During the summer of 1994, I first discovered structured role-playing.  Before that time I was dependent solely upon my imagination and the hundreds of fantasy fiction novels I lost myself in reading.  We were young and geeky, and my friend and I read the same books, most of which consisted of works by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.  Though, we both read The Death Gate Cycle before we stumbled upon Dragonlance.

This summer, my friend brought a board game over called Hero Quest, an adventure game created by Milton Bradley.  Together we embarked on hours of entertainment setting up two opposing armies consisting of plastic tiles on a plastic floor mat.  Finally, our imaginations had something physical to assist them.

My friend was so enamored by this game that not long after, during this same year, he came over one weekend with an even more amazing discovery.  I don't remember where he found it, and I don't precisely remember all these years later how, but I do recall that this new game he found was called Dungeons and Dragons.  The rest of that summer our time was spent reading the few manuals he had gathered, memorizing as many rules as we could, and running our own game.

Being the most spontaneously imaginative of the two of us, having shared my talent for writing even in those early years, it was quickly decided that I would be the first to rule as Dungeon Master.  The friend who had discovered the game and another were my first player characters.  It was a small game, but it's a memory we still share and talk about these many years later.

Soon the three of us were inseparable.  When school started up, we spent every weekend available to us engaging in our game.  We were the kings and queen of geekery in our small town.  We were the proud dice rollers who spent every second of every day not spent studying and doing our homework plotting and planning and drawing up adventures for our next session.

Before that time we were children.  We made up personalities and played in the back yard.  We were cops and robbers, knights and mages, animals that could talk, and so much more.  Everything before that was haphazard and had no rules.  We made them up as we went along.  Then came the structured and organized system that made us feel more adult, teenagers in our own way.

We didn't spend our days shopping in the mall.  We didn't discuss the latest fashions.  We didn't go to parties at the houses of school mates whose parents were out of town for the weekend.  We didn't start drinking and smoking and doing drugs.  Our parents never worried about devil worship.  Our parents were just happy that we stayed out of trouble.  And we all have one man to thank, a legend the world was forced to say good-bye to for the last and final time one fateful day in early March.

Role-players worldwide wept at the news of the death of Gary Gygax, a name more known than his partner Dave Arneson.  His is the name that all geekdom remembers when they think of Dungeons and Dragons, and it was a sad day when he passed away the morning of March 4, 2008.  At some point he had been diagnosed with an inoperable abdominal aortic aneurysm, but this did not stop him from advocating the game he helped create and loved for decades.

Several publications worldwide shocked the world with this news in early March.  It was featured in the New York Times, the Underwire from wired.com, and even covered by CNN.  All reports claim the same thing.  Our role-playing messiah was 69 years old at the time of his death, having seen the game he helped create with his friend Dave Arneson grow for 34 years, and ultimately seeing it redeveloped when bought by Wizards of the Coast.

There is no denying that much of what we role-play today in freeform is inspired by the system that Gary Gygax created.  His own vision was inspired much by the works of J. R. R. Tolkein, but also by the myths and legends of our very own world.  Some could say he is the pioneer of shared adventuring and the endless limits of collaborative imaginations.  Many of us started dreaming by the roll of a die, either online or off, in guilds or at tabletop gatherings.  We evolved and grew from the system he designed, in one way or another, until learning what he initially meant to teach us from the very start.

“The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience,” Mr. Gygax said in a telephone interview in 2006. “There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.”  Quoted from the New York Times article.

Four years before his passing, Mr. Gygax was quoted as saying, in an interview for GameSpy, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."  He was a man just as mundane as any other, a prestige geek the likes of which the world may have never known before.  Gary Gygax was just another one of us, so let's not forget him.  Let us remember him as he would like to be remembered.

Rest in peace, Dungeon Master.  May there never be a lack of dice to roll awaiting you in the afterlife.