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The Gygax Inspiration Never Dies
An article about the source of creativity By Ari Binus |
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I remember where I was when I learned that Gary Gygax had passed away.
That evening on March 4th in 2008, I was easing my car to a halt at the stop light on the corner of Walnut and Winchester Streets in Newton, MA. It had always been a preposterously long red light, so I just sat there waiting and listening to the idling engine with NPR babbling away on my car radio. Suddenly important words were seeping into my ears: "Imagine a mournful horn, echoing across thousands of fantasy worlds... E.Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons has died. He was 69."
I was already fully stopped at the red light, but judging from the involuntary noise that flew out of my voice box (as if I had just breathed in a moth or something), you'd have thought I was headed at top speed for a fatal collision in the intersection ahead.
In a way, it felt like a fatal collision for me personally. Dungeons & Dragons defined a massive chunk of who I am and was a main source of my creative spark. At the time I was seated in my car hearing the news of Gygax's death, I had long neglected D&D as one of my biggest passions. Still, to hear of Gygax's death was like hearing of the death of my muse.
I've always been a huge admirer of D&D. I have never had the chance to play it very much at all, but I couldn't get enough of the idea of playing it and for someone who has logged depressingly few hours of actual D&D gameplay, the extent of my admirer-from-afar obsession has been pretty ridiculous - to the point that the game has, in large part, made me the artist I am today. There have been many other inspirations - Star Wars, Frank Miller... but D&D is surely one of my life's earliest and most powerful creative influences, and though it regretfully went on hiatus for a long while as a focus of mine, it has never stopped fueling my imagination.
I remember one snowy night on Hanukkah long ago, my brother received a particular gift. From the outside it was just some box covered in gift wrap. I looked at it with zero envy - I probably thought it contained a sweater or something similar a kid would find lame. But when my brother tore the wrapping off I saw this was no ordinary box. It was two boxes, and they weren't even boxes to me anymore - one was red, the other blue, and Erol Otus' magical artwork had transformed each of them into a chest of untold treasures.
"My big brother has something cool..." I thought. And that was it; any ability to focus in school was now totally out the window .
From this point on I could no longer pay attention because I didn't see why we weren't all spending those precious classroom hours talking about magic-users and fighters and thieves and orcs.
If we weren't going to discuss these things, I was going to draw them in my notebooks and wherever I could. This caused some academic turbulence for me because the answer to "What does 'Remember the Maine' mean?" is definitely not a picture of a guy with a long beard and a pointy hat shooting magic missles from his bony fingers.
I collected book after book - whatever I could persuade my parents to buy for me. If it said "TSR" on it, it was good enough for me. While my inability to concentrate even extended to reading and processing the rules of D&D, I could not get enough of skimming the paragraphs and being mesmerized by the complexity of what were obviously extremely important rules and details of mystical consequence. And of course I was totally enamored of the old school RPG artwork. In short, to some extent I knew every page in every TSR product I owned. Turning the pages was like turning another corner in what was fast becoming the permanent network of tunnels and halls of my own imagination.
It's also worth mentioning that although I could not commit to really soaking in all the rules, I used to memorize tidbits here and there. The purpose of this had to do with my fantasy of flaunting those memorized facts during school recess in order to impress girls in my class with my Dungeons & Dragons knowledge while simultaneously putting the other kids to shame.
Ha, I daydreamed. That sure would show 'em.
One might say at this point that this article should be titled, "How E.Gary Gygax ruined my life," but it's really just the opposite.
Gygax's pioneering accomplishments clarified for me early on in life that my interests and passions were geared toward very certain things. My love for his game also pointed out to me many of the things in which I was definitely not interested. Life is full of big decisions and micro decisions and everything in between, and for me, so much of all of that has been steered by the little kid in me that fell head over heels for those two boxes - one red, one blue.
As mentioned above, I've had long phases during which my craze for D&D and all it stands for slept practically dormant somewhere within me - only periodically roused for short stints by a Lord of the Rings movie release and other such occasional things. But slumbering or not, it has always been in there somewhere.
In early 2013 I had what some might call a phase. Others might (and did) call it an epsiode. I started going on eBay and buying up all the old books I used to own. The red box. The blue box. The Monster Manual The Player's Handbook. The Dungeonmaster's Guide. Fiend Folio. The modules. Dragon dice. Miniatures. I couldn't get enough and the more I thought about it, the more I could not believe I had ever let my own copies from childhood out of my sight.
What had I even done with them - where had they gone? Had society convinced me I was crazy for having a passion for D&D? Had they convinced me that if I maintained my love for the game outwardly, I'd never turn a girl's head because as it turns out, girls are not in fact impressed to hear that you know by heart the armor class of a frost giant? Was I only now realizing at the age of 39 that allowing these factors to force my love of the game into passivity was utter nonsense?
I didn't blame other concerned parties for having the opposite view - from the outside looking in, it must have seemed pretty crazy. In response to each day's report of what I was bidding to win off eBay, horrified coworkers at my job were saying "Stop, stop - it's enough already! You need to STOP!" And my response was the typical "I can stop any time I want."
Tracking shipments online and racing home after work, hoping to find a package or bunch of packages waiting on my doorstep ...I felt like a kid on Christmas, and remember, I'm Jewish!
One night during all this madness, I dreamed I was digging through some old things and I uncovered my own copies of my D&D books from childhood. The dream had a strong emotional feel to it. Like when you've been holding in a good cry for too long and then one day the dam just bursts. I already had a strong hunch of my own but the dream confirmed it - this wild shopping spree was obviously an attempt to recapture my childhood. It expressed a yearning for the game's essence that has never quite gone away.
I'm a children's book illustrator and an animator/director of short animations. The jobs I currently do (and love) keep the lights on, and since last year I've had a burning desire to also create things that bespeak my love for Gygax's captivating work. This long-neglected passion has been resurrected more than ever over the last year or so.
It all comes back to the sound that escaped my mouth when I was alone and stopped at the unusually long red light on the corner of Walnut and Winchester Streets that night of March 4th in 2008. I think news of the loss of an obviously incredible human being who had created something truly amazing was intensified for me by the feeling that I had allowed my outward passion for D&D to die away.
But if someone is never truly gone so long as you remember them, then that March 4th was just a temporary red light for E. Gary Gygax. And likewise, my dormant passion for the game and subject matter was only temporary - it was somewhere in there waiting to become more powerful than I could possibly imagine, and one of the first indications of that was certainly my reaction to the report of Gygax's death on the car radio.
It was an unusually long red light, but it did eventually turn green again.
Ari Binus
May 8th, 2014
That evening on March 4th in 2008, I was easing my car to a halt at the stop light on the corner of Walnut and Winchester Streets in Newton, MA. It had always been a preposterously long red light, so I just sat there waiting and listening to the idling engine with NPR babbling away on my car radio. Suddenly important words were seeping into my ears: "Imagine a mournful horn, echoing across thousands of fantasy worlds... E.Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons has died. He was 69."
I was already fully stopped at the red light, but judging from the involuntary noise that flew out of my voice box (as if I had just breathed in a moth or something), you'd have thought I was headed at top speed for a fatal collision in the intersection ahead.
In a way, it felt like a fatal collision for me personally. Dungeons & Dragons defined a massive chunk of who I am and was a main source of my creative spark. At the time I was seated in my car hearing the news of Gygax's death, I had long neglected D&D as one of my biggest passions. Still, to hear of Gygax's death was like hearing of the death of my muse.
I've always been a huge admirer of D&D. I have never had the chance to play it very much at all, but I couldn't get enough of the idea of playing it and for someone who has logged depressingly few hours of actual D&D gameplay, the extent of my admirer-from-afar obsession has been pretty ridiculous - to the point that the game has, in large part, made me the artist I am today. There have been many other inspirations - Star Wars, Frank Miller... but D&D is surely one of my life's earliest and most powerful creative influences, and though it regretfully went on hiatus for a long while as a focus of mine, it has never stopped fueling my imagination.
I remember one snowy night on Hanukkah long ago, my brother received a particular gift. From the outside it was just some box covered in gift wrap. I looked at it with zero envy - I probably thought it contained a sweater or something similar a kid would find lame. But when my brother tore the wrapping off I saw this was no ordinary box. It was two boxes, and they weren't even boxes to me anymore - one was red, the other blue, and Erol Otus' magical artwork had transformed each of them into a chest of untold treasures.
"My big brother has something cool..." I thought. And that was it; any ability to focus in school was now totally out the window .
From this point on I could no longer pay attention because I didn't see why we weren't all spending those precious classroom hours talking about magic-users and fighters and thieves and orcs.
If we weren't going to discuss these things, I was going to draw them in my notebooks and wherever I could. This caused some academic turbulence for me because the answer to "What does 'Remember the Maine' mean?" is definitely not a picture of a guy with a long beard and a pointy hat shooting magic missles from his bony fingers.
I collected book after book - whatever I could persuade my parents to buy for me. If it said "TSR" on it, it was good enough for me. While my inability to concentrate even extended to reading and processing the rules of D&D, I could not get enough of skimming the paragraphs and being mesmerized by the complexity of what were obviously extremely important rules and details of mystical consequence. And of course I was totally enamored of the old school RPG artwork. In short, to some extent I knew every page in every TSR product I owned. Turning the pages was like turning another corner in what was fast becoming the permanent network of tunnels and halls of my own imagination.
It's also worth mentioning that although I could not commit to really soaking in all the rules, I used to memorize tidbits here and there. The purpose of this had to do with my fantasy of flaunting those memorized facts during school recess in order to impress girls in my class with my Dungeons & Dragons knowledge while simultaneously putting the other kids to shame.
Ha, I daydreamed. That sure would show 'em.
One might say at this point that this article should be titled, "How E.Gary Gygax ruined my life," but it's really just the opposite.
Gygax's pioneering accomplishments clarified for me early on in life that my interests and passions were geared toward very certain things. My love for his game also pointed out to me many of the things in which I was definitely not interested. Life is full of big decisions and micro decisions and everything in between, and for me, so much of all of that has been steered by the little kid in me that fell head over heels for those two boxes - one red, one blue.
As mentioned above, I've had long phases during which my craze for D&D and all it stands for slept practically dormant somewhere within me - only periodically roused for short stints by a Lord of the Rings movie release and other such occasional things. But slumbering or not, it has always been in there somewhere.
In early 2013 I had what some might call a phase. Others might (and did) call it an epsiode. I started going on eBay and buying up all the old books I used to own. The red box. The blue box. The Monster Manual The Player's Handbook. The Dungeonmaster's Guide. Fiend Folio. The modules. Dragon dice. Miniatures. I couldn't get enough and the more I thought about it, the more I could not believe I had ever let my own copies from childhood out of my sight.
What had I even done with them - where had they gone? Had society convinced me I was crazy for having a passion for D&D? Had they convinced me that if I maintained my love for the game outwardly, I'd never turn a girl's head because as it turns out, girls are not in fact impressed to hear that you know by heart the armor class of a frost giant? Was I only now realizing at the age of 39 that allowing these factors to force my love of the game into passivity was utter nonsense?
I didn't blame other concerned parties for having the opposite view - from the outside looking in, it must have seemed pretty crazy. In response to each day's report of what I was bidding to win off eBay, horrified coworkers at my job were saying "Stop, stop - it's enough already! You need to STOP!" And my response was the typical "I can stop any time I want."
Tracking shipments online and racing home after work, hoping to find a package or bunch of packages waiting on my doorstep ...I felt like a kid on Christmas, and remember, I'm Jewish!
One night during all this madness, I dreamed I was digging through some old things and I uncovered my own copies of my D&D books from childhood. The dream had a strong emotional feel to it. Like when you've been holding in a good cry for too long and then one day the dam just bursts. I already had a strong hunch of my own but the dream confirmed it - this wild shopping spree was obviously an attempt to recapture my childhood. It expressed a yearning for the game's essence that has never quite gone away.
I'm a children's book illustrator and an animator/director of short animations. The jobs I currently do (and love) keep the lights on, and since last year I've had a burning desire to also create things that bespeak my love for Gygax's captivating work. This long-neglected passion has been resurrected more than ever over the last year or so.
It all comes back to the sound that escaped my mouth when I was alone and stopped at the unusually long red light on the corner of Walnut and Winchester Streets that night of March 4th in 2008. I think news of the loss of an obviously incredible human being who had created something truly amazing was intensified for me by the feeling that I had allowed my outward passion for D&D to die away.
But if someone is never truly gone so long as you remember them, then that March 4th was just a temporary red light for E. Gary Gygax. And likewise, my dormant passion for the game and subject matter was only temporary - it was somewhere in there waiting to become more powerful than I could possibly imagine, and one of the first indications of that was certainly my reaction to the report of Gygax's death on the car radio.
It was an unusually long red light, but it did eventually turn green again.
Ari Binus
May 8th, 2014
