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.”

​

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.

 

[Mannahnin]

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?

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.

You are inventing more things.

"You are claiming that he didn't create her until he sent the rules off for publishing"

False statement.

I never claimed that Gary invented her at the same moment he typeset the book.

The evidence we have is that her first appearance in print was with the Women's Lib crack included.

You have invented a speculative alternative explanation for the apparent sexism on display- that he was reacting to someone else (unfairly? Was that your intended implication?) criticizing him for the Queen of Chaotic Dragons being female. But you haven't sourced a prior publication or any evidence of such criticism, so we have no support for that theory. Occam's Razor would seem to be in effect here. The simplest explanation which fits the available facts is most likely to be the accurate one.

Sexism would seem to be that simple explanation, given that the written documentary evidence available indicates that...

A) Gary first published her with a statement of defiance about the implications of the male being good and the female being evil, and
B) That when challenged about OTHER contemporary evidence of sexism in his work Gary defiantly stated "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.”

 

[Maxperson]

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.

The OP is.

"The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen."

That's a direct claim that they made her with sexism in mind.

Every last person arguing against me when I say it's uncertain is also arguing certainty. There have been several here in this thread. I'm also pretty sure, but am not slogging through 85 pages(and I increase the posts per page), that some folks have said it outright, independent of arguing with me.

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.

This is true.

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...

That's a possibility for sure. There's nothing inherently sexist in the dragon rulers, though, so it's extraordinarily hard to show that the subconscious bias was manifesting as he created them.

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!"

This is NOT certain. Unconscious bias is not certain to be present at the creation. You are assuming there, not showing certainty of those claims.

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!"

I haven't seen anyone here claim that he certainly didn't. Only that it's not certain that he did.

 

[Mannahnin]

People hold up a book like Playing at the World like it is the final world, but it is really just the first word.

That last part is practically quoting Peterson in interviews. Although I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone say that PatW is any kind of "final word". Obviously it's not because he's revised and expanded it.

But nothing else has come close to it yet for detail and comprehensiveness, and it's all based on primary source documentation.

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.

I don't think that's true. PatW certainly has been at least one of the monumental works kicking off serious scholarly inquiry into the field. The other new book this year, MIT Press' Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, from what I understand is mostly a series of academic essays and comprised primarily of the kind of discourse you're talking about.

 

[Steampunkette]

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.

Ah. No.

I haven't spent $90 on a conversation piece book. I don't have guests over often enough to want to put down that kind of money to leave on a coffee table, and if I did I'd rather it be a core rulebook rather than an overview or highlights of 40 year old books so I can unsubtly encourage my guests to play Level Up/A5e with me.

From what I've read in the reviews, however, it's less a "History of the Game" and more "Here are things that were in the books and here are the people who wrote them and here are their comments on their work and here are other people's glowing recommendations of these pivotal figures!"

Which, to me, reads as propaganda/marketing rather than any attempt at an actual history book.

As wide a gulf in reality as the difference between a detailed biography of Freddie Mercury and the Biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody".

 

[TiQuinn]

Honestly I don’t think there is a lot of value in taking it further.

I agree with this.

Because I don’t want to attack Peterson.

So are your questions designed to attack or are they honest questions about whether it's been peer reviewed? Maybe if you contacted him or did your own research you'd find out how the book was written? Is that not valuable to you?

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

Do you believe that Jon Peterson would be part of that discourse? A large number of the people involved with this era of the game's history have already passed away, and he's one of the few people to have approached this subject with the level of rigor you desire to have spoken with many of them firsthand. I would argue that your pet peeve is missing the forest for the trees.

 

[Mannahnin]

From what I've read in the reviews, however, it's less a "History of the Game" and more "Here are things that were in the books and here are the people who wrote them and here are their comments on their work and here are other people's glowing recommendations of these pivotal figures!"

Which, to me, reads as propaganda/marketing rather than any attempt at an actual history book.

As wide a gulf in reality as the difference between a detailed biography of Freddie Mercury and the Biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody".

I'm only partway through, but of the four things you've listed above, so far I've really just seen the first two.

No evidence of propaganda yet.

There's definitely an aspect of marketing, in that publishing a prestige format book like this reproducing early drafts and precursor materials is implicitly arguing that these things are important. That the game is significant and worthy of this depth of memorialization and looking at its roots.

 

[Steampunkette]

The OP is.

"The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen."

That's a direct claim that they made her with sexism in mind.

Every last person arguing against me when I say it's uncertain is also arguing certainty. There have been several here in this thread. I'm also pretty sure, but am not slogging through 85 pages(and I increase the posts per page), that some folks have said it outright, independent of arguing with me.

This is true.

That's a possibility for sure. There's nothing inherently sexist in the dragon rulers, though, so it's extraordinarily hard to show that the subconscious bias was manifesting as he created them.

This is NOT certain. Unconscious bias is not certain to be present at the creation. You are assuming there, not showing certainty of those claims.

I haven't seen anyone here claim that he certainly didn't. Only that it's not certain that he did.

Subconscious bias isn't "Extraordinarily hard to show" it's outright literally impossible because even the person experiencing it is unaware of it without an active attempt to register and question their personal biases.

But the point is: It's a REASONABLE assumption. It's something the average person can look at and go "Yeah, that makes sense."

Can it be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt? No. We can't even prove -gravity- beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But do you have ANY evidence to the contrary? And reason to believe that it's an UNreasonable conclusion rather than a reasonable one?

 

[Umbran]

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%.

No, they really don't "need" to do anything.

Let us make that clear. There is no law. No dire consequences. And you, Maxperson, are not the "100% Proof Police".

So, maybe chill out, huh?

 

[Bedrockgames]

That last part is practically quoting Peterson in interviews. Although I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone say that PatW is any kind of "final word". Obviously it's not because he's revised and expanded it.

Like I said, he seems to think like a historian. I have seen people hold it up in that way in discussions.

But nothing else has come close to it yet for detail and comprehensiveness, and it's all based on primary source documentation.

Sure and that is a good first step but isn’t like we have a robust historiography on the topic by people writing history in university presses under peer review. That is my only point. It does make a difference IMO

I don't think that's true. PatW certainly has been at least one of the monumental works kicking off serious scholarly inquiry into the field. The other new book this year, MIT Press' Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, from what I understand is mostly a series of academic essays and comprised primarily of the kind of discourse you're talking about.

Here I certainly spoke too quickly. Also I didn’t realize the second edition was published by MIT press. And looking it up it looks like MIT press generally does two rounds of peer review, so that would definitely change my view on Playing at the World

 

[Maxperson]

Subconscious bias isn't "Extraordinarily hard to show" it's outright literally impossible because even the person experiencing it is unaware of it without an active attempt to register and question their personal biases.

But the point is: It's a REASONABLE assumption. It's something the average person can look at and go "Yeah, that makes sense."

Okay. It's a reasonable assumption, but so is assuming that it wasn't there.

Can it be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt? No. We can't even prove -gravity- beyond a shadow of a doubt.

There's less doubt about gravity than Gygax intentionally or subconsciously creating Tiamat due to sexism.

But do you have ANY evidence to the contrary? And reason to believe that it's an UNreasonable conclusion rather than a reasonable one?

Yes. All of the evidence is to the contrary. Since none of your evidence shows the creation to be certainly sexism, it's all uncertain.

That doesn't mean that your assumption is an unreasonable assumption, but it does mean that it's not certain.

And since your strongest evidence of sexism at creation is unconscious bias, it also means that it's not an unreasonable assumption to assume that he came to the sexist comment later on and that it wasn't present at creation.

And just to be clear, I'm not assuming either way. I don't assume that he created them with sexism in mind, and I don't assume that he didn't. My position is that it is uncertain(and it is uncertain), so I'm not going to assume either way.