Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

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An offer is made…(but Five Rings doesn’t have the money…)

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Rings owner Abramowitz asks Adkinson if he wants to get involved…

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But Abramowitz had a follow up meeting with Williams…

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Endless Flight said:
Is this some kind of joke?

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Feels more like a woman out of her time to me--Buck Rogers had been a Big Deal in earlier times, and it had a network television show less than 20 years ago at this point, at a time when that was still a mark of prestige. I can see her thinking it could have become the next Star Trek or Star Wars at some point, and not keeping up with the shifts in the market.
 
Akrasia said:
Agreed for the most part...
...But ICE had Angus McBride doing most of their covers during their heyday (and Liz Danforth for interior art). I'd take McBride's covers over any of those by the later TSR artists.

(Of course, I prefer the earlier Otus and Trampier work over the later stuff. But I can see why Easley, et al, would be preferred by the benighted masses.)
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Angus McBride’s work for I.C.E. was very good, and alongside TSR they probably had the best looking products of the era. Alas, they were shackled to the Rolemaster system which was both bad on its on merits (IMO, of course) and an especially poor match for Tolkien and Middle Earth.

I love Trampier’s art, his combination of old woodcuts and underground comix styling was beautiful and inspiring. But he worked slowly and was at his best with pen & ink (I know his Players Handbook cover is universally lauded but it’s actually not one of my favorite pieces of his) so he wasn’t really suited for what TSR grew into. I wish he’d done more work for TSR and really wish he’d found success as an artist after they parted ways.

And while I know he’s very popular among fans “of a certain age” I must confess I’ve never been a big fan of Erol Otus. I really like a few of his pieces, but most of his stuff reminds me of Dr. Seuss and is too cartoony for my tastes. His art doesn’t match the pictures in my imagination.
 
Working at TSR in the post-Gygax era must have been strange. On the one hand they were the biggest rpg company by far, with the biggest staff and the biggest budgets and the most resources - I remember at GenCon in the 90s their booth in the dealer room was a massive replica castle that was literally about 10x bigger than anyone else's - but they were still the biggest fish in a tiny pond, effectively a scrappy bootstrapped startup where pretty much everybody was amateurs out of their depth, learning on the job, and making it up as they went along. They had more resources than any other company, but that mostly allowed them to blow money on half-baked ideas with limited commercial potential and fail to recognize and adapt to changing trends. Plus, as mentioned above, their headquarters was in a small town in the middle of nowhere so it must have been a weird "permanent summer camp" atmosphere. It's no wonder they were all so tight and have such good memories of the community they built there, but also not really surprising in retrospect that reality eventually caught up with them and the dream had to end.

In the 90s I resented TSR because they seemed like a bloated dinosaur coasting on their past achievements and bullying smaller, more innovative and creative companies who were doing a lot more with a lot less. But looking back now it really does seem like a nostalgic golden (or rather, I suppose, silver) age where, except for the lady at the top, the company was still run by gamers "roleplaying" at being professional business people and making a living at doing what they loved. It's romantic, like Camelot. The current iteration of WotC, run by MBAs who mostly came over from Microsoft, where every product is designed by committee and market-tested into a slick but faceless corporate widget, feels nothing like that.

I just wish they'd maintained a better relationship with Gary Gygax and found a way to continue working with him (perhaps some sort of an arrangement where he produced Greyhawk material under license that was then printed and distributed by TSR - not actually all that different than the arrangement he had in 1982-85 where he had his own personal "design studio" and staff (Frank Mentzer, Gail Carpenter, etc.) separate from the regular TSR design department that answered to Brian Blume). I'm sure given his personality that it wouldn't have been easy, but it also doesn't seem like they even tried.
 
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So what do I think of Slaying the Dragon: a secret history of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs?

I enjoyed reading this book more than other similar books that have come before. I find Riggs has a very engaging writing style with the right amount of seriousness and humor mixed in. He gives just enough facts and figures to keep the folks looking to dive into the sales numbers interested, but also shares several anecdotes from tabletop luminaries that I've never read before, some of them quite shocking. The book can read like a soap opera at times with dramatic twists and plots unfolding, but it seems very plausible that this was the reality of the situation at TSR for most of its existence, given what we've been told here and elsewhere.

The book spends most of its time from 1985 to 1997, when Lorraine Williams ran TSR after ousting Gary Gygax, or "Saint Gary", as Ben calls him humorously on several occasions. We cant fault him for that though, because this really where things get really interesting from my perspective. Williams had a management style where she funneled orders through her department directors, barely interacting with employees herself. Some creatives there wouldn't even speak more than a couple words to her during her tenure, which is fairly shocking for a company of TSR's size. She was a very secretive type, even middle management didn't have a clue as to how the company was really doing. The end of TSR probably seemed like being blindsided in that situation, and that shows how poorly the company was run. But did Gary run it any better in the beginning? Not really. The company threw money at all sorts of strange endeavors, such as a hauling up a shipwreck from the bottom of a lake. Why not spend that money on bonuses for poorly paid employees? We'll never know the answer.

What does Riggs think of Gygax and Williams? In Gary's case, he clearly thinks he was a creative genius but a very, very poor businessman. He should have never run a multimillion dollar company. The Blume brothers were shareholders as well but really had no business savvy of their own. They needed someone to really run the company the way it could be run. Who knows what would have happened if Don Kaye had not died in 1975. Many tumultuous years later, enter Lorraine Williams. Was she any better? She was also a very flawed owner, as was mentioned above, but in different ways. She was no creative like Gary but she seemed to have some success righting the ship temporarily. The problem was, she really made no innovative plans on how TSR should progress into the future and seemingly threw darts at a dartboard, none of which were a bullseye, and some outright disasters. But Riggs didn't totally throw her under the bus. He says that for all the fans who bemoaned her time there, she did save TSR for twelve years and was in charge of a truly peak period of creativity. She also took care of her employees better during her reign as owner and rivals such as Peter Adkinson considered her a true professional.

I think what Ben really gets at is that Lorraine Williams considered TSR the true asset and not the hard-working talented creative people who toiled away in Lake Geneva. These people really loved their job and were willing to do just about anything for their company, but the company did not love them back. And that is a stain on its legacy. This is where Peter Adkinson gets major credit upon purchasing TSR as Wizards of the Coast CEO. He truly was a gamer and thought of TSR as some sort of hallowed entity. He repaired so many relationships and corrected the wrongs of so many others, including Saint Gary. He truly could be considered the hero in all this. He believed the employees were the true spirit of TSR. With the OGL, I believe he was sending a message that no matter what, Dungeons & Dragons would never totally be held hostage by business executives in a boardroom somewhere. For that, he should be eternally thanked.

9/10. Highly recommended!
 
I hope that this gives folks a good look at the book and results in some sales for Mr. Riggs. I left out a lot of stuff in my snippets and there's some stuff I really, really wanted to share but you can't give everything out in a preview. Some things are just better to read for yourself. If anyone has any questions about anything, please ask.

I was going to share what I think Riggs thought of Flint Dille. He was considered a "hollywood type" by a lot of people working in and around TSR, and I don't believe he was beloved by many people in Wisconsin. They thought of him as one of those people. I get it, being from the Midwest originally myself. He is a creative person but didn't know much about the RPG business and would usually direct folks to his sister Lorraine, including Gary. In fact, if Gary had never moved to California, Lorraine Williams would never have taken control of TSR. Maybe some held a grudge against him just for that fact. But Riggs makes him seem like a affable type who was flexible and rolled with the punches.
 
Endless Flight said:
I hope that this gives folks a good look at the book and results in some sales for Mr. Riggs. I left out a lot of stuff in my snippets and there's some stuff I really, really wanted to share but you can't give everything out in a preview. Some things are just better to read for yourself. If anyone has any questions about anything, please ask.

I was going to share what I think Riggs thought of Flint Dille. He was considered a "hollywood type" by a lot of people working in and around TSR, and I don't believe he was beloved by many people in Wisconsin. They thought of him as one of those people. I get it, being from the Midwest originally myself. He is a creative person but didn't know much about the RPG business and would usually direct folks to his sister Lorraine, including Gary. In fact, if Gary had never moved to California, Lorraine Williams would never have taken control of TSR. Maybe some held a grudge against him just for that fact. But Riggs makes him seem like a affable type who was flexible and rolled with the punches.
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Wait people aren't pure Good or Evil like the various camps of the world like to portray them? Shocked I say! Shocked to hear this!
 
Bunch said:
Wait people aren't pure Good or Evil like the various camps of the world like to portray them? Shocked I say! Shocked to hear this!
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That’s one of the things I like about this book. Riggs is very nuanced and balanced in presenting the folks involved in the TSR era. For instance, I actually think Lorraine Williams comes out of this book looking better, even though Riggs writes plenty about her deficiencies.
 
Endless Flight said:
That’s one of the things I like about this book. Riggs is very nuanced and balanced in presenting the folks involved in the TSR era. For instance, I actually think Lorraine Williams comes out of this book looking better, even though Riggs writes plenty about her deficiencies.
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I mean it's clear the Gygax, Arneson and the Blues had deficiencies. Why wouldn't anyone else getting into business with them?
I give her credit. She took a run into the ground company and kept it out of the ground for a decade plus.
 
Does the book have anything about the meeting between Gygax and Games Workshop?
 
Endless Flight said:
But Abramowitz had a follow up meeting with Williams…

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Wait, why did Williams have so much animosity towards Adkison again? I got lost somewhere here.

And yeah, this book could totally be adapted into a mini series in the style of Mad Men or Pirates of Silicon Valley or somesuch if punched up with the Hollywood treatment a little.
 
T. Foster said:
Plus, as mentioned above, their headquarters was in a small town in the middle of nowhere so it must have been a weird "permanent summer camp" atmosphere.
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I wouldn't call Lake Geneva "the middle of nowhere" exactly -- it's an easy drive to Milwaukee from there, and it's also close to the north Chicago suburbs. But it's primarily a resort town that caters to rich people, so in that sense, it was kind of an odd location for the headquarters of a game company.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Wait, why did Williams have so much animosity towards Adkison again? I got lost somewhere here.

And yeah, this book could totally be adapted into a mini series in the style of Mad Men or Pirates of Silicon Valley or somesuch if punched up with the Hollywood treatment a little.
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It was basically another example of Williams having a really weird sense of proportion. WOTC and D&D were in different businesses but Williams did not see a difference between card games and tabletop gaming.

She was assuming WOTC was sweeping up their market.
 
CT_Phipps said:
It was basically another example of Williams having a really weird sense of proportion. WOTC and D&D were in different businesses but Williams did not see a difference between card games and tabletop gaming.

She was assuming WOTC was sweeping up their market.
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Given that they were competing for the same audience and the same broad market sector of income (entertainment dollars), and how TSR's sales start plummeting right around the time Magic launches, can we say she was wrong?
 
CT_Phipps CT_Phipps got to it before I did.

The funny thing is, they eventually got along after the sale started and she had him over for dinner as the guest of honor. He defended her after everything went down, even saying to TSR employees during his first meeting that he didn’t think anyone should bad-mouth her around the office.
 
Dyrnwyn said:
I wouldn't call Lake Geneva "the middle of nowhere" exactly -- it's an easy drive to Milwaukee from there, and it's also close to the north Chicago suburbs. But it's primarily a resort town that caters to rich people, so in that sense, it was kind of an odd location for the headquarters of a game company.
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Bruh, it's a town of 8,000 people 83 miles out of Chicago. It's the middle of nowhere. To use a local example, Palm Springs, CA is still the middle of nowhere no matter how many rich old people live there.

Edit: I want to be clear that I am not saying "middle of nowhere" means "bad place to live". A lot of lovely, beautiful places to live are in fact in the middle of nowhere.
 
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