Gary Gygax with Eric Silver

Summary

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This Guy Sucked – Gary Gygax (with Eric Silver)

Podcast: This Guy Sucked
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin
Guest: Eric Silver (Join the Party)
Release: October 16, 2025
Length: ~82 minutes

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Overview

This episode takes a critical look at Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), exploring his role as both the “Big Bang” of tabletop roleplaying and as a deeply flawed figure responsible for many of the game’s enduring problems. Historian Dr. Claire Aubin and game master Eric Silver dig into Gygax’s legacy—from his creativity and the invention of an entire genre, to his business mismanagement, toxic gatekeeping, and bigoted views. Together, they examine how Gygax's personal failings shaped both the world of D&D and its business, culminating in a modern IP juggernaut detached from its venerated (if controversial) founder.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Gary Gygax? Establishing Credentials & Stakes

• Claire & Eric’s Expertise & Investment in D&D

  • Eric’s experience as a professional in tabletop RPG (TTRPG) media and Claire’s long history with the game and its culture anchor the discussion in both personal and scholarly insight. (08:56, 10:00)
  • “You can, like, work with and around someone and thinking about them...but that doesn’t mean you owe them your loyalty forever.” — Dr. Claire Aubin (04:58)

• Both panelists are fans and critics, believing that “veneration and love for the game doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question the guy who made it.” (05:41)

2. What Is a Tabletop RPG? Why Does D&D Matter?

• Eric concisely explains TTRPGs: “If you remember sitting around the campfire and having someone tell a story to you...but we can take a step forward and add little game mechanics so that players can participate.” (12:15)
• D&D’s revolutionary role in moving from war games to immersive storytelling and collaborative character creation is underlined. (16:58–18:18)

3. Gary Gygax: Context & Origins

• Background: Born 1938, died 2008. Co-created D&D with Dave Arneson out of a hobbyist wargaming tradition in the 1970s.
• Eric: “[Gygax] just happens to create something that has teeth and claws in a way he’s not expecting...this is not a guy who was built to do this." (20:32)
• The invention of D&D was a collaborative, evolving process, but Gygax quickly positioned himself as the sole “genius”. (18:18)

4. The Creation & Growth of D&D – Bad Business, Good PR

• Gygax’s company (TSR) was founded in a scramble after mainstream publishers rejected D&D.
• Early sales were niche, but TSR “blew up” in the 1980s—helped paradoxically by the Satanic Panic. National distribution started in 1980 via Random House, catapulting volume from 250K to 2M boxes in a couple years. (28:25)
  • “In 1981, they sold nearly 2 million copies.” — Eric (28:40)
• Start-up chaos: nepotism, “boys being boys,” wild spending, and mismanagement abounded. (25:34, 32:19)
  • Hilariously, “TSR bought a needlepoint company run by the Bloom’s cousin and raised a shipwreck just for kicks.” (32:45, 35:21)

5. Exploitation & Gatekeeping: Gygax’s Harmful Legacy

• Gygax exploited staff and co-creators, notably “screwing over” Dave Arneson on royalties for Advanced D&D. (24:25)
• He regularly failed to honor contracts, claimed other people’s work as his own, and sabotaged professional women at TSR. (33:27, 78:21)
• Sexism and Exclusion:
  • Gygax’s published, deeply misogynistic response to women in wargaming:
    “Damn right I am sexist...They can jolly well stay away from war gaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex.” (38:41)
  • Gygax positioned D&D as male-exclusive, resisted any inclusiveness, and openly ridiculed those seeking change. (38:41–41:08)
  • “He wanted it to be for him...It’s a level of ego that I think is interesting here.” — Claire (57:05)

6. Gygax the Face—But Not the Mind—of D&D’s Success

• Gygax became a D&D “micro-celebrity,” inserting himself into rulebooks, adventures, and media appearances. (21:18)
• He distanced himself from negative business decisions but took credit for successes and creative innovations by others. (34:57–35:21)
• Ultimately, he ran TSR into heavy debt, was outmaneuvered by Lorraine Williams, and ousted from his own company in a “Succession-style” coup (44:24):
  • “He didn’t find out until the meeting he was chairing began and he got kicked out of his own company.” — Eric (45:14)

7. The Corporate Afterlife: Hasbro, IP, and Monolithic D&D

• After passing through several owners, D&D landed under Hasbro—now a prime “monetized” brand.
• The flood of D&D-branded consumer goods, a shift to digital “games as service,” and ever-more expensive player experience are outcomes Gygax likely would have embraced—so long as he got credit and royalties. (65:00, 69:49)
• Critical Open Gaming License controversy (2023): Hasbro tried to claw back rights from creators and influencers who made D&D popular—but was forced to retreat after massive backlash. (73:27–75:40)

8. The Gygax Myth: Veneration, Revisionism, Hagiography

• Even today, many defend Gygax as either “just a silly little joker” or a “rightful gatekeeper for nerd culture”—even using the same evidence to argue both sides. (41:08)
  • “People will use the exact same scenarios for how they defend him as they will use to say that he’s bad.” — Claire (41:08)
• Corporations and authors with a direct stake in D&D’s continuing profitability (e.g., Michael Witwer) have produced glowing biographies used to cement the Gygax myth. (71:15)
• Quotes such as “I think that has to do with the different thinking processes of men and women, first of all”—along with his open self-description as a “biological determinist”—are routinely downplayed or excused by defenders. (54:52–55:02)

9. Persistent Harm: Race, Antisemitism, and Problematic Content

• D&D settings and modules released under Gygax’s leadership (e.g., Ravenloft) included openly racist and antisemitic tropes, particularly toward Roma/Sinti populations, and continue to provoke criticism even in modern versions. (61:33–62:29)
• Gygax’s approach: “Just take religious shit and file off the barcodes.” (79:44)

10. Final Judgement: What Did Gygax Leave Us?

• Gygax created a revolutionary game but layered it with his prejudice and ego—then failed to steer it responsibly, losing it to corporate interests. (77:31)
  • “Now the thing he invented is a corporate weapon...something that hurts the people that love it. And he could have just not moved to LA and did cocaine for three years and dated a bunch of women, but instead he did.” — Eric (76:27)
• Modern D&D’s best advances come from creators and players breaking free of Gygaxian orthodoxy—not from honoring his legacy. “People are branching out into all kinds of other things...which I think is great.” — Claire (64:08)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “The only thing that Gary Gygax did for me was create the first edition...He was the big bang—how fundamental, really? Not that much.” – Eric Silver (05:41)
• “He’s a guy who started something wonderful, filled that thing with weird harmful shit that would do psychic damage to its players, and then steered that thing in directions that made it worse and less accessible.” — Dr. Claire Aubin (14:46)
• “Damn right I am sexist...They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good war game and war gamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex.” — Gary Gygax, Europa fanzine (38:41)
• “He wanted to make sure that the nerds who are involved in the game and who have power relative to the game should be people that look and think like him.” — Claire (57:05)
• “Gary Gygax sucked because he was a guy who made a very popular piece of art...and then he either didn’t know what was going on or he was negligent and kind of just let them do whatever...and now the thing he invented is a corporate weapon.” — Eric Silver (76:27)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 04:58 — Loving something doesn’t mean excusing its creator
• 12:15 — What is a tabletop RPG? (Eric explains)
• 20:32 — Gygax’s ill-suitedness for business stardom
• 24:25 — Gygax cuts out Dave Arneson
• 28:25 — Satanic Panic, Random House, D&D’s explosive growth
• 32:45 — Corporate malfeasance at TSR (“raising a shipwreck”)
• 38:41 — Gygax's public misogyny
• 44:24 — Gygax ousted from TSR by Lorraine Williams
• 54:52 — The rise of Gygax veneration, critics, and defenders
• 61:33 — Racism in D&D content (Ravenloft, Curse of Strahd)
• 65:00 — Hasbro’s “games as a service” model for D&D
• 73:27 — 2023 Open Gaming License backlash
• 76:27 — Final critique: Gygax's legacy as a corporate weapon

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Tone & Takeaways

As with every episode of This Guy Sucked, the tone is irreverent, insightful, and often exasperated. Both Aubin and Silver are clearly fans, but their “certified hater” credentials shine through as they refuse to let affection soften their critique. Gygax, in their view, is a perfect example of a person who made something massive and important—then tainted it with egotism, bigotry, poor stewardship, and a legacy that corporations have bent to their own ends.

For listeners unfamiliar with D&D or Gygax:
You’ll leave with a clear sense of why he “matters,” why so many people love the game he helped create, and why the man and his mythology deserve every bit of criticism Aubin and Silver direct his way.

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Further Reading

• Eric Silver’s article on antisemitism in D&D (linked in show notes)
• “Slaying the Dragon” by Ben Riggs
• “Empire of Imagination” by Michael Witwer (as an example of hagiography)

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a complete understanding of the episode without any need to endure the dicey legacy of Gary Gygax firsthand.

Transcript

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show, where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Eric Silver, who is a scholar of a different sort than our typical guest because he's a big, huge nerd and my friend and the game master for Join the Party, which is a tabletop role playing game. Sorry, I made him laugh already. He is. Let me try this again.

[Eric Silver]

Julia, I just love you calling me a big fucking nerd when there are literal doctors. Doctors of history, like, no, this guy who knows how games work. Big fucking nerd. This guy.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Nerd in the classical sense, sure. The nerd in the schoolyard insult sets.

[Eric Silver]

That's fair.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

He is the game master for Join the Party, which is a tabletop role playing game podcast, which also makes him another multitude cousin show host. Following on from last week's episode, which was another multitude episode, Eric has been doing cool stuff and making cool podcasts and teaching newbies to make cool podcasts and play games for years. And I'm so excited to talk to him about a guy that a lot of people have a lot of feelings on and including both Eric and myself. So if I seem personally offended during this episode more than usual, it's because I am. Welcome to the show and thank you so much for coming on Eric.

[Eric Silver]

I'm really excited to come on the show because one, I think that doing a guy who is not a president or a literal saint or like, who created an entire, like, I don't know, like, psychological study. He just made one game, but he might be more of a saint in people's eyes than literal saints. You had. You did St. Peter on this podcast, right?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Paul? We did Paul recently.

[Eric Silver]

Oh, you did Paul. I don't know. I don't know. The Christian guys, they're not your guys.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Not your.

[Eric Silver]

Not my guys. So I'm like, this guy might be considered more of a saint than the literal saints you've had on this show.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I totally agree. I have a good intro question for you because I like to Do a little patter, a little starter situation. If you could meet any either dead historical figure, or I would say a live fantasy figure, but that doesn't. Alive in the. In your mind fantasy figure, who would you choose to meet?

[Eric Silver]

Oh, if I could split that in half. Yeah, I would love to talk to F. Scott Fitzgerald and then Zelda Fitzgerald directly afterwards.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Oh, interesting. You would be like, I want the real stories of.

[Eric Silver]

I want both sides of the story. Like, F. Scott Fitzgerald, I know, was an absolute fuckboy and was, like, wanted Ernest Hemingway to kiss him so bad.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

But I also, like, want both sides of the story. I want to hear what happens.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I like that you did go for the historical figure instead of, like, a fantasy character, because I was expecting, like, like a Tom Bombadil or something. That's probably the fourth time I've said Tom Bombadil on the show, which is crazy.

[Eric Silver]

If you say one more time, Brennan Lee Mulligan does show up. So watch.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I was gonna say Tom Bombadil appears in the mirror behind you.

[Eric Silver]

I think it has something to do with what we're talking about today, because a lot of the quote unquote fantasy heroes who aren't in Lord of the Rings, it's just like standard fantasy pattern. Like, it's all just like, regurgitated Lord of the Rings guys. So it's like, no, I don't want to hang out with, like, Tiamat, or I don't want to hang out with Strahd of Barovia. And that's the end of the name of the guys I can remember from the canon Dungeons and Dragons universe. Because that universe is boring. No, it's boring. I don't give a shit. I don't care.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I know Drizzt Dorden. That's another guy from. From D and D. Am I right? I don't know. Someone listening to this is going is. There's a listener right now going into.

[Eric Silver]

And I'm with you. And I'm sure you all had a lot of fun playing Boulders Gate 3, but I find the Forgotten Realms super boring because it was just a guy who got hired by a company. The guy's name was Ed Greenwood, and this was the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game he was running. And he wanted to do the thing that all nerds wanted to do in the 70s and 80s, which is write fantasy novels about their Dungeons and Dragons campaign. So he did. And I just don't care about Illithids and drow and the. The spider people. Like, I just don't care because they're not. It's not an interesting world. I'm sorry, I just don't see.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I think that's something that I try to emphasize on the show, but doesn't always come through to people. Like, I think you are a good example of this. But then also, like Matt Gabriel in the Charlemagne episode, who I've talked about lots of times, are good examples of this where I'm, like, the person on the show, my guest wants to talk about someone who. Who has been fundamental to the career that they have, which proves that you can, like, work with and around someone and thinking about them and thinking through them while not, like, venerating them and not being like, yeah, they're so sick and amazing, and I love them. You can be like, no, this person has contributed enormously to my career in some way or another. But, like, that doesn't mean you owe them your loyalty forever.

[Eric Silver]

It's so funny because we're going to talk about this during the episode, but the only thing that Gary Gygax did for me was create the first edition of the game that captured everyone. The fifth edition that I fell in love with, the one that was made by people who worked at a giant corporation by the time this was all done and was spurred forward by, like, a creative rule that was created in the third edition after Dungeons and Dragons was sold to that corporation. So it's like, how fundamental, other than being like, the big bang, was he to my career? I don't think all that much, really. And I think what a good metaphor. He was. The big bang. Yeah, for sure.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

What simile? Including, like, her as you were in English, I use a sim. It's a simile.

[Eric Silver]

It's okay, Claire. You're crushing it. You're doing a great job. But, yeah, like, he didn't really do that much because I don't really like his worlds. Like, thank you for creating the monster manual and creating Dungeons and Dragons, but, like, Gary Gygax, you did really do it for me, my man. You really don't.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Totally fair. And thank you for giving us, like, the perfect segue into talking about this. Normally, I would say, who are we talking about today? But we already started talking about him.

[Eric Silver]

Yes.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

You tell me what the full name of the dude we're talking about for this episode is.

[Eric Silver]

All right. We're talking about Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons. That's who we're talking about.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hell, yeah.

[Eric Silver]

I am so excited to be on a history podcast because I get to say the following section. Claire, I read two books to remind me what's going on here and I do not recommend either of these books to your listeners.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Great.

[Eric Silver]

Perfect for things that will be important. The main one that I did was Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs, which is a history of tsr, the company that Gary Gygax created so that he could publish Dungeons and Dragons. This is not a good book because Ben Riggs loves to insert himself into the book all of the time. It's very annoying. However, I'm giving it more praise because it is not a total hagiography of Gary Gygax like the other book that I read which was Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer. Man, this guy super loved Gary Gygax and something you told me right before we recorded. Michael Witwer also currently writes like those errata random books you see in that weird part of the bookstore for Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro who owns the Dungeons and Dragons IP. So he sure in 2015 when 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons was popping off, he sure did have a vested interest in writing a very good biography of Gary Gygax.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure. And I will say not to. I don't want you to sell yourself short on this. Also like I know you read these two books, but you have also written previously about this and we're thinking about some of these problems with Gygax, I would say pretty early compared to some other people were in terms of being like hold on, hold on, hold on. And you were talking publicly and thinking about this publicly. So it's an interesting one because there are histories like academic historians who work on gaming and Gygax and stuff but like, and I can happily invite them on for a follow up episode. But I thought you would be a really good person to do this because I think you were a little ahead of the curve on some of this, which I think is pretty great and I'm really excited to get to talk about him.

[Eric Silver]

Yeah, I mean I've been working professionally in the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop RPG space since Join the Party started in 2017 and I've watched how so much of it has changed. And as 5th edition dungeons and Dragons has gotten a goddamn chokehold on society and now so many more people play Dungeons and Dragons than ever have. I read Slaying the Dragon a few years ago and re reading it now I'm like oh, this reminded me of all the things that I wanted because also like as a Jewish person and as like Someone who didn't want to, like, move to LA and become a voice actor, which so many people use Dungeons and Dragons media kind of as a springboard to go do.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Eric Silver]

I kind of got to look at it from the outside. I'm like, what are we pulling forward? What are we falling in love with that the community of people making Dungeons and Dragons content, D and D influencers are pushing forward, especially with how Hasbro, who owns the D and D ip, how they've been messing around with D and D, especially over the last few years.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, absolutely. And I will also say to add to the, like, our bonafides on this, because I think it's useful sometimes for people to be like, why the hell are they, the people talking about this? One, I can talk about whatever I want on my damn podcast.

[Eric Silver]

But two, yeah, get that straw man, Claire. Get him. Get the scarecrow. Get them.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, the people who are actually. Mostly they're mad at me for talking, which is a whole other. I cannot be a voice actor is what I've learned from this podcast. But the thing I will say is also that we have previously recorded a podcast that. An older podcast that you had called Games and Feelings, where I talked about how to make your TTRPG games or whatever, games not incredibly ethnocentric and make them not full of, like, people who are trying to commit genocide. And I do think it's interesting that we were talking about that then and now we're being like, maybe we should look at kind of the roots of this and how that could even be a problem that people are having in the first place. That that could actually be a problem where you're like, how do we solve this issue? And that means it's been there since.

[Eric Silver]

Inception because this one guy put his creative brain towards making a new type of tabletop rpg, and he then put all of his values in there, which was a very stark kind of like good versus evil, a regurgitation of where fantasy was in the 70s and 80s. And I think that also has to do with like, yeah, yeah, a guy who wants to commit genocide to a fantasy race. Yeah, that's a good villain. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A classic situation.

[Eric Silver]

All this religious study I'm doing. Oh, let's just like, let's throw those guys into this manual of monsters I'm making. This is going to be so sick. And now it is the progenitor of a entire massive, massive of games industry, but also media industry.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about him a little bit. I Mean, almost, perhaps like the whole episode. But let's talk about some of his backstory just for. So that people understand. Because I also know that not everyone listening to this will even be familiar with D and D. We'll know why this matters. We'll be interested in this. But I will make it interesting for you. When we say RPG first of all, or ttrpg, we're talking about tabletop role playing games, which is. How would you explain TTRPGs to people? Like just a 30 second elevator pitch on what a TTRPG is.

[Eric Silver]

So if you remember sitting around the campfire and having someone tell a story to you, that is just the oral tradition of humans telling stories to each other. But we can take a step forward with that and say, well, what if there were, like, little game mechanics we can add to it so that players can participate in the telling of those stories? That's literally it. We roll dice. There's some rules to allow someone who is facilitating that story, which is our dungeon master, the person who makes the setting, controls the plot, to tell that to a bunch of players who are controlling our protagonists and they make decisions. And the dungeon master, or game master. Dungeon master is the proprietary term for the person who runs a Dungeons and Dragons game. That's 100% true. While game master is usually for everything else. While everyone is in conversation kind of through this gamified oral storytelling.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. I also love that you were like, since time immemorial, humans have. Which is real. Like, that is real. But I also think that another good way that sometimes I will explain it to people is like, if you've ever played a video game where you are the character, it's that, but with your voice and your dungeon master or your game master is the person who's doing the narrating and designing the setting and stuff. If. If people want, like an alternate way of viewing this, it's just a game where you're a person or a character or whatever, and you say what you're going to do and you use dice or whatever, other implements or mechanics in order to determine actions and how well or how poorly you do them.

[Eric Silver]

Think about playing Skyrim, but instead of a video game controlling it, it's a person. And because you can talk to a person, you can do a lot more things than just whatever the video game prescribes for you. Absolutely.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. The only boundaries are what your game master says. You absolutely cannot do that. Yes. That's the only boundary to this. Your only boundary is your imagination. So Gary Gygax AKA well, technically Gary is his middle name. His full name is Ernest Gary Gygax. He's born in 1938. He dies in 2008. He does still qualify for people who are dead and therefore we are allowed to talk about them. But the way that I wrote my sort of big thoughts on this, because sometimes I like to write myself like a little bit of a headline so that I can understand how my thinking around it, which is I know that you have a lot of perspectives on the business side of it, which we are going to talk about in some depth. And when I think about him as a person too, because obviously all of these things are wrapped up together. He's a guy who started something wonderful, filled that thing with weird harmful shit that would do psychic damage to its players, and then steered that thing in directions that made it worse and less accessible and actively wanted it to be worse and less accessible.

[Eric Silver]

Yep, that sounds about right.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That's the way that I.

[Eric Silver]

And at the same time he ran a business bad, which made everyone's life worse.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And he did bad business at the same time. But this one thing that he made created this whole culture around it. And there are some parts of that culture that I really love as someone who participates pretty actively in it, and some parts of it that I absolutely can't stand. And it's interesting because a lot of the things that I can't stand, he very openly and overtly was very chill with, which I think is funny. And we'll talk about that also in in some depth. I think we should talk about the founding of TSR, D&D, the making of D and D, all those things. I think we should talk about those just so it makes sense where this comes from. But yeah, it starts in the 70s. He and a man named Dave Arneson co create D and D, which grows out of kind of their shared interest in historical miniatures and war gaming. And it's funny, we're not talking like when people think about war gaming now, they're thinking about like Warhammer or something, but we're talking like they were had little guys reenacting like the Civil War.

[Eric Silver]

I mean, that's what tabletop role playing games were before Dungeons and Dragons. Like, I cannot overstate how important Dungeons and Dragons is to what we understand as every. The definition that Claire and I just gave. Right. But it's like, you know, this is coming out of a tradition of war gaming. Like, so there was this game called Chainmail, which this guy named Jeff Perrin. It's so complicated Because I need to talk about what nerds in Wisconsin were doing in the 70s. Right. Which is so important to this. So Gary Gygax wrote this game called Chainmail with his friend Jeff Perrin. It emphasized, quote, man to man combat instead of arm, but what one on one combat. And There was a 14 page supplement about running it within a fantasy setting. People kind of liked it and they sold it around like with all their nerds. And it went well from there. Dave Arneson used those rules to run games in his own setting where he made even more rules, and that was called Blackmoore. Blackmoor let you not only run armies, but you could create your own characters and you would explore dungeons.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I'm seeing things happening.

[Eric Silver]

And you would have a character sheet that you would keep going. This was an invention. Someone needed to invent these things. It's also important to say that Blackmoore was inspired by a different game called Brownstein, which is by this guy named David Wesley, where players took on roles of characters in a Prussian town under threat of French invasion.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hell yeah.

[Eric Silver]

But the feature of that game was that characters had total freedom to act, unlike in the war games we're talking about. And because you could only like load your gun or tell your army to go here or other stuff. So this is all we're talking about, an artistic tradition moving towards where this is all going. And Gary Gygax is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice, nice, nice. He took the handwritten rules of Blackmoore and he cleaned them up and he went to his typewriter and bing, bang, boom, that was Dungeons and Dragons. And he ran that for his children. He play tested it with his friends, he play tested it with his children. And that is where the game. We're talking about him as part of a artistic tradition of a bunch of his friends. From there he's like, wow, look at this game. We should go to the guy who published Chainmail. And the publisher thought it was bad, so they didn't want to publish it. And that's when Gary Gygax made his first mistake of starting a company.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A classic first mistake. Let me just say starting a company, whenever anyone says that, I say, well, that's your first mistake.

[Eric Silver]

Don't, don't do it. Never, never do it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hi, it's Claire. I'm here to quickly say that this episode is free for everybody, but the next one won't be. That's because we switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of Public History Made by actual experts. Consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. Because we're not trying to get rich, we're just trying to make good history that is engaging and accessible at the same time. For the price of a fancy muffin, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives. To sweeten the deal, just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join the honorary haters club.

[Eric Silver]

So Gary Gygax started the company called tsr, which stands for Tactical Studies Rules. We're just going to call it TSR from there because that's what everyone calls it. He started it like late 1974. He started it with his childhood friend Don K. And this like, dice maker named Brian Bloom, who bought in with it. He gave $2,000 in 1974 money to get in on there. But Don K, like, immediately died of a heart attack in January 1975. So Gary Gygax didn't have any money, so Brian Bloom and his family bought the majority of the shares. So they were the majority shareholders of tsr. This will be important later.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Also, I love the idea of someone's family being like, yeah, let's buy this games company. If I said that to my family, they'd be like, what? We want us to invest in a, in a game. A little, A little statue game company.

[Eric Silver]

No, no, no. This guy Gary, he's really cool. Like, don't worry, Gary. He had two significant interactions with Ghosts as a kid and he was just fired from his insurance job. Don't worry about it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I mean, yeah. So I think it's also important to sort of like understand the field that's being set here, where it's kind of like this guy is already flying by the seat of his pants a little bit. He just happens to create something that has teeth and claws in a way that he's not expecting. But there's nothing before that that really indicates that this is what's coming down the pike for him. And it does explain his behavior later where you're like, this is not a guy who was built to do this. This is not a guy who was built to know what to do with this because he doesn't have the like, mindset of someone who's like this inventive, creative, business running guy. He's just a dude who comes up with an RPG game.

[Eric Silver]

With a really good game. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And he, and this is part of understanding why he's so famous is he becomes this real evangelist of RPG culture out of this. He becomes the person that people associate with this. He appears at conventions, he's on TV all the time. He writes himself into material for D and D. So he's constantly putting himself in, which is weird and like using little anagrams and weird altered names and stuff to put himself inside of the material. He's also on all the chat rooms later writing all his thoughts on like these forums and like boards. So it's also there's this weird thing where people have very direct access to this like micro celebrity figure. But this is someone who again, is not equipped at the beginning at least to like, know what to do with this or really like is. He's not the guy you would pick to be the face of your media empire.

[Eric Silver]

The thing is, is that this is like every single other story about any creative thing. This is the same story as any band or the same story as any novelist who gets popular. Like, Gary Gygax is the creative nerd in the middle and he does not change from being a creative nerd in the middle. He is smart and he is creative and he has a giant ego. And we're gonna see how those things play out. And now I have to tell you, Claire, the difference between Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Great. What is the difference between these two things? This is a good point. Is it meaningful?

[Eric Silver]

Yes, it is very meaningful. It's very meaningful. Okay, so here's. So D and D starts popping off, but it's complicated, there's no materials. It's just like everyone just are trying to buy these published books that they're publishing themselves. Right? So it's getting more and more difficult. And of course, Gary Gygax and the Blooms keep hiring people to help them put the book together, to draw stuff and to write, write stuff and to like do covers. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

So the game was complicated, so they split it into two products. One was the D and D basic set, which had a box set with simplified rules that would teach people how to play Dungeons and Dragons. And the second is what Gary Gygax is really known for, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons module, which is that nerd shit. That's where the monster Manual came from. That is where the Dungeon Master's Guide came from. And that's where the Player's Guide Handbook came from, where Gary Gygax has poured all of his, like, fantasy ideas into. And that is where his genius really soared. Here is the problem. Gary Gygax, being the guy who created it, thought that Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was a totally different product. And tsr, the company kind of categorized it as such than D and D basic set. So why would Dave Arneson remember the guy from a few minutes ago? That guy shouldn't get any royalties. Fuck that guy. Because Gary Gygax invented Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Dave Arneson was only a part of basic Dungeons and Dragons, okay?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

So I already feel like that sucks. Your co creator, you're like, immediately, you know what? Also, I looked this up right before we started and Eric and I were talking about this. They started off by selling a thousand D and D games and they were selling them for $10 each in 1970s money. And let me tell you, that's $86 per game in 2024, 2025 money. That's a lot. For those who are uninitiated in this, that's a lot of money to be paying for a gaming set, even if it involves a board and dice and rules and whatever that is a lot of money for these things. Especially because now you could buy the manual for like, what, 30 bucks, 25 bucks.

[Eric Silver]

TSR also did not have any distribution. That was just in the Wisconsin area, like in the Lake Geneva area. A thousand. A thousand boxes of $86 a piece is a lot of money and a lot of stuff. Which is why they really started getting momentum. And Gary Gygax immediately tried to cut Dave Arneson out of it. There was an agreement for 2.5% of some advanced Dungeons and Dragons titles. But they went back to court in 1984. Like it didn't, it just didn't stick.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I'm starting to understand some problems.

[Eric Silver]

So TSR just continues to grow, like growing growing. More and more people find out about D and D more, and people start falling in love with it. I mean, this is like real 70s nerd shit. People find out about it in newsletters and like right away for it and like just real word of mouth stuff. But this game was revolutionary that you could. You were having a conversation with your dungeon master and you could do anything you wanted to. And your characters kept going and Gary Gygax kept writing more stuff for it and they kept hiring more people to draw Arts. And to write more adventures, there's a bunch of stories about how TSR was run out of the third floor of an old building in Lake Geneva. And man, the number of stories in this book that Ben Riggs dug up. It sounds like all of the nonsense you hear about how, like, Facebook was doing, like, during the real tech unicorn style days of, like, boys being boys at, like, a massively growing company.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, sure.

[Eric Silver]

The number of times where they talk about how the FBI showed up because they kept bringing Nerf guns and very real looking BB guns in a building that looked like snipers and the FBI showed up, that happened multiple times.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Can I just say something? As someone who's experienced a lot of nerd culture and also lived in the Bay Area and has seen these, like, startup founder things. I know it smells crazy in there. I know, I know it smelled crazy in the TSR head, yo.

[Eric Silver]

It smelled insane in there. Think about where antiperspirant was at in 1976. Whoa.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

All of us have been to. I almost just said the least relatable thing. I almost just said all of us have been to Magic the Gathering Tournament.

[Eric Silver]

I mean real. I mean real, real.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I am certain that everyone listening to this has not been to a Magic the Gathering tournament. Another thing that happens that really makes DD blow up, which is funny because you would think that it would be the opposite. And this is actually what things like Stranger Things play on is that in the 80s, the satanic panic happens. And so this is when a lot of this stuff shifts from being, like, just guys being dudes on a floo of a building and turns into, like, Gygax is on the news all the time. Like, he's on 60 Minutes. He's in Newsweek talking about, like, well, my thing's not satanic. It's actually different. It's. These are. Whatever. And also, I don't know if he still is at this point, but he was a Jehovah's witness from 1958. Ish. After getting married. And so, like, he has this. There's a whole religious thing happening. And at the same time that he's being like, my thing is not satanic. The thing I'm doing is not that. He also is, like, just stacking cash off the back of it because, you know, all the teens are like, I've heard about this game and it's. I've heard it's satanic. So obviously I want a copy of it right now for $86.

[Eric Silver]

It's really important to point out that, like, it was Kind of vibing for a while in the 70s, it was gaining steam. And then Random House started distributing Dungeons and Dragons starting January 1, 1980.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Oh, okay.

[Eric Silver]

And that is where the money started going in. I found that there was this chart in Slaying the dragon, and in 1979, they sold like 250,000 copies. In 1980, they sold a million plus copies. And in 1981, they sold nearly 2 million copies.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That is, you know, as someone who knows a lot about businesses, let me. That is said with much sarcasm. That's a lot of year on year growth, I would think.

[Eric Silver]

Yes.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Doubling. Well, first quadrupling and then doubling. That's a lot. And he is able to, like, use this momentum to grow all of this. And at the same time, he is becoming an incredibly public figure who's associated with this.

[Eric Silver]

He loves looking like a cool guy. He sure does love doing it. And, like, what is he doing at TSR now? I don't know. It's hard to say because he wrote all that stuff with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. But, like, then he started hiring all these people that started writing new adventures. And then there are all these artists doing all of the art and he's just like, out and about. Honestly, Gygax said that, like, he was constantly getting outvoted by the rest of the executive team. So it was him, Kevin and Brian Bloom. Those are the guys. And the other Bloom I think we talked about was like their dad and he retired and whatever. So it's like. Like there were quotes saying that the executive team had to vote unanimously. And Gary Gygax was like, yeah, yeah, that's true. So when I wanted to do something, the Blooms were like, no, you can't do it. And then the Blooms kind of went and did whatever they wanted. But then there are other quotes saying that wasn't true. And I think it's because Gary Gygax really wanted to look like a cool, artistic guy. Especially when TSR, the company, didn't start doing so hot starting in 1984. But we'll get there in a second. It's still the hot Times. It's still 1981-1982. They are on fire.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I will also say that it's easy to think about these things as, like, when you're thinking of early Facebook, the sort of like, move fast and break stuff thing, right? Where you're like, they've started up this new thing. Everyone's young and hip and everyone's trying all. He's in his mid-40s. He has children and a wife. He's not like some 25 year old, 23 year old startup founder who is unaware of the harms that one might cause. Like, that is not what's happening here. He's in his 40s and he's. And that's not to say that that's old, but like, it is old enough to know better. It's old enough to know, for example, that you should not immediately screw over your partner. He's old enough to know that, like, there are potential harmful effects of the things that he says and does. He knows this.

[Eric Silver]

Oh, yeah. Remember his children were old enough to have been play tested on for the original run of Dungeons and Dragons, like years earlier, like in the mid-70s. And this is less than 10 years later.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. I mean, because he gets married in like the late 50s and his. So his kids are like fully adults at this point too. So we need to keep this in mind when we're trying not to be like, we're like, oh, well, he's new to this. Okay? Yeah, but he's not new to the planet.

[Eric Silver]

So, like, let's get to the hot part, right?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

TSR blowing through cash. Okay, There is an article in Ink magazine that came out in winter 1982 that said that TSR was the 6th fastest growing privately held company in the entire country. Isn't that crazy?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That is crazy.

[Eric Silver]

The little games company in Wisconsin was the sixth fastest growing company in the country.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And this guy is like at the helm, which is crazy.

[Eric Silver]

Supposedly 1984 was supposed to be new hot times. Like it was just gonna keep happening. TSR had 312 workers by then, which also included, like publishing and a warehouse and all this different stu. But here's the thing. There's a lot of corporate malfeasance happening while everything is going super hot. There is a really good example that TSR bought a needlepoint company called Greenfield Needle Women to create nerdy needlepoint kits.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

You know what's crazy is those exist in droves now. That's quite a popular genre of needlepoint kits.

[Eric Silver]

They sure did. And they thought it was gonna be 20% of the bottom line, I think. Like, the kitsch wasn't there just yet. If they had done it now, it would have been awesome. Turns out the person who started Greenfield Needle Women was the Bloom's cousin. Apparently, if you were a family member of the Blooms, or Gary Gygax for that matter, the company would just hire you to do random shit.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Okay, I also, when I was writing this down, like, I Wrote down as one of my main things I wanted to make sure that we talked about, beyond the sort of corporate malfeasance, he has a lot of just straightforwardly exploitative business practices.

[Eric Silver]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Like, this is like a huge, huge part of. So he would regularly, especially when he's in charge of tsr, he would regularly oversee contracts that he just like, wouldn't fulfill. Like, he would be in charge of contracts, sign contracts with people that he simply never paid or would then not credit the creators for things. Because at this point, they're also hiring people to write for them.

[Eric Silver]

And there was a royalty program which was really important to the artists. The Blooms ended that sometime in 1982. 1983, of course, Gary Gygax is like, I don't know. What are you. The Blooms did all this stuff. I was just here chilling because it's important to note that where Gary Gygax was, he was in California trying to get Dungeons and Dragons to be massive and huge. Ip. Remember that for later. Gary Gygax took his children and went to a mansion in LA and drank and smoke and did cocaine and philandered and had so many random ass actress girlfriends. He was just out there doing his shit.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. He is not still in Lake Geneva at this point. And there's also, like. With all of this exploitative stuff, it's interesting because he would put his name on things, be like, yeah, I did that. He would claim credit for all kinds of stuff all the time. So, like, he claims credit for Dave Arneson stuff. He also, there's someone named Gene Wells. A woman named Gene Wells. He claims a bunch of her stuff. He would claim credit for these things or minimize other people's contributions and sign his name to all this stuff. And then when people would be like, hey, this other thing you did is bad, he would say, well, I actually have. I'm busy in California, brother.

[Eric Silver]

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. When it would be something good, he would say, yeah, it was me who did this. TSR is mine. Everything I own. All of this. When it was bad, he'd be like, sorry, that's everybody else's problem. He. It's the thing you were saying earlier. He's like, well, everyone just kept out voting me. The problem is that everyone just didn't agree with me. Like, it's this thing where he. He will separate decisions based on whether he likes them or doesn't like them to blame other people for them.

[Eric Silver]

Exactly. It's worth noting. I love this example, that for some reason TSR raised a shipwreck from the bottom of Lake Geneva.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

What?

[Eric Silver]

And use company funds to do that. And no one really knew why, other than it sounded like a cool thing to do. And it sat in the building's boiler room for years until they had to convince the Smithsonian museum to come. Take it from the.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

You know what's funny is earlier you had like a slip up when you were talking and you said pirately owned instead of privately owned and then went back and said privately owned. It turns out it was both.

[Eric Silver]

It's pirately owned. Yep, it's pirately owned.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It really is this thing where you're like, I just can't believe those crazy kids. And then you're like, no, Fully adults. We must remember these are grown. Grown ass men and women who are making these decisions.

[Eric Silver]

Grown ass adults with so much money. So much money.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And we all know that if you give, like, fantasy nerds too much money, they either do something really cool with it or are actively insane and evil. Like, Those are the two options.

[Eric Silver]

80%. They do the terrible evil thing.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Honestly, I think so. I think basically that's how the Magic Castle exists.

[Eric Silver]

You give LeBron James that much money, he starts a school. But you give some nerds some stuff, they make sure that it's like, like difficult to. For, like, black people to use the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yes. And this actually brings me to my next point, which was, like, one of the things I wanted to make sure. We talked about a big thing for Gygax, and this doesn't follow the timeline structure, but that I want to make sure it's like really sort of at the forefront in terms of what we're talking about with him and not just with the business. He's extremely. Has a really strong reputation for gatekeeping D and D and baking exclusion into his games and very openly talking about wanting D and D to not. He'll say, I want to sell as much of it as I can, but I don't want everyone who's playing it to feel included in playing it, which is wild. He would actively resist changes that make the game more inclusive or more accessible and would go and publicly explain why he didn't think these changes should be made. And in fact, make fun of people who wanted changes to be made. Like, for example, where, like, I'll get you a quote, please. People who were like, I think the way that women are portrayed in this might be kind of bad. Like, this guy might not like women and he goes to the Europa fanzine in 1975 and says, I can't even believe that I'm reading this. He says, I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist male chauvinist pig for the wording in DD 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 I considered adding women in the raping and pillaging section in the Whores and tavern wenches chapter, the special magical part dealing with hags and Crohn's, 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 war gaming in droves. This is all one quote. They can jolly well stay away from war gaming in droves for all I care. I've seen many a good war game and war gamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex.

[Eric Silver]

The funniest thing to me is that he like mailed that to the magazine and they were like, sick. We're gonna publish that.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. And I think it speaks to the personality and the ego of someone that people say, hey, I feel like your game is making me feel bad and also has written off women or cast them in these really terrible roles or whatever. And he says, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna make fun of you to your face for saying that. And I'm gonna joke about adding women being sexually assaulted. I'm going to joke like these. He says, and I'm going to write in to this magazine to make sure that as many people as possible see and know for a fact that this is what I think and feel like. That says something about his psychology and the way that he runs his business and the way that he envisions his games. When we've talked about this hagiography thing and we'll talk about it in like more depth shortly. But there's this thing now that even when I was looking up Gygax and doing research on this and I was looking at what people are saying about him, it's so funny because they're kind of in the, in the defenders camp, which is, I would say, very large. The Gygax Defenders camp because of say Garfield is enormous. But there are two strains of people in the defender's camp and they're on opposing sides while still defending the same person. One strain is he wasn't actually sexist. He was not sexist. He was not a misogynist. He didn't actually hate women. These things are all taken out of context. He's just a silly little joker guy. He's just a little guy. And then the second strain is, he absolutely was a sexist. He absolutely was a misogynist. And you know what? He was right to be. And they're like, these are both people defending the same person using the same quotes, which I find interesting. They'll use the exact same scenarios for how they defend him. So for that they'll be like, he was was just joking. He was just saying people take it too far. And so he was just being a sarcastic. Classic, classic Gary. Classic Gygax. And the other people are like, well, scientifically, he also called, this is real. He also called himself a biological determinist. And as we all know, that's just science. So he was a misogynist because he actually had a scientific mind. Like, it's just so like trying to unpick some of these things feels impossible because people will use the exact same things to defend him as they will use to say that he's bad. And then even in the defending camps, they can't agree on whether something is good or bad.

[Eric Silver]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It's, for me, baffling. Like, it's a total mind fuck.

[Eric Silver]

We're just not seeing the person. It's like, I like Gary Gygax because I like Dungeons and Dragons or I like Gary Gygax because girls ruin nerds. Yeah, you know, it's like it is. And because I'm going to say this in a second, but Gary Gygax disappears from the story of Dungeons and Dragons in an incredibly succession style piece of nonsense.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, please, please move to the next part of the story.

[Eric Silver]

Let's get to the business. True crime of it all. Okay, so this is a really good quote from Slaying the Dragon about how Gary Gygax is an unreliable narrator. Here's the tale of the crisis as related by him after the fact that the Blooms were mean spirited and incompetent, but also so Machiavellian that they boxed him out of all major decisions at the company where he was president. Because of that, he went west and got the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon made. That show ran from 83 to 1985. That's where when you see like a weird photo of a guy with like a bald head and like pointy ears, Doing something strange. That's the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. There he negotiated big deals with big names. He didn't. He didn't do that. While entirely unbeknownst to him, the Blooms were burning down the company, wasting cash on idiocracy and nepotism while firing staff and watching sales circle the strain. That's kind of true. Remember the ship in the water? They also had tons of cars. They also bought companies all the time. Okay, so because he was in California, which was somehow unreachable by telephone letter or messenger pigeon, go and beg rigs. Okay, fine. Gary Gygax didn't know any of this was going on. In 1985, he learned that Kevin Bloom was trying to sell the company. He raced back to Lake Geneva, discovered all the terrible things the Blooms had done and made a heroic choice. He would present all of Kevin's misdeeds to the board of directors. Yes, the board consisted of the Blooms and people put on the board by the Blooms. But this meant that the board was more likely to remove Gygax from speaking the truth than Kevin for his mismanagement.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Uh huh.

[Eric Silver]

But that's not exactly what happened because of course Gary Gygax knew all this was happening and it got a lot more complicated really fast. So he did run back to Lake Geneva and left la, but that was because he was like done doing cocaine and no one wanted to have deals with him anymore. And he kind of ran out of money.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Eric Silver]

What he did, he exercised an option to buy 700 shares of TSR stock which gave him and his son, who was, remember a grown ass adult at the time, 51.1% of all stock. Then he became president and CEO and he came back as saving hero. But the company was one and a half million dollars in debt. So he was the president CEO of a company that was going down the tube.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And this is in 80s money.

[Eric Silver]

This is in 80s money. It was a lot of money.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

So he started looking around for investors, especially all of his friends from la. There was this guy named Flint Dill who shows up a lot in this part of the book.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That's a D and D character name, let me just say, by the way.

[Eric Silver]

Yeah, for sure. But here's the thing and the reason why Flint Dill, who wasn't a very good screenwriter, but he lived in la. His family owned the Buck Rogers ip. Okay, you remember Buck Rogers? It was like a comic from like the 50s and 60s about a guy who just like flies around in space. Buck rogers in the 23rd century, you know.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Eric Silver]

So it turns out that Flint Dill had a sister whose name was Lorraine Williams, who, although she wasn't a nerd, which is very important because women can't be nerds. Claire.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, famously, she thought it was a.

[Eric Silver]

Total money pit, but she decided to come on as a general manager to help right the ship because she didn't have anything else to do other than running the Buck Rogers IP for her family. The thing is, although Lorraine Williams was not a nerd and didn't really, quote, unquote, get Dungeons and Dragons and the company and kind of pooh, poohed the vibes going on, she realized that there was actually a company here and they were ruining it. So after some, like, exercising of rights and consolidating shares and talking to the Blooms, Gary Gygax walked in one day as president and called a company meeting. But it turns out he didn't have the majority shares of the company anymore. Lorraine Williams did.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Okay.

[Eric Silver]

And he didn't find out until the meeting he was chairing began and he got kicked out of his own company.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

This is some succession stuff. Interesting.

[Eric Silver]

And now you can see why Gary Gygax cares so much about how he's portrayed, especially after this meeting happened. Yeah, like he was trying to keep his momentum from being the cool nerd guy against the Christians, and now he's just some loser who lost his own company because he is not a good businessman.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And then he doesn't ever really get it back.

[Eric Silver]

Right, he never gets it back, but.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

He still wants to be associated with it forever and wants everyone to see him as the guy behind it forever. Even though he is no longer making the creative decisions in the company.

[Eric Silver]

Exactly. Yes. Because TSR is a publishing company, so they publish the fantasy novels and the dungeon adventures written by people. So the things that we associate with Dungeons and Dragons like Ravenloft and with Strahd of Barovia and Dragonlance, those were written by authors who were hired by tsr and then TSR owned that ip. And because Gary Gygax invented Dungeons and Dragons, he's taking credit for everything.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've established his main thing is saying that he did things he didn't do. Like, his main thing is saying, I had a good idea. All other ideas associated with my good idea therefore fall under the umbrella of my ideas.

[Eric Silver]

Exactly. So, Claire, can I fast forward how TSR actually kept itself afloat as a business?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. There's only a finite amount of minutes we can do this. So fast forwarding is encouraged.

[Eric Silver]

I'm gonna try to do this as fast as possible. Lorraine Williams was not a savior. She was just a woman running a failing company. She also kept pushing Buck Rogers shit to be made by tsr. She was not like a good person either. But she was trying to keep this company afloat that already had of debt. By June 1995, TSR owned $12 million to Random House because they did not like meet the money to get published enough because they were, that was their distributor. So it was a big deal and Lorraine was trying to sell TSR to someone else. Luckily, at the same time, this game called Magic the Gathering was popping off.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I've, I've heard of it. I have heard of it.

[Eric Silver]

And the company that published it, Wizards of the coast, was doing really, really well. So they were like, hey, I guess we should buy, we could buy them because like this company's going down the tubes, but someone should own Dungeons and Dragons, right?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Eric Silver]

It's a good piece of ip. This is incredibly simplified. But like basically this guy Peter Atkinson, who founded Wizards of the coast was a. Another very good businessman. That is not a positive or negative statement. He just was. Everything he touched turned to gold. So he ended up buying TSR for a relatively small amount of money because it was going down the tube. And he also purchased all of Gary Gygax's residual rights to D and D and AD and D for a six figure sum. So Gary Gygax felt whole. So from there the, the gathering people bought TSR. Dungeons & Dragons was then owned by Wizards of the Coast. That is when the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out. The second edition came out underneath. Lorraine Williams, the thing you pointed out about how Gary Gygax didn't want to improve D and D&AD and D. That was very important. That's why second edition didn't come out out until after he left. Third edition got going under wizard of the Coast. That is also when the open gaming license was invented, which let anyone kind of write D and D modules or items for free because it was actually good for the game for people to be making homebrewed content. Remember that for later.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

And then eventually, because remember Peter Atkinson, everything he touches turned to gold. Hasbro then bought Wizards of the coast, which owns Dungeons and dragons now, in 1999. And a lot of what we understand D and D to be going through it kind of continued this fallow period. Like there was the high when Gary Gygax was there and then there was this like trough For a very long time. Lorraine Williams, the Wizard of the coast time. And then like 3.5 and 4th editions of D and D didn't really do that well. And then once 5th edition came out, it was fucking on and popping. And that is when the hagiography of Gary Gygax really got got going. Yeah, we really started to see this starting in the 2000s when like nerds started buying third edition and 3.5.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, when nerds stopped being kids doing stuff and started being rich adults buying things.

[Eric Silver]

Exactly.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Which I think is the early 2000s. Like when it starts to be like, oh, there's like the.com boom and all of these things are happening. And nerds all of a sudden have buying power in a way that they like kind of didn't before.

[Eric Silver]

In a 2000 episode of Futurama, they put in Gary Gygax. And I always use that as kind of like the kicking off point of nerds really giving a shit about him.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And he voices himself in it.

[Eric Silver]

Exactly. D and D was still very niche with 3.5 and 4, but then like now that a media entity and that hasbro started seeing dollar signs in their eyes. Because also it was like 2012, 2013 and that's when companies all started being terrible all at the same time. That's really when it started. Gary Gygax also died and that's also when the Hagern biography really kicked off.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hi friends, it's Claire again with my usual quick shout out to tell you about other Multitude shows I think you might be interested in. If you like this guy sucked. Today I want to talk about the show that got me hooked on Multitude's whole catalog and really got me introduced to Multitude as a group, which is Join the Party if you've already heard me talk about it or it sounds familiar. That's because it's Eric Silver's show. Show. If your nerdiness is not restricted to history and extends to things like Dungeons and Dragons or A Pathfinder, this is the show for you. Join the Party is an actual play podcast with tangible, engaging worlds, genre pushing, storytelling and sound design, and collaborators who make each other laugh every week. Join GM Eric and players Amanda, Brandon and Julia as they welcome everyone to the table. From longtime TTRPG players to folks who've never touched or listened to a role playing game before. You can start by hopping into their current campaign. The drama and excitement of a superhero high school told using the game Masks or Marathon. One of their previous completed stories which include Plant and Bug Pirates Monster of the week at a summer camp and high fantasy worlds. What are you waiting for? Pull up a seat and join the party. Available on your local podcast app. It's Claire again. I don't know if you've noticed, but fall is here and with it comes cooler nights, heartier meals, and at least for me, the craving for something warm and satisfying. That's where America's number one choice for home cooking, HelloFresh, comes in. They're bringing comforting chef designed recipes and fresh seasonal ingredients right to your door. This season they've taken things to the next level with their biggest menu refresh yet. Firstly, they've doubled their menu. Now you can choose from 100 options each week, including new seasonal dishes and recipes from around the world. Secondly, it's also an even healthier menu filled with high protein and veggie packed recipes which I really appreciate as a very active person in I've been really enjoying my most recent hellofresh box which was delivered last week. The creamy zucchini orzotto that I made was the most comforting thing that I've had in a while on a night that was surprisingly cold after a really hot day. So it was really like the exact right meal for me. And I've also been really enjoying the rice bowls that I got and I'm looking forward to having some more in the future between my book, which is due soon, academia, and the pod that you're currently listening to. I have been working really crazy hours lately, so I'm being very genuine when I say that having hellofresh has made my life a lot a lot easier. Just because I don't have the time or energy to grocery shop or even come up with recipes like pretty frequently the best and easiest way to cook just got better. Go to hellofresh.com tgs10fm now to get 10 free meals and a free item for life. You'll get one per box with an active subscription and the free meals are applied as a discount on the first box to new subscribers only and it varies by planning. That's hellofresh.com TGS10FM to get 10 free meals and a free item for life. Or head to the link in our episode description for the same discount. It really cannot be understated how intense this veneration of Gygax is. So I was reading an article in Kotaku where that was totally reasonable about him like being like, there's some stuff we need to think about with this guy, especially when it comes to like women and race and how he really struggles or really struggled with portraying either of these things in even kind of a moderately acceptable light. And after that article, if you look him up, there are a bajillion blog posts from like big nerdy blogs being like, I can't believe they've written these horrible slandering things about Gary Gygax. And especially they were like, they're quoting him, but they're not quoting him in context. If you add in, in one sentence, for example, the quote that was included is, he wrote in 1998 or in an interview in 1998. Gaming in general is a male thing. It isn't that gaming is designed to exclude women. Everybody who's tried to design a game to interest a large female audience has failed. And I think that has to do with the different thinking processes of men and women, first of all. And bad. But people are writing articles being like, he literally says it isn't that gaming is designed to, to exclude women. He clearly didn't want to exclude women. And it's like, brother, who do you think designed the games that are excluding women?

[Eric Silver]

It was him. It was literally him. The guy who goes around saying he's a biological determinist, which is like a phrase. Did he make that up? Like, I don't. I've never heard that before.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It's like a phrenology level thing where you're saying people naturally do things because of biology and especially with gender, it shows up where people are like, well, well, in his case, he says basically like, well, women, I guess the only thing they like about DND is the creative stuff because women are soft and creative and they're not smart and warlike like men. Like, he does that and he says it's, women can play as well as males, but they do not achieve this. At 2005, I came with quotes. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same level of satisfaction from playing. Also, again, bad. But like, people are reading that and being like, like, well, he's a scientist. And actually in context, if you read the charts that I have prepared from my Definitely not racist eugenics book that I'm reading, you will agree with me, like, this is a real, a real way that people are, are trying to cast him and like, retcon their way into all of this stuff. And like, again, the thing we're constantly doing on the show is being like, we should take people at their word, right? Like, we should take these historical actors at their word. If they said they're something, we should take them at Their word. We should not try to reinvent a version of them that doesn't have that. And in his case, word about himself and what he thinks, especially when it comes to, like, things he says about women, things he says about race, and things he also says that are, we know are blatantly untrue. Like how he talks about his company and the founding of D D and all these things. If we take him at his word, he looks like an.

[Eric Silver]

Yes.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Like, he looks like a total asshole. And he is.

[Eric Silver]

There's something that's important that, like, people started seeing him as a mythological figure so much earlier than what we expect because he was kicked out of the company.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

Just go to the Wikipedia page. I think it's really important that, like, this is easily accessible. Just go to his Wikipedia page. Then, like, people started saying that he was, like, an influential person and one of the most important nerds of all time, starting in, like, 1999, in 2000. It's almost like people are trying to bring culture war nonsense to it, but it's like, nah, man. He's been saying this before because he loved that. He was venerated by the nerds who loved his game and there for him.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. It seemed to me that he wanted to make sure that the nerds who are involved in the game and then playing the game and who have power relative to the game should be people that look and think like him. He wanted it to be for him, which also shows a level of ego that I think is interesting here. He wanted everyone who played the game to think the way that he did look, the way that he did talk the way that he did, et cetera. That's also part of the prescriptive nature of his version of D and D. Modern D D is. Well, questions regarding some of these things. But people now will have branched out into doing a lot more like, I'm gonna make it reflect me and all these things, which are great. But he was like, absolutely not. That's not what they should be doing. I don't want this game to reflect anyone else's thinking. I want it to be prescriptive. I want there to be specific rules in how we do things, why we do things. I want a DM or Dungeon Master or. Or a GM or Game Master. I want them to run things the way that I think they're supposed to be running them. He would go on these, for example, go on chat rooms again. Wildcat, we have our first chat room goer of the. Of the show. But he would go on Chat rooms and be like, no, no, you're playing my game wrong. Like, ah, that's crazy.

[Eric Silver]

There's something you said that I think is important about how successful Dungeons and Dragons is as a piece of IP and as a game. Because, again, it wasn't. It was very fallow for a while, and it was very, very nerdy when 3rd, 3.5 and 4 were coming out like, 5th edition. It being like, not only is our society's acceptance of nerd culture that, like, everyone can, quote, unquote, be a nerd if you put on glasses, but also how popular 5th edition is and how popular Critical role is and Dimension 20 is and how people got into it in the pandemic. It's almost like retroactive. Hasbro is now patting themselves on the back for being, like, so glad we acquired that shit back in 1999, because it's currently floating their business. And therefore, like, the advent of fifth edition in 2012 is, like, seen as such a good idea. But. And then because of that, who. The people who wrote fifth Edition are like, wow, we really went back to what Gary wanted to do. I can read a quote which I think is really important from the hagiography one, the one by Michael Witwer. Again, the guy who works for Wizards of the coast in some ways and publishes books about him. He might not work for it, but he definitely writes the errata. He, he, he has checks.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

He wrote Hero's Feast, which is like the official licensed D and D cookbook.

[Eric Silver]

Yeah. So this is a quote at the end of the book. D D's newest version is an unqualified success. Ironically, much of 5th edition success is due to returning to many of the original concepts that Gary had laid out in his early D and D products. Back to the basics. The designers of 5e have ruthlessly hacked off much of the complexity that can put off new role players arriving at an elegant system that owes much more to classic D and D than it does the other previous editions, Said one reviewer. Wizards designer Rodney Thompson explained more methodically. We wanted our players to be able to trust the Dungeon Master as much as we did. And a big thing we could do to make that happen is to have a system function in a way that makes judgment calls seem natural and expected. If you look back at old editions of D and D, especially those that Gygax and Arneson had a hand in crafting, you can see that they had the same kind of trust in the dm. Fuck Lorraine Williamson. Fuck that lady. She obviously ruined it in second Edition. No, we're going back to what Gygax and what Dave Arnason, what they did.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, yeah. And also, so I gave this example to Eric before we started as something that I've been like, this is a Gygax. This is a gygaxian scenario. In 1983 also, he says he leaves TSR rather than he gets basically voted and kicked out of TSR. But according to him, he leaves TSR, which. What? That's 1984.

[Eric Silver]

Somewhere between 1985 and 1986, he comes back and does his big bravado thing. In 1985. I don't remember when Lorraine Williamson kicks him out.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Okay, well, so in 1983, TSR releases something called Ravenloft, which is like a module that you can use to play and it's a setting and all this stuff. And in Ravenloft, really fundamental to the mechanics of the fantasy plane that exists on the mechanics of the game itself. When you play something like Curse of Strahd, which is a campaign setting that.

[Eric Silver]

You can play, the vibe is. It's like a vampire movie out there.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

It's like a spooky, vaguely spooky Eastern European.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yes.

[Eric Silver]

Which is important and I think is also the brief that the people were given whose job it was to write this novel and setting.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. Really fundamental to the mechanics of this is that you encounter spooky Roma or Sinti people in them and they've given them a spooky Eastern European person group name. But like, they are fundamental to how you interact with the world there. And it's. I remember the first time I played Curse of strahd, it was 2020. It was during the pandemic and they had re released it in 2016 and been like, we've reskinned this. It's not as bad as it was. And I was like, okay, whatever, this is fine.

[Eric Silver]

So much of 5th edition was saying, don't worry, it's not as racist as it was.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

And then charging you $30 again for it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. And then you. I remember playing it and being like, hold on. Because this is my first time I'd ever interacted with Strahd and with Ravenloft and all of this stuff. I was like, immediately I'm in a. What they're calling essentially like a gypsy plague camp.

[Eric Silver]

Yes.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And I was like, that seems bad. Like, I was like, that doesn't seem good. And then the further we got in, I was like, yeah, I think this might be incredibly racist. And then it becomes clear, like, oh, they're trying to represent, like, Roma and Sinti people, but they're trying to do it in this way that's like just really overt Nazi style, eugenic style representations of them. And I was like, there might be some problems with this IP that I love and have loved for a while and have not critically considered before now. And surprise. That was released under Gygax. Not written by him, but.

[Eric Silver]

Right. Released under him. Supposedly he was managing it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Eric Silver]

It's funny you say IP, because I never really understand this. If we fast forward to our current decade, right? Hasbro owns Dungeons and Dragons. It's so popular. And they're like, you know what we're gonna do is we're gonna make this into ip. And what does that mean, really? It means that they're taking the world written by people who were not Gary Gygax. Sometimes it was him, but most of the time it was people who worked for the company. And now they're going to be like, even though this is a setting for an imagination machine, they're going to be like, no, no, no. We're going to make movies on this. We're going to make video games on this. This world that they're squeezing all of the life out. And I think that Gary Gygax, if he was still around, would have been like, sick. Nice. Thanks for remembering me. Gary Gygax, the guy who made all of this possible. Like, that's the vibe that I get as Hasbro is doing what corporations do.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And please give me my money.

[Eric Silver]

Exactly.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Like, this need to, like, retain some fidelity to him does not seem representative of his feeling about this at all. Other than him being like, well, I just want it to be whatever I want it to be. Rather than like, some sort of, like, deeper loyalty he has to the world that he created. So much as it is like a desire for himself to be at the center of absolutely everything. And yeah, so it's a weird one because it's like, can you make a D and D that's not a Gygax one? And right now they say no. So then what's happened now is people are just branching out into lots of. Which I think is great, is people are branching out into all kinds of other things. Like, join the party is playing not D and D anymore. Started off playing D&D, 5th edition, and now is doing all kinds of other shit. Where are you playing masks?

[Eric Silver]

Right now we're playing Masks, which is like teenage superhero tabletop rpg. It's really good. I'm loving it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It's really good.

[Eric Silver]

It's funny you say we're playing fifth edition. We're not playing the current iteration of Dungeons and Dragons right now. Because what Hasbro has also done is turn Dungeons and Dragons into something called 1D&D. It is no longer put out in editions book based. It is now all on the cloud, baby. Because now you can charge everyone for stuff. Remember how I said that tabletop RPGs are more like oral tradition, whereas one person can kind of puts the thing together and then everyone like plays. And I think that was what the company Hasbro realized was going on. That one person was buying the books and all their friends would borrow it because that's how humans work. No, no, no. We have to figure out a way to do that. Here's what the CEO of Wizard of the Coast, Cynthia Williams, who doesn't work there anymore, she's now the CEO of Funko, which I think is really funny. She said this at a webinar in December 20th. D&D has never been more popular and we have really great fans and engagement, but the brand is really under monetized. She pointed out that Dungeon Masters only make up about 20% of the player base, but are the largest share of paying players. There is some support in digital channels like D and D beyond and the impending one D&D which be the key to unlock the type of recurring spending you see in video games. Currently Hasbro is turning Dungeons and Dragons into Fortnite because that's how corporations make money. And if only Gary Gygax knew how to run a fucking company, then maybe we wouldn't be in this goddamn position.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I agree. I think it really is like, it sucks for everybody all around except Hasbro right now. Okay, so again, I love D and D. I like playing D and D. I have been playing D and D for a long time. I really enjoy it. The amount of things I have to buy now to play it is crazy. Like, I like D and D Beyond because I like having a thing that I can set and do. And I'm really bad at like writing stuff down and remembering them. And I'm like, okay, D and D Beyond, okay. It's constantly costing more. And then you have to buy a new thing. Oh, if you wanted to include a homebrewed item, which is just something that you made up yourself, or if you want to use a spell that's not from a book that you currently own and have it work in your character, you must now buy that book. Like things that we used to be able to just like, do, because that was just how the game worked. Now you can't. And they found a way to make absolutely everything cost money and also make every single individual player buy them. So, yeah, $86 before was a lot, but how much cumulatively have I spent on Dungeons and Dragons over the all the years of playing it? And especially it's gone up every year because now I need all these digital accoutrements basically, in order to be able to play it.

[Eric Silver]

It's worth pointing out that the reason why 1984 was such a bad year for TSR was because everyone who had Advanced Dungeons and Dragons already bought it. Like, they saturated the market.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

So it's like Hasbro has now ran into the same problem and they're doing the corporate strategy of the 2020s, which is turn everything into a games, a service. Nothing is free. You're going to take it because your life is now this product and you have to pay.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

You know what's interesting is this episode is coming out the week after our collaborative episode with wow of True on inshidification called like this Internet Sucks. And this is a good example of a business that has become insidified where like now the way that Cory Doctorow talks about insidification in his book is he, he says, essentially actually begins to abuse the users, essentially because it knows that they're so entangled in this. And part of what nerd culture does and part of what Gary Gygax really gloms onto and all these other people attach themselves to is that it becomes a real all encompassing identity. Or it can become an all encompassing identity because it encompasses things that you like to read, things that you like to watch, things that you like to imagine yourself doing. It encompasses the activities you're engaging in with your friends. It becomes. Becomes a real way of viewing yourself. And things like D and D, like, play on that now, especially with the like gigantic boom in shows, podcasts, like, every possible thing around this, many of which I watch and enjoy. Like, I have no problems with actual plays. I think they're wonderful, obviously, otherwise why the would you be here? But like, I like all these things, but like, they have become fundamental to people's views of themselves. And Hasbro as a major corporation has said, great, we've got them, basically, has been like, great, they will not disentangle themselves from this thing. So let's just start charging them for it.

[Eric Silver]

Can I make a great example of that, please? Maybe you might be interested in the Dungeons and Tale of riches. The upcoming digital slot machine coming to casinos and online iGaming platforms sometime in 2025.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, shut up.

[Eric Silver]

Hasbro just made a D and D slot machine. Folks like, they're slapping that shit on everybody.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Anything on anything at this point, you could literally. And I am not, when I'm saying literally, I do mean literally. I'm not just using that for emphasis. You could outfit your entire house in Hasbro affiliated, officially licensed DND gear. You could get like your dining table can be. Can be a gaming table. Your couch could be fucking dragon. Print everything you want.

[Eric Silver]

Every single piece of your clothing could be licensed D and D clothing. Your shoes, your socks, your underwear, your.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

People are buying D and D themed wedding rings. Literally anything you could imagine could be this. And I don't think that's bad, but I do think it is indicative of the fact that they care a lot less about the actual game and the people playing it than they do about making money off it.

[Eric Silver]

That is sure how it feels.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. And like people again, to bring this back to Gygax, the way that he was thinking about this stuff even before then was like, well, as long as they credit me with it.

[Eric Silver]

Yeah. You know, there was like a moment when he stopped creating and just became a famous dude. When he moved to la, I think he was like, good, now I get to get fat on this hog. Like, this is. This is what he's. What I'm going to do. And he was riding that high for a lot of his life and now he's doing that as a force.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Ghost who published Empire of Imagination? I'm so curious.

[Eric Silver]

That's a great question.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Bloomsbury. Let me read you some reviews of Empire of Imagination. And I'm sorry, Michael Witwer, you're catching strays in this, but what the fuck? It says things like the work of Michael Witwer is all I could have hoped it would be. If you want to know what it was like back when D and D was being born, then this book is a must have. And you know who wrote that? ERNEST Gary Gygax Jr.

[Eric Silver]

I know there's a lot of. Of stories of D and D out there. I. I had read Slay the Dragon because. Slaying the Dragon because so business focused. But like now just look, I'm just looking at the Amazon recommended. There's of Dice and Men. There is Game Wizards. There's Rise. Yeah. There's Rise of the Dungeon Master. There's all this stuff and it's all these biographies, I guess. And Michael Witwer Just, he's the one who got access to Gary Gygax. This is as close to a authorized biography as it could be. I guess.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

There's another one. Empire of Imagination tells the story of the emperor himself. At times brilliant, sometimes tragic, but ultimately victorious. Peter Adkisson, founder and former CEO of Wizards of the coast, owner of Gen Con. Like, these are all endorsed by people who have a vested interest in Gygax being cast as a sort of tortured genius, you know, rather than like a cocaine fueled massage as a cocaine fueled misogynist.

[Eric Silver]

Yeah. It's funny also to think that, like, Hasbro's also keeps trying to take things away from players so that they can have more corporate control. So it's like, let's talk about something that they tried to take away from D and D players that had nothing to do with Gary Gygax. Remember when I talked about the Open Gaming License, something that came up in third edition?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I was hoping that would come back. Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

Yes. So the Open Gaming Licenses, again, was this thing that was codified by people who worked at Wizards of the coast at the time. I think this was before they got bought by Hasbro.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

Where they're like, hey, anyone can make anything based on D and D and they can sell. So this is what we call third party materials. These could be items, these are stories, these are adventures, these are all this different stuff. People have been doing it for a long time. And I think it's a. It's the backbone of why D and D got so popular, especially fifth edition.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yes.

[Eric Silver]

It's also why actual play podcasts and streams exist. Because you could use Dungeons and Dragons, the game to fuel your storytelling piece of media. Right.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Eric Silver]

Back in January 2023, Hasbro intimated that they were going to change how the Open Gaming License worked. They now made you pay royalties. They now wanted a big slice of the pie. And that made everyone freak out. Rightly so. Something that was a backbone of the reason why we like this thing. And in people's entire lifestyles, like there are influencers, but also D and D creators. It was a really big, big thing. And everyone stood up and said, fuck you, fuck that. And I was part of like some organization groups that were putting this together, but a lot of people stood up to it. And then Hasbro had to back down. They said, no, actually, that's not true. They put Dungeons and Dragons in Creative Commons. Now, I'm not a lawyer, I don't exactly know what that means, but now, like, Hasbro can't Theoretically fuck with it. Which is nice. And Hasbro had to admit, admit Hasbro CEO, real name Chris Cox, had to admit it was a misfire because he, he lost a lot of goodwill, especially as they were starting to port over Dungeons and Dragons into being a games as service, into making it one D&D and D beyond located.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. And especially like this actually, again, a gygaxian thing to do because like, like when we talk about him totally screwing over Arneson, like, immediately, is that the reason D and D had this enormous resurgence in 2016, 2015, the reason it, like, exploded and became what it is right now in this, like, real cultural obsession is because of people using this open games license, is because of things like Critical role and dimension 20 and all these, like, big, big actual plays and streamers, influencers, podcasts, like, join the party. All these people, people are the reason that it had this resurgence. And they were like, okay, now it's big enough. Let's try to screw all those people over. Because a big thing. I remember in 2023 when this happened, a big thing. Sorry, I'm just yelling at this point because I'm just so. Do it, do it.

[Eric Silver]

Go in.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A big thing with this was that in 2023, I remember when this happened and everyone was freaking out. And one of the things they were freaking out about was like, what the hell are all these shows that they watch? What are they going to do? How are they going to negotiate to be allowed to still use the property that they're using? And people are like, I guess they're just going to have to come up with their own systems, or maybe they're not and they're going to have to pay a crazy amount of money, or maybe they're going to have to get bought by Hasbro. Like, there was this whole thing where everyone was like, okay, we're so locked into this media culture as nerds or as people who enjoy DND or whatever. We're so locked into this that, like, our whole lives could be flipped on its head because a company was like, how do we make a little bit more money off this? And how do we screw over the people that really are responsible for us making money in the first place?

[Eric Silver]

Right. Because, and I mean, this is fundamentally where this comes back to is like, Gary Gygax sucked because he was a guy who made a very popular piece of art in part of the artistic tradition. He was working in the milieu of all these nerds in Wisconsin putting some more role play into their war game. And he did a really good job and a lot of people bought it. And then he either didn't know what was going on or he was negligent and kind of just let them do whatever. Or he rubber stamped themselves and ran that company into the ground. So then companies are going to do what companies are going to do. Wizards of the coast bought it and Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast. And now the thing that he invented is a corporate weapon. Yes, it is something that hurts the people that loves it. And he could have just not moved to LA and did cocaine for three years and dated a bunch of women, but instead he did. And now this is what happened to the game he invented. Because he cares more about himself and his big old ego than actually maintaining the game that he invented, while also.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Profiting and really actively benefiting from all the love and the care that other people had for this game while he was just selling off chunks of it along the way and not doing any real stewardship of it and whatever, while still claiming all of the credit for it and all of taking in all of their love for it and for him. So. Which I think sucks. Like, I think that sucks.

[Eric Silver]

Claire, I'm looking at the timeline from the book by White Gold Witwer and I just want. I have the actual timeline of what happened here. So Gary Gygax hired Lorraine Williams to help manage TSR on April 1, 1985. And Gary Gygax was kicked out of TSR on October 22, 1985. It happened so quickly.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

She totally successioned him. She.

[Eric Silver]

Yeah, so quickly.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Like, I mean, I do think that's a little bit of. So I mentioned Gene Wells earlier, but I think that's a little bit of karmic retribution on that front because Gene Wells, I didn't really talk about her, but is the first woman that TSR hired. And she like later accused TSR of like treating her horribly. She said that she faced like harassment, a lack, as she was like not supported, had a lack of support. She was sabotaged professionally by them, like, did all these things. And so I do think it's funny that he hires this woman to like take over and then she is like, well, actually it's time for you to go, bud.

[Eric Silver]

It is funny. There is a kind of like. What is the, the phrase? It's like maiden mother crone. Is that the tradition? It's funny. We actually have our own trinity here. We have Lorraine Williams, we have the put upon woman, Jane Wells, and then we also have Gail Carpenter, who was Gary Gygax's girlfriend and former. And his former assistant who gave him his third son, Alexander. Hugh Hamilton Gygax.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure. And you know, it is hilarious that he has a kid named Alexander Hamilton Gygax because that he sure does kind of sucks.

[Eric Silver]

He extremely does.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I think we are out of time.

[Eric Silver]

We are.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

We didn't even get to talk about some of the other things that could be there. For example, like D. And D is overtly anti Semitic. And everyone should go read Eric's article on this for hey Alma, read my art.

[Eric Silver]

It's in the show notes. Read that. It's like I don't have enough time just to talk about how like all the monsters in AD&D is just like fantasy pastiche as shot through his like quasi Jehovah's Witness reading a bunch of religious survey texts sort of guy. You know, there's a God called Tiamat who is a seven headed dragon goddess, but really that name is just ripped from the primordial sea in Mesopotamian mythology. Like he just loved taking religious shit and filing off the barcodes. He really did.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, totally. I think I'm thoroughly convinced. And also I did a lot of the convincing too here. But Gary Gyax sucks. I hate him. Also embarrassing the hat. His initials are egg. So that's another thing.

[Eric Silver]

That's why he went by Gary.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That's. Well, yeah. Also a fun fact is his middle name was Gary because his mom named him after the actor Gary Cooper and she was the one who wanted to call him Gary. You have made a convincing argument. He sucks. Thank you so much for coming on. Eric Silver can be found on Twitter and Instagram Silvero bluesky is Eric Silver. You can listen to Join the Party wherever pods are cast or at the link in our episode description. And you can also read any Eric's article on antisemitism and D and D there. And if he thinks of any other articles for me to add, I'll put those in there too. And yeah, great.

[Eric Silver]

So am I the biggest nerd who's been on the show? Is that. Is that it?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, I mean by your. You said earlier everyone who's been on the show is a gigantic nerd.

[Eric Silver]

I think it's fair. I don't have a doctorate to show for it. Like I just have like all of these books I now own. So I think that does make me a nerd because I didn't like. I kind of just did it for fun.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

You got a nerd in both senses. Both in the dress up as wizards and yell about stuff sense and also in the red, a bunch of books and feel strongly about the things that you that you sense.

[Eric Silver]

Hell yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Thanks for tuning into this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Eric Silver, and edited by Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by multi, multi multi hyphenate Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month, and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our [e-mail] this guy sucked. See you next week.

[Eric Silver]

It.