Elon Musk Calls for Wizards of the Coast to "Burn in Hell" Over Making of Original D&D Passages

Elon Musk, the owner of the app formerly known as Twitter, is calling on Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro to "burn in hell" for the publication of Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons. On November 21st, former gaming executive turned culture warrior Mark Hern posted several passages from Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons on Twitter, criticizing the book for providing context about some of the misogyny and cultural insensitivity found in early rulebooks. These passages were pulled from the foreword written by Jason Tondro, a senior designer for the D&D team who also worked extensively on the book. Hern stated that these passages, along with the release of the new 2024 Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide for D&D's "40th anniversary" (it is actually D&D's 50th anniversary) both "erased and slandered" Gary Gygax and other creators of Dungeons & Dragons.

In response, Musk wrote "Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons. What the [naughty word] is wrong with Hasbro and WoTC?? May they burn in hell." Musk had played Dungeons & Dragons at some point in his youth, but it's unclear when the last time he ever played the game.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons. What the [xxxx] is wrong with Hasbro and WoTC?? May they burn in hell.

- Elon Musk​

Notably, Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons contains countless correspondences and letters written by both Gygax and Dave Arneson, including annotated copies of early D&D rulesets. Most early D&D rules supplements as well as early Dragon magazines are also found in the book. It seems odd to contain one of the most extensive compliations of Gygax's work an "erasure," but it's unclear whether Hern or Musk actually read the book given the incorrect information about the anniversary.

Additionally, Gygax and Arneson are both credited in the 2024 Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. The exact credit reads: "Building on the original game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and then developed by many others over the past 50 years." Wizards of the Coast also regularly collaborates with Gygax's youngest son Luke and is a participant at Gary Con, a convention held in Gygax's honor. The opening paragraph of the 2024 Player's Handbook is written by Jeremy Crawford and specifically lauds both Gygax and Arneson for making Dungeons & Dragons and contains an anecdote about Crawford meeting Gygax.

Musk has increasingly leaned into culture war controversies in recent years, usually amplifying misinformation to suit his own political agenda.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

What?!?!?! A billionaire raised in apartheid South Africa is fine with cultural insensitivity and misogyny? NO WAY!

I'm not sure why you think this is a helpful post or adds in any way to what's being discussed. Throwing gas on a fire is not a useful contribution to a conversation in my opinion.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Foreword.

I stand corrected!

(Assuming that I wasn't auto-corrected into the spelling error, and then I've been correctly corrected instead of incorrectly corrected).

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I stand corrected!

(Assuming that I wasn't auto-corrected into the spelling error, and then I've been correctly corrected instead of incorrectly corrected).

Onward and foreword!

 

[Vaalingrade]

Judge all you want with the info you have. At the end of the day his friends and family knew him best.

More than him, apparently.

That doesn’t mean he was want a tad sexist, it just wasn’t his defining personality trait like a lot of people like to pretend it is.

No one is saying this. The focus of this discussion is the actual sexist material in the books, not the man himself.

As others have said, he was human and no human is perfect.

And no human is above criticism for the things they say and do.

Even if they invent a fun game of pretend.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't own the book. I was hoping for some quotes or paraphrasing.

I would recommend getting it. My point is how shallow the complaints are, focusing on some careful and nuanced commentary in the foreword, rather than really engaging with what the foreword is trying to contextualize and justify reprinting when it would get kicked off the DMsGuild in 2024.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I stand corrected!

(Assuming that I wasn't auto-corrected into the spelling error, and then I've been correctly corrected instead of incorrectly corrected).

I thought of this explanation when it happened to me, so I tested it, but to no avail. The fault was mine

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Assuming that I wasn't auto-corrected into the spelling error, and then I've been correctly corrected instead of incorrectly corrected

Oh man, the troubles I've had getting my tablet to let me say bleep or bleep. (Not to mention bleep.)

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I'm not sure why you think this is a helpful post or adds in any way to what's being discussed. Throwing gas on a fire is not a useful contribution to a conversation in my opinion.

@beaumontsebos All good! I'm glad you can see that this wasn't an attack on or any kind of judgement of you as a person... just my opinion on the post itself.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think the point was that people who were closest to him are the best judges of what he was actually like. Not the only judges mind you... just the best ones. To your point, that doesn't preclude anyone else offering an opinion. The post you're responding to doesn't make any judgements regarding what anyone else is allowed to say, or whether what they say is valid.

Yes, it absolutely does. It explicitly rejects the possibility that someone can judge what someone did or said based on books (written by or about them, it doesn't specify) or interviews. That's a value judgment: "Your opinion does not, and cannot, matter if it is only based on these things."

Which, where I come from, would be called a load of horse...pucky.

Judge all you want with the info you have. At the end of the day his friends and family knew him best.

They are also the ones most likely to be biased in his favor and to forgive, overlook, or minimize anything bad about him, both because they want others to think well of him, and because it reflects on them too.

And, again, even his family agrees about this! Despite trying to drown it out in a paragraph about a whole lot of things unrelated to whether he said, did, wrote, or believed sexist things, Heidi Gygax explicitly said, "Was he sexist? He was born in 1938 to a father born in the 1880's and a mother born in 1906. He was raised in a traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant family with traditional biblical family values where the male was the head of the household. In my adult aopinion, yes, this is sexist and doesn't hold up to our more enlightened standards today."

And this is her defending him. Like...if even his family, who "knew him best," also admits that he held sexist beliefs, said or wrote sexist things, and engaged in sexist behaviors, where is your position? Are you now going to argue that his daughter didn't know him well enough?

That doesn’t mean he was want a tad sexist, it just wasn’t his defining personality trait like a lot of people like to pretend it is.

I already said this. I've said it repeatedly.

Nobody talking about this is pretending that he was a crazy person exclusively defined by chauvinistic behavior. Responding to a valid criticism of the real work, behavior, and words of a person with "You can't possibly know him like his friends and family would, so you're just wrong" is at best a non sequitur, and more generally a straight-up moving of the goalposts.

I have said, again repeatedly, that we need to be able to talk about the dark sides of our heroes. That doesn't mean pretending they are their dark sides and NOTHING else. But if every single time someone brings up anything critical about someone who also did a lot of good things, and instantly people start trying to shout them down with "He was a good person! He was a good father! He was a good husband! He was good to women in the industry!" etc., etc., etc.--what that's doing is telling people that no, our heroes weren't human, they were superhuman, they were without fault, and ever discussing or admitting their faults is always and exclusively character assassination.

Gygax was a good father and husband, and was a business ally to some of the women in the early TTRPG industry. He also, very intentionally, wrote some extremely and offensively sexist things in early D&D books. When challenged about this, he openly and explicitly doubled down on this, proudly called his own behavior sexist, and specifically hoped that that work would mean no women would choose to play wargames because, in his opinion, the presence of one or more women necessarily would ruin games. This is all publically-available knowledge, it's not some hit piece, it's not inventing random bull$#!+, it's just the historical facts.

As others have said, he was human and no human is perfect.

I also said this. Repeatedly.

If we are allowed to recognize the imperfect humanity of our heroes, then we have to be able to talk about the bad AND the good. And if we have cconversations where we talk only about the good--which are by far the most common conversations about Gygax--then we need to have at least some conversations where we talk only about the bad. Anything else is refusing to recognize the humanity of our heroes, not embracing that humanity with all its imperfections.

 

[Clint_L]

Juat because he is on the spectrum and has a limited capacity for keeping his thoughts inside is not really an excuse.

Okay. So.

My child has autism (Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD). He was diagnosed at age 3. It creates a number of challenges for him in daily life. It is a diagnosis that came after extensive, rigorous testing by a team of highly credentialed medical professionals. Autism is a spectrum, as is well known, and traits that used to be associated with so-called Asperger's Syndrome, which Musk has publicly claimed, are now considered a part of that spectrum, at what would be called the mild range (my son has mild-moderate autism, and there are quite a few specific measurements that I won't get into).

There are a number of traits that are often associated with autism but that does not mean having some or all of them means that you are on the spectrum. As far as I can find, Musk is self-diagnosed, as an adult. So I am not convinced that he actually has autism; it is not a condition that you can self-diagnose, and it is more difficult for even experts to assess in adults, particularly functioning adults. It is certainly not something that an expert, let alone a non-expert, should claim to assess based on seeing someone on media.

Most people on the spectrum are gentle and kind, like my son, and are frequently the victims of bullying behaviour, not the instigators. They do not behave even remotely like Elon Musk. He may or may not be on the spectrum, but in any event, he is not very representative of what that is like for the vast majority of people with ASD. I would appreciate it, as a parent of a child with actually diagnosed autism, if we can leave the (possible) ASD angle out of the discussion and, as Parmandur suggests, just focus on the specific behaviours themselves.