Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons

This is a nicely written biography that in some ways appears more like a print version of a bio-pic than an old-fashioned biography. There are interludes of imagined game sessions between Gary and his children that effectively recreate the sidebar “fluff” that is a common method for giving readers a feel for the mechanics about which they are reading. The text itself is both descriptive and creative sometimes recounting events in Gary’s life as any typical biography would and other times using the information from interviews, history, and corporate lore, to dramatize the events in the way a bio-pic would.

The conclusions of the book could further be extended today as the success of Dungeons & Dragons and it’s acceptance into mainstream culture has only increased since Witwer published his book. Unfortunately that success has also encouraged lawsuits, jealousy, and mismanagement of Gary’s estate which Witwer carefully avoided addressing.

Highly recommended not only for those who want to know about the man, the game, and the business but also see, especially today when it is all too obvious that Gary’s legacy is every bit as important and present in today’s globalized world as Roddenberry, or Lucas, or Tolkien.

While not a perfect book, there are things to like about this biography of Gary Gygax. For one, while it does fictionalize some portions, it footnotes the rest. This allows the reader to both identify which is which, and evaluate the sources the author worked from. As this is not something you can do with the other history of D&D I'm familiar with, namely that found in [b:Designers & Dragons: The '70s|22876735|Designers & Dragons The '70s (Designers & Dragons, #1)|Shannon Appelcline|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1422738563s/22876735.jpg|42441465], I'm very appreciative of this.

I do have a couple of criticisms. First, I could have done without the little fictional vignettes between each "level" of the book. Second, I thought starting with Gary's losing control of TSR and then going back to the beginning of his life was unnecessary. Rather than being the 'hook' that I'm sure the author was hoping for, it instead was something I found myself slogging through as it was one of the chapters of Gary's life that I'm most familiar with (and I suspect many, if not most, other readers are also most familiar with). Third, I felt there were some odd gaps in the history. We get a pretty solid telling of the events leading up to the creation of TSR and the first publication of D&D, then skip to where the company first gets in real trouble. There was very little about those early years of the company as it grew to have some 300 employees, instead just focusing on the crises.

These issues were more than made up for in the various stories and anecdotes from Gary's earlier life that I was unfamiliar with. This early history of Gary and D&D is the best part of the book.