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Dungeons & Dragons was invented in this Wisconsin town. Why no statue?

April 27, 2023

Christopher Borrelli | Chicago Tribune

When Ed Schwinn thinks about the history of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin — and as president of the board of directors for the Geneva Lake Museum, he thinks about it quite a bit — he thinks of a summer retreat, a tourist town that has fewer than 10,000 year-round residents. He thinks of his own family living there year-round for 34 years. He thinks of his grandfather, who helped steer the Schwinn Bicycle Company into becoming a household name, buying a second home on the lakefront in the 1920s. He notes that a lot of summer families have long since become permanent residents, though “when I grew up on Lake Geneva, people with homes on the lakefront shut off the water on Labor Day, slipped a key under the mat and went home until May.”

He thinks of all those wealthy, famous names associated with the history of the town — the Schwinns, the Wrigleys, the Maytags, the Wards — then admits, “No matter how many well-known families have been coming here a century or more, I’m not sure any of us have done as much for the city of Lake Geneva as Gary Gygax.”

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’d be hard-pressed to learn more in Lake Geneva.

True, there is a combination store and small museum there centered on Gygax’s inventions. And yes, one of Gygax’s homes is now something like holy ground for true believers. But there are no historic markers or formal signs of civic pride, and the closest thing Lake Geneva has to formal recognition of Gary Gygax is a maroon brick alongside the lake itself, set into a promenade and inscribed with the following:

“In memory of E. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons.”

“Call me biased because he’s my dad,” said Luke Gygax, one of Gygax’s six children, “but I don’t know another figure from Lake Geneva who had as much impact beyond Lake Geneva as my dad. You should drive into Lake Geneva and there should be a sign, at the least, saying: ‘Lake Geneva, Home of Dungeons & Dragons.’ Someone in local government should be arguing for this. Hopefully, the 50th anniversary will help.”

Chuckle, but he’s not wrong.

Next year will mark a half-century since Gygax and co-developer Dave Arneson debuted a radical new form of tabletop gaming, one that did away with a traditional board and relied on storytelling, a set of dice and a player’s imagination. In subsequent decades, the game’s popularity gave the fantasy genre new life, influencing video game designers, artists, authors, costume makers and generations of Hollywood producers. In March, a new Chris Pine-led “Dungeons & Dragons” movie became the highest-grossing film in the country, unseating the latest “John Wick” blockbuster. A few weeks later, Gary Con, an up-and-coming convention held annually near Lake Geneva in honor of Gygax, drew 3,000 attendees, including Vince Vaughn, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and “Game of Thrones” co-creator D.B. Weiss — not to speak or sign autographs, but to blend in and play alongside fellow gamers. According to Wizards of the Coast, the Seattle company that now owns Dungeons & Dragons (and is itself owned by Hasbro), more than 50 million people worldwide have played the game. After a lull in popularity, the pandemic gave D&D a renewed burst of energy, and now it’s more popular than ever, with an estimated 14 million active players.

Seems worth a statue at least, right?

“Lake Geneva has an opportunity here,” said Paul Stormberg, a Nebraska auction house owner and president of the Gygax Memorial Fund, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) set up more than a decade ago with Gygax’s widow, Gail, after Gygax died at age 69 in 2008. “But I don’t think the town has embraced yet what this could mean. There are whole towns that shape their economies around the legacy of a single author. D&D is niche. But so is chess. And if chess was invented in your town, you’d probably want to celebrate that.”

This is a story about how we choose to recognize a cultural legacy, particularly when the legacy is not that of a soldier, politician, activist or wizard of more accepted classical arts. Chess Records on South Michigan Avenue, one of the birthplaces of rock n’ roll, gets a small home and adjoining garden. Miles Davis gets a statue in his hometown of Alton, Illinois, north of St. Louis. And John Belushi, in Wheaton, his hometown, gets nothing at all.

Rarely, however, does any of it feel like enough.

Vintage game modules from the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons on display at The Dungeon Hobby Shop and Museum in Lake Geneva, which is located in the old offices of TSR, the company Gary Gygax created to sell the game. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

Nearly a decade ago, I went to Lake Geneva to speak with Gail Gygax, who was trying then to get the Lake Geneva city government interested in a huge, wildly ambitious memorial to her late husband. City administrators felt that she needed the money for the memorial first. And better focus. Like any good D&D player — despite having barely played — I wanted to know what happened next. The answer was epic.

There are tangentially related businesses. The former headquarters of TSR, the company Gary Gygax started to publish D&D, is now a hobby shop and small museum devoted to TSR. The home where Gygax first played D&D is now rentable for D&D matches and parties. This summer, the Geneva Lake Museum will open a permanent exhibit about Gygax’s life. And for years, a local fan has been raising money to build a 30,000-square-foot immersive fantasy-themed entertainment center and restaurant in Lake Geneva named the Griffin & Gargoyle, with an eye on opening in time for 50th-anniversary festivities around D&D.

Yet it’s unclear if there will be any.

“I never really thought about this in the light of day, I suppose,” said Brian Waspi, head of Lake Geneva’s tourism commission, and himself a D&D player. “I grew up on the game. My brother tested it with Gary. I have D&D books on my shelf right here, and I know all about its resurgence, which is amazing. But if you’re from Lake Geneva, I think it’s just something that was always here. It’s felt like more of a local thing around here. It stayed sort of alternative and different for a long time, and only now seems to be in the mainstream.”

Not to mention, since Gygax’s death 15 years ago, there have been more lawsuits involving his estate and creation than even a Dungeon Master could juggle; one, between Luke and Gail, his stepmother, over a contested Gary Gygax will, was set for trial this spring in Lake Geneva. And none of that even touches the decades-long stink attached to D&D after concerned parents and evangelical preachers in the 1980s linked it with Satan worship, resulting in no less than “60 Minutes” devoting a full hour to this perceived epidemic; that scare would be so enduring the most recent season of “Stranger Things” was partly centered on its town attacking a harmless cadre of D&D players called the Hellfire Club.

Figurines for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, on exhibit at the Geneva Lake Museum. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

Asked why Lake Geneva still seems ambivalent about its famous creation, Ben Riggs, a Milwaukee author who wrote “Slaying the Dragon,” a 2022 history of the game, said: “I think, for one, the Satanic panic still lingers, in a way. In general, ask people around Lake Geneva what they think of the game, and a lot of them act like you’re pointing to a bug under a rock. There’s a sense of shame about it. In many ways, this new movie is a Wisconsin product, but I find that Wisconsin is like, what do you mean? It’s not cheese or beer or sausage. Having said that, I also think that their lack of understanding of D&D makes some sense.”

Dungeons & Dragons offers no winners or losers; it seeks cooperation among players, not competition. It’s known for having rule books so dense they fill bookshelves; it was never the easiest game to comprehend.

“During the Satanic panic, my kids were kids and I remember thinking, ‘Well, they’re not playing that,’” said Charlene Klein, the mayor of Lake Geneva and a native of rural Illinois. “But I also never realized what the game was until five years ago, when I visited Gary Con. They’re not all nerds. They’re professionals. They’re smart. Years ago, when I was president of the board at Horticultural Hall, I remember guys coming in to look around. I asked if I could help them. They said, ‘We just want to breathe the air.’ Gary held his first (gaming) convention in that hall. I thought, ‘Wow, they’re devoted.’ Now I think they’re creative and remarkable.”

Just outside of her office, high on the walls of the administration building, there are murals of Lake Geneva’s past, a narrative of bucolic summers, parasols, sailboats. There are no images of introverted middle-class teens huddled at basement card tables, jiggling 20-sided dice, pretending to be fifth-level warlocks. The town was established by business owners in 1837, and, partly thanks to railroads, became a seasonal destination for Chicago money. Tourism, and summertime, then and now, made its economy.

Patrick Quinn, the now-retired archivist of Northwestern University, grew up in Lake Geneva, raised by his grandparents and an uncle. He attended high school with Gygax. His uncle delivered mail; his grandfather, a plumber, installed toilets for the vacationing rich. “Was there tension? You mean between the working class and the wealthy?” He laughed. “Most people I knew worked for the rich bastards on the lake. And a lot were laid off after the summer. Was there resentment? In a way, it was like a feudal medieval village.”

He remembers Gygax and friends escaping into town swamps to smoke and talk castles and monsters. “Understand, Gary was a total geek in high school — way outside the mainstream of kids I grew up with.”

Gygax, originally, was a Chicagoan. His parents moved after his mother became concerned about raising a son in the Uptown neighborhood. She herself came from a middle-class Lake Geneva family. Gary found friends, though never graduated high school. After a stint in the Marines, he returned to Lake Geneva, married and commuted by rail to an insurance job in Chicago. Hobby gaming was never far from his mind.

By the late 1960s, he had founded Gen Con in Lake Geneva, a gaming convention that became not only a major influence on later nerd gatherings like San Diego Comic-Con and Chicago’s C2E2, but continues today in Indianapolis, attracting 50,000 attendees a year.

Photographs of Gary Gygax in the Lake Geneva home where he created and first played Dungeon & Dragons in 1974. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

By the early 1970s, his small home in Lake Geneva was a Midwest mecca for a loose fellowship of gaming buddies. “It was a social club of guys, many driving over from Illinois, all of which eventually morphed into TSR,” said Jon Peterson, author of “Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons.” “So D&D was initially a white middle-class thing. That’s changed profoundly, in terms of race and gender. But in a town like Lake Geneva, you do wonder who would connect to a game like this.”

But internationally, TSR, Gygax’s company, became a leading publisher of role-playing tabletop games, with rule books so popular they made their way onto New York Times bestseller lists. Before moving to the West Coast, the company employed 500 people in the area, attracting artists and model makers and writers and toy designers. Its cultural influence would become far more familiar than the mechanics of its complicated gameplay. It became a rallying point in the 1970s and 1980s, organizing like-minded nerds into social networks. It moved tales of swords and sorcery beyond the shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien. It also introduced the idea that a player’s skills could increase with experience — a foundational tenet of contemporary video games. In fact, the concept (and slang use) of “leveling up” was a direct byproduct of the gameplay principle in D&D.

For better and worse.

D&D was so strange and original (and vaguely defined), it scared people.

“The Satan thing began in 1979,” Peterson said, “with a student at Michigan State who disappeared, presumably into tunnels under campus, because he was so into D&D presumably he confused the game with reality.” A few years later a Virginia mother claimed her teenage son’s suicide was a result of role-playing games. It snowballed from there. Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness who hosted Bible study in his home. But D&D grew popular against a backdrop of ‘70s paranoia, Chicago’s Tylenol Murders and preachers eager to claim fantasy was leading to satanic rituals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI, would later disavow any link between suicides and D&D (and the existence of underground networks of Satanists massacring children in wooded areas). But to this day, the Federal Bureau of Prisons maintains a ban on prisoners playing (or owning) D&D, citing everything from it being a security threat to a gateway for gang activity.

A Dungeons & Dragons role-playing aide on exhibit at the Geneva Lake Museum. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

“Still, the thing about people who said D&D was a tool of evil forces was that they actually made a trenchant observation about the game,” Riggs said. “Defenders would say that it’s just a game. And it was never just a game. It occupied attention in this scary, new way. You might even question if it was a game at all! I think it’ll join jazz and comic books as a seminal invention of the American imagination — but what kind of game could actually last for weeks?” Not to mention, TSR art featured demons. Imagine being a nervous parent in 1983 and finding your kids at a table, casting spells to resurrect the dead and call on dark forces.

Ask around Lake Geneva now about the link between the Satanic panic and their famous export and you get a lot of guarded eye rolls, then claims that some of the older residents still believe it’s dangerous, but no, not themselves. You’re more likely to hear about the messy afterlife of Gary Gygax: A few years ago, Gail Gygax was in a $30 million breach-of-contract lawsuit with a movie producer over control of the Gary Gygax name (the lawsuit was eventually dropped). Last fall, Wizards of the Coast, which purchased TSR in the 1990s but let the trademark lapse in 2000, filed an injunction against an owner of the Dungeon Hobby Shop in Lake Geneva and the latest iteration of TSR.

The only thing that anyone agrees on is that Lake Geneva should do more.

Inside the Lake Geneva home where Gary Gygax created and first played Dungeon & Dragons. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

By the end of this summer, there will be two self-directed Gary Gygax walking tours of Lake Geneva. (He didn’t drive, so most of the stops are within blocks of each other.) One tour is offered by the Dungeon Hobby Shop, which itself is worth a look: Artifacts from TSR fill glass cases, most of the memorabilia donated by former TSR employees who still live nearby. But it’s not exactly a true museum — if you don’t understand much about D&D before stepping inside, you’d probably still feel lost afterward.

The other tour is organized by the Geneva Lake Museum. I went there with Yolanda Frontany, a bank manager from Portage Park who bought Gary Gygax’s former home. We walked through the museum’s half-finished Gygax exhibit, which will eventually feature D&D stained glass windows, a custom D&D gaming table and a brief history of role-playing games. A docent said he’d been there his whole life and he didn’t know much about D&D, only that people now come here from all over the world for a taste of its history.

“Yeah,” Frontany said, “they all show up at my front door.”

The Lake Geneva home where Gary Gygax created and first played Dungeon & Dragons. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

About 18 years ago, while visiting Lake Geneva with her husband, she slowed the car outside a tiny white house on Center Street, not much bigger than a Chicago bungalow. Even after she bought it as a second house (along with the house next door), she still didn’t know the full history: Here Gary Gygax created the original Dungeons & Dragons rules and gameplay and first tested it with friends. There’s no historic marker out front that tells you this, only a rubber dragon mask in a picture window. Frontany recalled her grandmother — “a strict Roman Catholic” — imploring her to stay away from D&D. But now she rents the house next door as an Airbnb and, if you’re a D&D fan, for a little extra, she’ll let you play D&D in the very home where it was all started. She’s hosted D&D-themed bachelor parties here. She showed me pictures on her phone of Vince Vaughn playing there a few weeks ago, holding up a T-shirt that reads: “I Played D&D at Gary’s House.”

“People make pilgrimages here. They take off their shoes at the front door — holy ground! I’m already getting inquiries about the anniversary next year,” she said. “But I don’t have a clue what (the city) has planned.” She can feel a palpable disinterest.

Ed Schwinn of the Geneva Lake Museum said he spent a lot of time with city officials when the museum was still considering a Gygax exhibition, and “I’ve heard the whole gambit, from the enthusiastic, to they don’t get it, to they misunderstand what D&D is.” Mayor Klein noted the town’s history of attracting artists and said “there’s a lot of opinion about where, or if, stuff like this gets recognized.” She said Gary Con is drawing visitors to the town during its less-crowded months. She expects “to make a proclamation of sorts.”

An exhibit under construction at the Geneva Lake Museum about the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which was created by Lake Geneva resident Gary Gygax. (E. Jason Wambsgans/TNS/Chicago Tribune)

Beyond that, there are no solid plans to honor Gygax or the anniversary of D&D.

Brian Waspi, the tourism commissioner, whose office gave the Geneva Lake Museum $10,000 for its exhibit, said “the town should and probably will lean into this eventually and own this — absolutely, it will.” But so far, he has “not personally heard of any initiatives.”

Paul Stormberg of the Gygax Memorial Fund is still preparing his.

He calls it the Greater Gygax Initiative and plans to pitch it for 2024. It includes a new memorial design (a gaming table, with a Gygax statue), an annual festival, historic markers and a push to educate the town on Gygax. He’s talked to the mayor and city council and said his “models give a $3 million impact annually,” partly in the form of hotel bookings and restaurant traffic. He’s launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise more for a memorial; the fund’s most recent IRS filings suggest it’s raised about $200,000 in a decade.

Luke Gygax is skeptical of that memorial fund but added: He and the fund’s stewards want the same thing, to remind Lake Geneva that a piece of its local history still resonates around the world. He’s sick of boat tours that point out the home of the Wrigleys but never his father’s lakefront home. “There’s people out there who never water ski. They stayed home in dark rooms and played a game with friends for hours. They weren’t sailing on that lake. Now they have money. Someday I hope the city of Lake Geneva realizes this.”

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Dungeons & Dragons was invented in this Wisconsin town. Why no statue?

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