Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to cool people do cool stuff, but
Speaker 2: your weekly reminder that I'm a nerd. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Maria Kiljoy and with me today is my guest Edza
Speaker 2: Trun who's the host of Better Offline. Hi. Hi ho
Speaker 2: h Offline Just life.
Speaker 3: Absolutely just flawless introduction from me, and I'm just unable
Speaker 3: to communicate with the human Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's that's why we get paid the big bucks.
Speaker 3: That's why we told good Macron.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they told us we had faces for radio,
Speaker 2: and then here we are. Our producer today is Sharene
Speaker 2: Hi Sharen. Hi, I'm back, Sharene. When did you play
Speaker 2: D and D? What was it like? How'd it go?
Speaker 1: I mean, if I'm being honest, it was like maybe
Speaker 1: twelve thirteen years ago. It was a long time ago.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, And if I'm being honest, I thought it
Speaker 1: was a little boring. Yeah, really long. It's like the
Speaker 1: Baseball of games.
Speaker 3: It takes a way to yeah.
Speaker 1: And I don't it's hard to pay attention and most
Speaker 1: people are really into it, so if you're not, it's
Speaker 1: just kind of a weird vibe.
Speaker 2: But that makes a lot of sense to me. I
Speaker 2: feel like it might be they just like not into it.
Speaker 2: And there's also that I think that a lot of
Speaker 2: people running games just sort of take it for granted
Speaker 2: that everyone's having fun. Whereas I was reading this thing
Speaker 2: I really liked while I was doing research for this episode,
Speaker 2: where I was talking about how like people are used
Speaker 2: to coming into games where it's like this team versus
Speaker 2: that team, but the players are working together, and then
Speaker 2: the game master's goal isn't to kill all the players,
Speaker 2: it's to make them have fun. And that's like your
Speaker 2: win condition.
Speaker 3: Punish them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guy gaxit's punish them.
Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with games. I love any kind of game,
Speaker 1: I love any kind of puzzle, but I just need
Speaker 1: able to have and I'm very competitive. At the same time,
Speaker 1: I understand people being into something. But D and D
Speaker 1: has a it's a little too much for me. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's just a little too much of a.
Speaker 2: It feels like.
Speaker 3: Something that's very variable based on the group you have.
Speaker 2: My best mate, it's very true, plays.
Speaker 4: D and D.
Speaker 3: He's a great dungeon master and also apparently very horrible
Speaker 3: to people during it in a fun way. But I imagine
Speaker 3: if you get kind of a half ost group or
Speaker 3: you get like a guy gag style guy. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: guy's like, ah, but the book was the book was cursed.
Speaker 3: You opened and read the cursed book, you fucking idiot.
Speaker 3: How didn't you know that? Yeah? And I get I
Speaker 3: guess maybe there's some sort of line to drive from.
Speaker 3: Was Guy GaX a very paranoid guy?
Speaker 2: Yes? I was after him.
Speaker 3: Okay, so he may legitimately have just been trying to
Speaker 3: teach people or just lived his life in his constant stay. Well,
Speaker 3: is this dangerous? Is there a centipede in there?
Speaker 2: Gary? Gary, we're in an Albertson.
Speaker 3: We'll get buying groceries imilipeds in it?
Speaker 2: Dangerous reason. I got really excited when I found out
Speaker 2: the first game of D and d Ever had centipedes
Speaker 2: as the the monster. Was that in the game that
Speaker 2: I wrote the number city, the like generic first enemy
Speaker 2: for the players to fight is giant centipedes. Yeah, if
Speaker 2: you don't know what.
Speaker 1: In most games, I mean not pretty sure worm you know,
Speaker 1: like Zelda had like the worm that in the sand
Speaker 1: like it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the slimes and dragon, I mean I'm pretty
Speaker 2: sure that they were in early EverQuest.
Speaker 3: Whatever. The someone listening to this is going to correct
Speaker 3: me here. Pretty sure what the second zone of Western
Speaker 3: Commons after knos Quinos. It was Sony EQ backwards. I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure that there were some there, but it might
Speaker 3: also have been the later expansion. If you email me
Speaker 3: and want to talk about EverQuest, I will talk to
Speaker 3: you all day. I got a lot of depression in
Speaker 3: that game.
Speaker 2: I am very grateful that I am old enough that
Speaker 2: World of Warcraft came out after I was done with
Speaker 2: high school. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was a tough time to have to be around
Speaker 1: for the high school.
Speaker 2: Time of Wow. Yeah, I was.
Speaker 3: I was EverQuest in high school. Wow. In the beginning
Speaker 3: of Carl Wow. Wow. Towards the end, do you know
Speaker 3: how World of Warcraft actually got started? Though? Just taking
Speaker 3: the show. But there's a very short story. Okay, so
Speaker 3: well towards the EverQuest is still going for some reason day.
Speaker 3: But what happened towards the end in the name they
Speaker 3: keep claiming it the end of the Shadows of Lukelin expansion,
Speaker 3: which was set on the moon, or maybe it was
Speaker 3: the Planes of Power there was, Yeah, it was the
Speaker 3: Planes of Power expansion, and the game was kind of
Speaker 3: very obviously starting to fall apart.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 3: It was obvious that the developers kind of weren't fucking
Speaker 3: sure what to sell people anymore. And there was this
Speaker 3: final level raide level called Planes of Time and a group,
Speaker 3: one of the bigger groups, Fires of Heaven, one of
Speaker 3: the they went to it. They got to the thing
Speaker 3: and it just didn't work. It was very obvious that
Speaker 3: Sony did not expect Sony Online Entiment did not expect
Speaker 3: people to get there. Guy called four Or got very
Speaker 3: pissy about it. Another guy called tig old Bitties was
Speaker 3: his name, and on the nameless I believe Legacy.
Speaker 2: A classic English name. Both of these two guys.
Speaker 3: Insult the culture, insult them all away. Jeff Kaplan who
Speaker 3: played tig Ole Bitties. He is now senior at Blizzard
Speaker 3: Activision Blizzard, so is Rob Pardo, who I believe is
Speaker 3: also on Legacy of Steel, as well as Furor, who
Speaker 3: I can't remember the real name of. I've actually also
Speaker 3: been a weird guy. Nevertheless, what World of Warcraft did
Speaker 3: and what Blizzard did, because they used to be quite
Speaker 3: a smart company, was they just hired people from the
Speaker 3: EverQuest forums whoa okay, they hired them and they went
Speaker 3: and they everyone I've met a Blizzard really not like
Speaker 3: World of Walcroff was actually founded on something kind of cool,
Speaker 3: which is these people actually played the game.
Speaker 2: It's crazy idea, yeah fans. Yeah, but all of.
Speaker 3: This, like mailing people's stuff and all of this like
Speaker 3: really petty shit, kind of reminds me of the Fires
Speaker 3: of Heaven days when people just went on there like well,
Speaker 3: that's actually the conflict needs being and it was usually
Speaker 3: just directed at the game developers, who are in this
Speaker 3: thankless job of just knowing that they had to make
Speaker 3: these people happy, but knowing that this was like twenty people, yeah,
Speaker 3: in a game with hundreds of thousands, if not millions
Speaker 3: of players, and you just had to make these very
Speaker 3: loud people who people just agreed with. Anyway, that's my story.
Speaker 3: No that sorry for that.
Speaker 2: No, it's a good like nothing ever changes about nerds thing,
Speaker 2: you know, And again for all my like, well, I
Speaker 2: think I started this episode by saying I'm a nerd,
Speaker 2: I'm whatever. So in case you're just joining now, which
Speaker 2: would be a very strange thing for you to do.
Speaker 2: This is part two of a two parter about the
Speaker 2: history of Dungeons and Dragons and role playing games in general.
Speaker 2: Where we last left our heroes, they were working for
Speaker 2: minimum wage for a monster who invented D and D,
Speaker 2: swimming around a man who wait, he can't sue me,
Speaker 2: he's dead buildings. Yeah. D and d's early heyday is
Speaker 2: the mid nineteen seventies of the mid nineteen eighties, and
Speaker 2: this is a time when, especially for white American culture,
Speaker 2: it's obsessively and we talked with this last time, almost
Speaker 2: pathologically non political. Don't talk about politics is of course
Speaker 2: a political position, one that reinforced the status quote capitalism, consumerism,
Speaker 2: and shit. Everyone in twenty twenty four knows that fucking shit,
Speaker 2: but people didn't want to hear it back then. The
Speaker 2: thing is, though, the cultural influences on D and D
Speaker 2: and RPGs more broadly way way the fuck political in
Speaker 2: all kinds of ways, both good ways and bad ways.
Speaker 2: You don't live through the forties or the sixties without
Speaker 2: paying attention to how the world works and noticing that
Speaker 2: there's a lot of people trying to make very dramatic
Speaker 2: changes in how the world works. There are all kinds
Speaker 2: of influences on Dungeons and Dragons, of course, high fantasy
Speaker 2: and epic fantasy. We're really getting going by the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: But two of the most present and clear influences are
Speaker 2: two authors I've paid a lot of attention to as
Speaker 2: relates to their political positions. J R. Tolkien, who's probably
Speaker 2: from the same town as you because he's British, and
Speaker 2: fucking Michael Moorcock, who is also British. I assume people
Speaker 2: have heard of Tolkien, and if people are first hearing
Speaker 2: about Morcock just now, you're going to be in this
Speaker 2: stage for about a year where you can't say his
Speaker 2: name without laughing.
Speaker 3: Oh fuck, he was he was born He wasn't even
Speaker 3: born in England, j R. R.
Speaker 2: Tolkien.
Speaker 3: He was born in South Africa.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, really that makes sense.
Speaker 3: He died in Bournemouth, which is where my mother was born.
Speaker 3: And I thought I was about to be very embarrassed,
Speaker 3: like the technically we all kind of from the same place.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, I love that. You know this British guy
Speaker 2: and you're like, yeah, of course there's three people on
Speaker 2: this island and no one's angry.
Speaker 3: Yeah hate each other. So wait, there's a fellow called
Speaker 3: Morecock in England.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Michael Moorcock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's got a rough ross secondary school for that man.
Speaker 2: Either we are if they all read any more Cock, No,
Speaker 2: I've had plenty. Thanks, yeah, I will. I won't expect
Speaker 2: any of you to say his name yet. In a
Speaker 2: year he'll be able to say his name. Just too
Speaker 2: hard to pronounce anyway.
Speaker 3: I think Michael Moorcock might have actually grown up near me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he lives in Texas now, born in London and thirty
Speaker 3: nine of the landscape of London, particularly the er in
Speaker 3: notting Hill and Labort Grove. Labbort Grove is very close
Speaker 3: to where I grew up.
Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, See there's three people in England and none
Speaker 2: of them live there, and one of them is here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna go too deep on talking because he's
Speaker 2: probably gonna get his own episodes one of these days
Speaker 2: when I'm because, but I'm gonna say a few things
Speaker 2: about him first. Anyone isn't aware of J. R. Tolkien.
Speaker 2: This is the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 2: which is basically where modern fantasy fiction comes from. He
Speaker 2: didn't invent the genre, but he breathed life into it.
Speaker 2: Another one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, said about
Speaker 2: who's also British God damn it said about Tolkien and
Speaker 2: his influence quote j R. R. Tolkien has become a
Speaker 2: sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy, the way
Speaker 2: that Mount Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's big and up close, sometimes it's just shape on
Speaker 2: the horizon. Sometimes it's not there at all, which means
Speaker 2: either of the artist has either made a deliberate decision
Speaker 2: against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is
Speaker 2: in fact standing on Mount Fuji. So whenever there isn't
Speaker 2: Tolkien in fantasy, it is a conscious choice, right Terry, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Terry Bratchet is probably the most blameless of all these.
Speaker 3: People, one of the few people I'll say whatever, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I got nothing bad to say about Terry.
Speaker 2: No, the only good cop he know is uh Vimes.
Speaker 3: Vimes. Yeah, it was luck how he didn't like being
Speaker 3: He didn't like other people to shave him. WHOA.
Speaker 2: When that other British author decided to come out as
Speaker 2: a massive transphobe a couple of years ago, there's this
Speaker 2: Everyone was like, oh God, this is sad and horrible.
Speaker 2: And then this person told a story, this trans woman
Speaker 2: told a story about meeting Terry Pratchett and getting her
Speaker 2: book signed by Terry Pratchett and being like, well, my
Speaker 2: name is actually and then gave a boy's name, but
Speaker 2: I'm trying to change my name to girl's name, and
Speaker 2: Terry Pratchett was like, oh great, and signed it to
Speaker 2: the girl's name and was like that, good luck with
Speaker 2: every name.
Speaker 3: Yeah. What a legend. Yeah, and so I have no
Speaker 3: idea what the other author is. But if I did,
Speaker 3: they get it by a big truck.
Speaker 2: An obscure lady that no one pays attention to anymore.
Speaker 2: Tolkien has earned his detractors. He is an English Catholic
Speaker 2: who's obsessed with Norse mythology, so his monumental impact on
Speaker 2: fantasy has made it extra hard for non European fantasy
Speaker 2: and medieval stuff to really break through culturally. And his writing,
Speaker 2: while I would argue it's well intentioned, is absolutely racist.
Speaker 2: In a short story I wrote back a while back,
Speaker 2: a character calls him the most influential, subconsciously racist author
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century, and I stand by that completely.
Speaker 3: It makes say it was the World War One veteran
Speaker 3: as well. Yeah, he grew up in like.
Speaker 2: The Golden Age, of British racism. Yeah, and he tried
Speaker 2: not to be. And he actively worked against racism while
Speaker 2: unconsciously absolutely encouraging racism fairly our a bias. His villains
Speaker 2: are basically Middle Eastern coded and Orcs are like born
Speaker 2: bad and all kinds of other shit. He was also
Speaker 2: vocally anti Nazi. The Nazis wrote saying they wanted to
Speaker 2: translate his stuff into German, but they wanted to make
Speaker 2: sure he wasn't Jewish first, and he told his publisher,
Speaker 2: as far as I'm concerned, they can go hang. And
Speaker 2: he told Nazis, if I am to understand that you
Speaker 2: are inquiring whether or not I am of Jewish origin,
Speaker 2: I can only reply that I regret that I appeared
Speaker 2: to have no ancestors of that gifted people nice And
Speaker 2: so Nazi Germany did not publish translations of his books.
Speaker 2: He also wrote some of the most compelling critiques of
Speaker 2: political power ever written, and he wasn't subtle when he
Speaker 2: named the ring of power the ring of power which
Speaker 2: is not to be used but instead cast into the
Speaker 2: fires of Mount Doom. Near the end of his life,
Speaker 2: he wrote a letter to his son saying this politics
Speaker 2: were moving more and more towards anarchism. He wrote a
Speaker 2: world full of elves and dwarves and hobbits, which is
Speaker 2: what D and D is, except D and D had
Speaker 2: to change it's the name of hobbits to halflings to
Speaker 2: avoid a lawsuit. He basically set up all the fucking
Speaker 2: tropes of modern fantasy, well a lot of them, because
Speaker 2: actually all these other writers did too, and hippies love Tolkien.
Speaker 2: So you have all these like crazy radicals through the
Speaker 2: sixties and seventies, like kind of doing shit and naming
Speaker 2: it after shit from Lord of the Rings and shit.
Speaker 2: Hippies love Tolkien, but not all of them. One fantasy
Speaker 2: author writing during that time whose influence on D and
Speaker 2: D is just as apparent when you dig into it,
Speaker 2: is the anarchist author Michael Moorcock. Morcock is mostly known
Speaker 2: today for writing el Rick, maybe the first anti hero
Speaker 2: the fantasy genre. Morcock also invented the chaos star, that
Speaker 2: eight pointed star that everyone either loves or hates, and
Speaker 2: there's always annoying discourse about on the Internet unless you
Speaker 2: live in a blessed corner of the Internet that doesn't
Speaker 2: care about the sort of thing, which case I'm envious
Speaker 2: all kinds of shit from him ended up in D
Speaker 2: and D and D and D. There's like this, and
Speaker 2: some of it's like bad and annoying stuff in D
Speaker 2: and D, Like basically everyone speaks this language called Common,
Speaker 2: which is more or less like English. Like if you're
Speaker 2: like an elf, you speak Elvin and Common. If you're
Speaker 2: a human, you just speak Common. So just fucking Americans
Speaker 2: in English, you know, right. That comes from Michael Morcock.
Speaker 2: He had the common tongue that he wrote into things.
Speaker 2: Also drinking a potion that makes you immune to edged weapons,
Speaker 2: which is some obscure, random gamey shit. He wrote gamey
Speaker 2: ass fiction like it was just full of game stuff.
Speaker 2: Put on a ring that makes you move twice as fast,
Speaker 2: that kind of fancy writing. Yeah, all these new moods.
Speaker 3: Sound one hundred years old, these new movies, it's all
Speaker 3: like interconnected shit. Oh, it's got to be a franchise thing. Now,
Speaker 3: why didn't you get cart I took a poshm. Yeah,
Speaker 3: why are we in a fancy world if we can't
Speaker 3: use the easy tree? The fuck that it has?
Speaker 2: It's fantasy? Yeah, yeah, I have some.
Speaker 3: Fun with everything. Some fucking dull these days.
Speaker 2: He might like his writing, his writing is like kind
Speaker 2: of edgy, but pulpy and well, not edgy. If he
Speaker 2: took the potion, that's true, it's immune. Well, people can
Speaker 2: be as edgy as they want around him, He's immune
Speaker 2: to it. He also cynical talking swords comes from fucking
Speaker 2: Michael Morricock. And maybe most importantly, he frames his book
Speaker 2: as books a lot of them as this like weird
Speaker 2: theological war between the universal forces of law and chaos,
Speaker 2: only he's not in favor of law. His hero is
Speaker 2: a chaos paragon. The D and D alignment system of
Speaker 2: morality used to just be law versus chaos. Eventually it
Speaker 2: became a two axis chart of law and chaos and
Speaker 2: good and evil. Morcock also wasn't a big fan of Tolkien.
Speaker 2: He didn't like cozy moral stories of good and evil.
Speaker 2: I love Tolkien, but I also love my Morcock's teardown
Speaker 2: of the Lord of the Rings, which is called the
Speaker 2: Epic Pooh, which compares Lord of the Rings to the
Speaker 2: Winnie Pooh to the Winny Pooh, Winnie.
Speaker 4: The Pooh, the Winnie the Witty the Pooh. Yeah no,
Speaker 4: the Winnie Pooh has his real name. Yeah, clipp is game.
Speaker 3: The other day drunk off his ass yelling at the
Speaker 3: dances got chucked out of the half.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a fucking winny. So Morcock was part of this
Speaker 2: culture of like free sharing of ideas, that was a
Speaker 2: common hippie thing. That was where the juice of D
Speaker 2: and D comes from. I will never call it that again.
Speaker 2: Morcock freely gave permission to the founders of D and
Speaker 2: D to use his stuff without credit or payment. He wrote,
Speaker 2: quote when I told the original D and D guys
Speaker 2: they could use elric it was in the spirit of
Speaker 2: the sixties slash seventies, when it seemed to many of
Speaker 2: us that we were sharing in a common culture and
Speaker 2: the products of that culture. Of course, I hadn't anticipated
Speaker 2: that some people would start turning all this stuff into
Speaker 2: commercial businesses. I was even more surprised to see it
Speaker 2: all developing into pretty soulless marketing methods, where companies like
Speaker 2: Warcraft and others began to rip me off and talking
Speaker 2: in particular, I suppose I should have trademarked and copyrighted
Speaker 2: all this stuff sooner, but I'm still unhappy about that
Speaker 2: sort of thing, which goes against all my ethical notions,
Speaker 2: and so, like you know, they ripped him off because
Speaker 2: he was like, oh, we're all just sharing, and then
Speaker 2: someone's like yeah, sharing, and then then just say they
Speaker 2: sell this shit, you know, just before it feels like
Speaker 2: like a.
Speaker 3: Real invention of lying situation. They're like, yeah, capitalism doesn't exist, right,
Speaker 3: we're all friends here, Gary geigs like, we are not friends.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I am going to steal all of this because
Speaker 4: you allowed me to the trap that I hit undunderneath
Speaker 4: the contract. I didn't know the legal contract hidden within.
Speaker 2: Yeah. As for Tolkien, Gary Geygax hated Tolkien, but not
Speaker 2: for like because he wanted political nuance like more Cock did,
Speaker 2: but for boring like let's not talk about politics, asshole reasons. Also,
Speaker 2: I suspect most of what Gygax wrote about how D
Speaker 2: and D how he doesn't even like Tolkien. He only
Speaker 2: threw it in there because fans insisted all of this stuff.
Speaker 2: It's because he didn't want to get sued by Tolkien's estate. Yes,
Speaker 2: that's my best guess. I read this like editorial he
Speaker 2: wrote about Tolkien and D and D and years ago,
Speaker 2: and in it he wrote, I found the Ring trilogy
Speaker 2: well tedious, The action dragged, and it smacked of an
Speaker 2: allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk
Speaker 2: of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil. At
Speaker 2: the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor's dedicated readers,
Speaker 2: I must say that I was so bored with his
Speaker 2: tones that it took me nearly three weeks to finish them,
Speaker 2: which is like so many weird levels of bragging. Three
Speaker 2: weeks is a perfectly reasonable length of time to read
Speaker 2: very thick ass fucking books. I was gonna say, am
Speaker 2: I just like an anciently slow reader. No, No, you're not.
Speaker 3: I mean, None of the Rings is a fucking long book.
Speaker 3: It's not I'm going to come out and say I
Speaker 3: do not like that book. It took me forever to
Speaker 3: retook me more than three weeks. Yeah, it is through
Speaker 3: the Earth's Sea books though. Yeah, and the fourth one
Speaker 3: with the farming that was not not very good.
Speaker 2: I've only read the first two Earth Sea books.
Speaker 3: I've been like third one is that the first. I
Speaker 3: don't consider it going further than the third just because
Speaker 3: it gets weird. But the first three is some of
Speaker 3: the best fantasy books ever. Yeah, second one as well.
Speaker 3: The punchline of the second book is so fantastic. It's
Speaker 3: like it's one It's the first time I read something
Speaker 3: where I was like, Wow, I fucking like I get
Speaker 3: why fantasy exists.
Speaker 2: That's cool because it's not a like it's not pure polp.
Speaker 2: It actually is like specifically saying stuff.
Speaker 3: I also just really like the fact that there is
Speaker 3: with these with fantasy novels that including a lot of
Speaker 3: the Rings, just the idea of the costs of power, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: And I know bringing up anime is probably could have
Speaker 3: pissed someone off, but for my Alchemists, great thing about
Speaker 3: like the the exchange that one for power, but I
Speaker 3: feel like obviously does a much better thing. But also
Speaker 3: the consequences of that first book are threat like they
Speaker 3: just the whole time gets like, I fucking.
Speaker 2: Why did I do any of them?
Speaker 3: Like there's just a real regret.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also the pain of curiosity.
Speaker 3: It's fantastic.
Speaker 2: I think that that whole thing, Like it's almost like
Speaker 2: when you can tell whether someone takes just seriously as well,
Speaker 2: Like the thing the copy from talking is critiquing and
Speaker 2: complicating and talking about power. That's what fantasy is really
Speaker 2: good at doing.
Speaker 3: So a delight in character like a real, just like
Speaker 3: truly getting into the guts. He got too far into
Speaker 3: the guts of characters.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I'm not going to read the similary and I'm
Speaker 2: going to come out and say it. Oh, but you
Speaker 2: know what I will read. Actually, I don't read ads,
Speaker 2: but I do transition into them because of my desire
Speaker 2: to eat food on a regular basis. And here are ads,
Speaker 2: and we're back. I really got to have more fun
Speaker 2: with the ad rates. I it's it's like part of
Speaker 2: the joy of your job for me.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I just especially off to like mainlining a
Speaker 3: bunch of Bostard's recently. Yeah, Robert talk about untraceable poisons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, And everyone finds their own way. I mean
Speaker 2: trade actually is just kind of like I hate that
Speaker 2: their ads. I'm just going to go whatever, here they are, now,
Speaker 2: we're done.
Speaker 1: Now let's go back to But usually I'm just like, so,
Speaker 1: I'm too upset to make a joke, you know, like,
Speaker 1: I know it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't imagine cutting that aim with Gauza, like.
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 1: Try. I have a c Orchard episode coming out eventually,
Speaker 1: and I want to hear that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that'll be fun. But like the sun but no,
Speaker 2: it's it's Margaret's the best at it. I think I'm
Speaker 2: going to say that you, thank you. This is not
Speaker 2: a lot of things I can. I'm a jack of
Speaker 2: all trades, but I'm a master of one thing, the
Speaker 2: cynically addressing my own position within a complicated system. So
Speaker 2: what cynically broke?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: I can't. I can't. I can't transition out ads as
Speaker 2: well as I can transition into them. So the thing
Speaker 2: that fucking took D and D to another goddamn level
Speaker 2: was and broke it into the mainstream was right wing
Speaker 2: Christian backlash. Hell yeah, And what's funny about it is
Speaker 2: it's right wing Christian backlash against a game written by
Speaker 2: like centrist. Honestly, my guess is center right. But I'm
Speaker 2: not certain Christians like D and D was not made
Speaker 2: by the woke mob like Jehovah's Witnesses. Yea, So Gygaks
Speaker 2: was okay. So my best read Gygax's first wife was
Speaker 2: far more I'm guessing was far more religious, because certainly Gygax,
Speaker 2: as soon as he gets money in power, is just
Speaker 2: gonna do cocaine and move into a mansion and start
Speaker 2: cheating on his wife. And then divorce her and marry
Speaker 2: his secretary. Spoiler alert for a couple paragraphs down from
Speaker 2: no classic seventies guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely entering the eighties as well, so really
Speaker 3: like very acura.
Speaker 2: Yeah, almost cliche he is. He is a fucking cliche,
Speaker 2: That's what he is. And like, look, if someone handed
Speaker 2: me millions of dollars, it would take my ethical background
Speaker 2: of politics and stuff to not do a bunch of
Speaker 2: cocaine and move to a mansion. So who amongst us
Speaker 2: doesn't whatever? Okay, So this anti D and D panic
Speaker 2: started in nineteen seventy nine, as best as I can tell.
Speaker 2: On August fifteenth, nineteen seventy nine, content warning, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: talk about suicide, a sixteen year old college kid like
Speaker 2: boy genius style named James Dallas Egbert the Third disappeared
Speaker 2: from Michigan in State University and Lansing. He was a
Speaker 2: computer science student. He wrote a suicide note, went down
Speaker 2: to the steam tunnels beneath campus and tried to ode
Speaker 2: on kueludes, which is another eighties thing to do, I guess.
Speaker 2: But he survived, but he didn't return and so he
Speaker 2: was missing. So his family hired a private private detective,
Speaker 2: and this private detective was convinced the disappearance was related
Speaker 2: to D and D, that the kid had lost track
Speaker 2: of what was and wasn't reality. The detective was like, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: and this is like this is where fucking everything comes from, right,
Speaker 2: because we've seen this with.
Speaker 3: Like just people who do not understand fucking anything making
Speaker 3: decisions about children.
Speaker 2: Yep. The detective was like in his dorm room taking
Speaker 2: photos of the pushpins on the corkboard, convinced that there's
Speaker 2: like clues and hidden messages in the way that the
Speaker 2: push pins are in the corkboard or whatever.
Speaker 3: What was this person who tried to tagle on Live sixteen? Okay,
Speaker 3: see the sixteen year old? The detective question was like,
Speaker 3: all right, got a genius here, We've got it, like
Speaker 3: we've got I guess this might be before this audiat Kaila,
Speaker 3: but like this, we're going to decode the message of
Speaker 3: a fucking the press sixteen year old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who wrote a note and then yeah no and.
Speaker 3: Then tried to offer them poor thing. Yeah Jesus.
Speaker 2: And according to this guy, D and D was a
Speaker 2: cult and that's his like theory and the whole thing
Speaker 2: actually that thing where it's so complicated that you have
Speaker 2: to get invited to play in order to learn how
Speaker 2: to play. That's part of how it's a cult, right,
Speaker 2: And what actually happened is that the kid had gone
Speaker 2: over to East Lansing after he survived. He took a
Speaker 2: bus to New Orleans. He took a bunch of cyanide.
Speaker 2: The second time he survived that he became a day
Speaker 2: laborer for in oil fields.
Speaker 3: Jesus, and this person cannot die.
Speaker 2: No, he does eventually, but yeah, no, it took a while. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's he. He goes back to his family. He like
Speaker 2: turns himself in basically, and then the news stories drop
Speaker 2: about him. That stops being They stop caring because he's
Speaker 2: been saved from D and D or whatever. Right, he
Speaker 2: does successfully kill himself when he's seventeen a year later
Speaker 2: with a gun.
Speaker 3: Anytime, we could put some fucking government services into helping
Speaker 3: this person versus the ones which to them, and then
Speaker 3: we'll blame colts versus having any responsibility for anyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, him famous nationwide because articles around about him when
Speaker 2: he's disappeared go nationwide. Game cult is still missing. Dungeons
Speaker 2: and Dragons cult may lead to missing boy like, yes,
Speaker 2: I feel bad for the people he played with.
Speaker 3: I feel bad for everybody involved other than the police.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Like this poor person tries to off themselves and they
Speaker 3: have fucking newspaper things calling them ast a cultist. Yeah,
Speaker 3: fucking hell, which I'm sure didn't help. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: remain him. That made things better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so this is national news. And soon D
Speaker 2: and D was swept up into the satanic panic. A
Speaker 2: minister in nineteen eighty one was like raised that they
Speaker 2: either wanted to or did raise one thousand dollars to
Speaker 2: buy D and D products and then burn them. And
Speaker 2: I just want to say that is the early level
Speaker 2: conservatism I know. But if any evangelicals, I publish a
Speaker 2: way more radical game than called P Number City. If
Speaker 2: you want to buy one hundred copies at full price
Speaker 2: to burn them, hit me up. You can buy my
Speaker 2: product at full price. It's yours now you can do
Speaker 2: whatever you want with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my very boring pr business books full of satanic shit.
Speaker 3: You need to buy them and burn them right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you go go back download by podcast as well,
Speaker 3: and then down your phone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, lots of downloads. The more down, the.
Speaker 3: Cool zone media full of satanic sheet You need to
Speaker 3: go and download everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In a school, a school in Utah band D
Speaker 2: and D. In nineteen eighty one, teachers who defended it
Speaker 2: were accused of witchcraft because that's a real thing that people.
Speaker 2: And also people claimed that the books screamed when they
Speaker 2: were burned because there was literal demons in them. Oh
Speaker 2: my god, who's the weird wacky cult snack? Now, who's
Speaker 2: called the crazy beliefs here?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, not me.
Speaker 3: I'm just the one that heard the book screaming.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know there's that group mad Mothers against
Speaker 2: drunk Driving.
Speaker 3: I now remembered them.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, how do you feel about bad bothered? About
Speaker 2: Dungeons and dragons?
Speaker 3: Is that real thing?
Speaker 2: It is real?
Speaker 3: You double bothered?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It was Ricky Gervaissa Ship, the mother of a
Speaker 2: kid who killed himself because teenagers who are alienated by
Speaker 2: society sometimes killed themselves.
Speaker 3: It sucks. It's not my faults, his mother, it's dungeons
Speaker 3: and dragons.
Speaker 2: Yeah. She later wrote a book called The Devil's Web,
Speaker 2: Who is stalking your children? For Satan? So is she
Speaker 2: the one that kind of led the detective? No, it's
Speaker 2: a different is a different mother. Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 3: It's the same shit though. It's the same bullshit, conservative nonsense.
Speaker 3: I know, a lack of responsibility towards the people that
Speaker 3: you are responsible for, finding anything else to blame tragic,
Speaker 3: horrible things that you took part in. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: the same shit being done to trans kids, same shit
Speaker 3: being done to every child who's ever been part of
Speaker 3: these things. Fucking disgusting. You have a child, you owe them,
Speaker 3: not the other way round. Fucking assholes.
Speaker 2: No, I I fucking agree.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: You ever seen the nineteen eighty two Tom Hanks movie
Speaker 2: called Mazes and Monsters? Absolutely not?
Speaker 3: I have not.
Speaker 2: I watched it last night.
Speaker 3: How was it?
Speaker 2: It is based roughly on What Happened to James. It
Speaker 2: is a trash movie. It is like, not even so bad,
Speaker 2: it's good. It's only worth watching in this specific the
Speaker 2: context of trying to pay attention to the satanic panic
Speaker 2: around this. It's about a guy at college who plays
Speaker 2: too much and he starts hallucinating and following a god,
Speaker 2: and he tries to kill himself and his friends. I'll
Speaker 2: try and save him, but it's two ladies. Lost his
Speaker 2: mind forever? Well, when I was in fourth grade and
Speaker 2: getting into D and D. We whispered rumors that there
Speaker 2: were older kids who played D and D for real,
Speaker 2: D and D for blood, we called it. If you
Speaker 2: were injured in the game, you had to hurt yourself.
Speaker 2: If you were killed, you had to die. There is
Speaker 2: no evidence that this was anything other than some shit.
Speaker 2: Some fourth graders fucking talked about this shit.
Speaker 3: This sounds like in London when they claim that people
Speaker 3: had HIV needles that they put in the bus seats. Yeah, yeah, totally,
Speaker 3: like in the Yeah, yeah that you meant that you
Speaker 3: sit down on the bus you got HIV, the plan
Speaker 3: being I'm not sure. Yeah, like question Mark prophet Big
Speaker 3: HIV was, we had HIV the thing that was having
Speaker 3: a lot of trouble spreading in London.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and neat people really wanted to give a
Speaker 2: needed new vectus for Yeah. And all of this moral
Speaker 2: panic made D and D cool as shit. It was
Speaker 2: up there with underage drinking and fucking and smoking cigarettes
Speaker 2: and shit. You know, like, you want to be cool
Speaker 2: and edgy played D and D, which is good advertising
Speaker 2: for fun. Yeah, that is nerdy that you do hiding
Speaker 2: in the basement with uncool friends, you know, totally. A
Speaker 2: church in Minnesota burned a bunch of D and D books,
Speaker 2: so sales doubled in that area. Like they literally they
Speaker 2: were like I know they fucking yeah, hurt me. Oh
Speaker 2: they got me. During the Satanic Panic from nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: nine to nineteen eighty three, sales of D and D
Speaker 2: went from two point three million dollars a year to
Speaker 2: twenty seven million dollars a year.
Speaker 1: That's honestly hilarious, I know, fucking funny, Like a church
Speaker 1: burned a bunch of books and people bought them more
Speaker 1: than ever, Like that's.
Speaker 2: Just they must have been so mad. Yeah, yeah, Wow,
Speaker 2: that's a big jump too. That's like I know, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like millions, and there's like correlation causation stuff going
Speaker 2: on in there, right, Like it could be that it's
Speaker 2: just an idea is time had come, but like nationwide
Speaker 2: attention and making it cool, like yeah, you know, even
Speaker 2: like thinking about like stranger things, right, you have this
Speaker 2: like concept of like the nerd kids, but then by
Speaker 2: the end of whatever such and such season, you also
Speaker 2: have like there's still nerds, but they're like metal heads
Speaker 2: and punks and they're kind of cool, they're like the
Speaker 2: bad kids instead of the just relentlessly bullied kids. And
Speaker 2: as someone who made that own trend, like I am
Speaker 2: a living example of that. When I first would play
Speaker 2: D and Dia, I'd have to go h over to
Speaker 2: my friend's house in fourth grade. In order to get there,
Speaker 2: I had to go through my bully's backyard where people
Speaker 2: would like he would come out and beat me up
Speaker 2: on my way to go play D and Jason's right.
Speaker 2: But then by like high school, I hung out with
Speaker 2: the bad kids and anyone who tried to beat us up, like,
Speaker 2: don't try to fuck with someone wearing a Sepultura shirt.
Speaker 2: Don't fuck with him or as friends, it's not gonna work.
Speaker 2: You're going somewhere painful. Yeah, like Brazilian metal not made
Speaker 2: by soft people. So I don't know whatever. D and
Speaker 2: D became cool and I became cool. That's the important
Speaker 2: part of the story, right, I never beat anyone up.
Speaker 2: My friends beat people up when they tried to fuck
Speaker 2: with us. We didn't go around beating people up anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 2: So there were impacts on the game from the satanic
Speaker 2: panic before Margaret started talking about her own childhood. Distributors
Speaker 2: did drop them like JC Penny used to carry D
Speaker 2: and D. And then they stopped and folks were like, hey,
Speaker 2: if you remove the demons, the devils will keep publishing
Speaker 2: them and props to Guy GaX. He was like, no, fuck, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to do that. Why would I do that.
Speaker 2: By the second edition of A D and D, under
Speaker 2: a new CEO who wasn't a gamer, they dropped devils,
Speaker 2: demons and assassins in order to try and what did
Speaker 2: assassins have to do with it? They're killing people, aren't
Speaker 2: they poise looped in with a supernatural there? I know,
Speaker 2: have they ever heard of like war or like there's
Speaker 2: like worse things in this world?
Speaker 3: Was it one of those things where assassins had, like
Speaker 3: I remember with early fantasy things that weren't great, there
Speaker 3: was like a weird kind of a Middle Eastern tinge
Speaker 3: to assassinations that it was something of the foreigners.
Speaker 2: Like assassins. I don't think so, because they were selling
Speaker 2: the shit out of Orientalism at the time. They haven't.
Speaker 2: There's a D and D book called Oriental Adventures. Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: That's terrible. Yeah, no it is. Yeah, we're unfortunately, we're
Speaker 2: going to talk a little bit about the misogyny baked
Speaker 2: in and all like kind of also touch in on
Speaker 2: all the orientalism and shit picked, and when we get
Speaker 2: near the end, we'll talk about all the work that
Speaker 2: people have done to try and undo all of the
Speaker 2: shit that's baked into it. But Oriental adventures part of
Speaker 2: Dandy from the start. In fact, the first woman game
Speaker 2: designer was named Gene Wells, who joined in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: At this point, about ten percent of the D and
Speaker 2: D players in the country are women, which is way
Speaker 2: the fuck up from the point five percent of war gamers.
Speaker 2: Still not super high. Just to spoil my own script,
Speaker 2: these days, it's fifty three percent men who played D
Speaker 2: and D as of twenty twenty. What happened to Jean
Speaker 2: Wells is not great. She did a bunch of work
Speaker 2: on different adventures and then she wrote her own. It
Speaker 2: was called The Palace of the Silver Princess. One of
Speaker 2: the pieces art of art in it was like too
Speaker 2: sexual or something, even though other TSR art from the
Speaker 2: same time was at least as horny. The whole thing
Speaker 2: was recalled like either a day or three days, depending
Speaker 2: on your source. After it was published, They published this
Speaker 2: adventure and then someone was like, oh, I don't know
Speaker 2: about this, and then they recalled it and like buried
Speaker 2: it in a landfill, and then it was rewritten by
Speaker 2: a man. No one would ever green light Jean's ideas anymore,
Speaker 2: and she wounded up basically being a secretary, so she quit.
Speaker 2: The surviving copies of her adventure are some of the
Speaker 2: most expensive collectible pieces in D and D because there's
Speaker 2: some of the rarest Do you think that she lived
Speaker 2: long enough to see that? Yeah, I've read some interviews
Speaker 2: with her from I Actually I'm unsure one way or
Speaker 2: the other whether she's still alive, but I've read like
Speaker 2: interviews from the twenty first century with her.
Speaker 1: Okay, for this part of it, maybe that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's I hate that she had to go through that,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I'm glad that she's at least getting some
Speaker 1: type of recognition.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, Yeah, people are like, I mean, it's funny too,
Speaker 2: because though because it's just like, oh, this is rare
Speaker 2: and has like the secret horny picture in it, which
Speaker 2: is a naked woman tied up by her hair being
Speaker 2: attacked by men. It was actually less sexual than like
Speaker 2: the cover of like another one that was like a
Speaker 2: woman being sacrificed naked on a fucking altar and shit,
Speaker 2: you know, like but they're like, oh, this is too
Speaker 2: s and M. And I'm a little bit like, oh
Speaker 2: a girl wrote this. You're mad that a fucking girl
Speaker 2: wrote something. Well, you said it was written by a man.
Speaker 2: I'm sure it defined yeah, once it was rewritten by man. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: They took out the offending pictures and changed it up
Speaker 2: a little bit, and it sure didn't help the misogyny
Speaker 2: culture at the office. That guy GaX, who was one
Speaker 2: of the three leaders of the company in the early days,
Speaker 2: it is just a misogynist, sorry, a biological determinist as
Speaker 2: he puts it.
Speaker 3: Oh that's better.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you want to hear what he said? Is that
Speaker 1: a phrase that it's just like a thing? Am I
Speaker 1: just a little bit out of the loop.
Speaker 3: Whenever someone has a contrived term I know this from
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley like that, it just means they're racist or sexist.
Speaker 3: Like that's it.
Speaker 5: You don't need to even work out what it means,
Speaker 5: just to be so I don't like woman or people
Speaker 5: who want know why. Oh, but I'm going to give
Speaker 5: the quote about it, and why if anyone cuts that
Speaker 5: and uses that against me, I will kill you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because his whole thing, right is he's like, I'm
Speaker 2: a simulationist. I want everything to be as realistic as
Speaker 2: possible in my game with Fireballs. As late as two
Speaker 2: thousand and four, he said, quote as I have often said,
Speaker 2: I am a biological determinist, and there is no question
Speaker 2: that male and female brains are different. It is apparent
Speaker 2: to me that by and large, females do not derive
Speaker 2: the same inner satisfaction from playing games as a hobby
Speaker 2: that males do. It isn't that females can't play games, well,
Speaker 2: it's just that it is not a compelling activity to
Speaker 2: them as is in the case for males. Ah, fuck
Speaker 2: this guy.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: Perfect, and I would guess and I will use the
Speaker 2: fact that now D and D's almost fifty percent women
Speaker 2: that the reason women didn't enjoy playing D and D
Speaker 2: to the same degree is that the games were very
Speaker 2: gygax overwhelmingly male, and men acted badly. During those games.
Speaker 2: Women would write into the game's magazine called The Dragon
Speaker 2: later Dragon. They would write and tell stories about how
Speaker 2: other players in the DM were routinely sexist to them.
Speaker 2: Early versions of the game, instead of having the fighter
Speaker 2: had the fighting man and women's strength score. Once they
Speaker 2: finally added rules, they were like, well, I guess you
Speaker 2: could play a woman, and so they added some rules
Speaker 2: in case you wanted to play a woman. Don't worry,
Speaker 2: they got you covered. Women's strength score was capped four
Speaker 2: points lower than men's. Oh and most offensive of all,
Speaker 2: because you can vaguely, vaguely be like, I guess on
Speaker 2: average the average testosterum bodied person.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: But it's a fantasy game. Who fucking cares. Also, the
Speaker 2: other thing they did is they replaced one of the
Speaker 2: ability scores in Dungeons Dragons's careerisma for boys. Boys can
Speaker 2: have charisma and girls have beauty instead, so.
Speaker 3: Women are only perceived they are not interacted with.
Speaker 2: It was bad, that's terrible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe it's good that a lot of these guys
Speaker 3: didn't meet women.
Speaker 2: I met a woman, they would think differently.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's because they had never met a woman that they.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, I mean he's probably not guys, because we
Speaker 2: know because he's higher women.
Speaker 3: Often they should have met women in a more violent sense.
Speaker 3: The woman should have smacked them. Yeah, so I'm just thinking.
Speaker 3: I grew up, I grew very close to my sister.
Speaker 3: I'm just imagining telling her she did not have charisma. Yeah,
Speaker 3: she would say to me in response to.
Speaker 2: That, Yeah, no personality, just a face. Yeah yeah, did
Speaker 2: we already do a second ad? Break?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: Who does have charisma? Here's ads of charisma? Did they
Speaker 2: roll your will to defend yourself? What the young kids
Speaker 2: call it RIZ?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: Well, really is that what RIZ stands for? This makes
Speaker 2: so much sense. It's for charisma. Jez, Well, here's I
Speaker 2: can't even say that with a straight face. So here's
Speaker 2: some ads and we're back. So by nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 2: Dungeons Tsr. Rather was the nation's sixth fastest growing privately
Speaker 2: held company in the country. It's in all the glossy
Speaker 2: business matters wild yeah, despite none of their nine top
Speaker 2: level managers having any prior business experience. But don't worry,
Speaker 2: they all did shit. That's as fucked up as any
Speaker 2: NBA great well off all of them did, but several
Speaker 2: of them certainly did. Former occupations of the people in
Speaker 2: charge were like biologists and plumber and the fuckery, oh
Speaker 2: my god, the business fuckery. Game designers worked against impossible
Speaker 2: odds to make the game work because the business of
Speaker 2: it was trying to make it not. Everyone in charge
Speaker 2: of TSR did weird nepotistic shit and made horrible decisions
Speaker 2: with money. Soon enough, writers got cut out of royalties
Speaker 2: for what they had made, and former employees were constantly
Speaker 2: being threatened with lawsuits for taking their ideas elsewhere. This
Speaker 2: isn't really an episode about the rise and fall of
Speaker 2: TSR Wizards of the Coast, but here are some of
Speaker 2: the highlights. They changed the name to AD and D
Speaker 2: Advanced Ungs and Dragons to try and cut that guy
Speaker 2: out of royalties. Right then, Okay, this one's actually kind
Speaker 2: of fun. They blew a whole bunch of corporate money
Speaker 2: raising a shipwreck out of Geneva Lake for no discernible reason. Cool.
Speaker 3: No, that's cool. I I don't fucking need a reason.
Speaker 3: Bring the ship out. I know the ghosts.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They kept the boiler from the ship like behind
Speaker 2: the building for a while and then like sold it
Speaker 2: for scrap. Gary Geygax moved out to la to try
Speaker 2: and sell TSR's properties to Hollywood. He rented out a
Speaker 2: mansion and he would have like hot tub parties with
Speaker 2: sex workers in cocaine and shit. Not inherently bad except
Speaker 2: those funded by paying writer's minimum wage and cutting their
Speaker 2: fucking royalties. Although I think he was more pro worker
Speaker 2: than everyone else involved. That's grim good. He like at
Speaker 2: some point he tried to get workers like shares in
Speaker 2: the company. Oh, and it didn't happen. It was a
Speaker 2: complete jackass. I suppose I know he see, he's like
Speaker 2: an interesting jackass. He's like a jackass. I'd have a
Speaker 2: beer with, you know, unless he thinks my womanly brain
Speaker 2: can't handle it, or I suppose unless he thinks that
Speaker 2: I'm a woke mob.
Speaker 3: Just won't let you speak, yeah, just to be looked at.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's how he's being trans affirming as he's like, no, no,
Speaker 2: I changed your I changed your character sheet, says female.
Speaker 3: Now that's good though, Like you can change your character
Speaker 3: sheet too, but I will obey the rules.
Speaker 2: I do love. There's this thing that happens to me
Speaker 2: sometimes in nerd spaces that I kind of appreciate, where
Speaker 2: I'll be like hanging out with some like random like
Speaker 2: hanging out with some random dude, and then he'll figure
Speaker 2: out that I'm trans and he'll immediately switched like kind
Speaker 2: of maladying me, and I'm like, oh, that's kind of
Speaker 2: sweet at all. It comes from a good place, exactly
Speaker 2: exactly me, Like.
Speaker 3: On some level I figured to some extent, it's almost
Speaker 3: like ship, did I walk into this acting roy and
Speaker 3: you have no look, if you haven't met many transpatople,
Speaker 3: perhaps it's just like I don't fucking do it a
Speaker 3: little different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally no, We're a monolith. That's why I
Speaker 2: play in a noise band and I'm a computer programmer
Speaker 2: and only talk about I don't know howse trans people do.
Speaker 2: I did the most trans thing I've ever done. When
Speaker 2: people come over my house, I show them I built.
Speaker 2: I built a gaming computer that has like pink fans
Speaker 2: inside it that glue.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's a good ship.
Speaker 1: That's pretty Yeah, I'm really proudous, some nerdy ass ship, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hadn't built a fucking computer since I was
Speaker 2: in high school. But I was like, I really wanted
Speaker 2: to play boulders Gate three, which in the end I
Speaker 2: didn't like very much. But that's completely besides the point. Okay,
Speaker 2: So anyway, let's see what else. So he's like he
Speaker 2: divorces his wife on not good terms, and he marries
Speaker 2: a secret harry, which you know, maybe they're in love
Speaker 2: and shit, and I don't know. It just looks fucking
Speaker 2: cheesy eighties yuppie bullshit. There's two brothers that are in
Speaker 2: charge alongside of him, and they buy a relative's needle
Speaker 2: point business to sell needle point patterns that say shit
Speaker 2: like dragon power. And they're convinced that a fifth of
Speaker 2: the company's revenue is going to come from this. They
Speaker 2: the Etsy or something. No, I'm what do you mean
Speaker 2: by that?
Speaker 3: I'm a bit confused.
Speaker 2: So they that they bought a needle point company.
Speaker 3: A needle point company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there was like I think they're like sisters
Speaker 2: or cousins or something. We're like, oh, we do needle point.
Speaker 2: And someone's like, I'm gonna give you all so much
Speaker 2: money in order to sell needle point patterns. This was
Speaker 2: going to be dragon power. And who was who made
Speaker 2: this decision to two brothers who are in charge of
Speaker 2: this company. I haven't introduced. They're the Bloom Brothers, and
Speaker 2: I don't know enough about them, but they keep coming
Speaker 2: up as villains and all the histories of it, but
Speaker 2: it's all there's so much corporate fuckery that gets them
Speaker 2: put in charge for a while. It's like them too,
Speaker 2: and guy GaX for a while. Wow, And this is
Speaker 2: just transparently nepotism. No one, their audience is not buying
Speaker 2: needle point patterns. Let's say dragon Power. They would grow
Speaker 2: too large and then layoff workers again and again as
Speaker 2: they made terrible business decisions. The Dragonlance novel so the
Speaker 2: mid eighties floated the company for years, but the authors
Speaker 2: are basically paid fuck call and they pretty much have
Speaker 2: delve tsar to write books elsewhere. And then in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five, Gary Geygax was forced out of the company
Speaker 2: by a hostile takeover by a non gamer woman sorry
Speaker 2: femail named Lorraine Williams dun dun dum, a woman I know.
Speaker 2: And here's where all the histories get really annoying, because
Speaker 2: like everyone's like mostly people are like Gygax is amazing.
Speaker 2: Lorrain is the one who destroyed the company, and it's like, no,
Speaker 2: everyone involved sucked, and the fact that Lorraine was a
Speaker 2: woman is unrelated. And she did suck, and so did
Speaker 2: Gary at least as business people whatever. Almost everyone did
Speaker 2: prefer working under her, but she wasn't much better. Lots
Speaker 2: of ink has been spilled, defaming her to the point
Speaker 2: where it just reads like misogyny. She was corrupt and incompetent,
Speaker 2: so were the people who came before her. The fun
Speaker 2: part of her story is that her family owned the
Speaker 2: rights to Buck Rogers. This is where the story just
Speaker 2: goes off the rails. Okay, buck Rogers is a wildly
Speaker 2: irrelevant comic book hero from the nineteen twenties that had
Speaker 2: a failed recent TV run recent at this point nine
Speaker 2: also a famous TV run though, Yeah, I like, I
Speaker 2: know all I know about Buck Rogers some old timey shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah it was that was That was a TV show.
Speaker 3: No true, listen, I was just about to say, anyone
Speaker 3: else hear. This is if the readers can, like Jesus
Speaker 3: fucking Grist cost work almost done TV show.
Speaker 2: That's a TV show, And at this point when she's
Speaker 2: in charge mid eighties, he is irrelevant. No one wants
Speaker 2: this property. Her family owns the property, the rights, so
Speaker 2: she keeps more or less bankrupting TSR to try and
Speaker 2: push buck Rogers stuff. They make game after game that
Speaker 2: won't sell. Everyone in I know, I know, and her
Speaker 2: priorities are her family's bullshit.
Speaker 3: This is actually nepotism sounding. I'm sorry, you know, my
Speaker 3: family's assets. Most That's what it is, and I think
Speaker 3: everyone who's like working on it hates it. At one point,
Speaker 3: the salesperson at a big trade show is like up
Speaker 3: there like pitching the new buck Rogers RPG after like
Speaker 3: the last one doesn't sell, and he says, We'll keep
Speaker 3: making it until you buy it. It's a classic way
Speaker 3: to appeal to your audience, you know what they say, Uh,
Speaker 3: Supply and demand is just forcing supply on people as
Speaker 3: much as humanly possible until they accept it.
Speaker 2: So one thing that they did that was going really
Speaker 2: well is they started working with DC Comics, and they
Speaker 2: started selling their properties to DC Comics, and you started
Speaker 2: getting these ad and d fucking comic books that were
Speaker 2: like mid list but like successful and profitable. They were
Speaker 2: compared with Aquaman and Wonder Woman at terms of how
Speaker 2: popular they were, which is funny to me because now
Speaker 2: Wonder Woman's a big fucking deal, right, I mean, Wonder
Speaker 2: Woman was a big deal then as well, seventies eighties
Speaker 2: so apparently less so. Apparently they were all around the
Speaker 2: like in the top one hundred best selling comics, but
Speaker 2: kind of just hanging out around near one hundred, which
Speaker 2: was fine. It was profitable. DC Comics made some money.
Speaker 2: TSR made some money, and they did a bunch of comics.
Speaker 2: But Lorraine was like, what about buck Rogers. Don't you
Speaker 2: all want to do Buck Rogers? And they were like, no,
Speaker 2: that's some corny old shit. We do not care at
Speaker 2: all about Buck Rogers. She really tried.
Speaker 3: It was a Buck Rogers TV show from uh nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy nine through ninety ninety one. Oh that's a time,
Speaker 3: wrote little Buck Rogers histories in the twenty fifth century.
Speaker 2: Yeah, better than I thought. But DC Comics wouldn't fucking
Speaker 2: touch it. And so instead of doing something that would
Speaker 2: be intelligent, like saying, oh, well we tried, Lorraine ran
Speaker 2: the company like her personal fiefdom, as had the previous owners. People.
Speaker 2: People don't really get that we don't live in a
Speaker 2: democracy because the primary economic model is authoritarian, hierarchical corporate structures.
Speaker 2: But she decided to compete with DC Comics. That's what
Speaker 2: she would do in order to get buck Rogers comics out.
Speaker 2: So she decided to compete with the people who published
Speaker 2: a ton of their comics and had rights to all
Speaker 2: their most popular properties. But you said that they were
Speaker 2: working with TC Comics. I know it wasn't very smart. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So in nineteen eighty nine, TSR went back to where
Speaker 2: It's dream goes to die, Los Angeles, this time to
Speaker 2: make buck Rogers comics under the name TSR. West. Lorraine's
Speaker 2: brother was running it. Naturally nice, DC, for completely predictable reasons,
Speaker 2: got mad about this. So TSR. West was like, oh, no,
Speaker 2: we are not making comic books. Their comic modules, and
Speaker 2: a module is basically an adventure in D and D
Speaker 2: talk like at ice self contained thing. And so what
Speaker 2: they did in order to make them legally distinct from
Speaker 2: comic books was throwing tiny amounts of RPG content at
Speaker 2: the end of any given comic book. And they didn't
Speaker 2: just do buck Rogers, but they did all they didn't
Speaker 2: do any of their frontless shit is all their backless shit,
Speaker 2: because all their frontless shits with DC. But now they're
Speaker 2: not comic books. They're not sold by a comic book distributor.
Speaker 2: They're distributed I think by Random House, and so they're
Speaker 2: in the book section of the store and they're not
Speaker 2: in comic book stores. They're comic books. No one fucking
Speaker 2: buys them because they're in the wrong. They're not. It's
Speaker 2: just a mess. It's a nightmare. And DC was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're gonna stop publishing y'all's shit. You're right, we can't
Speaker 2: sue you because you call them comic modules. We can
Speaker 2: just drop all your shit and you can't publish it
Speaker 2: because we have all the rights. So they did. So, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Lorrain saved the company from being run into the ground
Speaker 2: by Guygax and co. And then ran it into the
Speaker 2: ground herself because of the book rogers. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And there's like some other shit, and they like keep
Speaker 2: trying to go become basically like a book publisher, and
Speaker 2: they drive away all their like most fiction publisher because
Speaker 2: for a while fiction is just covering the cost of
Speaker 2: everything else, and they're just just wildly incompetent at running
Speaker 2: this thing, and they drive away all the creatives and
Speaker 2: they just treat everyone like shit. So eventually it was
Speaker 2: bought by the makers of Magic the Gathering, a company
Speaker 2: called Wizards of the Coast in nineteen ninety seven. Wizards
Speaker 2: of the Coast. I'm not trying to like sing their praises,
Speaker 2: but they revitalized Dungeons and Dragons. They put out additions
Speaker 2: where the rules actually were consistent in the and they book,
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and they they made it the wildly successful
Speaker 2: game it is now. They are still full of fuckery,
Speaker 2: But this isn't a show about fuckery. It's a show
Speaker 2: about cool people did cool stuff. And an incredible amount
Speaker 2: of work has been done across the field, especially by
Speaker 2: this upstart publisher, pays O Games that I'm not really
Speaker 2: talking about anywhere in here, but they publish a game
Speaker 2: called Pathfinder that's a split from Dungeons and Dragons. An
Speaker 2: incredible amount of work has been done to make tabletop
Speaker 2: role playing games more accessible to a wider audience, not
Speaker 2: by dumbing down the games or making them less interesting,
Speaker 2: just going through systematically and rooting out the misogyny and
Speaker 2: racism that have been baked into them. And a couple
Speaker 2: of years ago, I had the pleasure to write a
Speaker 2: canon Magic the Gathering story in which I got to
Speaker 2: make one of the characters canonically gay and another I
Speaker 2: added a trans character to the lore of Magic the
Speaker 2: Gathering because and that was her. Wizards of the Coast.
Speaker 2: Giant evil companies run the world, but the weird thing
Speaker 2: that you run across all the time, especially these days,
Speaker 2: is that evil companies are worked for and at by
Speaker 2: people like you and I, not us. We don't work
Speaker 2: for a giant evil company obviously.
Speaker 3: No, that's so good. I love them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And many of the people who work at these
Speaker 2: companies fucking hate capitalism and racism and misogyny and all
Speaker 2: that shit and try to do what they can to
Speaker 2: alleviate the worst of the evils they run across. And
Speaker 2: so the people in the role playing game industry, and
Speaker 2: there's like all these fights about it where these people
Speaker 2: are like, no, Gygax did nothing wrong, and women are weaker,
Speaker 2: and you know, probably running around measuring the skulls of
Speaker 2: different ethnicities. But by and large, it is it's changing.
Speaker 2: And I didn't even get into it how much this
Speaker 2: shit changed everything else about how everything just how much
Speaker 2: D and D in role playing suffuse through culture, video games,
Speaker 2: everything and like change the way that we see creativity.
Speaker 2: But that's my story of the history of Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 2: The end of the story.
Speaker 3: Think what we've learned here, m hmm is that women
Speaker 3: do not have charisma.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is Ed's takeaway, just takeaway is that I would.
Speaker 3: Say exactly the kind of guy who I thought did
Speaker 3: invented dungeons and dragons. Oh yeah, had you asked me
Speaker 3: to come up with who did it would come up? Yeah,
Speaker 3: I would have come up with some Hitchhiker's guide the
Speaker 3: galaxy sounding ass guy. Yeah, assume he had weird proclivities
Speaker 3: of some sort, and then assumed that he got into
Speaker 3: weird labor disputes. They're kind of close story.
Speaker 2: Yeah no. And then when you think about the people
Speaker 2: who make it. I mean, he obviously ran the first
Speaker 2: dandie game, right, but the people that they ended up hiring,
Speaker 2: you get all of these people who like it's kind
Speaker 2: of like a nonprofit job where people work at nonprofit
Speaker 2: jobs because they care and then they get treated by
Speaker 2: shit like shit by the nonprofit. Yeah, you know, and
Speaker 2: the people who run the nonprofit of horrifying Yeah. TSR
Speaker 2: was people's dream because it was the fucking magic factory,
Speaker 2: you know, and they took advantage of that, and sometimes consciously,
Speaker 2: sometimes unconsciously, and that sucks. But people made incredible stuff,
Speaker 2: much like you make an incredible podcast called Better Offline
Speaker 2: that people can listen to.
Speaker 3: Oh sorry, I meant to plug stuff, So yeah, Better
Speaker 3: offline dot com. You can FuMB a newsletter. Please subscribe
Speaker 3: to my newsletter. It's very lonely, please read it. Please
Speaker 3: listen to my podcast. Download every episode. Go to Better
Speaker 3: offline dot com click the link. Go to your podcast thing.
Speaker 3: Click every single download button. Listen to every episode in fact,
Speaker 3: go and do that.
Speaker 2: Then do it again.
Speaker 3: Leave it on all day.
Speaker 2: H don't work.
Speaker 3: Listen to podcasts now money now, please.
Speaker 2: Get more the sales pitch and then oh, oh my god,
Speaker 2: I didn't even get into there's all this stuff baked
Speaker 2: into the problem of running role playing games where once
Speaker 2: you buy the game, you don't need anything else, and
Speaker 2: so that they like run out of like when I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: they fucked it up with comics. It's also like market saturation,
Speaker 2: right because like people whatever.
Speaker 3: I imaginations are so dangerous.
Speaker 2: I know. Well, and that's the thing is, it's like
Speaker 2: people are trying to figure out how to make this
Speaker 2: game work within this economic system, and like everything else
Speaker 2: we do, it struggles against the economic system we live in.
Speaker 2: But you know, that's the episode. I also have a
Speaker 2: newsletter you should subscribe to both. Mine is on substack.
Speaker 2: You just search Margaret Kiljoy substack and Saran you got anything,
Speaker 2: you do anything with your life.
Speaker 1: Occasionally I'm on it could happen here on cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Uh listen if you want to. I do a lot
Speaker 1: of episodes about Palestine recent so go go educate yourself
Speaker 1: and talk to your friends.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, and we'll be back next week with more
Speaker 2: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, probably with fewer assholes
Speaker 2: at the center of the story. But who knows, because
Speaker 2: I don't even know Whe'm gon to cover next week.
Speaker 2: HIE Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 2: of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website
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