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.

 

[TiQuinn]

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


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 feel that your stance is irrelevant for purposes of this forum then.

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.

Have you read any of the books by Jon Peterson?

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

Have you considered contacting Jon Peterson with these questions?

What have you done to answer your own questions and concerns?

 

[Bedrockgames]

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

This is all I am saying

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

It is meaningful because people invoke the labels history and historian to lend weight to points they are making. That is what I was reacting to. This is admittedly the worst thread to do that in. But it has happened all the time in other threads where people invoke one of these books to dismiss a point. My issue there is two-fold, these aren’t peer reviewed sources and they are limited sources (normally in a given historical topic there are a wide range of books, often advancing different arguments—-but we essentially have one narrative to draw on)

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.

I have read part of playing at the world, about half of Slaying the Dragon. I enjoyed both but Peterson writes more like a professional historian from what I read. I am not critical of either one of them. I am being critical of how we discuss these sources

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Sure, unless a person is claiming certainty(100%). If the claim is that something is 100%(certain), then they need to prove that it was 100%.

Even in a court of law 100% isn't required. In criminal it's only beyond a reasonable doubt, not all doubt, and in civil it's a preponderance of evidence(more likely than not).

All I'm saying is that it's not certain(100%) that Gygax created her with his sexism in mind. He might have. It might even be probable that he did, though I wouldn't make that claim just based on that one comment in the Greyhawk book.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I feel that your stance is irrelevant for purposes of this forum then.

I think it is very relevant to discussions about the hobby and its history

Have you read any of the books by Jon Peterson?

Like I said I have read some of Playing at the Work. I have no personal objection to it, I like it. I am unclear on his background but he seems to think like a historian to me and the things that other poster who is a historian said give me further faith in that conclusion. I am guessing his methods are very good. But that isn’t the same as being peer reviewed

Have you considered contacting Jon Peterson with these questions?

What have you done to answer your own questions and concerns?

This isn’t about Peterson. I don’t want to make it about him as he hasn’t done anything warranting scrutiny. But when I have looked into any of the books we are talking about, they appear not to be peer reviewed or come out of the academic system.

 

[AnotherGuy]

The book is a compilation of historical primary records for the origins of the game.
It is not an advertisement of the current game as I understand it.

I'm not a fan of gatekeeping the word history for only works which have been peer reviewed by historians. Thats nonsense.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not a fan of gatekeeping the word history for only works which have been peer reviewed by historians. Thats nonsense.

the issue isn’t gatekeeping it is that history is a field. It is extremely hard to write reliable history, especially if you are doing so outside of a history department. that doesn’t mean someone can’t write a great history book outside it, but there is value in being cautious about a source not vetted like a history written by an expert with the vetting of peer review.

 

[Steampunkette]

Do you have a copy of the book?

Why do you ask?

And also, @Maxperson, no one is claiming that he designed the Chaos Dragon Queen to be a dig at women's lib or feminism or women specifically and explicitly from the moment of conception.

However, we do know he was a rampaging misogynist who explicitly used her as a dig against women's lib or feminism or women specifically.

So it's really unfortunately likely that consciously or subconsciously he let his biases lead him in his writing much as the rest of us writers do. Because that's just how people work that we put our perspectives into our creations since we can't create material that utterly lacks our own perspective without doing enough ayahuasca to undergo complete ego death and free-write whatever the drugs want us to make...

And even -that- isn't a sure thing 'cause all the words chosen will still carry political ramifications. Like calling it "Thieves Cant" instead of "Rake's Tongue" or something similar.

So. On the one hand we have a rampaging misogynist, we have evidence that he used his material specifically to raise a middle finger to feminism, and we take a firm, reasonable, step to the conclusion that yeah. He knew what he was doing when he created the evil chaos woman dragon god. And if he didn't know what he was doing it's only because his bias at the time was so ingrained into his person that he did it automatically and then later went "Oh, look! I did a sexism. Better point out I did a sexism to show people how sexist I am!"

OR we can take the leap of faith based on no material evidence, whatsoever, that "Nuh huh! He didn't do it that way and you can't provide 100% foolproof evidence that he did, therefore he didn't!"

 

[TiQuinn]

I think it is very relevant to discussions about the hobby and its history

Nobody else appears to have this issue.

Like I said I have read some of Playing at the Work. I have no personal objection to it, I like it. I am unclear on his background but he seems to think like a historian to me and the things that other poster who is a historian said give me further faith in that conclusion. I am guessing his methods are very good. But that isn’t the same as being peer reviewed

I'm unclear what your goal is then. Is it to get affirmation from posters here?

This isn’t about Peterson. I don’t want to make it about him as he hasn’t done anything warranting scrutiny. But when I have looked into any of the books we are talking about, they appear not to be peer reviewed or come out of the academic system.

I don't see how setting peer review as the gold standard for a book to be discussed as a history book in your opinion doesn't make this about Peterson and his work.

Edit: I should say, not just the gold standard. You appear to be making peer review the minimum bar for a book to be discussed as a history book. Please clarify if that's not the case.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Why do you ask?

Well, I was wondering what your opinion on the book was (and I might have missed parts of the thread where you have already elaborated on this). So do you think it is a history book or propaganda as you say, although I may not see things so binary on this issue.
If you actually have the book and read it then sure you are in a better position than me to comment if it does paint things a little too rosy.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nobody else appears to have this issue.

I have seen others raise similar points

I'm unclear what your goal is then. Is it to get affirmation from posters here?

It is a side point that emerged when I was responding to someone who was using these labels to dismiss arguments. Honestly I don’t think there is a lot of value in taking it further. It is one of those tangents that tend to emerge in threads like this

I don't see how setting peer review as the gold standard for a book to be discussed as a history book in your opinion doesn't make this about Peterson and his work.

Because I don’t want to attack Peterson. This isn’t about him doing anything wrong. He is a good writer, his methods seem strong, it is about a pet peeve of mine regarding how we discuss sources in debates about gaming history. People hold up a book like Playing at the World like it is the final world, but it is really just the first word. My point is we haven’t even begun to have the kind of discourse you would have in the field of history on topics like this