Gary Gygax doesn’t make his saving roll (updated)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008Dungeons & 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.)