Gary's Gargantuan Game

In honor of the late Gary Gygax’s birthday and the truly magical game that he created, which so many people have come to love over the years, I felt it necessary to do my first of many lore dives into the annals of D&D’s history and the man behind the original DM PC, Mordenkainen.

Most adventurers would be familiar with the name Mordenkainen through the use of his spells but all of them would have been affected by his actions in the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Barovia, Avernus, and countless other planes throughout the D&D multiverse. Whether they get to summon a faithful hound, his sword, or use his mansion, he has fundamentally altered the foundations of magic so much that he has spells that bear his name.

As players we likely first encounter Mordenkainen as a narrator in either of the sourcebooks: Tome of Foes or Monsters of the Multiverse (though Tasha is annotating throughout the Multiverse text). We may have encountered him unknowingly as a mad man or a quest-giver without knowing it like in the 5e module Curse of Strahd. His first appearance in any book however is in AD&D 1st edition in the form of his spells (1978), Mordenkainen’s Faithful hound and Mordenkainen’s Sword. More than merely NPC quest-giver (though he was that when Gary DM’ed) or mythical figure depicted as having boundless knowledge of the arcane, a wizard’s name on the spells telling us only he had a magic dog and a sword. That in and of itself is pretty darn cool if you ask me! I’ll take a magic sword and dog any day of the week.

Rewind the clock to 1973, at Rob Kuntz’s table Mordenkainen was Gary Gygax’s PC, named after Väinämöinen of Finnish mythology (also a source of inspiration for Gandalf and Tom Bombadil). Gary wanted to be a wizard while most of the other folks at the table wanted to be fighters; he wanted to tamper with the essence of magic itself. Through 12 years and 20 something levels Mordenkainen became a remarkable wielder of immense knowledge and power. He went on to be one of the members of The Circle of Eight, a collection of Gary’s other PCs, such as his apprentice Bigby, that pooled loot from adventuring to build the Obsidian Citadel in Greyhawk. It was conveniently placed inside enemy territory so that there would always be a fight, meaning more loot… why go adventuring to get loot when you can just build a castle behind enemy lines and have them bring loot to you right?

As a quick aside, Rigby and Zigby, and Yrag are also a part of the Circle of Eight. The man certainly didn’t try too hard on names. Bigby, Rigby, and Zigby, speak for themselves but Yrag is Gary spelled backwards but more on that a bit later.

We see the demi-god wizard who has real life books with his name on them and spells that alter reality like disjunction (some might be familiar with through the Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves film). That same character started as a sheet at someone’s table. Imagine showing up on an otherwise mundane Monday night to roll some dice with your friends and finding out that one of the usual folks you play with is roleplaying a character that becomes a mythical figure that changes the course of every other table that is playing the same game you are all over the world. That is Gary Gygax’s wizard Mordenkainen, just a regular guy playing a wizard with his friends at a table, telling larger than life stories and sharing that vision with the rest of the world.

In June of 1985: Unearthed Arcana is released. In it is the spell that breaks all magic. Mordenkainen’s Disjunction. All magical items within 30 feet lose all magical properties.

October of 1985: The Blume Brothers sell their controlling shares of TSR to Lorraine Williams.

October 22nd 1985: There is a TSR board meeting that Gary is not told about and the board asks for his resignation. He was fired from his position as President, CEO, and Chairman of the company he created… Disjunction.

Gary lost the rights to his game, the namesakes of his personal characters that he played for over a decade, and control over how his characters were framed moving forward. After his separation from TSR Gygax continued to work in the fantasy creative space in making Castle Zagyg, when he partnered with Stephen and Davis Chenault and Troll Lord Games. The name came from the wizard who built Castle Greyhawk, Zagyg Yragerne the Mad Mage. When he remade his castle in 2005, twenty years after he was pushed out of TSR, he used the name of the “Mad Mage” who created it in the Greyhawk setting he no longer owned. His own name, Ernest Gary Gygax, nearly spelled backward.

Mordenkainen kept busy in the years after Gary and TSR parted ways as well. He made ongoing appearances in the Dragon magazine column by Ed Greenwood, the author of the Forgotten Realms world, in the Wizards Three from 1992-2007. Mordenkainen was busy doing all manner of arcane research, traveling across planes, and collecting relics that could tip the scales between good and evil to one side or the other. As we know him in the modern era, Mordenkainen is depicted as a being striving to maintain balance and order keeping a finger on each side of a delicate scale between good and evil, law and chaos. This notion was not proposed by Gygax, it began in the 1991 book From the Ashes where Mordenkainen was elevated to his status as the most powerful wizard in the planes and painted him as having a strongly neutral stance on maintaining balance.

Mordenkainen notably fought and lost to Strahd in Barovia, losing his ring, staff, and sanity when Strahd throws him over Tser Falls. He is stranded wandering the mists until the most powerful wizard in D&D lore is rescued by PCs. The Tome of Foes which is the least of his knowledge, is essentially notes that were supposedly transcribed by Bigby his apprentice but the preface from Shemeska the Marauder, a yugoloth, is perhaps not the most reliable source of information being a fiend mercenary. From there he travels to Avernus to unravel the magic of the devils, which fits the Tome of Foes introduction. Most recently he encounters an old foe once again, the lich Vecna. He comes back to the forefront of the Forgotten Realms with Volo and Tasha in Dark Horse Comics ongoing series slated to be released this November.

At the center of the larger than life stories there is a very down to Oerth person, who loved playing games with his friends. Gary Gygax’s legacy is not the mechanics he created that have since been replaced, like THAC0, his saving throw mechanics, and even Disjunction which has been deemed too powerful to maintain balanced gameplay (which is inherently ironic). The legacy he left us with is the heart and soul of the game he created as a labor of love. The love of coming together with friends, giving voice to those who feel voiceless, telling stories that otherwise wouldn’t have authors, giving people an excuse to make time to turn a mundane Monday into magic.