Gargy Gygax Dead at 69

There's only a brief AP story so far, but it confirms that Gary Gygax has passed away after a long struggle with illness.

wow...that...realy sucks....its unbelievable...man...

Well, he had a good life. Along with Dave Arneson, he not only created D&D, but the whole idea of role-playing games. D&D and RPGs became a worldwide phenomenon and brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. And D&D has inspired many popular wargames, boardgames, video games and even films and books. Very few people achieve as much.

And in my opinion, no subsequent official edition of D&D has actually improved on the early rules written by Gary (the original rules and 1st edition AD&D), and the 1st edition DMG is one of the most useful and best written RPG rulebooks ever.

The Associated Press article says "Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January".

I have to wonder what rules he used. AD&D 1st edition? Or maybe Castles and Crusades? He had been planning to publish a version of his Castle Greyhawk dungeon using the C&C rules, which I suppose now we will never see.

I've always thought it's a pity we never saw a "Gygaxian" 2nd edition of AD&D. He did write a game called Lejendary Adventures after leaving TSR - I don't know anything about that, is it any good?

Actually, I just stumbled across a Q&A session he did on Dragonsfoot, and I see that the D&D game he DMed in January used the original D&D rules.

I've been thinking a lot about this today. Gygax hugely upset wargaming when he created Dungeons and Dragons, and I don't know of any similar games developed independently. If it wasn't for Gygax, RPGs might not have shown up for years or decades. Maybe they would've chosen a different default theme and modern games wouldn't be predominately quasi-medieval.

I plan on going to his funeral on Saturday. The world has lost a great man.