The death of the storyteller

I've written this a couple of times already today, and there are plenty of people who have done the same, so I'm keeping this short.

Gary Gygax, the father of roleplaying games, died today (March 4th, but I guess its past midnight now). And we're all grieving in our own special way - looking through old gaming books and throwing around D&D jokes.

The co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons was one of the seminal people in the hobby, more than anyone else he was loved and hated by the gaming community. He was especially loved for starting it all, and giving us the framework and rules that we could distance ourselves from or break. A lot of us has criticized Gygax and D&D, and rightly so, we've even cursed him and the game from time to time, because it wasn't what we wanted from a roleplaying game. On the other hand, we could never forget that without Gygax we would have nothing to compare our expectations to. Nowhere to start from. He gave us that start. He was the giant whose shoulders we perched ourselves on, and he was every gamer's uncle.

And therefore, he was loved and respected.

Personally, I will be forever grateful for the gift of roleplaying games. It game the tools and settings to learn the craft of storytelling, something that has become a part of my life. Both my writing and my academic work always return to one thing - the stories we tell. And not to forget the stories I want to tell myself, as a writer of fiction and of roleplaying game supplements.

Thank you Gary, for all that. And so sorry you didn't make your saving throw, and even more sorry the cleric didn't have a resurrection spell handy.

Next session, I promise.