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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don’t do online gaming so I can’t weigh in on that. But in other competitive circumstance, like combat sports, I have heard people say things as insults meant to get under a persons skin. They didn’t always reflect what the person really thought as the aim wasn’t to express a world view but provoke a reaction and affect performance. Again some insults are going to be more reflective of what a person believes (most people wouldn’t have an easy time deploying the N word to unseat an opponent in my opinion)

I'm British so I'm well aware of the practice of "sledging", and yeah, that's not what's going on. With sledging, you slyly attack an opponent with words designed to mess with them. Sometimes homophobic or plausibly deniable but obviously homophobic stuff is used, very often the fidelity of people's spouses/SOs (in fact this is probably the majority of sledging), parentage of their children, the size of their bank account or um genitals and so on is question, but racism has been out-of-bounds for decades, as you note (indeed it would be grounds for banning someone for a sport, were it confirmed).

What I'm describing isn't sledging though, it's the online equivalent of the batsman angrily throwing down his cricket bat, or John McEnroe losing his mind because he got (entirely correctly) ruled against by the ref. It's an outburst of rage, typically from someone who is losing, and it's not always directed at the opponents - in fact it's more often directed at the team that person is on, because many online games don't allow you to communicate with the opponents at all (indeed this is true of pretty much all professional e-sports).

 

[Steampunkette]

I think your attributions are not how I'd read that at all. All the way down to the D*mn... part, Gygax is obviously making a belligerent joke. I would not say by any means that Gygax was not sexist at all by any means. He was a man of his times, and perhaps a midwestern man of his times. But this is a hyperbolic statement meant to offend all his critics.

If JK Rowling, right now, went on an anti-trans tirade screaming about how trans people should be killed or forcibly detransitioned, or that the suicide numbers should jump upwards...

People would argue the exact same thing you're arguing, now. "She was just trying to provoke a reaction"

Rowling is being called out by critics in her time and saying tons of transphobic stuff on the regular, but you can be sure that 20 years after her death there will be people hemming and hawwing and saying "She was just really concerned about women's rights and didn't -hate- trans people. She even had trans friends who agreed with her, and her views were contemporary for the time. We shouldn't vilify her we should celebrate the good things she did! Don't we all love Harry Potter?"

... Also people do that now as it is, so, y'know...

The dude said sexist stuff. He got called out by people born earlier than he was, later than he was, and in the same time he was. He doubled down. He said sexist stuff to his employees and his friends. He made snide jokes about women's lib. He cheated on his wife repeatedly, sought the services of sex workers and then used them as insults, and he made women who sat at his tables at conventions incredibly uncomfortable.

And he continued to espouse sexist ideas until at least 2005.

Dude was a sexist. It's not that deep.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Why engage on those debates? they are not really pertinent to the original topic, create more smoke than light and not really necessary since Gary was not shy about stating his opinions.
What Gary really believed has no current bearing on anything.

Did you? I must have missed that then.

Just to reiterate: I said the foreword looks like pretty standard academic analysis of media. I think that type of analysis has a lot of flawed assumptions but there isn’t anything I wouldn’t expect to see. I don’t think it is the best approach to history but it is also just a foreword. Some parts particularly stand out to me as things I disagree about (the cultural appropriation claim and the conscious misogyny claim). I don’t have a problem with the foreword being written but I think people should be allowed to critique it and it should be expected people will not all agree on its conclusions because many of these are still contested in the hobby and by people who knew him.

On musk, I think like a lot of what Gary Wrote, it sounds hyperbolic but I dislike the phrasing. I just think consigning people to hell over this sort of disagreement, even if he isn’t speaking literally, undermines any point he is trying to make (but then I tend to take hell pretty seriously, I believe he is an atheist so it may be a less charged phrasing if he doesn’t believe in hell). I don’t know that musk weighing in helps because he is, whatever one thinks of him, a divisive figure.

In general I think people should be more open to having a civil discussion about the matter on both sides of the debate. The side that thinks Gary was sexiest isn’t going anywhere, the side that thinks he isn’t isn’t going anywhere either. We have to learn to live together in the same hobby space because these kinds of division cause us to dehumanize one another and weaken the strength of the hobby overall

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm British so I'm well aware of the practice of "sledging", and yeah, that's not what's going on. With sledging, you slyly attack an opponent with words designed to mess with them. Sometimes homophobic or plausibly deniable but obviously homophobic stuff is used, very often the fidelity of people's spouses/SOs (in fact this is probably the majority of sledging), parentage of their children, the size of their bank account or um genitals and so on is question, but racism has been out-of-bounds for decades, as you note (indeed it would be grounds for banning someone for a sport, were it confirmed).

What I'm describing isn't sledging though, it's the online equivalent of the batsman angrily throwing down his cricket bat, or John McEnroe losing his mind because he got (entirely correctly) ruled against by the ref. It's an outburst of rage, typically from someone who is losing, and it's not always directed at the opponents - in fact it's more often directed at the team that person is on, because many online games don't allow you to communicate with the opponents at all (indeed this is true of pretty much all professional e-sports).

Fair enough but even then, I am going to be skeptical when McEnroe ragequits and shouts, that his words reflect genuine belief (he is likely just saying whatever outrageous and provocative thing comes to mind).

 

[Emerikol]

If JK Rowling, right now, went on an anti-trans tirade screaming about how trans people should be killed or forcibly detransitioned, or that the suicide numbers should jump upwards...

People would argue the exact same thing you're arguing, now. "She was just trying to provoke a reaction"

Rowling is being called out by critics in her time and saying tons of transphobic stuff on the regular, but you can be sure that 20 years after her death there will be people hemming and hawwing and saying "She was just really concerned about women's rights and didn't -hate- trans people. She even had trans friends who agreed with her, and her views were contemporary for the time. We shouldn't vilify her we should celebrate the good things she did! Don't we all love Harry Potter?"

... Also people do that now as it is, so, y'know...

The dude said sexist stuff. He got called out by people born earlier than he was, later than he was, and in the same time he was. He doubled down. He said sexist stuff to his employees and his friends. He made snide jokes about women's lib. He cheated on his wife repeatedly, sought the services of sex workers and then used them as insults, and he made women who sat at his tables at conventions incredibly uncomfortable.

And he continued to espouse sexist ideas until at least 2005.

Dude was a sexist. It's not that deep.

I have not read everything she has written on the subject or even her Harry Potter novels but from what I've seen I think she is fighting the good fight. This isn't a political thread though so if you want to discuss in depth send me a personal message. I don't want to make the guardians mad.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think your attributions are not how I'd read that at all. All the way down to the D*mn... part, Gygax is obviously making a belligerent joke. I would not say by any means that Gygax was not sexist at all by any means. He was a man of his times, and perhaps a midwestern man of his times. But this is a hyperbolic statement meant to offend all his critics.

Like I said, some people are determined to ignore even the obvious and direct meaning of Gygax's own words, even when he carefully explained that he was deeply sexist. My wife is from the Midwest, and I know her family, and they're not, um, liberals by and large, but I'm sorry I don't think the men would have gladly said stuff like "I don't care if women get paid as much as men", even in 1975. Let alone wrote in to a magazine about it. Let alone suggested directly that their game would be better off without women, as he did.

People would argue the exact same thing you're arguing, now. "She was just trying to provoke a reaction"

This is exactly right.

Rowling has called for policies and attitudes that directly harm trans people. She's used a ton of vile and horrific abusive terminology towards trans people in general. She'd like'd posts where specific trans people are horrifically abused. She even supported fringe political extremists last election because they had policies which were really nastily anti-trans*.

But there are still people ignoring her own words, her own stated beliefs, the exact things she's called for, and saying "Well she's just trying to provoke a reaction!", and it's just laughable.

* = They got just 2622 votes out of 28,924,725 cast, thankfully. There are apparently limits to her influence.

 

[mamba]

I think people should be allowed to critique it and it should be expected people will not all agree on its conclusions because many of these are still contested in the hobby and by people who knew him

what evidence does it take to settle something conclusively? There are still people out there debating that the Earth is flat, meanwhile most people have moved on from considering that an open question…

We have to learn to live together in the same hobby space because these kinds of division cause us to dehumanize one another and weaken the strength of the hobby overall

or maybe the side that thinks there is nothing wrong with what Gary wrote is weakening the hobby by intentionally excluding ever larger parts of the population

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fair enough but even then, I am going to be skeptical when McEnroe ragequits and shouts, that his words reflect genuine belief (he is likely just saying whatever outrageous and provocative thing comes to mind).

I don't think McEnroe has ever used a slur in one of his (many) ragequits, has he?

Swearing, sure, but even that isn't usually directed at other people, rather at the situation.

He absolutely has not said "whatever outrageous and provocative thing comes to mind", that's not even arguable.

You're proving my point here. There's a vast different between a normal ragequit and someone who decides to bust out a bunch of wild racial slurs and homophobic insults because they're losing. Both come from a place of rage, but one is clearly a more messed-up and deep-seated behaviour.

 

[mamba]

I have not read everything she has written on the subject or even her Harry Potter novels but from what I've seen I think she is fighting the good fight.

maybe you should read some more then, there is no good fight in her perspective, intolerant bigot is all it is

 

[Umbran]

I don’t do online gaming so I can’t weigh in on that. But in other competitive circumstance, like combat sports, I have heard people say things as insults meant to get under a persons skin. They didn’t always reflect what the person really thought as the aim wasn’t to express a world view but provoke a reaction and affect performance.

1) So, saying something to "get under a person's skin", meaning, to evoke an emotional response, is what we call trolling. Let us not position this as something easily excusable.

2) There's a guy on the internet who has come up with an incredibly evocative response to such things, but it is also incredibly vulgar*. It amounts to - if you are an insincere member of a group, you are still a member of that group.

F'rex: Belittling women, but "only for trolling," is still being willing to belittle women. Women are still belittled, so it is still sexist.


* I refer to Popehat's Law of Goats.