the World (which I think is a good book by the way). Having primary sources is valuable I agree. The difference is when it comes out of a university press, follows the peer review process, the curating is going to be at a level I can put greater trust in (and I am not saying there is anything wrong with these books in that respect, just I make a distinction when I use labels like History and Historian in that respect)

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

I have said several times, there isn't anything I am taking issue with.

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

Just looking at the preface that was highlighted by @Steampunkette, there seem to be a lot of issues hotly debated within the hobby there. I am not saying those issues shouldn't be raised in a history book, but I think coverage of such issues is going to be benefit when the writers aren't as invested in the discussions as most gamers tend to be and getting peer reviewed vetting as well

 

[Bedrockgames]

Playing at the World is a history book by any definition. There is no more exhaustively researched and detailed history of the development of simulation games and the various elements and precursors which predated and influenced the creation of D&D in existence. No book has come close to equaling it since it was published in 2012. That being said, more sources and data have come to light since, so Jon has done the second edition and is going to top his own work.

but my understanding is it still was written outside the history department and peer review process i was describing. If I am wrong on that, I will 100% call it a history book. But if I am not, I would call it something else, like a popular history book or a work of journalism covering history. There are different schools of thought on this. You don't have to agree with me. But this is also how I was trained to think about history sources. It isn't an attack on the book. It is a quibble over how we talk about history sources in gaming discussions

 

[Mannahnin]

And there is also no evidence showing that it is certain that he created the dragon rulers with sexism in mind. The evidence is that it is certain that he printed the rules with the dig in them, but he created the two dragon rulers prior to the printing.

He created the Queen of the Chaotic Dragons and first published her with a dig at Women's Lib in print.

You are shifting the burden of proof.

You have invented a speculative alternative explanation (that with that dig he was reacting to prior criticism) without any substantiation.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

Actually, the same intro has a disclaimer that it isn't really meant to ne a playable version of the game, and recommend the DMsGuild PDFs for that explicitly...because they aren't including any vital errata.

This is for historical documentation purposes, primarily

 

[Mannahnin]

but my understanding is it still was written outside the history department and peer review process i was describing. If I am wrong on that, I will 100% call it a history book. But if I am not, I would call it something else, like a popular history book or a work of journalism covering history. There are different schools of thought on this. You don't have to agree with me. But this is also how I was trained to think about history sources. It isn't an attack on the book. It is a quibble over how we talk about history sources in gaming discussions

I'm sure Jon would be the first person to say it's a work of popular history.

But that's almost never a meaningful distinction for the purposes of these threads.

When we've reviewed and discussed each of the individual books folks have gone more into the weeds of the quality of the research and writing. Ben Riggs, for example, got a lot more criticism of his less objective tone and apparent lesser standards of documentary evidence. Where Peterson got criticism for how dry the first edition of PatW is, but has always been lauded for scrupulously documenting his sources, making clear where evidence is ambiguous, and minimizing his editorializing.

 

[AnotherGuy]

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.

Do you have a copy of the book?

 

[Umbran]

Where is your 100% absolute proof that he created them with the sexism in mind? You need 100% absolute proof for it to be certain.

You seem to be of the mistaken conception that this is a court of law, or a mathematics proof, or something.

The burden of proof here is merely "what is convincing to the individual". That's as far as it goes. 100% certainty need not apply.

 

[Maxperson]

He created the Queen of the Chaotic Dragons and first published her with a dig at Women's Lib in print.

You are shifting the burden of proof.

No I am not. You are claiming that he didn't create her until he sent the rules off for publishing and that he did so with sexism in mind. That's absurd. You don't create in the moment you are sending the rules off. You create in advance of the printing.

Since she was created in advance of the Greyhawk supplement being sent off to printing, it's not possible from ANYTHING yet shown in this thread to know at what point in advance he created her or at what point in advance he wrote in that comment.

Since you are claiming certainty and I'm only arguing against that claim of certainty, you need to prove your claim he made both of those decisions in the same moment. Do you have any hard proof that she was created at the same moment as he wrote that Women's Lib crack?

You have invented a speculative alternative explanation (that with that dig he was reacting to prior criticism) without any substantiation.

I'm merely showing that despite your claim of certainty, it is not actually certain. There are several other ways he could have come up with her that don't involve sexism. It's on you to prove your claim of certainty.