Gary Gygax’s last saving throw

Gary Gygax. Now there’s a name for you. And one, too, that will forever be linked to my fumbling, tentative (yet inquisitive) march towards adulthood. The co-founder of Dungeons & Dragons died on March 4th at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and I can’t let this slip by without a few reflections. (I learned of Gygax’s passing while still in London, but wanted to wait until I returned home where I had access to some buried treasure in the archives…)

Gygax, along with Dave Arneson, laid the foundation for an alternate world populated with enough nightmarish inhabitants to keep an active imagination up all night, running on a mixture of fear and utter fascination. I never ‘played’ D&D as part of a regular group — though I remember word of Brian Stolt’s prowess as a DM (dungeon master) — but the lure of Dungeons & Dragons, as a parallel-universe proving ground for reinventing and testing yourself against a panoply of mythic creatures (good and evil), was simply irresistible.

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent poring over the pages of the original Monster Manual — Gygax’s taxonomy of terror. Many of the drawings look comical now, but as an “illustrated compendium of monsters: aerial servant to zombie”, the manual served as a kind of metaphorical index to all the dark, twisted, and gor-rific creatures that lie in wait for us in the real world quest that is adolescence, searching for safe passage through to the other side. As a budding teen-ager the book was just what I needed: a modern-day Grimm’s Faerie Tales to gird my psyche for any unimaginable horror lurking around the next corner.

The Monster Manual runs the gamut from the mundane — ant, baboon, elephant, snake, what have you — to the wondrously bizarre — brain mole, beholder, floating eye, shambling mound, and, one of my personal favorites, the gelatinous cube (which somehow managed to find its way into most of our adventures). Typically used as a reference while playing the game, I just loved to peruse the Manual in search of the fantastic and grotesque. Plus, there were plenty of female creatures with boobs, too, so that was good.

As already mentioned, I didn’t regularly play D&D with a group of my peers, but Todd, Geoff, and I would occasionally whip up a game for each other (with Geoff usually presiding as DM). I never knew if we were doing it “right” or not, but it was still gripping play all the same — even in Todd’s room on a gray Saturday afternoon, substituting craggy channels in the carpeting for subterranean passageways that our die-cast figurines were determined to chart. I think that’s what I liked best about D&D: the creation and exploration of new territory. I’d spend hours mapping out vast worlds with elaborate geo-topographical features (maps, which, were not too dissimilar from Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I might add…).

But the creative impetus did not stop at map-making. In order to play, of course, you need to invent a character to embark upon the quest. Half the fun of D&D is in dreaming up new alter egos for yourself, although it should come as no surprise how transparent those characters really are when viewed (in hindsight) as projections of the perceived self. Take my two characters, for instance, Freelik (half-elf) and Gandorf (wizard). OK, the names are pretty weak, but these two are both me in one sense or another: Freelik being a representation of how I actually saw myself at the time (with a low “charisma” rating) and Gandorf a working incarnation of a more idealized self. (See that cap he’s got on? Mom had made one just like it for me years previous when I was a wizard for Halloween. The fact that it looks so ridiculously small in the sketch makes me wonder if I wasn’t imagining myself in the future: Space Wiz!) I see that both are fairly intelligent and wise, however — sign of a self-esteem not too beaten down and battered. Quest on!

Freelik’s character sheet

Gandorf’s character sheet