Even the BBC is reporting that Gary Gygax, the original creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died. I only ever dabbled with the table top version of the game when I was at university, but I enjoyed it immensely. I remember my character quite well. Corporal Barn turned out to be like teflon. I didn’t follow the strategy of the rules too closely and ended up building a fighter with high-DEX and low-STR. He was nearly untouchable, was rather useless in attack – a bit line Stone Boy from the Subs.

After that I lost interest in the table top version, but I did become hooked on the Forgotten Realms game series from Bioware. The Baldur’s Gate series was by favourite. Even today I’m still playing through the second expansion to Neverwinter Nights. And somewhere at home I’ve got a first edition boxed set of the Forgotten Realms (I think I was given it). I’ve also got source books and novels from his Mythos line (the one Gygax set up after leaving TSR). It was a great parallel/fantasy Earth setting, but was killed off by legal action.

The strange thing is that, while I rarely played the games, I was fascinated with the worlds associated with them. I’ve got piles of random source books from all sorts of games that I’ve never played and haven’t got the core rules for. Amid that lot there is of course the old DC Heroes material. I don’t know why, but I’ve always liked encyclopaedia and atlases of worlds that don’t exist – often more than the original stories those books document. It’s part of the reason I write character profiles and the like (which isn’t something I get time to do much nowadays). So I guess I can thank Mr Gygax for starting my interest in documenting DC’s superheroes.

RIP Gary Gygax