Sitting around the kitchen table in the summer of ‘80, my brothers and I were in a heated discussion.

“You can’t use a spell here! You haven’t recovered from the poison dart that stuck you in the ass!”

Yup, we were D&D geeks.

It was an unlikely group. I was a true geek, but my brothers weren’t. Yet the ability to use our imaginations to create a new world, with our created alter-egos had an inexorable pull on us. We’d spend hours around the kitchen table, them trying to figure out the puzzles I’d created for them, them working to figure out what diabolical traps I had set for them. We fought about it, laughed about it, and had a great time.

We still talk about that summer and laugh about it. Heartily. So it is with sadness that I mark the passing last week of Gary Gygax.

Gygax, along with Dave Arneson, came up with the basic set of rules and concepts that formed Dungeons and Dragons, a game that even today boasts as many as 20 million players. Their creation gave us a framework to build our worlds, hoisting our heroes and slaying our villains. heir work was the precursor for today’s online roleplaying and computer enhanced, CGI-laden RPGs.

So today, a geek mourns. His imagination fed ours. Let us raise a mug of mead.

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