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.

 

[Azzy]

This hasn’t been my impression

Then perhaps you should give it a charitable interpretation.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Then perhaps you should give it a charitable interpretation.

Lol touche'

 

[Justice and Rule]

I am not going to do that. If you think the thread hasn't had those kinds of positions, fair enough.

I feel like if you are going to make vague generalizations that you say you have proof for, you should be able to provide the proof, especially when it should be pretty simple. It feels really disingenuous to try and handwave it away.

Also, please don't call me bud.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I am not asserting that any sources were altered. But what is the basis on which the sources were selected? (I mean, we know that Gods, Demigods and Heroes is not included.)

A history is not just a collection of materials. It's an interpretation and explanation of the past, undertaken by reference to materials created by those who are being interpreted and explained.

This book is not that. It serves a different purpose - as someone upthread posted, it is a memorialisation of a game, and of some of the texts produced for and associated with that game.

Well, other than Gods, Demigods and Heroes, which as Nikosandros points out contained copyrighted works from other authors in the original text... they seem to have hit select all and used all of the sources.

Which makes it interesting to me that you want to posit a difference between their work and a true history book as one "between creation of knowledge and conjecture." Yet, you have not offered any basis for them conjecturing... anything. You just want to propose that they MIGHT have made conjectures, instead of recorded actual knowledge. Which, to men, strikes as trying to discredit their work sight-unseen, simply because of the publisher not being an academic university press.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I feel like if you are going to make vague generalizations that you say you have proof for, you should be able to provide the proof, especially when it should be pretty simple. It feels really disingenuous to try and handwave it away.

I don’t think it’s vague and I think it’s apparent over the course of this thread. But we could be reading things in different lights

 

[Justice and Rule]

I don’t think it’s vague and I think it’s apparent over the course of this thread.

It's literally vague. Saying you saw two posters in a thread of 1,800 responses is vague, like me saying "There are specifically two cars here that are stolen" in an airport parking lot and me refusing to say which ones.

But we could be reading things in different lights

Which is why it'd be helpful to post what you're talking about instead of merely hinting at the prospect of it existing.

 

[Maxperson]

View attachment 373759

 

[Steampunkette]

It's 100% fact that you and I have been posting here in this thread.

I'm not. My argument literally doesn't do that even a little bit. His blatant sexist statements have damned him in this regard, and whether or not he had sexism in mind when he created the two rulers doesn't make a difference.

Let's assume for a moment that he did have sexism in mind when he created them. That connection died when he did as there is nothing at all inherently sexist with Tiamat being queen of evil dragons and Bahamut the king of good dragons.

YOU ARE LITERALLY ARGUING THAT IT ISN'T SEXIST EVEN IF HE CONCEIVED IT, SPECIFICALLY, AS A SEXIST NOTION.

If his intention was sexist, if his description of his action was sexist, if he went out and said "Look how sexist this is!" then it is, -inherently- sexist.

You could certainly argue that having a female deity be evil while a male deity is good doesn't -automatically- have to be sexist. But that's not the context of the situation we're in. And it does no one -any- good to bring it up in this thread because it's irrelevant theorycrafting about "Well maybe if everything was different it would be different."

Everything isn't different. So it's the same as it was.

Their creation is, and was, and will be, sexism. Because there's no way to go back in time and change it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Again people are complicated, our reactions to people are complicated. I am just saying I can see people reading what he said in different ways and I think it is important for us to be able to let people have different reactions. And like I said before, I found a lot of what he said sexist.

Why is it so hard for you to agree with Gygax on who Gygax was?

Humor is very subjective, but I find humor done in poor taste often makes people laugh because it breaks a social expectation or taboo

And I find it often allows an "in" crowd to laugh at an "out" crowd. My father often found it funny to mock and deride my mother to complete strangers, because that's what men do, they mock their wives to other men. It was just a joke... of course... it wasn't. He just wanted to put her down and in her place.

But people are complicated, maybe I shouldn't judge my own father based on his words, his actions, his attitudes, and years of evidence. He might not have meant any of it.

I am not saying you have to agree with these other interpretations. I am just saying people are going to disagree about this stuff. That is normal and expected. And we can't just insist others agree with us.

When you don't agree that a man who called himself a sexist is a sexist, it does beg the question of why. People have different interpretations of a lot of events in history, we are not required to accept all of them.

My opinion is content warnings are not particularly helpful. But when it comes to something like a book from the 70s, I have a baseline expectation I may encounter some outdated ideas. I just don't know that a content warning tells me anything I didn't already know

Maybe the point isn't to tell YOU something you don't know, but someone else.

 

[Maxperson]

YOU ARE LITERALLY ARGUING THAT IT ISN'T SEXIST EVEN IF HE CONCEIVED IT, SPECIFICALLY, AS A SEXIST NOTION.

It's not inherently sexist. Any sexism died with Gygax. It was his, not Tiamat or Bahamut. Unless you are arguing what @Azzy said no one was arguing and are saying that evil female gods are sexist.

If his intention was sexist, if his description of his action was sexist, if he went out and said "Look how sexist this is!" then it is, -inherently- sexist.

No. It isn't. To be inherent is has to be present in all examples of that type. All evil female gods must be sexist for it to be inherently sexist. IF, and it's a big if, he created them in a sexist act, it's the act(ie Gygax) that is sexist, not the product.

You could certainly argue that having a female deity be evil while a male deity is good doesn't -automatically- have to be sexist.

It's not sexist, automatic or otherwise. Men, women, non-binary, all of us have examples of good, evil, lawful, chaotic, and neutral.

Their creation is, and was, and will be, sexism. Because there's no way to go back in time and change it.

We don't have to change it, because only the act would have been sexist, not the product.

Going back to the hunting rifle analogy, you are arguing that if I buy a hunting rifle for the purpose of murdering someone, that hunting rifle can never be anything other than intended for murder. That it's inherently murderous. That's wrong. It's just a plain old hunting rifle to anyone else who comes along and uses it.