“Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons”, by Ben Riggs

 

293 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-1250278043

I first delved into the history of Dungeons & Dragons with Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson (reviewed on August 17^th, 2023). While that magisterial book delved deep into the origins of not only D&D but of TSR, as well, it ended in 1985 when Gary Gygax was forced out of the company he’d founded. With Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, we have a less-detailed yet more-complete story of the rises and falls of D&D and TSR and all the rest of it, not only from its beginnings in Lake Geneva, WI, in 1973 but to its acquisition by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

Maybe the first quarter of the book is about Gary Gygax, the founding of TSR and the creation of D&D, along with some of TSR’s other, ultimately abortive attempts to expand its D&D franchise beyond the roleplaying table and into other mediums, especially television and movies. Popular wisdom seems to hold that Gygax was blameless for the misfortunes that befell him and his company while holding that Lorraine Williams was the villain who stole his company and ran it into the ground, leaving it as easy pickings for rival Wizards of the Coast. As is usual in such cases, the truth is much more complicated and, it must be said, interesting.

Under Riggs’ pen (or keyboard?), Williams is just as quirky and individualistic as every other nutjob working at TSR, although with a focus on the business aspect of the company rather than it’s creative. Gygax, meanwhile, while undoubtedly a creative dynamo, was a poor businessman, spending money like it was water on a litany of projects, like trying to raise a shipwreck from the bottom of a lake, or a hard-R Dungeons and Dragons movie when they were marketing the game to kids. The cartoon (of which I never missed an episode, FYI) was a good way to expand the market for his product, but precious few of his ideas really had merit.

In contrast, Lorraine Williams was an excellent businesswoman who was disinterested in the product TSR produced and kept her distance from her employees, a bad combination for a creativity-driven company. She was also obsessed with the Buck Rogers IP and erroneously believed it would be a massive success (the fact her family owned the rights to Buck Rogers had NOTHING to do with her beating this dead horse). Later, she would attempt to move out of the tabletop roleplaying game business into paperback publishing because they were selling far more books than games, a move the obsessive gamers within loathed.

There’s a lot to talk about here, and I, for one, was shocked to learn that the 90s was not the silver age of TSR I imagined it to be, the era that I really came to know and play the game. All the products I loved – the player character Handbooks, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Al-Qadim and all the rest – that were being produced by a successful and robust company (I thought) were in fact desperate throws of the dice by a company trying to grow the game by attracting new players with these new campaign settings. Other plans – like partnering with DC to make comics, and then screwing DC by making their own “comic modules” – failed and cost the company millions.

Ben Riggs has written a fascinating story with reams of detail gleaned from interviews with many of the power players involved (not the dead ones, and not Lorraine Williams); if said interviewees contradict one another, Brigg’s is very good at giving us insight into both what actually happened and the biases of those recalling. The writing is cheeky but accessible, not to say irreverent, what with Riggs’ references to “Saint Gary” or TSR’s HQ as the Q-Tip factory. I have to say, however, that I enjoyed this book because of all of the detailed background of the founding I received after having read Game Wizards by Peterson, so you may want to do the same.

Slaying the Dragon is, then, the tragic tale of how a small, independent company that made games for geeks and squares the world over was brought down by stupidity and mismanagement (they passed on a Lord of the Rings RPG?!) only to be swallowed up by another independent firm (that would be Wizards of the Coast) that was, in turn, eaten whole by that gaming leviathan Hasbro. While D&D is still alive and kicking, it is only as an adjunct of a larger corporate giant without identity or spirit. While I’d rather have any D&D than no D&D at all, that chaotic, creative spirit of the original is long gone – and so is the magic.