D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—7. D&D changes the game’s original handling of races and humanoids

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When D&D creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax adopted the word race for the playable species in D&D, they used the term in the same sense as the human race. More commonly, “race” refers to human groups who share superficial traits common to their ancestry, and that use recalls a long history of people using ancestry and appearance to justify mistreating and exploiting people. The choice of the word “race” weighed the game with problems that lasted until today. And D&D’s issues with race go beyond the baggage that weighs on the word.

“In the old days, elves and dwarves and some of the other playable options were very much the product of folklore, and in folklore, elves and dwarves were embodied metaphor,” said D&D’s lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford. “They were metaphors for different aspects of the human psyche. So elves were often associated with more elevated lofty aspects of the human psyche. Dwarves were often associated with the industriousness that some people manifest.” If fairy tales, these metaphors became talking creatures. “You can meet a demon that’s embodied evil. You can meet an angel that’s embodied good. You can meet a dwarf that’s the embodiment of industriousness and hardiness.”

Often gamers enjoy playing metaphors and relish taking the role of an ale-loving, hammer-smacking dwarf who craves gold. Sometimes gamers like to play characters who stand out for their unique qualities, such as a dwarf wizard who happens to love tea and gardening. When the D&D team made faeries a playable race, tiny barbarians became widely popular. A chance to play a raging fairy that felt one of a kind delighted players.

Through most of D&D’s history, the rules penalized or blocked players who wanted a character who defied a race’s archetype. At first, rules blocked many combinations of race and class, so a dwarf simply couldn’t become a wizard. Later, the game added racial ability score modifiers that encouraged characters to fit the archetype of their chosen race, so half-orcs gained strength and constitution, but lacked charisma. Originally, half-orcs only excelled as assassins. The modifiers meant a player who wanted to play something like a dwarf wizard had to settle for a less efficient character. Most players disliked suffering a penalty just to play a certain combination of race and class.

Also, ability score modifiers raise troubling reminders of how real ethnic groups can suffer from racist stereotypes that paint people as lacking certain aptitudes. D&D’s unfortunate use of the word “race” makes those reminders far more powerful. D&D races can include robot-like warforged, tiny fairies with wings, and humanoid dragons that breathe fire and lay eggs, but they all represent sorts of people in the game world.

In 2020, the D&D team decided that some of the game’s rules and lore aimed at treating non-human game people as metaphors had to go. To “pave the way for truly unique characters,” Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything stopped linking ability modifiers to race. Now, players could create a dwarf wizard with a green thumb without settling for a less efficient build than a similar character who happened to be an elf.

Players also wanted game people to have just as much potential to be good and virtuous—or to be wicked—as real people.

Humans have a knack for imagining human-like qualities for animals, monsters, and even inanimate objects like desk lamps. When a human-like character also shares qualities associated with a human group, we tend to imagine that that character as part of the group, so a cartoon truck with eyelashes and a bow seems female. When imaginary creatures share qualities associated with real human groups, this tendency can create troubling associations. For example, Gary Gygax created drow to resemble the photo-negative of Tolkien’s elves. Instead of having dark hair and white skin, drow featured white hair and black skin. A dark-skinned race characterized as evil without exception creates a troubling association. Drow are imaginary, and Gygax never intended to link drow to real races, but the association remains. Suppose you read a children’s book featuring imaginary talking dogs. In the tale, all the golden dogs are good and pure, while all the brown dogs are wicked and savage. Instead of thinking, “Well, they’re just imaginary talking dogs,” you would say, “Oh, hell no,” before hurling the book across the room.

The D&D team wrote, “Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”

This belief shows in the alignments listed for creatures in the game. The 2014 Monster Manual listed drow and orcs as evil, but newer books characterize them as having “any alignment.” Even demons and angels now get “typical” alignments rather than unvarying ones. Some of this just reflects an extra emphasis. The 2014 Monster Manual already explained that “the alignment specified in a monster’s stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster’s alignment to suit the needs of your campaign.”

More recently, the D&D team announced that the 2024 update to the game would scrap the term race, likely in favor of the word species. Unlike races, the differences between character species go beyond superficial, so the term “species” fits better, even if its flavor seems a bit scientific for a fantasy game.

Some folks have pointed out that the word “species” brings as much historical baggage as “race,” because real world racists once pretended that people who looked different were different species, and then used that as a way to justify all sorts of injustices. Still, “species” likely rates as the best of all the imperfect options.

The controversy came from different perspectives. Some gamers favored characters that fit mythic archetypes—a valid preference. Some gamers loved the D&D they grew up with and felt angry about any changes that implied the old game included elements that felt racist. Some gamers wanted a game with unalterably evil humanoids, so young and old orcs could be killed without question. And many just followed an allegiance to their ideological team and raged at change.

Next: Number 6.

Related: How D&D’s Rules Changed To Encourage More Varied Groups of Heroes Than Those in the Pulp Fantasy That Inspired the Game

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—8. TSR Demands That D&D Players Stop Sharing Their Fan Creations on the Internet

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TSR's web page in 1997

TSR’s web page in 1997

In 1994, when file sharing on the internet typically meant logging into a FTP server hosted by a university for uploads and downloads, gamers used the new technology to exchange their own D&D creations like monsters, classes, and spells. TSR management felt that even fan creations for D&D belonged to the owners of the game, so to stop gamers from freely sharing any D&D content on the internet, the company took two steps: First, a TSR representative sent letters to the administrators of servers hosting D&D content and in some cases content for other games. “On behalf of TSR, Inc. I ask that you examine your public net sites at this time and remove any material which infringes on TSR copyrights.” Because universities hosted most of these sites, the notices led to a quick wave of shutdowns. Second, TSR insisted that fans who wished to distribute their D&D creations exclusively use a server run by a TSR-licensed company. The process required creators to add a disclaimer granting TSR exclusive rights to publish or distribute the content.

The demands alarmed D&D fans. Many creators feared that TSR would bundle their creations in a CD-ROM or start charging for online access. The more conspiracy-minded worried that TSR would simply gather content and pull the plug, eliminating a source of competition.

After a year enforcing the policy in the face of the backlash, TSR eventually stopped sending cease-and-desist letters that threatened people posting their own D&D creations, and started focusing on actual copyright infringement. TSR online coordinator Sean K. Reynolds said, “Without actually changing the TSR policy, we just kind of mitigated our enforcement of the policy.”

For the full story, see part 1 and part 2.

Next: Number 7.

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—9. D&D Infringes on Tolkien by Including Hobbits, Ents, Nazgûl, and Balrogs

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Battle of the Five Armies (TSR 1977)

Battle of the Five Armies (TSR 1977)

When D&D co-creator Gary Gygax penned the original D&D books, he took fantastic creatures and magic from every source he knew and added them to the game. He never considered who owned the ideas. Surely a few references to hobbits in a game that originally reached a minuscule number of hobbyists would pass unnoticed. So the first D&D books and supplements included references to hobbits, ents, nazgûl, and balrogs.

In April 1977, TSR went too far by releasing an unlicensed game based on The Hobbit called Battle of the Five Armies. A note under the title said, “From ‘The Hobbit’” and revealed that TSR had applied to trademark “The Battle of the Five Armies.”

The board game reached hobby shops just as marketing started for a television adaption of The Hobbit. Perhaps, TSR figured that the game could benefit from the movie publicity, while escaping the notice of any lawyers. This calculation proved wrong. Worse for TSR, the board game drew legal attention to D&D.

Hobbit (TV Movie 1977)

Hobbit (TV Movie 1977)

The Hollywood production company behind The Hobbit owned the non-literary rights to Tolkien’s works, and that included games. The man running the production company, Saul Zaentz, would later gain fame by suing John Fogerty for plagiarizing his own songs. (Zaentz owned the songs Fogerty wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival, so when one of the artist’s new songs sounded too much like “The Old Man Down The Road,” Zaentz took Fogarty to court. Fogarty would strike back by penning the song “Zanz Kant Danz.”) Zaentz‘s company sent TSR a cease-and-desist notice.

TSR killed the board game and cut words coined by Tolkien from D&D. They used synonyms while leaving the fundamental concepts unchanged. Hobbits became halflings, ents became treants, and nazgûl became wraiths. The Eldritch Wizardry supplement dropped the note that said Type VI demons were sometimes called balrogs. Eventually, the D&D version of the demon would become balors.

Next: Number 8

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—10. TSR Trashes the Entire Print Run of the Palace of the Silver Princess Adventure

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In 1981, D&D publisher TSR printed B3 The Palace of the Silver Princess, but when the new copies reached key TSR management, they ordered the entire print run sent to a landfill rather than to distributors.

The debacle started when, after a year working mostly administrative tasks, the module’s author, Jean Wells, had finally landed a creative assignment writing an adventure that would introduce D&D to new players. Perhaps the company’s management expected a woman to deliver a gentle module that would nurture D&D’s burgeoning young audience. Instead, she wrote a sandbox with the same grown-up sensibilities as prior TSR products.

When TSR co-owner Brian Blume saw the newly printed adventure for the first time, one illustration titled “The Illusion of the Decapus” led him to have the printing trashed. In the picture a woman dangles from a ceiling beam, bound by her own hair. Men taunt and poke her, “pulling at what few clothes she has on.” Just a year earlier, such an illustration might have passed unnoticed. After all, in the October 1980 issue number 42 of Dragon, TSR printed a picture of a bound, naked woman on her knees before the corpulent, goat-headed figure of Orcus.

Illusion of the Decapus by Laura Roslof

Illusion of the Decapus by Laura Roslof

In 1981 though, D&D enjoyed rocketing sales that reached beyond the older wargamers and sci-fi fans who first found the game. Now the public worried that the game blurred reality and fantasy, potentially leading players to real trauma or to act out the violence in the game in real and dangerous ways. Fundamentalist parents feared the spells, demons, and devils in D&D would lead their kids to actual witchcraft, satanism, or ritual sacrifice. TSR strategy focused on building sales to younger gamers while comforting the parents who might worry about a game full of evil creatures and supernatural make believe. The original Palace of the Silver Princess failed to fit that approach.

For the whole story, read Part 1 and
Part 2

Tomorrow: Number 9.

How D&D’s Rules Changed To Encourage More Varied Groups of Heroes Than Those in the Pulp Fantasy That Inspired the Game.

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Today’s Dungeons & Dragons focuses on letting players build custom characters to suit their taste, but for half of the game’s 50-year history, the rules emphasized rolling a character and playing the numbers the dice gave. Especially at first, gamers demonstrated their play skill by making the most of some random combination of scores. Original D&D paired non-humans with particular character classes, so dwarves could only become fighting men. Every elf, dwarf, and (until 1977) hobbit fit their race’s archetype. Mainly though, gamers loyal to the game rules played humans, because the rules limited the number of levels non-humans could gain. For example, a dwarf could only reach level 6. Largely human parties suited the taste of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. Ability scores hardly mattered, and with limited character options, characters became distinctive as they adventured and won magical gear. Those magic trophies served as mementos and made one elf play differently from all the others.

Today’s game looks very different. If a party contains a single human, the group rates as unusual. Player’s typically want characters who feel extraordinary from level 1. Often, that means playing the best ale-loving, hammer-smacking, dwarf who ever craved gold. Sometimes that means playing a dwarf wizard who happens to love gardening. The countless tiny, fairy barbarians that have joined my tables show that players relish a chance to play a character who defies type and at least seems one of a kind. Non-human characters only match a racial archetype when a player chooses it. To most players, the old rules that made races fit a stereotype now feel confining. Sometimes, those old rules even feel like a troubling reminder of outdated attitudes.

This evolution took all of D&D’s 50 years. This post tells the story of the change.

“In the old days, elves and dwarves and some of the other playable options were very much the product of folklore, and in folklore, elves and dwarves were embodied metaphor,” says D&D’s lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford. “They were metaphors for different aspects of the human psyche. So, elves were often associated with more elevated lofty aspects of the human psyche. Dwarves were often associated with the industriousness that some people manifest.” In fairy tales, these metaphors became talking creatures. “You can meet a demon that’s embodied evil. You can meet an angel that’s embodied good. You can meet a dwarf that’s the embodiment of industriousness and hardiness.”

Early D&D included rules that made characters fit the archetype of their chosen race. The game restricted non-humans to particular classes and blocked their advancement to higher levels. Later, the game added racial ability score modifiers that encouraged characters to fit certain archetypes, so half-orcs gained strength and constitution, but lacked charisma. Originally, half-orcs only excelled as assassins.

Gary Gygax favored the sort of human-dominated fantasy that appeared in the fiction that inspired him. To Gary, non-human level limits explained why humans dominated D&D worlds despite the extraordinary talents and longevity of elves and dwarves. Gary wrote, “If demi-humans, already given some advantages, were as able as humans, the world would be dominated by them, and there goes the whole of having a relatively familiar world setting in regard to what cultures and societies one will find in control. So, a demi-human is unlimited in thief level only, as that this a class not destined to control the fate of major groups or states.

“Why are humans more able to rise to higher levels than demi-humans?“ Gygax wrote in a internet discussion. ”Because the gods say so, and don’t like pointy eared types with curly-toed shoes, squat miners with big beards, hairy-footed midgets, etc.” Gygax intended the comment as harmless fun at the expense of make-believe creatures, and in 2005 most readers read it that way. But now the comment reads in a way Gygax surely didn’t consider. In our history, people have justified inflicting countless horrors on other humans by claiming that God disapproved of some group. Talking about even fictional half-humans like this raises uncomfortable echoes.

Arduin adventure party

This adventuring party was pictured in Arduin Grimoire III

Even in D&D’s first years, not every player shared Gygax’s taste for games where most characters resembled the human heroes of Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E. Howard. When J. Eric Holmes wrote the 1977 D&D Basic Set, his draft explained, “An expedition might include, in addition to the seven basic classes, an African witch doctor/magic-user, a centaur, an Amerindian medicine man/cleric, a lawful werebear, a Japanese samurai fighting man and a half-human, half-serpent naga”. The published book cut most of those options, leaving only “a centaur, a lawful werebear, and a Japanese samurai fighting man.” In Dragon 53, Holmes wrote about the set’s limited character options. “I am personally sorry to see the range of possibilities so restricted. The original rules (the three little brown books) specifically stated that a player could be a dragon if he wanted to be. I enjoyed having dragons, centaurs, samurai and witch doctors in the game. My own most successful player character was a Dreenoi, an insectoid creature borrowed from McEwan’s Starguard.” Meanwhile, Arduin Grimoire III (1978), an unofficial supplement to D&D, included pictures of an exotic adventuring parties that scarcely resembled a typical group. Author Dave Hargrave wrote, “The fact is that most players want individuality in their characters.”

When Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, new CEO Peter Adkison steered D&D to more flexible character options. “My biggest beef with the older rules were the consistent limitations on what characters could become,” Adkison wrote. “Why couldn’t dwarves be clerics. Why could wizards of some classes only advance to some pre-determined level limit? Why couldn’t intelligent monster races like orcs and ogres pick up character classes? In my mind these restrictions had no place in a rules set but should be restrictions established (if at all) at the campaign-setting level.” The 2000 edition scrapped non-human level limits and rules that limited each race to particular classes.

Still, ability score modifiers remained in the game, and they stayed in the 2014 Player’s Handbook. Lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford said the modifiers “are specifically there just to reinforce the traditional D&D archetypes for dwarf adventurers, elf adventurers, halfling adventurers, and so on.” The modifiers meant a player who wanted to play something like a dwarf wizard had to settle for a less efficient character.

Experienced players rarely settled, so the ability score modifiers felt like as much of a restriction as the old rule that limited dwarves to playing fighting men. As for new players, the ability score modifiers became a trap. A player who fancied playing a halfling barbarian would later learn their character suffered a permanent limitation. Restrictions that force players to make interesting choices can make better games. Much of the fun of character building comes from choosing among enticing options, but for players set on a class, the choice between one race and a plainly weaker option adds nothing. “All games are about making choices and making meaningful choices,” Crawford said. “But we want the choices to be between things that are all fun and interesting. Like a great example is making the choice between the classes where it’s an open-ended field and you get to just choose the one that sing to you. What we don’t want is choice where just hiding inside it is some kind of trap. And that’s what the traditional ability score bonuses often feel like to people.”

Aside from adding a trap—and not the fun kind—ability score modifiers raise troubling reminders of how real ethnic groups can suffer from racist stereotypes that paint people as lacking certain aptitudes. D&D’s unfortunate use of the word “race” makes those reminders far more powerful. When D&D creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax adopted the word race for the playable species in D&D, they used the term in the same sense as the human race. More commonly, “race” refers to human groups who share superficial traits common to their ancestry, and that use recalls a long history of people using ancestry and appearance to justify mistreating and exploiting people.

Our characters in roleplaying games represent us in the game’s imaginary world. They might be just-pretend types like dragons, vampires, and robots—sometimes pronounced warforged—but we identify with them because our game world stand-ins think and feel mostly like us as people. Our characters represent people, and if they’re people, we can imagine them enjoying the same versatility and potential as real-world people.

To “pave the way for truly unique characters,” Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (2020) stopped linking ability modifiers to race. Now, players could create a dwarf wizard with a green thumb without settling for a less efficient build than a similar character who happened to be an elf. “It is not our assumption and never has been in fifth edition that those bonuses in the players racial traits are true of every member of the race,” said Crawford. “As the game continues to evolve, and also as the different types of character people make proliferates and becomes wonderfully diverse as people create types of characters that many of us would never imagine. It’s time for a bit more of those old assumption to, if not pass away, to be something that a person can set aside if it’s not of interest for them and their character. It’s with that in mind that we created this system to be true to our philosophy. We sometimes talk about when we give DMing advice to whenever possible say yes. This is a system about saying yes to players. That yes, you can play the dwarf you want to play. You can play the elf you want to play. You can play the halfling you want to play.” In D&D, player characters stopped serving as metaphors.

Shut Up and Fight This Thing!

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At a convention, Teos “Alphastream” Abadia and I played an adventure that featured fights seemingly contrived to fill the hours between the opening scene and climactic battle. Monsters just sprang and attacked, depriving us of any choices to avoid the battles. Later, Teos described the match ups as the DM saying, “Shut up and fight this thing,” and I broke out laughing.

“Shut up and fight this thing” dates to original D&D and the wandering monsters that threatened dungeon explorers. By those rules, parties needed bad rolls to land an unavoidable fight: rolls needed to bring an encounter at a nearby distance against unsurprised creatures that happen to be hostile. And if unlucky rolls served a dangerous foe, skilled players knew to flee.

Nowadays, “shut up and fight this thing” just means grinding out a fight. Good thing today’s adventurers typically enjoy impossible luck that lets them keep facing threats they can beat.

As a DM, I’ve served countless shut-up-and-fight-this-thing battles for one good reason and a couple of sketchy ones.

When a session goes too long without a chance to cross swords and spells, some players grow restless. Those players include me. Saying, “Fight this thing,” injects a dose of adrenaline. For years, if my 2-hour Wednesday night games lacked a battle, I knew players would go home disappointed.

As a DM preparing to fill the hours of a game session, nothing works as effortlessly. Just say, “Fight this thing,” and an hour passes.

Back when organized play adventures required an XP budget worth of monster battles, “fight this thing” delivered. Organized play insiders even coined the phrase obligatory thug encounter for any attacks needed to fill an XP budget and a 4-hour convention slot. Thugs, bless their black hearts, did the job without requiring any connection to the rest of the adventure.

I still sometimes say, “Fight this thing,” but before I do, I consider whether I’m losing any opportunities to prepare a better adventure. When planning potential combat encounters, I ask two questions:

  • Why would the players want this fight? When the players see that a fight will bring them closer to their goal and willingly throw their characters into battle, the combat feels like a meaningful part of the story of the adventure. Obligatory bandit encounters stand out from an adventure because they seem only tangentially related to the rest of the tale and because they fail to bring the characters any closer to their goals. At best, the players only want to fight for the XP. Among their characters, only the paladin seeks a chance to murder some thugs.
  • How could the players avoid this fight? During one of the first games I ran for organized play, the adventure ended with a literal OTE: a group of bandits attack the party for loot. Except in play, nothing went as the author planned; the party tried to talk their way out of the fight. Who could have expected such a twist? As DM, I hesitated. If the party skipped the fight, then the adventure would run short and I would fail my duty to deliver the full experience (and XP) printed in black and white. Now, I know to let the adventure spin in an unexpected direction, but then I stalled until a player noticed my faltering, took pity, and attacked. (This might rate just below my top 5 game mastering blunders.) Combat stands as just one of three pillars of D&D, and when players can choose to overcome obstacles such as monsters through roleplaying or ingenuity, the game becomes richer. It offers more variety, and the players can steer play toward the sort of game they favor. Plus, the additional choice of how to engage encounters can spin the game in surprising directions.

As a DM planning an adventure, asking why players might want a fight and how they could avoid a fight leads to better games. Plus, if players can choose a fight, then the option frees DMs from the burden of trying to balance foes so players can always beat them.

Related: The 4 Unwritten Rules No Dungeon Master Should Break

The Scandal of Palace of the Silver Princess, the D&D Adventure that TSR Printed and Trashed

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In 1981, Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR printed an adventure so scandalous that when new copies reached key TSR management, they ordered the entire print run sent to dumpsters rather than to distributors.

The story of the adventure, B3 The Palace of the Silver Princess, began when Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax hired Jean Wells as the first woman to join the design team at TSR. After a year working mostly administrative tasks, Jean finally landed a creative assignment writing an adventure that would introduce D&D to new players. Perhaps the company’s management expected a woman to deliver a gentle module that would nurture D&D’s burgeoning young audience. Instead, she wrote a sandbox with the same grown-up sensibilities as prior TSR products.

Gygax had hired Wells because he liked her ideas, and she wanted her first module to show her unique voice. She feared that other developers would meddle, so she had Gygax remind the development team to leave her ideas intact and to limit changes to proofreading. Artist Erol Otus remembers “The module was sent in and the editors were told hands off. Don’t change Jean’s stuff. Send it through.”

TSR editor Stephen Sullivan says that the adventure “was what Jean wanted it to be. It was her baby. And for another place and another time, it probably would have been just perfect.” Wells and Sullivan collaborated on one of the module’s illustrations.

The liberty that Gygax granted the project gave artist Erol Otus a sense of creative freedom. For the module, he illustrated a group of 3-headed creatures called ubues. He says, “I remember asking Jean if the ubues could be male/female. I remember being thrilled when she said yes. I remember being really happy to put male and female together in different combinations and just thinking about what they’re lives would be like.”

Home of the Ubues by Erol Otis

Ubues by Erol Otus

Work on the adventure came after some recent firings, leaving tension between TSR’s management and creative staff. “We [artists] were down with the editors and designers,” says Otus. “We felt like we were a team.” In the spirit of team and perhaps as a cheeky dig at management, Otus drew the ubues’ heads so they resembled members of TSR’s creative team.

Ubues besides TSR staff photos

Photos in reading order: Lawrence Schick, Dave Cook, Jean Wells, Dave LaForce, Skip Williams, and Darlene

When the module reached print and upper managers saw the drawing, they saw the resemblances, but could not figure out who the picture mocked. Designer Lawrence Schick says, “There were a lot of in-jokes in there. And if you aren’t ‘in’ on the in-jokes, it can be easily misinterpreted.” Designer Kevin Hendryx says, “Management was very sensitive about mutiny in the ranks at the time and took all these perceived slurs or snoot-cockings as an insult and a challenge.”

Forty years later, Otus no longer remembers more of the creative process behind the picture, or even who the likenesses match.

Even though management found Otus’s picture of the ubues troublesome, another illustration in the adventure actually landed the print run in the garbage.

For the adventure, Wells imagined a new monster called the decapus that used illusion to lure prey. “I created the decapus to draw paladins into the room quickly without thinking and to be the first in. I wanted them to rescue the maiden whose clothes were torn and seemed to be surrounded by nine ugly men taunting her. Editor Ed Sollers thought it was a good idea and so did our boss Harold Johnson. It went through the channels with no problems at all until it had been printed.”

Illusion of the Decapus by Laura Roslof

Illusion of the Decapus by Laura Roslof

Artist Laura Roslof drew the creature’s illusion as Wells described. A woman dangles from a ceiling beam, bound by her own hair. Men taunt and poke her, “pulling at what few clothes she has on.” Just a year ago, such an illustration might have passed unnoticed. After all, in the October 1980 issue number 42 of Dragon, TSR printed a picture of a bound, naked woman on her knees before the corpulent, goat-headed figure of Orcus.

But in 1981, TSR no longer just catered to an older audience of wargamers and sci-fi fans. James Dallas Egbert, a gifted and troubled 16-year-old studying at Michigan State University, disappeared in 1979, and the detective searching for the teen blamed D&D. The case fired a media sensation that introduced D&D to America. Dragon magazine editor Tim Kask wrote, “Dungeons & Dragons is getting the publicity that we used to just dream about.” The attention led to rocketing sales, but news reports also consistently painted D&D as a “bizarre” game enjoyed by “secretive” and “cultish” players. By 1981, TSR strategy focused on making sales to younger gamers while comforting the parents who might worry about a game full of evil creatures and supernatural make believe.

The decapus illustration threatened to alarm parents. Worse, the drawing appeared in a teaching module for the basic D&D line, all targeted for younger gamers. “D&D was under attack by religious conservatives at the time,” explained Lawrence Schick, “and TSR thought that releasing the original B3 would be just throwing red meat to the mad dogs.”

According to Gygax, when copies of the newly printed module reached Brian Blume, he “pitched a fit.” Blume held a seat on the TSR board and was part of the family that controlled TSR. Only he and his brother held the power to overrule Gygax.

Jean Wells and her editor Ed Sollers were called into the office of art director Dave Sutherland. She remembered that TSR vice president Will Neibling waited “mad as hell.” She and Ed knew they were in trouble, but had no idea why. Neibling asked, “Why did you write S&M into a child’s module?”

According to Wells, neither she nor Sollers knew what sadomasochism was. “Ed and I just looked at each other and went, ‘What’s S&M?’ Will didn’t believe us, but we just stood there looking dumbfounded because we didn’t know.”

Kevin Hendryx remembers the blowback. “It happened very, very fast. One day they were handing out our office copies, and then one day we were told that supervisors were collecting copies, telling people to turn theirs in. Most of us, having got a whiff of what was going on, were busy squirreling ours away.”

Stephen Sullivan estimates that the print run numbered between 5,000 and 10,000 copies. Management made sure that TSR handyman Dan Matheson supervised the work of moving the stacks to the landfill and personally witnessed their burial. “I find it funny that management was so concerned about anyone filching copies of B3 that they had employees like Dan—who was a big, imposing bear of a fellow, burly and bearded—riding shotgun on the garbage dump,” says Hendryx.

“It really was just a tempest in a teapot,” Gygax wrote later. “Had TSR not made a fuss about it, I think it would have passed largely unnoticed. They’re going now for really high prices, but I think most of the people who get them are really disappointed because there’s nothing really very wrong in the thing.”

“Jean held onto her filing job, but her only shot at success was blown,” writes TSR insider Frank Menzer. “Tom Moldvay rewrote the module significantly, removing most of Jean’s flavor and replacing it with his own style and preferences.”

The trashing of her creative work left Wells feeling soured, but she rallied and pitched more creative projects to TSR. “Everything I suggested to someone, anyone, was shot down as not a good idea.” Soon, Wells would leave TSR, marry, and raise two sons. She died in 2012.

Related: 

The Story of Palace of the Silver Princess, the Adventure so Scandalous That the Print Run Went to a Landfill

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In 1981, Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR printed an adventure so scandalous that when newly printed copies reached key TSR management, they ordered the entire print run sent to dumpsters rather than to distributors. According to legend, the art featured a bound, naked woman menaced by leering monsters, and another art page that mocked TSR’s owners by putting grotesque versions of their faces on three-headed creatures. The legends proved exaggerated, but because surviving copies sold at auction in shrink wrap for sky-high prices, few knew the truth.

B3 Palace of the Silver Princess“I think that the reaction to the module is more interesting than the module itself,” said TSR design head Lawrence Schick. “The actual content of it is only mildly eccentric by current standards. It’s more a matter of what light it shines on the management reaction at the time, and the ‘Satanic Panic.’ It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.” (Teaser: Schick’s likeness appears as one of those monstrous heads.)

The true story mixes the trials of the first woman to work at TSR as a D&D designer, a cheeky bit of rebellion by the TSR art staff, and executives fearful of provoking angry parents at a time when the media consistently painted D&D as a “bizarre” game enjoyed by “secretive” and “cultish” players.

In 1979, 23-year-old Jean Wells responded to an ad in Dragon magazine seeking game designers, D&D co-creator Gary Gygax liked the ideas she pitched well enough to hire her. “Gary and I corresponded from around Thanksgiving until mid-January when he flew me up,” Wells said. “I spent three days at his house.” Wells became friends with Gary and his wife Mary, who Wells taught how to make southern fried chicken and tried to show the game. “We liked each other, but Gary knew I didn’t know how to really write rules. He told me he’d teach me how to do them his way. He was hiring my imagination and would teach me the rest.”

Gygax said he wanted “to give the game material a feminine viewpoint—after all, at least 10% of the players are female!”

D&D insider John Rateliff wrote “Wells’ hiring was a deliberate attempt by Gary Gygax to expand beyond the all-male perspective that had dominated the design department for the company’s first eight years—no doubt with an eye toward attracting a female market to match the burgeoning youth market the game had already tapped.”

Wells became The Sage who answered rules questions for Dragon magazine. Readers enjoyed how she answered even the strangest questions with poise and wit. She contributed art for the eye of the deep and for the rat to new printings of the Monster Manual. For Gygax, she edited B2 Keep on the Borderlands (1981). When Gen Con needed an extra DM to run the D&D Open competition, Jean stepped up. “I grabbed my stuff and met the team and did that. One of the semi-washed teenaged boys on the squad there looked at me, gaping, and said, ‘It’s a woman!’. I said, ‘10 points for perception.’”

However, Gygax lacked time to develop her design skills, and no one else filled in. Instead of getting design assignments, she got filing and administrative tasks. “I don’t think my sex had anything to do with it being difficult for me,” she said. “I lacked a proper mentor and that is what I believe made it difficult. I believe that lacking a mentor cast me into the role of token female.” She underestimates the disadvantage of being dismissed as a token.

Still, Wells paid her dues and earned an assignment writing a teaching module for D&D. That project became B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (1981). But now, her friendship with Gygax may have hurt her chances of success.

The adventure let players explore the haunted ruins of a castle and dungeon 500 years after its silver princess mysteriously disappeared. The adventure includes clues to the princess’s fate for players to discover, and the discoveries can prove surprising. Reviewer Merric Blackman praises the adventure’s attention to non-player characters. “Wells’s work gives hints to the palace existing in a greater world: there’s a wilderness outside it, and NPCs that are described to be more than simple opponents or allies.”

Wells delivered something more than a first adventure; she created the foundation for a campaign. The original describes the wilderness around the palace and includes rumors and random encounters. Wells created the keep above the dungeon to give characters a home base for future adventures. The dungeon includes multiple collapsed tunnels and advises, “To expand the dungeon, the DM need but open up the blocked passageways and add new and challenging dungeon levels.”

But in 1981, such an old-school, sandbox design might have just seemed old fashioned to the rest of the design team. Surely, one of Wells’s instructional tricks seemed outdated. Like in B1 In Search of the Unknown (1978) by Mike Carr, Wells left blank spaces for new DMs to fill with their own traps, monsters, and treasures. Gygax had already dropped that technique when he wrote Descent Into the Depths of the Earth (1978). To be fair, Wells improved on the method by leaving the spaces for rooms that start empty but that a DM might want to fill later. Justin Alexander writes, that the space “emphasizes that dungeon keys are designed to evolve and change over time: These rooms are empty now, but perhaps they will not be the next time the PCs come here.”

Later when Tom Moldvay redesigned Silver Princess to create the version that reached stores, he abandoned the content that created the backbone for a campaign. He reworked the sandbox adventure in favor of the newer fashion of designing for a particular story. For example, he eliminated a staircase leading to the lower level, forcing players to take a more linear path through the dungeon to the final foe and to the story’s climax.

For all the original adventure’s virtues, it suffered from inevitable rough edges. “Jean did pretty well, though there were a few errors characteristic of a newbie who didn’t know the ropes,” wrote TSR insider Frank Mentzer. “I was also involved in the playtests. I helped a bit, critiquing some of the details, but didn’t give it a full checkover. I didn’t have time.” Mentzer assumed development and editing would lead to improvements, but Wells’s friendship with Gygax let the project skip some of the usual development process.

After a year of paying dues, the adventure stood as even more than Wells’s big shot, it also gained a personal investment, perhaps too personal. “The Silver Princess character was also her persona in the Society of Creative Anachronism—a hauntingly lovely woman who destroyed hearts,” artist Bill Willingham wrote. “It was clearly the private fantasies of the author.”

Wells wanted to protect her work, and so she leveraged her relationship with Gary Gygax. Game developer and designer Kevin Hendrix wrote, “When this thing came through, and the development people wanted to edit it, Jean went to Gary and said—and I know I’m going to make this sound more harsh than it actually was—‘They’re changing my stuff, tell them not to do it.’ And Gary reminded us all that we were not to change the designers’ word or intent in the work.” So, a new hire, editor Ed Sollers, got the project and only did proofreading.

Despite the flaws that skipped development, Menzer still rated it as publishable “and potentially popular for Jean’s style (notably different from other writers).”

Instead, the adventure’s art destroyed Well’s chance at design success and landed virtually the entire print run into a Lake Geneva landfill.

Part 2: Scandal!

Curse of Vecna and the Creative Method of Asking How Can This Be True?

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As a kid obsessed with roleplaying games, The Space Gamer ranked as my favorite magazine, and their articles where game designers analyzed their creations excited me the most. This article by Steve Jackson on The Fantasy Trip made such an impression that I’ve quoted it several times in my posts. My love of designer’s notes makes writing similar posts for my adventure designs irresistible. This brings me to Curse of Vecna, my second Dungeons & Dragon adventure available on the DMs Guild. This post spoils virtually everything in it.

I run weekly, open games at a local game store. One kid started with fourth edition’s D&D Encounters program, played at my table for years, grew up and went to college. During a return home, he asked to revisit old times with a new adventure for a favorite level-7 character. A night at the game store only gave me 2 hours to fill, just time for an unforgettable hook, a bit of roleplaying, and a showdown versus a boss monster.

For the hook, I remembered playing DDEX03-14 Death on the Wall by Greg Marks and its irresistible hook: Someone fleeing pursuit dumps a pack containing a message on the characters and then drops dead. The mystery behind the hook makes it so compelling. What’s the message and why did someone die to deliver it?

The best hooks include enigmas that raise the players‘ curiosity. I decided on an unexplained message, but instead of killing the messenger, I imagined a sympathetic child unable to read the note that could get him killed. So the adventure starts when 8-year-old Mika hands the party a note that reads, “I poisoned my parents. I am a very wicked boy and I should hang.”

This idea started my most productive creative activity, one called How can this be true? I needed to explain this note.

Some fey creatures relish mischief, so I searched for fey in D&D Beyond and sought something wicked enough to work such a cruel prank. I found the boggle, “the little bogeys of fairy tales,” who “hide under beds and in closets, waiting to frighten and bedevil folk with their mischief.” Better yet, a “child might unintentionally conjure a boggle and see it as a sort of imaginary friend.” Suddenly the note came from a boggle who Mika saw as a funny-looking friend. My roleplaying encounter would feature a meeting with the creature.

But Mika had a real problem with his parents, and since I wanted a good end, they could not actually be poisoned, only sleeping. The boggle turned my imagination to fairy tales, poisoned apples, and magic mirrors. The apple has been done, but what if a mirror captured the parents’ souls, leaving the players to rescue the spirits. I liked the idea, and decided to imagine the details after I found a villain.

For a foe, I turned to my own list of monsters by function and found a mastermind likely to challenge 7th-level characters. I selected the skull lord based on fond memories of battling them and because I fancied my skull lord miniature. This choice was a small misstep. At level 7, skull lords prove very dangerous. I underestimated the skull lord because I selected it while playing lots of D&D with tactical experts. During play, I dropped the creature’s legendary actions to even the match up.

So a skull lord used a magic mirror to capture the parents’ souls, but why? How could that be true? According to Monster Manual lore, skull lords suffered a curse from Vecna. What if this lord could lift its curse by trading places with three new victims? Such an exchange felt like it fit with magic and folklore. It explained why the skull lord might seek the two parents’ souls plus a third. In the final adventure, that third soul becomes Mika’s younger sister Affie.

For the two-hour version, the players met Mika, learned about the skull lord from the boggle, and then went beyond the magic mirror to face the skull lord and rescue the parents’ spirits. I liked the result well enough to plan a 4-hour version for part of a D&D weekend.

I decided to add 2 hours by expanding the skull lord’s lair to a complete dungeon. For this, I took inspiration from Curse of Strahd. In that adventure, the players gather magic items that give them enough of an edge to beat Strahd. In my expanded dungeon, players would learn enough secrets to give them the help they needed to destroy the skull lord. This scheme enabled me to keep the overpowered villain without requiring dramatically more powerful characters. The design also let me use one of five tricks for creating brilliant dungeon maps from Will Doyle. Check number 3, “Give players goals that compel them to explore.”

As I drew the dungeon, I consulted Will‘s five tricks, and sought to use more.

I interpreted number 2, “Show the final room first,” loosely by previewing the players‘ target. I added a way for the players to see the skull lord through the magic mirror before entering the dungeon.

For number 5, “Give each level a distinctive theme,” I imagined the dungeon that traps the parent’s souls as a dark reflection of the world on the other side of the mirror. I put that behind-the-mirror reflection on the Shadowfell and I aimed for a haunted feel. This echoes the upside down on Stranger Things, the show that put the name Vecna into the popular imagination.

For number 4, “Make the dungeon a puzzle,” I turned to my idea notebook of dungeon tricks and found one that fit the creepy tone. I had imagined a tyrant who had punished murdered rivals by wiring their corpses up like scarecrows as a demonstration of power and revenge. (I would later learn of a real-life ruler who did something similar.) In my idea, each corpse lacks an essential piece, like the mule’s head that once topped the body labeled as “willful.” As the party finds and returns the missing pieces, the dead tell secrets. To explain what makes the dead chatty, I again asked, “How can this be true?” The answer came from Vecna’s rival the Raven Queen. In death, all secrets belong to the Raven Queen, and she can arm the party with secrets that help win victory.

Not all the dungeon’s tricks come from one post. To Jaquays the dungeon, I added cave-ins and shafts connecting the two levels and the surface. Plus, I filled the rooms with interactive features and things to figure out.

To develop this adventure, I ran it four times, then playtesters helped me perfect it. Nine other DMs ran the adventure and shared their results. Their experience and feedback forged a better adventure than the one I drafted.

Curse of Vecna makes a great level 8-10 one shot and also works as a side-quest that fits easily into a campaign. So grab a copy for yourself or as a gift for your favorite dungeon master.

The Astral and Ethereal Went From Interchangable to Overcomplicated. How Can D&D Fix Them?

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As introduced in the original Dungeons & Dragons supplements, the astral and the ethereal planes seemed like two names for the same place. D&D characters visited both planes for the same reason: to snoop undetected. Either way, travelers pass through walls. On both planes, travelers braved the psychic wind. Monsters with attacks extending to one dimension invariably touched the other as well. The two planes shared the same encounter tables.

dosctor strange etheral selfToday, thanks to decades of new planar lore, the astral and ethereal now differ. Instead of psychic winds, ethereal travelers face ether cyclones. On both planes, travelers fly around at will, but on the ethereal, creatures have a sense of gravity. Planar diagrams show the astral plane touching outer planes like the Hells and Limbo, while the ethereal touches the elemental planes. (Nonetheless, characters will still use plane shift and portals to travel the planes.)

Despite these differences, when the fourth-edition designers simplified the lore in their Manual of the Planes (2008), they dropped the ethereal plane. No wonder fans felt incensed!

How did D&D wind up with the Coke and Pepsi of planes? Do their redundancies just add useless complication to the game’s cosmology as the fourth edition designers seemed to conclude?

Signed Greyhawk CoverTwo magic items that appeared in Greyhawk (1975) introduced the ethereal to D&D. Both oil of etherealness and armor of etherealness put characters “out of phase,” letting them through solid objects and making them immune to attack except by other creatures that can also become out of phase. Only a mention of creatures that can see ethereal things reveals that ethereal travelers are invisible rather than merely intangible.

One spell that debuted in Greyhawk introduced the astral to D&D. The astral spell let casters send their astral form out of their body. The form can fly at the speed of 100 miles per hour or more “and nothing but other astral creatures could detect it.” so the spell offered a superb way to find the best treasures and the worst traps in the dungeon.

The astral spell offers no more detail about astral travel, but fantasy gamers in the early 70s likely understood the concept. In Doctor Strange’s comic book appearances of the time, the Sorcerer Supreme frequently traveled in ethereal, astral, or ectoplasmic form; the superhero’s writers used the terms interchangeably. Gary Gygax included every idea he found in fantasy and folklore in his game, and gamers in his circle knew Doctor Strange. Brian Blume, the co-owner of D&D publisher TSR, was a fan. The teenage artist Gary recruited to draw the original D&D cover patterned the image after a panel in a Doctor Strange comic. Gamers could also consult books like the Art and Practice of Astral Projection (1975). Back then, astral projection attracted popular attention and even the U.S. Army took the paranormal seriously enough to launch a research effort that included astral projection.

The Eldritch Wizardry supplement (1976) frequently mentions ethereal and astral travel together, making the two dimensions interchangeable except for the magic item or spell required to reach them. The distinction between oil of etherealness and astral spell created one big difference in play. The oil made the body ethereal, so when the effect wore off, the user gained substance wherever they had traveled. With the astral spell, the caster’s astral form left their body behind and then returned to their body when the spell wore off or when something destroyed their astral form. This let someone scout while nearly immune to harm, but they could not physically travel to another place.

Until the plane shift spell debuted in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook (1978), characters could not bring their bodies to the astral plane. Plane shift enabled travel to and from the astral and ethereal, making visiting either plane equally simple.

In the AD&D Player’s Handbook, Gary’s urge to gather ideas from other sources led him to complicate the astral spell with more lore from astral projection. Some real-world investigators into astral projection claimed that during their out-of-body experiences, they saw an elastic, silver cord that linked their astral form to their physical body. Based on this, the astral spell added cords that tether astral travelers to their flesh and blood. Breaking the cord kills the traveler, so the cords potentially add some risk and tension to astral projection, even though “only a few rare effects can break the cord.” When Charles Stross created the astral-dwelling githyanki for the “Fiend Factory” column in White Dwarf issue 12 (1979), he wisely gave them swords capable of cutting the silver cords, adding some real peril to astral travel.

In the July 1977 issue of Dragon magazine, Gary Gygax printed a diagram that showed a difference between the astral and ethereal planes. The astral stretched to the outer planes like Olympus and the Hells, while the ethereal reached the inner, elemental planes. This proximity hardly made a difference in gameplay, since Gary never explains how astral travelers can navigate to Olympus, or why someone might care in a game with plane shift on page 50 of the Player’s Handbook. Besides, with Queen of the Demonweb Pits still years away, a DM who allowed players to travel the planes lacked any example to follow.

doctor strange ectoplasmicAs far as players cared, the astral and ethereal just offered ways to snoop while undetectable and unblocked by walls. The choice of plane depended on the available magic. In 1977, D&D co-creator Gary Gygax would write about how astral and ethereal travel “posed a headache for DM’s.” In Tomb of Horrors (1978), he writes “Characters who become astral or ethereal in the Tomb will attract a type I-IV demon 1 in 6, with a check made each round.”

The Manual of Planes (1987) finally created differences between the astral and ethereal that factored into game play.

The astral no longer overlapped the material plane, so astral travelers lost the power to scout and spy. At best, astral travelers could find a portal called a color pool leading to the material plane and use it as a window to scry. Instead, the astral became a crossroad of connections to other planes. The astral gained those color pools and also conduits that work like portals but looked different. Years later, the fourth-edition designers fully realized this idea of the astral connecting to the outer planes when it made the Heavens, Hells, and other outer planes domains floating in the astral sea.

The ethereal still allowed invisible, intangible scouting, but it now extended into the deep ethereal, a place that connected to the elemental planes and various demi planes. The deep ethereal seems like a useless complication that stems from a diagram Gary printed in that 1977 issue of Dragon, because it resembles the astral plane, and besides players travel by plane shift and portal.

By the 90s, as D&D settings started proliferating, D&D designers started looking for ways to connect them. The Spelljammer setting gave characters a way to pilot their fantasy spaceships between Faerûn, Krynn, Oerth, and so on. The Planescape setting uses the deep ethereal to create similar connections between D&D worlds.

The astral and deep ethereal are different thanks to Coke versus Pepsi nuances of flavor and because each plane led to different places. (Does that feel like too much complexity for few gameplay rewards?) In practice, plane shift and portals mean that few visit the astral except to fight githyanki and no one visits the deep ethereal ever. In today’s game, the new Spelljammer setting uses the astral sea to connect D&D worlds, leaving the deep ethereal with no reason to exist. (Update: The Radiant Citadel of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel exists in the deep ethereal, which provides the feel of a magical place disconnected from the ordinary, but without the problems created by locating a city in the astral where nothing ages.)

If I were king of D&D, I would adjust the astral and ethereal with some changes:

  • Drop the deep ethereal, keeping the ethereal as the sole, overlapping plane of creatures out of phase. The deep ethereal rates a description in the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide, but I suspect no fifth-edition character has ever visited it.
  • Drop the astral projection spell and the silver cords. The ability to spy from the astral plane disappeared in 1987, so the astral spell just rates as a pointless nod to a passing interest in the paranormal.
  • Make the astral sea the plane of portals and conduits that serves as the crossroads of worlds and planes.

Related: Queen of the Demonweb Pits Opened Dungeons & Dragons to the Planes