Also, The Order of the Stick:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html

And Achewood:

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03062008

And in the Onion's AV Club (not to be confused with the Onion itself)
http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/behold_the_gygax

That was beautiful.
LOL cats tribute

Matt -

Nicely done. As you probably remember, I've very much a FORMER D&D player & DM, but you summed up the way the game changed the world (and the people who played it).

Thanks.

Voted your up before I even knew it was yours.
most excellent.

Matt, that was a great article -- very much conveyed the heart & spirit of game design, as GG did himself.

Very nice.

Amy

http://amyoops.blogspot.com/

Matthew:

Great article. I have fond 80s-era memories involving D&D, and your article brought back a little of that old "role-playing" frisson. Well done!

A couple of other Seattle blogs have written tributes to Gygax's legacy:
here
and
here.

That's a great line. It's hard to imagine what the world would be like if there had been no Gary Gygax.

Wired has an excellent article about Gygax and the early days of the development of D&D here.

It's strange to me how little I knew about this guy, given the amount of time I spent playing his games. It goes to show you how much one's access to information has improved in the era of teh Intarwebs, but I think really all I knew about Gygax was that he was somehow involved with TSR, the company that issued the books. I didn't even have MISinformation (a la doctored wikipedia biographies, etc.); there was simply a void.

I grew up in Lake Geneva WI, and I played D&D for the first time (and soo many times after that!) in a dark, Mountain-Dew and Hardee's smelling back room of the Lake Geneva Library, the same room where Gary had invented the game years earlier. Gary, and other TSR employees, designers and writers, would often show up to these games, and was very generous with his knowlege without ever intruding. I spent my teenage years as a fighter with a Vorpal-Blade (Named Noslom Nedlog-backwards that's Molson Golden) and some Dragon Plate Mail...Life was great. Gary was a huge figure in this world, he was our Tiamat, or whatever-but one that showered us with game parts, not Chlorine Gas or Fire-Breath...RIP, Ol' Dungeon Master.
(I guess that's one last failed Constitution check.)

One of my favorite neighbors was a hardcore D&D fanatic; weekend-long games in the basement were the rule. She started describing a campaign to me and I said, "Wow, that sounds an awful lot like Fritz Lieber. Have you ever read the Fafhrd books?"

She said, "I don't like reading it. I like PLAYING it."