Elon Musk Tells Wizards Of The Coast To "Burn In Hell" Over The Company's Latest Trashing Of Dungeons & Dragons Creator Gary Gygax

Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast have been on a crusade to transform Dungeons & Dragons from the fantasy adventuring, monster-slaying tabletop RPG everyone loves into an identity politics-fueled social game, evoking a lot of fan criticism. Now, Elon Musk savaged the company after World of Warcraft designer Mark Kern reminded players on how they’re mistreating their founder, Gary Gygax.

This year, Wizards of the Coast recently released a revisionist history book titled, “The Making Of The Original Dungeons & Dragons,” which fans noted was beyond disrespectful to original creator Gary Gygax.

In the preface written by Jason Tondro, a Senior Designer on Dungeons & Dragons, and shared to X by user dLsd_25, Tondro attacks the original creators writing, “Some language in the first iteration of D&D presents a moral quandary. The documents reproduced in this book include many pages of charts and tables alongside lists of monsters, spells, and magic items. But that game content also includes a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language, words that are casually hurtful to anyone with a physical or mental disability, or who happens to be old, fat, not conventionally attractive, indigenous, Black, or a woman.”

Tondro continued, “Some people have charitably ascribed this language to authors working from bad assumptions. In the 1970s, historical wargamers in America were predominately white, middle-class men; it isn’t surprising that they would dub a class of soldiers the ‘fighting-man.’ But when, in the pages of Greyhawk, the description of the Queen of Chaotic Dragons includes a dig at ‘Women’s Lib,’ the misogyny is revealed as a conscious choice. It’s an unfortunate fact that women seldom appear in original D&D, and when they do, they’re usually portrayed disrespectfully.

Tondro went on, “Slavery appears in original D&D not as a human tragedy that devastated generations over centuries, but as a simple commercial transaction.”

“The cultural appropriation of original D&D ranges from the bewildering (like naming every 6th-level cleric a ‘lama’) to the staggering; Gods, Demi-gods and Heroes (not reprinted in this book) includes game statistics for sacred figures revered by more than a billion people around the world,” he wrote. “Were players expected to fight Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism, kill him, and loot his ‘plus 3 sword of demon slaying’?”

Tondro concluded the preface writing, “Despite these shortcomings, D&D has always been a game about people choosing to be someone unlike themselves and collaborating with strangers who become friends. It has slowly become more inclusive, and as the player base has become more diverse, the pool of creators who make the game has expanded to include people with a broader range of identities and backgrounds. As these new creators make the game more welcoming, the game has attracted new fans who, in turn, continue to make the game more inclusive. The future of Dungeons & Dragons, here at its fiftieth anniversary, is bright.”

It was not just Tondro who attacked Kuntz and the other original creators such as Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but so did Jon Peterson who penned a Foreword for the book. Peterson is a writer who has co-authored Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook, and Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse.

In his Foreword, Peterson wrote, “Note that the ‘Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns’ that make up original D&D were created and sold to a wargaming community that was almost exclusively white, middle-class men. The rules compiled here offer little by way of roles for other players, nor indeed for anyone who wouldn’t easily identify with a pulp sword-and-sorcery hero. Especially before 1974, the rules made light of slavery, in addition to including other harmful content. To reiterate the disclaimer Wizards of the Coast includes on legacy D&D content, ‘these depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. The content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.'”

World of Warcraft designer Mark Kern, posting as Grummz on X, made a thread this week reiterating how D&D has fallen, saying, “DnD creators, Gygax and others, are erased and slandered at the same time. WoTC and Hasbro just released the new Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, as well at the 40th Anniversary "Making of DnD" book whose foreward slams the original creators and attempts to distance themselves. I spoke with one of the original creators, Rob Kuntz @threelinestudio, about the problem.”

Elon Musk saw the post and chimed in with his passionate expertise, “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons. What the f*** is wrong with Hasbro and WoTC?? May they burn in hell.”

This echoes a lot of fan sentiment about the recent directions Wizards of the Coast has taken Dungeons & Dragons, as they’ve leaned into wokeism for their latest editions of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbooks.

With Elon Musk voicing outrage, the failure of the new D&D is hitting the mainstream, which Hasbro had better take notice of, or they might end up losing their entire player base.

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