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.

 

[Umbran]

I feel like it's a very foreign thing to me and those around me--I assume UK generally, but I can't speak for anybody else. The concept of venerating 'founders' or 'fathers' is very alien; the very words feel alien. I wonder if it's more an American phenomenon, but I kinda cringe whenever I see terms like that.

Yes, well, Morrus, the first person to rule over "England" as a whole was back in, what 927 AD? The history of your nation is so freaking long that it is hard to relate to the individuals involved.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Rejection isn't about changing people. It isn't about punishing the wrongdoing. It is about protecting oneself.

If a member of the family has become toxic, there is no onus on anyone else in the family to put up with it, or try to fix it. If they want to try to help people to learn better, that's great. But simply not allowing that into their homes and lives is a perfectly reasonable choice.

I think every one has a different family dynamic. I wasn't raised to cut off family members. Obviously there are lines where someone might be dangerous or harmful to have around. In exceptional cases like that I would behave differently and with appropriate levels of caution. But I can't reject family and I do think it is important to love members of your family and help them. Also we are talking about the realm of opinion. I'm not going to keep a family member out of the house because I don't like their opinions

 

[Clint_L]

...There were game stats for religious figures (not Jesus, notably).

No good loot.

 

[briggart]

Do I look like a cultural historian? I have no idea!

All I know is that Americans like to venerate 'fathers' and 'founders' and that's not language I ever hear from anybody but Americans. Who do you imagine we might venerate? Maybe we learned the hard way that those people were never anything special. That Henry VIII, right? What a cool dude! William the Conqueror?

I guess we just don't do that. I can't picture anybody who might hold a venerational place in British culture. The idea of it just seems weird.

I think that the idea that inventing something is metaphorically equivalent to giving birth is pretty common, hence "father/mother of". Or are terms like "brainchild" also more used in the US than in the UK?

Figures of speech like "father of the nation" go back to at least Roman times. Socrates was considered the founder of philosophy already in ancient times, etc.

So I'd guess this kind of language to be common at least in cultures whose traditions somewhat trace back to the ancient Europe/Mediterranean.

 

[Maxperson]

I've no idea. Maybe it's an Italian thing? You guys do also refer to places as like the "World Capital of Cheese Strings" and stuff, which we really do not do, and find really cringey. I think you just like pedestals and we really don't like them.

Yeah. As an American I've felt the same way for most of my life. We have the world champion Dodgers, when only North America participates in MLB. The world champion Lakers, when only the U.S. has the NBA. It has always seemed really pretentious to me that we claim world champion status on things when the rest of the world isn't even participating.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's very much an American thing. For much of our history, to criticize the Founding Fathers was to criticize America itself. I took a graduate course on the Civil Rights Movement, and the professor asked us what we thought of Martin Luther King, Junior's decision to allow children to march in one of their protests even knowing violence was likely to follow. At first nobody was willing to even offer the mildest of criticisms and then a few students moved on to halfhearted criticisms. "Oh, it was really important." To many Americans, MLK was the Civil Rights Movement and you couldn't criticize one without criticizing the other.

So it is with Gygax. To some people, criticism of Gygax or even older products is a criticism of D&D itself.

I don't think it's just a Unitedstatesian thing though. Simón Bolívar has a similar place in the culture of the northern parts of South America (the states that would have been part of his failed ideal "Gran Colombia"), hence Bolivia today. It may not be as strong, but you also see relatively reverential/heroic portrayals of people like Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (for Mexico) or Toussant Louverture--who, yes, is called one of the "fathers of Haiti" (alongside Jean-Jacques Dessalines).

You also see comparable recognition for heroes of other national revolutions. People who fight for the independence and freedom tend to get lionized everywhere. I could cite some other examples but...well. Political revolutions, and the people who conduct them, tend to be rather hot-button topics, y'know?

More to the point, Britain (note, not "the UK") does have figures comparable to the Founding Fathers. They're just figures from many centuries earlier, because Britain has been around about five or six times longer than the US has. Some of them are historical (albeit heavily romanticized), such as Boudicca and Elizabeth I. Some of them are mythical but likely based on one or more real people, like King Arthur. And others are almost certainly pure inventions, but still important, like Robin Hood. Every country has its heroes. European countries just have an extra 1500+ years for their heroes to have faded into history, legend, or even outright myth.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah. As an American I've felt the same way for most of my life. We have the world champion Dodgers, when only North America participates in MLB. The world champion Lakers, when only the U.S. has the NBA. It has always seemed really pretentious to me that we claim world champion status on things when the rest of the world isn't even participating.

Some of it certainly comes from an inflated sense of self-importance. That said, the US really is the world leader in a number of different categories, and some of them, like the "Cheese String Capital of the World" example, are at least rooted in an objective numerical assessment in most cases. (Other examples being the number of Nobel prizes received, the number of Summer Olympic medals both overall and each individually gold/silver/bronze, number of millionaires, the discipline and equipment of our armed forces, etc.--note that I am not necessarily saying these are all equally things to be proud of, just that the US is first for a lot of things in pure objective numbers.)

I think things may have changed in the past 20 years, but I do know that the city where I grew up--Portland, OR--was the microbrewery capital of the world, having more microbreweries both per capita and per square mile than any other city on Earth at the time. My dad was an avid brewer for more than a decade before I was born, so this sort of information was something known in the house.

 

[Jahydin]

Gary was a complicated man who did good things and bad things. He was most definitely sexist and racist, but not a misogynist, white supremacist, or monster. Then again, nobody (of note) has actually accused Gygax of monstrosity. To deny his failings is to deny recorded facts. It's silly. To complain when others point out Gygax's sexism and racism is to complain about truth and to insist our heroes must be mythologized rather than evaluated. No thanks.

The foreword stating he was a misogynist is what I'm pushing back on, which it looks like we both agree on.

If it stated your entire first sentence I wouldn't even have taken issue.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The foreword stating he was a misogynist is what I'm pushing back on, which it looks like we both agree on.

If it stated your entire first sentence I wouldn't even have taken issue.

I certainly don't think it is weird, inappropriate, or extreme to interpret Gygax's EUROPA submission as demonstrating at least some degree of misogyny. Saying, effectively, "stay the hell away from my gaming table, women ruin wargames and wargamers" isn't exactly a neutral-gyny position, no?

 

[Hussar]

The foreword stating he was a misogynist is what I'm pushing back on, which it looks like we both agree on.

If it stated your entire first sentence I wouldn't even have taken issue.

But that’s not what it says.

It says that the text that was written was sexist - and a few other things as well.

Is it really that hard to actually address what the text says when it’s been repeatedly presented to you?