Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to cool people do cool stuff, but your weekly reminder that I'm a nerd. I'm your host, Maria Kiljoy and with me today is my guest Edza Trun who's the host of Better Offline. Hi. Hi ho h Offline Just life.
Absolutely just flawless introduction from me, and I'm just unable to communicate with the human Yeah.
That's that's why we get paid the big bucks.
That's why we told good Macron.
Yeah, because they told us we had faces for radio, and then here we are. Our producer today is Sharene Hi Sharen. Hi, I'm back, Sharene. When did you play D and D? What was it like? How'd it go?
I mean, if I'm being honest, it was like maybe twelve thirteen years ago. It was a long time ago. Oh yeah, And if I'm being honest, I thought it was a little boring. Yeah, really long. It's like the Baseball of games.
It takes a way to yeah.
And I don't it's hard to pay attention and most people are really into it, so if you're not, it's just kind of a weird vibe.
But that makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like it might be they just like not into it. And there's also that I think that a lot of people running games just sort of take it for granted
that everyone's having fun. Whereas I was reading this thing I really liked while I was doing research for this episode, where I was talking about how like people are used to coming into games where it's like this team versus that team, but the players are working together, and then the game master's goal isn't to kill all the players, it's to make them have fun. And that's like your win condition.
Punish them.
Yeah, I mean, I guy gaxit's punish them.
I'm obsessed with games. I love any kind of game, I love any kind of puzzle, but I just need able to have and I'm very competitive. At the same time, I understand people being into something. But D and D has a it's a little too much for me. Maybe there's just a little too much of a.
It feels like.
Something that's very variable based on the group you have.
My best mate, it's very true, plays.
D and D.
He's a great dungeon master and also apparently very horrible to people during it in a fun way. But I imagine if you get kind of a half ost group or you get like a guy gag style guy. Yeah, the guy's like, ah, but the book was the book was cursed. You opened and read the cursed book, you fucking idiot. How didn't you know that? Yeah? And I get I guess maybe there's some sort of line to drive from. Was Guy GaX a very paranoid guy?
Yes? I was after him.
Okay, so he may legitimately have just been trying to teach people or just lived his life in his constant stay. Well, is this dangerous? Is there a centipede in there?
Gary? Gary, we're in an Albertson.
We'll get buying groceries imilipeds in it?
Dangerous reason. I got really excited when I found out the first game of D and d Ever had centipedes as the the monster. Was that in the game that I wrote the number city, the like generic first enemy for the players to fight is giant centipedes. Yeah, if you don't know what.
In most games, I mean not pretty sure worm you know, like Zelda had like the worm that in the sand like it was.
Yeah, like the slimes and dragon, I mean I'm pretty sure that they were in early EverQuest.
Whatever. The someone listening to this is going to correct me here. Pretty sure what the second zone of Western Commons after knos Quinos. It was Sony EQ backwards. I'm pretty sure that there were some there, but it might also have been the later expansion. If you email me and want to talk about EverQuest, I will talk to you all day. I got a lot of depression in that game.
I am very grateful that I am old enough that World of Warcraft came out after I was done with high school. Yeah, it was.
It was a tough time to have to be around for the high school.
Time of Wow. Yeah, I was.
I was EverQuest in high school. Wow. In the beginning of Carl Wow. Wow. Towards the end, do you know how World of Warcraft actually got started? Though? Just taking the show. But there's a very short story. Okay, so well towards the EverQuest is still going for some reason day.
But what happened towards the end in the name they keep claiming it the end of the Shadows of Lukelin expansion, which was set on the moon, or maybe it was the Planes of Power there was, Yeah, it was the Planes of Power expansion, and the game was kind of very obviously starting to fall apart.
Like.
It was obvious that the developers kind of weren't fucking sure what to sell people anymore. And there was this final level raide level called Planes of Time and a group, one of the bigger groups, Fires of Heaven, one of the they went to it. They got to the thing and it just didn't work. It was very obvious that Sony did not expect Sony Online Entiment did not expect people to get there. Guy called four Or got very
pissy about it. Another guy called tig old Bitties was his name, and on the nameless I believe Legacy.
A classic English name. Both of these two guys.
Insult the culture, insult them all away. Jeff Kaplan who played tig Ole Bitties. He is now senior at Blizzard Activision Blizzard, so is Rob Pardo, who I believe is also on Legacy of Steel, as well as Furor, who I can't remember the real name of. I've actually also
been a weird guy. Nevertheless, what World of Warcraft did and what Blizzard did, because they used to be quite a smart company, was they just hired people from the EverQuest forums whoa okay, they hired them and they went and they everyone I've met a Blizzard really not like World of Walcroff was actually founded on something kind of cool, which is these people actually played the game.
It's crazy idea, yeah fans. Yeah, but all of.
This, like mailing people's stuff and all of this like really petty shit, kind of reminds me of the Fires of Heaven days when people just went on there like well, that's actually the conflict needs being and it was usually just directed at the game developers, who are in this thankless job of just knowing that they had to make these people happy, but knowing that this was like twenty people, yeah, in a game with hundreds of thousands, if not millions
of players, and you just had to make these very loud people who people just agreed with. Anyway, that's my story. No that sorry for that.
No, it's a good like nothing ever changes about nerds thing, you know, And again for all my like, well, I think I started this episode by saying I'm a nerd, I'm whatever. So in case you're just joining now, which would be a very strange thing for you to do. This is part two of a two parter about the history of Dungeons and Dragons and role playing games in general.
Where we last left our heroes, they were working for minimum wage for a monster who invented D and D, swimming around a man who wait, he can't sue me, he's dead buildings. Yeah. D and d's early heyday is the mid nineteen seventies of the mid nineteen eighties, and this is a time when, especially for white American culture, it's obsessively and we talked with this last time, almost
pathologically non political. Don't talk about politics is of course a political position, one that reinforced the status quote capitalism, consumerism, and shit. Everyone in twenty twenty four knows that fucking shit, but people didn't want to hear it back then. The thing is, though, the cultural influences on D and D and RPGs more broadly way way the fuck political in all kinds of ways, both good ways and bad ways.
You don't live through the forties or the sixties without paying attention to how the world works and noticing that there's a lot of people trying to make very dramatic changes in how the world works. There are all kinds of influences on Dungeons and Dragons, of course, high fantasy and epic fantasy. We're really getting going by the nineteen sixties. But two of the most present and clear influences are two authors I've paid a lot of attention to as
relates to their political positions. J R. Tolkien, who's probably from the same town as you because he's British, and fucking Michael Moorcock, who is also British. I assume people have heard of Tolkien, and if people are first hearing about Morcock just now, you're going to be in this stage for about a year where you can't say his name without laughing.
Oh fuck, he was he was born He wasn't even born in England, j R. R.
Tolkien.
He was born in South Africa.
Oh shit, really that makes sense.
He died in Bournemouth, which is where my mother was born. And I thought I was about to be very embarrassed, like the technically we all kind of from the same place.
No, yeah, I love that. You know this British guy and you're like, yeah, of course there's three people on this island and no one's angry.
Yeah hate each other. So wait, there's a fellow called Morecock in England.
Yeah, Michael Moorcock.
Yeah, that's got a rough ross secondary school for that man.
Either we are if they all read any more Cock, No, I've had plenty. Thanks, yeah, I will. I won't expect any of you to say his name yet. In a year he'll be able to say his name. Just too hard to pronounce anyway.
I think Michael Moorcock might have actually grown up near me. Yeah, he lives in Texas now, born in London and thirty nine of the landscape of London, particularly the er in notting Hill and Labort Grove. Labbort Grove is very close to where I grew up.
Okay. Yeah, See there's three people in England and none of them live there, and one of them is here.
Yeah, beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada.
I'm not gonna go too deep on talking because he's probably gonna get his own episodes one of these days when I'm because, but I'm gonna say a few things about him first. Anyone isn't aware of J. R. Tolkien. This is the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings, which is basically where modern fantasy fiction comes from. He didn't invent the genre, but he breathed life into it.
Another one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, said about who's also British God damn it said about Tolkien and his influence quote j R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy, the way that Mount Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it's big and up close, sometimes it's just shape on
the horizon. Sometimes it's not there at all, which means either of the artist has either made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mount Fuji. So whenever there isn't Tolkien in fantasy, it is a conscious choice, right Terry, Yeah, Terry Bratchet is probably the most blameless of all these.
People, one of the few people I'll say whatever, Yeah, I got nothing bad to say about Terry.
No, the only good cop he know is uh Vimes.
Vimes. Yeah, it was luck how he didn't like being He didn't like other people to shave him. WHOA.
When that other British author decided to come out as a massive transphobe a couple of years ago, there's this Everyone was like, oh God, this is sad and horrible.
And then this person told a story, this trans woman told a story about meeting Terry Pratchett and getting her book signed by Terry Pratchett and being like, well, my name is actually and then gave a boy's name, but I'm trying to change my name to girl's name, and Terry Pratchett was like, oh great, and signed it to the girl's name and was like that, good luck with every name.
Yeah. What a legend. Yeah, and so I have no idea what the other author is. But if I did, they get it by a big truck.
An obscure lady that no one pays attention to anymore. Tolkien has earned his detractors. He is an English Catholic who's obsessed with Norse mythology, so his monumental impact on fantasy has made it extra hard for non European fantasy and medieval stuff to really break through culturally. And his writing, while I would argue it's well intentioned, is absolutely racist.
In a short story I wrote back a while back, a character calls him the most influential, subconsciously racist author of the twentieth century, and I stand by that completely.
It makes say it was the World War One veteran as well. Yeah, he grew up in like.
The Golden Age, of British racism. Yeah, and he tried not to be. And he actively worked against racism while unconsciously absolutely encouraging racism fairly our a bias. His villains are basically Middle Eastern coded and Orcs are like born bad and all kinds of other shit. He was also vocally anti Nazi. The Nazis wrote saying they wanted to translate his stuff into German, but they wanted to make sure he wasn't Jewish first, and he told his publisher,
as far as I'm concerned, they can go hang. And he told Nazis, if I am to understand that you are inquiring whether or not I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appeared to have no ancestors of that gifted people nice And so Nazi Germany did not publish translations of his books.
He also wrote some of the most compelling critiques of political power ever written, and he wasn't subtle when he named the ring of power the ring of power which is not to be used but instead cast into the fires of Mount Doom. Near the end of his life, he wrote a letter to his son saying this politics were moving more and more towards anarchism. He wrote a world full of elves and dwarves and hobbits, which is what D and D is, except D and D had to change it's the name of hobbits to halflings to
avoid a lawsuit. He basically set up all the fucking tropes of modern fantasy, well a lot of them, because actually all these other writers did too, and hippies love Tolkien. So you have all these like crazy radicals through the sixties and seventies, like kind of doing shit and naming it after shit from Lord of the Rings and shit. Hippies love Tolkien, but not all of them. One fantasy author writing during that time whose influence on D and D is just as apparent when you dig into it,
is the anarchist author Michael Moorcock. Morcock is mostly known today for writing el Rick, maybe the first anti hero
the fantasy genre. Morcock also invented the chaos star, that eight pointed star that everyone either loves or hates, and there's always annoying discourse about on the Internet unless you live in a blessed corner of the Internet that doesn't care about the sort of thing, which case I'm envious all kinds of shit from him ended up in D and D and D and D. There's like this, and some of it's like bad and annoying stuff in D and D, Like basically everyone speaks this language called Common,
which is more or less like English. Like if you're like an elf, you speak Elvin and Common. If you're a human, you just speak Common. So just fucking Americans in English, you know, right. That comes from Michael Morcock. He had the common tongue that he wrote into things. Also drinking a potion that makes you immune to edged weapons, which is some obscure, random gamey shit. He wrote gamey ass fiction like it was just full of game stuff. Put on a ring that makes you move twice as fast,
that kind of fancy writing. Yeah, all these new moods.
Sound one hundred years old, these new movies, it's all like interconnected shit. Oh, it's got to be a franchise thing. Now, why didn't you get cart I took a poshm. Yeah, why are we in a fancy world if we can't use the easy tree? The fuck that it has?
It's fantasy? Yeah, yeah, I have some.
Fun with everything. Some fucking dull these days.
He might like his writing, his writing is like kind of edgy, but pulpy and well, not edgy. If he took the potion, that's true, it's immune. Well, people can be as edgy as they want around him, He's immune to it. He also cynical talking swords comes from fucking Michael Morricock. And maybe most importantly, he frames his book as books a lot of them as this like weird theological war between the universal forces of law and chaos, only he's not in favor of law. His hero is
a chaos paragon. The D and D alignment system of morality used to just be law versus chaos. Eventually it became a two axis chart of law and chaos and good and evil. Morcock also wasn't a big fan of Tolkien. He didn't like cozy moral stories of good and evil. I love Tolkien, but I also love my Morcock's teardown of the Lord of the Rings, which is called the Epic Pooh, which compares Lord of the Rings to the Winnie Pooh to the Winny Pooh, Winnie.
The Pooh, the Winnie the Witty the Pooh. Yeah no, the Winnie Pooh has his real name. Yeah, clipp is game.
The other day drunk off his ass yelling at the dances got chucked out of the half.
Yeah, a fucking winny. So Morcock was part of this culture of like free sharing of ideas, that was a common hippie thing. That was where the juice of D and D comes from. I will never call it that again. Morcock freely gave permission to the founders of D and
D to use his stuff without credit or payment. He wrote, quote when I told the original D and D guys they could use elric it was in the spirit of the sixties slash seventies, when it seemed to many of us that we were sharing in a common culture and the products of that culture. Of course, I hadn't anticipated that some people would start turning all this stuff into
commercial businesses. I was even more surprised to see it all developing into pretty soulless marketing methods, where companies like Warcraft and others began to rip me off and talking in particular, I suppose I should have trademarked and copyrighted all this stuff sooner, but I'm still unhappy about that sort of thing, which goes against all my ethical notions, and so, like you know, they ripped him off because he was like, oh, we're all just sharing, and then
someone's like yeah, sharing, and then then just say they sell this shit, you know, just before it feels like like a.
Real invention of lying situation. They're like, yeah, capitalism doesn't exist, right, we're all friends here, Gary geigs like, we are not friends.
Yeah, I am going to steal all of this because you allowed me to the trap that I hit undunderneath the contract. I didn't know the legal contract hidden within.
Yeah. As for Tolkien, Gary Geygax hated Tolkien, but not for like because he wanted political nuance like more Cock did, but for boring like let's not talk about politics, asshole reasons. Also, I suspect most of what Gygax wrote about how D and D how he doesn't even like Tolkien. He only threw it in there because fans insisted all of this stuff. It's because he didn't want to get sued by Tolkien's estate. Yes,
that's my best guess. I read this like editorial he wrote about Tolkien and D and D and years ago, and in it he wrote, I found the Ring trilogy well tedious, The action dragged, and it smacked of an allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor's dedicated readers, I must say that I was so bored with his tones that it took me nearly three weeks to finish them,
which is like so many weird levels of bragging. Three weeks is a perfectly reasonable length of time to read very thick ass fucking books. I was gonna say, am I just like an anciently slow reader. No, No, you're not.
I mean, None of the Rings is a fucking long book. It's not I'm going to come out and say I do not like that book. It took me forever to retook me more than three weeks. Yeah, it is through the Earth's Sea books though. Yeah, and the fourth one with the farming that was not not very good.
I've only read the first two Earth Sea books.
I've been like third one is that the first. I don't consider it going further than the third just because it gets weird. But the first three is some of the best fantasy books ever. Yeah, second one as well. The punchline of the second book is so fantastic. It's like it's one It's the first time I read something where I was like, Wow, I fucking like I get why fantasy exists.
That's cool because it's not a like it's not pure polp. It actually is like specifically saying stuff.
I also just really like the fact that there is with these with fantasy novels that including a lot of the Rings, just the idea of the costs of power, Yeah, totally. And I know bringing up anime is probably could have pissed someone off, but for my Alchemists, great thing about like the the exchange that one for power, but I feel like obviously does a much better thing. But also the consequences of that first book are threat like they just the whole time gets like, I fucking.
Why did I do any of them?
Like there's just a real regret.
Yeah, and also the pain of curiosity.
It's fantastic.
I think that that whole thing, Like it's almost like when you can tell whether someone takes just seriously as well, Like the thing the copy from talking is critiquing and complicating and talking about power. That's what fantasy is really good at doing.
So a delight in character like a real, just like truly getting into the guts. He got too far into the guts of characters.
Absolutely, I'm not going to read the similary and I'm going to come out and say it. Oh, but you know what I will read. Actually, I don't read ads, but I do transition into them because of my desire to eat food on a regular basis. And here are ads, and we're back. I really got to have more fun with the ad rates. I it's it's like part of the joy of your job for me.
Oh yeah, I just especially off to like mainlining a bunch of Bostard's recently. Yeah, Robert talk about untraceable poisons.
Yeah, no, And everyone finds their own way. I mean trade actually is just kind of like I hate that their ads. I'm just going to go whatever, here they are, now, we're done.
Now let's go back to But usually I'm just like, so, I'm too upset to make a joke, you know, like, I know it makes sense.
Yeah, I can't imagine cutting that aim with Gauza, like.
I do.
Try. I have a c Orchard episode coming out eventually, and I want to hear that.
Yeah, that's that'll be fun. But like the sun but no, it's it's Margaret's the best at it. I think I'm going to say that you, thank you. This is not a lot of things I can. I'm a jack of all trades, but I'm a master of one thing, the cynically addressing my own position within a complicated system. So what cynically broke?
Oh?
I can't. I can't. I can't transition out ads as well as I can transition into them. So the thing that fucking took D and D to another goddamn level was and broke it into the mainstream was right wing Christian backlash. Hell yeah, And what's funny about it is it's right wing Christian backlash against a game written by like centrist. Honestly, my guess is center right. But I'm not certain Christians like D and D was not made by the woke mob like Jehovah's Witnesses. Yea, So Gygaks
was okay. So my best read Gygax's first wife was far more I'm guessing was far more religious, because certainly Gygax, as soon as he gets money in power, is just gonna do cocaine and move into a mansion and start cheating on his wife. And then divorce her and marry his secretary. Spoiler alert for a couple paragraphs down from no classic seventies guy.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely entering the eighties as well, so really like very acura.
Yeah, almost cliche he is. He is a fucking cliche, That's what he is. And like, look, if someone handed me millions of dollars, it would take my ethical background of politics and stuff to not do a bunch of cocaine and move to a mansion. So who amongst us doesn't whatever? Okay, So this anti D and D panic started in nineteen seventy nine, as best as I can tell.
On August fifteenth, nineteen seventy nine, content warning, I'm gonna talk about suicide, a sixteen year old college kid like boy genius style named James Dallas Egbert the Third disappeared from Michigan in State University and Lansing. He was a computer science student. He wrote a suicide note, went down to the steam tunnels beneath campus and tried to ode on kueludes, which is another eighties thing to do, I guess. But he survived, but he didn't return and so he
was missing. So his family hired a private private detective, and this private detective was convinced the disappearance was related to D and D, that the kid had lost track of what was and wasn't reality. The detective was like, yeah, yeah, no, and this is like this is where fucking everything comes from, right, because we've seen this with.
Like just people who do not understand fucking anything making decisions about children.
Yep. The detective was like in his dorm room taking photos of the pushpins on the corkboard, convinced that there's like clues and hidden messages in the way that the push pins are in the corkboard or whatever.
What was this person who tried to tagle on Live sixteen? Okay, see the sixteen year old? The detective question was like, all right, got a genius here, We've got it, like we've got I guess this might be before this audiat Kaila, but like this, we're going to decode the message of a fucking the press sixteen year old.
Yeah, who wrote a note and then yeah no and.
Then tried to offer them poor thing. Yeah Jesus.
And according to this guy, D and D was a cult and that's his like theory and the whole thing actually that thing where it's so complicated that you have to get invited to play in order to learn how to play. That's part of how it's a cult, right, And what actually happened is that the kid had gone over to East Lansing after he survived. He took a bus to New Orleans. He took a bunch of cyanide. The second time he survived that he became a day laborer for in oil fields.
Jesus, and this person cannot die.
No, he does eventually, but yeah, no, it took a while. Yeah, that's he. He goes back to his family. He like turns himself in basically, and then the news stories drop about him. That stops being They stop caring because he's been saved from D and D or whatever. Right, he does successfully kill himself when he's seventeen a year later with a gun.
Anytime, we could put some fucking government services into helping this person versus the ones which to them, and then we'll blame colts versus having any responsibility for anyone.
Yeah, him famous nationwide because articles around about him when he's disappeared go nationwide. Game cult is still missing. Dungeons and Dragons cult may lead to missing boy like, yes, I feel bad for the people he played with.
I feel bad for everybody involved other than the police.
Yeah, totally.
Like this poor person tries to off themselves and they have fucking newspaper things calling them ast a cultist. Yeah, fucking hell, which I'm sure didn't help. Yeah, I don't remain him. That made things better.
Yeah, and so this is national news. And soon D and D was swept up into the satanic panic. A minister in nineteen eighty one was like raised that they either wanted to or did raise one thousand dollars to buy D and D products and then burn them. And I just want to say that is the early level conservatism I know. But if any evangelicals, I publish a way more radical game than called P Number City. If you want to buy one hundred copies at full price to burn them, hit me up. You can buy my
product at full price. It's yours now you can do whatever you want with it.
Yeah, my very boring pr business books full of satanic shit. You need to buy them and burn them right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, you go go back download by podcast as well, and then down your phone.
Yeah, lots of downloads. The more down, the.
Cool zone media full of satanic sheet You need to go and download everything.
Yeah. In a school, a school in Utah band D and D. In nineteen eighty one, teachers who defended it were accused of witchcraft because that's a real thing that people. And also people claimed that the books screamed when they were burned because there was literal demons in them. Oh my god, who's the weird wacky cult snack? Now, who's called the crazy beliefs here?
Yeah?
Yeah, not me.
I'm just the one that heard the book screaming.
Yeah. And you know there's that group mad Mothers against drunk Driving.
I now remembered them.
Okay, well, how do you feel about bad bothered? About Dungeons and dragons?
Is that real thing?
It is real?
You double bothered?
Yeah? It was Ricky Gervaissa Ship, the mother of a kid who killed himself because teenagers who are alienated by society sometimes killed themselves.
It sucks. It's not my faults, his mother, it's dungeons and dragons.
Yeah. She later wrote a book called The Devil's Web, Who is stalking your children? For Satan? So is she the one that kind of led the detective? No, it's a different is a different mother. Oh okay, yeah.
It's the same shit though. It's the same bullshit, conservative nonsense. I know, a lack of responsibility towards the people that you are responsible for, finding anything else to blame tragic, horrible things that you took part in. Yeah. Yeah, it's the same shit being done to trans kids, same shit being done to every child who's ever been part of these things. Fucking disgusting. You have a child, you owe them, not the other way round. Fucking assholes.
No, I I fucking agree.
Uh.
You ever seen the nineteen eighty two Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters? Absolutely not?
I have not.
I watched it last night.
How was it?
It is based roughly on What Happened to James. It is a trash movie. It is like, not even so bad, it's good. It's only worth watching in this specific the context of trying to pay attention to the satanic panic around this. It's about a guy at college who plays too much and he starts hallucinating and following a god, and he tries to kill himself and his friends. I'll try and save him, but it's two ladies. Lost his
mind forever? Well, when I was in fourth grade and getting into D and D. We whispered rumors that there were older kids who played D and D for real, D and D for blood, we called it. If you were injured in the game, you had to hurt yourself. If you were killed, you had to die. There is no evidence that this was anything other than some shit. Some fourth graders fucking talked about this shit.
This sounds like in London when they claim that people had HIV needles that they put in the bus seats. Yeah, yeah, totally, like in the Yeah, yeah that you meant that you sit down on the bus you got HIV, the plan being I'm not sure. Yeah, like question Mark prophet Big HIV was, we had HIV the thing that was having a lot of trouble spreading in London.
Yeah, yeah, and neat people really wanted to give a needed new vectus for Yeah. And all of this moral panic made D and D cool as shit. It was up there with underage drinking and fucking and smoking cigarettes and shit. You know, like, you want to be cool and edgy played D and D, which is good advertising for fun. Yeah, that is nerdy that you do hiding in the basement with uncool friends, you know, totally. A church in Minnesota burned a bunch of D and D books,
so sales doubled in that area. Like they literally they were like I know they fucking yeah, hurt me. Oh they got me. During the Satanic Panic from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty three, sales of D and D went from two point three million dollars a year to twenty seven million dollars a year.
That's honestly hilarious, I know, fucking funny, Like a church burned a bunch of books and people bought them more than ever, Like that's.
Just they must have been so mad. Yeah, yeah, Wow,
that's a big jump too. That's like I know, yeah, it's like millions, and there's like correlation causation stuff going on in there, right, Like it could be that it's just an idea is time had come, but like nationwide attention and making it cool, like yeah, you know, even like thinking about like stranger things, right, you have this like concept of like the nerd kids, but then by the end of whatever such and such season, you also have like there's still nerds, but they're like metal heads
and punks and they're kind of cool, they're like the bad kids instead of the just relentlessly bullied kids. And as someone who made that own trend, like I am a living example of that. When I first would play D and Dia, I'd have to go h over to my friend's house in fourth grade. In order to get there, I had to go through my bully's backyard where people would like he would come out and beat me up on my way to go play D and Jason's right.
But then by like high school, I hung out with the bad kids and anyone who tried to beat us up, like, don't try to fuck with someone wearing a Sepultura shirt. Don't fuck with him or as friends, it's not gonna work. You're going somewhere painful. Yeah, like Brazilian metal not made by soft people. So I don't know whatever. D and D became cool and I became cool. That's the important part of the story, right, I never beat anyone up. My friends beat people up when they tried to fuck
with us. We didn't go around beating people up anyway. Whatever. So there were impacts on the game from the satanic panic before Margaret started talking about her own childhood. Distributors did drop them like JC Penny used to carry D and D. And then they stopped and folks were like, hey, if you remove the demons, the devils will keep publishing them and props to Guy GaX. He was like, no, fuck, no, I'm not going to do that. Why would I do that.
By the second edition of A D and D, under a new CEO who wasn't a gamer, they dropped devils, demons and assassins in order to try and what did assassins have to do with it? They're killing people, aren't they poise looped in with a supernatural there? I know, have they ever heard of like war or like there's like worse things in this world?
Was it one of those things where assassins had, like I remember with early fantasy things that weren't great, there was like a weird kind of a Middle Eastern tinge to assassinations that it was something of the foreigners.
Like assassins. I don't think so, because they were selling the shit out of Orientalism at the time. They haven't. There's a D and D book called Oriental Adventures. Jesus Christ. That's terrible. Yeah, no it is. Yeah, we're unfortunately, we're going to talk a little bit about the misogyny baked in and all like kind of also touch in on all the orientalism and shit picked, and when we get near the end, we'll talk about all the work that people have done to try and undo all of the
shit that's baked into it. But Oriental adventures part of Dandy from the start. In fact, the first woman game designer was named Gene Wells, who joined in nineteen seventy nine. At this point, about ten percent of the D and D players in the country are women, which is way the fuck up from the point five percent of war gamers. Still not super high. Just to spoil my own script, these days, it's fifty three percent men who played D and D as of twenty twenty. What happened to Jean
Wells is not great. She did a bunch of work on different adventures and then she wrote her own. It was called The Palace of the Silver Princess. One of the pieces art of art in it was like too sexual or something, even though other TSR art from the same time was at least as horny. The whole thing was recalled like either a day or three days, depending
on your source. After it was published, They published this adventure and then someone was like, oh, I don't know about this, and then they recalled it and like buried it in a landfill, and then it was rewritten by a man. No one would ever green light Jean's ideas anymore, and she wounded up basically being a secretary, so she quit. The surviving copies of her adventure are some of the most expensive collectible pieces in D and D because there's some of the rarest Do you think that she lived
long enough to see that? Yeah, I've read some interviews with her from I Actually I'm unsure one way or the other whether she's still alive, but I've read like interviews from the twenty first century with her.
Okay, for this part of it, maybe that's I mean, that's I hate that she had to go through that, but yeah, I'm glad that she's at least getting some type of recognition.
Yeah. No, Yeah, people are like, I mean, it's funny too, because though because it's just like, oh, this is rare and has like the secret horny picture in it, which is a naked woman tied up by her hair being attacked by men. It was actually less sexual than like the cover of like another one that was like a woman being sacrificed naked on a fucking altar and shit, you know, like but they're like, oh, this is too s and M. And I'm a little bit like, oh
a girl wrote this. You're mad that a fucking girl wrote something. Well, you said it was written by a man. I'm sure it defined yeah, once it was rewritten by man. Yeah, totally. They took out the offending pictures and changed it up a little bit, and it sure didn't help the misogyny culture at the office. That guy GaX, who was one of the three leaders of the company in the early days, it is just a misogynist, sorry, a biological determinist as he puts it.
Oh that's better.
Yeah, you want to hear what he said? Is that a phrase that it's just like a thing? Am I just a little bit out of the loop.
Whenever someone has a contrived term I know this from Silicon Valley like that, it just means they're racist or sexist. Like that's it.
You don't need to even work out what it means, just to be so I don't like woman or people who want know why. Oh, but I'm going to give the quote about it, and why if anyone cuts that and uses that against me, I will kill you.
Yeah, because his whole thing, right is he's like, I'm a simulationist. I want everything to be as realistic as possible in my game with Fireballs. As late as two thousand and four, he said, quote as I have often said, I am a biological determinist, and there is no question that male and female brains are different. It is apparent to me that by and large, females do not derive the same inner satisfaction from playing games as a hobby
that males do. It isn't that females can't play games, well, it's just that it is not a compelling activity to them as is in the case for males. Ah, fuck this guy.
I know.
Perfect, and I would guess and I will use the fact that now D and D's almost fifty percent women that the reason women didn't enjoy playing D and D to the same degree is that the games were very gygax overwhelmingly male, and men acted badly. During those games. Women would write into the game's magazine called The Dragon later Dragon. They would write and tell stories about how other players in the DM were routinely sexist to them. Early versions of the game, instead of having the fighter
had the fighting man and women's strength score. Once they finally added rules, they were like, well, I guess you could play a woman, and so they added some rules in case you wanted to play a woman. Don't worry, they got you covered. Women's strength score was capped four points lower than men's. Oh and most offensive of all, because you can vaguely, vaguely be like, I guess on average the average testosterum bodied person.
Whatever.
But it's a fantasy game. Who fucking cares. Also, the other thing they did is they replaced one of the ability scores in Dungeons Dragons's careerisma for boys. Boys can have charisma and girls have beauty instead, so.
Women are only perceived they are not interacted with.
It was bad, that's terrible.
Yeah, maybe it's good that a lot of these guys didn't meet women.
I met a woman, they would think differently.
Maybe it's because they had never met a woman that they.
Oh, yeah, I mean he's probably not guys, because we know because he's higher women.
Often they should have met women in a more violent sense. The woman should have smacked them. Yeah, so I'm just thinking. I grew up, I grew very close to my sister. I'm just imagining telling her she did not have charisma. Yeah, she would say to me in response to.
That, Yeah, no personality, just a face. Yeah yeah, did we already do a second ad? Break?
Well?
Who does have charisma? Here's ads of charisma? Did they roll your will to defend yourself? What the young kids call it RIZ?
Now?
Well, really is that what RIZ stands for? This makes so much sense. It's for charisma. Jez, Well, here's I can't even say that with a straight face. So here's some ads and we're back. So by nineteen eighty two, Dungeons Tsr. Rather was the nation's sixth fastest growing privately held company in the country. It's in all the glossy business matters wild yeah, despite none of their nine top level managers having any prior business experience. But don't worry,
they all did shit. That's as fucked up as any NBA great well off all of them did, but several of them certainly did. Former occupations of the people in charge were like biologists and plumber and the fuckery, oh my god, the business fuckery. Game designers worked against impossible odds to make the game work because the business of it was trying to make it not. Everyone in charge of TSR did weird nepotistic shit and made horrible decisions
with money. Soon enough, writers got cut out of royalties for what they had made, and former employees were constantly being threatened with lawsuits for taking their ideas elsewhere. This isn't really an episode about the rise and fall of TSR Wizards of the Coast, but here are some of the highlights. They changed the name to AD and D Advanced Ungs and Dragons to try and cut that guy out of royalties. Right then, Okay, this one's actually kind of fun. They blew a whole bunch of corporate money
raising a shipwreck out of Geneva Lake for no discernible reason. Cool.
No, that's cool. I I don't fucking need a reason. Bring the ship out. I know the ghosts.
Yeah. They kept the boiler from the ship like behind the building for a while and then like sold it for scrap. Gary Geygax moved out to la to try and sell TSR's properties to Hollywood. He rented out a mansion and he would have like hot tub parties with sex workers in cocaine and shit. Not inherently bad except those funded by paying writer's minimum wage and cutting their fucking royalties. Although I think he was more pro worker
than everyone else involved. That's grim good. He like at some point he tried to get workers like shares in the company. Oh, and it didn't happen. It was a complete jackass. I suppose I know he see, he's like an interesting jackass. He's like a jackass. I'd have a beer with, you know, unless he thinks my womanly brain can't handle it, or I suppose unless he thinks that I'm a woke mob.
Just won't let you speak, yeah, just to be looked at.
Yeah. Yeah, that's how he's being trans affirming as he's like, no, no, I changed your I changed your character sheet, says female.
Now that's good though, Like you can change your character sheet too, but I will obey the rules.
I do love. There's this thing that happens to me sometimes in nerd spaces that I kind of appreciate, where I'll be like hanging out with some like random like hanging out with some random dude, and then he'll figure out that I'm trans and he'll immediately switched like kind of maladying me, and I'm like, oh, that's kind of sweet at all. It comes from a good place, exactly exactly me, Like.
On some level I figured to some extent, it's almost like ship, did I walk into this acting roy and you have no look, if you haven't met many transpatople, perhaps it's just like I don't fucking do it a little different.
Yeah, no, totally no, We're a monolith. That's why I play in a noise band and I'm a computer programmer and only talk about I don't know howse trans people do. I did the most trans thing I've ever done. When people come over my house, I show them I built. I built a gaming computer that has like pink fans inside it that glue.
Yes, that's a good ship.
That's pretty Yeah, I'm really proudous, some nerdy ass ship, Margaret.
Yeah, I hadn't built a fucking computer since I was in high school. But I was like, I really wanted to play boulders Gate three, which in the end I didn't like very much. But that's completely besides the point. Okay, So anyway, let's see what else. So he's like he divorces his wife on not good terms, and he marries a secret harry, which you know, maybe they're in love and shit, and I don't know. It just looks fucking
cheesy eighties yuppie bullshit. There's two brothers that are in charge alongside of him, and they buy a relative's needle point business to sell needle point patterns that say shit like dragon power. And they're convinced that a fifth of the company's revenue is going to come from this. They the Etsy or something. No, I'm what do you mean by that?
I'm a bit confused.
So they that they bought a needle point company.
A needle point company.
Yeah, so there was like I think they're like sisters or cousins or something. We're like, oh, we do needle point. And someone's like, I'm gonna give you all so much money in order to sell needle point patterns. This was going to be dragon power. And who was who made this decision to two brothers who are in charge of
this company. I haven't introduced. They're the Bloom Brothers, and I don't know enough about them, but they keep coming up as villains and all the histories of it, but it's all there's so much corporate fuckery that gets them put in charge for a while. It's like them too, and guy GaX for a while. Wow, And this is just transparently nepotism. No one, their audience is not buying needle point patterns. Let's say dragon Power. They would grow too large and then layoff workers again and again as
they made terrible business decisions. The Dragonlance novel so the mid eighties floated the company for years, but the authors are basically paid fuck call and they pretty much have delve tsar to write books elsewhere. And then in nineteen eighty five, Gary Geygax was forced out of the company by a hostile takeover by a non gamer woman sorry femail named Lorraine Williams dun dun dum, a woman I know.
And here's where all the histories get really annoying, because like everyone's like mostly people are like Gygax is amazing. Lorrain is the one who destroyed the company, and it's like, no, everyone involved sucked, and the fact that Lorraine was a woman is unrelated. And she did suck, and so did Gary at least as business people whatever. Almost everyone did prefer working under her, but she wasn't much better. Lots of ink has been spilled, defaming her to the point
where it just reads like misogyny. She was corrupt and incompetent, so were the people who came before her. The fun part of her story is that her family owned the rights to Buck Rogers. This is where the story just goes off the rails. Okay, buck Rogers is a wildly irrelevant comic book hero from the nineteen twenties that had a failed recent TV run recent at this point nine also a famous TV run though, Yeah, I like, I know all I know about Buck Rogers some old timey shit.
Yeah it was that was That was a TV show. No true, listen, I was just about to say, anyone else hear. This is if the readers can, like Jesus fucking Grist cost work almost done TV show.
That's a TV show, And at this point when she's in charge mid eighties, he is irrelevant. No one wants this property. Her family owns the property, the rights, so she keeps more or less bankrupting TSR to try and push buck Rogers stuff. They make game after game that won't sell. Everyone in I know, I know, and her priorities are her family's bullshit.
This is actually nepotism sounding. I'm sorry, you know, my family's assets. Most That's what it is, and I think everyone who's like working on it hates it. At one point, the salesperson at a big trade show is like up there like pitching the new buck Rogers RPG after like the last one doesn't sell, and he says, We'll keep
making it until you buy it. It's a classic way to appeal to your audience, you know what they say, Uh, Supply and demand is just forcing supply on people as much as humanly possible until they accept it.
So one thing that they did that was going really well is they started working with DC Comics, and they started selling their properties to DC Comics, and you started getting these ad and d fucking comic books that were like mid list but like successful and profitable. They were compared with Aquaman and Wonder Woman at terms of how popular they were, which is funny to me because now Wonder Woman's a big fucking deal, right, I mean, Wonder Woman was a big deal then as well, seventies eighties
so apparently less so. Apparently they were all around the like in the top one hundred best selling comics, but kind of just hanging out around near one hundred, which was fine. It was profitable. DC Comics made some money. TSR made some money, and they did a bunch of comics. But Lorraine was like, what about buck Rogers. Don't you all want to do Buck Rogers? And they were like, no, that's some corny old shit. We do not care at all about Buck Rogers. She really tried.
It was a Buck Rogers TV show from uh nineteen seventy nine through ninety ninety one. Oh that's a time, wrote little Buck Rogers histories in the twenty fifth century.
Yeah, better than I thought. But DC Comics wouldn't fucking touch it. And so instead of doing something that would be intelligent, like saying, oh, well we tried, Lorraine ran the company like her personal fiefdom, as had the previous owners. People. People don't really get that we don't live in a democracy because the primary economic model is authoritarian, hierarchical corporate structures.
But she decided to compete with DC Comics. That's what she would do in order to get buck Rogers comics out. So she decided to compete with the people who published a ton of their comics and had rights to all their most popular properties. But you said that they were working with TC Comics. I know it wasn't very smart. Yeah, So in nineteen eighty nine, TSR went back to where It's dream goes to die, Los Angeles, this time to make buck Rogers comics under the name TSR. West. Lorraine's
brother was running it. Naturally nice, DC, for completely predictable reasons, got mad about this. So TSR. West was like, oh, no, we are not making comic books. Their comic modules, and a module is basically an adventure in D and D talk like at ice self contained thing. And so what they did in order to make them legally distinct from comic books was throwing tiny amounts of RPG content at
the end of any given comic book. And they didn't just do buck Rogers, but they did all they didn't do any of their frontless shit is all their backless shit, because all their frontless shits with DC. But now they're not comic books. They're not sold by a comic book distributor. They're distributed I think by Random House, and so they're in the book section of the store and they're not in comic book stores. They're comic books. No one fucking
buys them because they're in the wrong. They're not. It's just a mess. It's a nightmare. And DC was like, yeah, we're gonna stop publishing y'all's shit. You're right, we can't sue you because you call them comic modules. We can just drop all your shit and you can't publish it because we have all the rights. So they did. So, Yeah, Lorrain saved the company from being run into the ground by Guygax and co. And then ran it into the
ground herself because of the book rogers. Yes, yeah, yeah, And there's like some other shit, and they like keep trying to go become basically like a book publisher, and they drive away all their like most fiction publisher because for a while fiction is just covering the cost of everything else, and they're just just wildly incompetent at running this thing, and they drive away all the creatives and
they just treat everyone like shit. So eventually it was bought by the makers of Magic the Gathering, a company called Wizards of the Coast in nineteen ninety seven. Wizards of the Coast. I'm not trying to like sing their praises, but they revitalized Dungeons and Dragons. They put out additions where the rules actually were consistent in the and they book, Yeah yeah, and they they made it the wildly successful game it is now. They are still full of fuckery,
But this isn't a show about fuckery. It's a show about cool people did cool stuff. And an incredible amount of work has been done across the field, especially by this upstart publisher, pays O Games that I'm not really talking about anywhere in here, but they publish a game
called Pathfinder that's a split from Dungeons and Dragons. An incredible amount of work has been done to make tabletop role playing games more accessible to a wider audience, not by dumbing down the games or making them less interesting, just going through systematically and rooting out the misogyny and
racism that have been baked into them. And a couple of years ago, I had the pleasure to write a canon Magic the Gathering story in which I got to make one of the characters canonically gay and another I added a trans character to the lore of Magic the Gathering because and that was her. Wizards of the Coast. Giant evil companies run the world, but the weird thing that you run across all the time, especially these days, is that evil companies are worked for and at by
people like you and I, not us. We don't work for a giant evil company obviously.
No, that's so good. I love them.
Yeah, And many of the people who work at these companies fucking hate capitalism and racism and misogyny and all that shit and try to do what they can to alleviate the worst of the evils they run across. And so the people in the role playing game industry, and there's like all these fights about it where these people are like, no, Gygax did nothing wrong, and women are weaker, and you know, probably running around measuring the skulls of
different ethnicities. But by and large, it is it's changing. And I didn't even get into it how much this shit changed everything else about how everything just how much D and D in role playing suffuse through culture, video games, everything and like change the way that we see creativity. But that's my story of the history of Dungeons and Dragons. The end of the story.
Think what we've learned here, m hmm is that women do not have charisma.
Yeah, that is Ed's takeaway, just takeaway is that I would.
Say exactly the kind of guy who I thought did invented dungeons and dragons. Oh yeah, had you asked me to come up with who did it would come up? Yeah, I would have come up with some Hitchhiker's guide the galaxy sounding ass guy. Yeah, assume he had weird proclivities of some sort, and then assumed that he got into weird labor disputes. They're kind of close story.
Yeah no. And then when you think about the people who make it. I mean, he obviously ran the first dandie game, right, but the people that they ended up hiring, you get all of these people who like it's kind of like a nonprofit job where people work at nonprofit jobs because they care and then they get treated by shit like shit by the nonprofit. Yeah, you know, and
the people who run the nonprofit of horrifying Yeah. TSR was people's dream because it was the fucking magic factory, you know, and they took advantage of that, and sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and that sucks. But people made incredible stuff, much like you make an incredible podcast called Better Offline that people can listen to.
Oh sorry, I meant to plug stuff, So yeah, Better offline dot com. You can FuMB a newsletter. Please subscribe to my newsletter. It's very lonely, please read it. Please listen to my podcast. Download every episode. Go to Better offline dot com click the link. Go to your podcast thing. Click every single download button. Listen to every episode in fact, go and do that.
Then do it again.
Leave it on all day.
H don't work.
Listen to podcasts now money now, please.
Get more the sales pitch and then oh, oh my god, I didn't even get into there's all this stuff baked into the problem of running role playing games where once you buy the game, you don't need anything else, and so that they like run out of like when I'm like, oh, they fucked it up with comics. It's also like market saturation, right because like people whatever.
I imaginations are so dangerous.
I know. Well, and that's the thing is, it's like people are trying to figure out how to make this game work within this economic system, and like everything else we do, it struggles against the economic system we live in. But you know, that's the episode. I also have a newsletter you should subscribe to both. Mine is on substack. You just search Margaret Kiljoy substack and Saran you got anything, you do anything with your life.
Occasionally I'm on it could happen here on cool Zone Media. Uh listen if you want to. I do a lot of episodes about Palestine recent so go go educate yourself and talk to your friends.
Hell yeah, and we'll be back next week with more Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, probably with fewer assholes at the center of the story. But who knows, because I don't even know Whe'm gon to cover next week. HIE Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.