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Gary Gygax Departs the Prime Material
3/4/2008
Gary Gygay, co-creator and "father" of Dungeon & Dragons has died this day at age 69. Very sad.
I'm sitting here thumbing thru a ragged copy of the Monster Manual I bought way back in 1978 and casting glances at my bookshelf filled with old gaming supplies. The games I have stretch across many genres and many years; and were written by many authors; but it's Gygax's works that are the diamonds in the mine. His are the only one I ever bother to occasionally reread. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Dungeonland, The World of Greyhawk and so many others riffed on ideas from many corners of literature and popular culture and shoehorned them into something special and compelling. Gygax was never a great game designer per se -- his notion of campaign balance was laughable -- but works were always crafted with sharp intelligence, immense imagination and could be read for sheer enjoyment without ever being played.
No where were his talents more obvious then when they receded from the game after 1985. Dungeons and Dragons flourished in his absence but became more pedestrian, more homogenized. Its manic, chaotic creativity began to yield to well-planned and sensible fantasy structures. Gygax's high-brow prose, so often laced with archaic terminology that would send one groping for a dictionary (ewer??), slowly ceded to plain language and artless words. Things started to make more sense, game mechanics started to work better, and the game as a whole became a lot less interesting.
Citing Gary Gygax on of my heroes would be too strong a statement. But attributing to his works anything less than a significant impact on my life would be negligent. He occupies a special and unique cleft in literary history and in my own youth. He will be missed.
Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who do not enjoy the Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!
- E. Gary Gygax, 1973
3/4/2008 | Permanent Link
