Dungeons & Dragons (and before that Chainmail, a proto-RPG which I played in a campaign run by Walter Jon Williams) co-creator Gary Gygax has died.
Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!
Those of us who have enjoyed, and devoted far too much life, time, and creative energy to, role-playing games, owe Gygax a deep (if somewhat ambivalent) debt. So do those of us who make our living as professional fantasists – by which I include SF writers, by the way: all SF, and arguably all fiction, is a subset of fantasy. Like J. K. Rowling he brought us many, many potential customers, in the form of readers turned onto fantastic fiction through his work.
Naturally, those of us who have earned income from role-playing games or RPG-derived fiction owe him big time. Since Wild Cards started life as an RPG (you knew this, yes?), and I wrote a D&D novel, War in Tethyr
He had his enemies and critics. Anybody who leaves a mark is going to. Especially in such insular, and strongly overlapping, circles as gaming and SF&F.
I don’t know much – okay, anything, really – about Gygax as a person. But I’ll readily say of him: hail, farewell, and thanks for everything.
(Thanks to David Weigel on the Hit & Run blog for the heads-up. Lolcat added 3/7/2008, courtesy of, where else, I Can Has Cheezburger? And if you think that’s inappropriate, I only hope that when I die, I rate my own Lolcat.)
When you die, I will so totally LOL you, don’t you fret, Vic!
I had no idea you’d written a D&D media tie in book.
Is it possible that one of them is good?!
I think you are a fine writer, but every D&D book has been horrible in my experience. This is setting up a cognitive dissonance in me that might break my head.
*goes off to find a copy of War in Tethyr and see*
And a happy belated birthday to you, Saraphina!
I’ve been distracted, as you can probably infer from my dearth of posts (trying to finish the durn Rogue Angel yarn so’s I can jump right on the next) so it took me longer than conscionable to understand your exceedingly complex 13-word post.
I’m honored. I can’t readily conceive of a greater or more appropriate memorial than my own LOLcat from you.
Mind, I’m holding you to this!
Ty:
Well, thanks. I like to think this one’s good.
While I’d actually played D&D, unlike … ahem … BattleTech … and enjoyed the experience, mostly (especially since it was generally with the Usual Suspects), and of course had to shape the book to fit its place in their ficton, I wrote, as I always try to, for my own pleasure.
Try not to let cognitive dissonance break your head. The lovely Jayné might never forgive me. It’d be hard to live with that. Perhaps the knowledge that War in Tethyr is a Vic Milán book that just happens to be a D&D tie-in will help maintain the old cranial integrity…
Of course, if on reading you decide the book blows it should certainly be safer. As always, YMMV.