Book Review: Slaying the Dragon

Book Review: 'Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons' by Ben Riggs

5 / 5 Stars

'Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons' (293 pp.) was published by St. Martin's Press in 2022. Author Ben Riggs is active in chronicling the contemporary RPG landscape in podcasts and articles for a variety of online portals. His blog hasn't posted content since 2022, but contains articles relevant to 'Slaying the Dragon'.

I was a wargamer in the 1970s, and I have only vague memories of 'Dungeons and Dragons' (D&D). I played the games from the major publishers such as SPI and Avalon Hill. As far as I was concerned, D&D was just another one of a number of indie games that floated around the periphery of the tabletop gaming world, buying small ads in The Wargamer's Digest:

D&D advertisement in The Wargamer's Digest, 1974

Little did I know that D&D would morph from a modest, home-made game into a franchise that would come to define Planet Geek like no other properties before or since.

'Slaying the Dragon' tells the story of TSR and D&D from its start in the 1970s to 2022. It all began with Gary Gygax, a man in his mid-thirties who worked as a shoe repairman in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and who, in his spare time, wrote about, designed, and sold, board games. 

In 1973 Gygax formed 'Tactical Studies Rules' to promote and market his properties, and in January 1974, he began selling an RPG called 'Dungeons and Dragons'. The game was assembled in the basement of Gygax's house in Lake Geneva, and immediately became popular with gaming geeks.

As author Riggs relates in 'Slaying', within a few years, D&D had become a pop culture phenomenon, and Gygax moved his enterprise into the Hotel Clair, a rather dilapidated building in downtown Lake Geneva. TSR's expansion only accelerated in the late 1970s and early 1980s when lurid stories of impressionable youth, led astray by D&D, proliferated in the national media.

William Dear's account of the life and death of D&D fan James Dallas Egbert III

But although outwardly TSR was a thriving enterprise, Riggs shows that in reality, the company based its business strategy on what proved to be an inherently risky arrangement with publisher Random House. And its management had a habit of alienating some of its most imaginative, and commercially successful, creative personnel. By the mid-1990s, TSR was experiencing increasing financial difficulties, and only the intervention of an RPG rival would enable the world of D&D to survive into the 21st century.

'Slaying the Dragon' is a very readable book. Author Riggs avoids getting too bogged down in the minutiae of tabletop RPG gaming, keeps his chapters short, and uses a large body of on-the-record statements from many former and current staff to provide 'insider' perspectives on the history of TSR and D&D.

This allows the book to appeal both to geeks, and to businesspeople. This is a rather unusual conjunction of interested parties, but Riggs does a commendable job of interlacing the actions taken by TSR's creative staffers with the actions of the managerial tiers, emphasizing that the willful separation of these two facets of the D&D enterprise was ultimately to the detriment of the company. 

Riggs does not shy from arguing that many of TSR's business problems originated with Lorraine Williams, who ousted Gary Gygax from the company in October, 1985 and installed herself as CEO. Riggs acknowledges that he was unable to persuade Williams to be interviewed for the book, and thus her side of the story is absent, but he relies on anecdotes and observations from other TSR staff, as well as company documents, to buttress this argument.

The 'hero' in the TSR narrative is Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison, who purchased TSR in April 1997. Riggs portrays Adkison as the sort of boss who inherently understood what RPG gaming was all about, and realized the need to treat employees with consideration and respect. 

[ Its publication date of 2022 means that 'Slaying the Dragon' can't remark upon the current, fractious state of affairs between a reincarnated TSR, helmed by Gary's son Ernie Gygax, and Wizards of the Coast. ]

The verdict ? Whether you are an RPG and fantasy fan, or someone interested in the rise and fall of corporations, 'Slaying the Dragon' is worth reading.