page_title: Gary Gygax
section_title: 2000–2008: Later works and death
hierarchical_section_title: Gary Gygax / After TSR / 2000–2008: Later works and death
caption_attribution_description: Gary Gygax and Stephen Chenault at Gen Con 2003 in the Troll Lords booth.
context_page_description: Ernest Gary Gygax was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson.
  In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he helped develop Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The following year, he and Arneson created D&D, which expanded on Gygax's Chainmail and included elements of the fantasy stories he loved as a child. In the same year, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, Gygax began work on a more comprehensive version of the game, called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game a rough script and ideas on how to run a particular gaming scenario. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series.
context_section_description: Gygax continued to work on Lejendary Adventures which he believed was his best work. However, sales were below expectation.
  On June 11, 2001, Stephen Chenault and Davis Chenault of Troll Lord Games announced that Gygax would be writing books for their company. Gygax's early work for Troll Lord included a series of hardcover books that eventually came to be called "Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds"; the first was The Canting Crew (2002), a look at the roguish underworld. He also wrote World Builder (2003) and Living Fantasy (2003), generic game design books usable in many different settings. After the first four books in the series, Gygax stepped down from writing and took on an advisory role, though the series logo still carried his name. Troll Lord also published a few adventures as a result of their partnership with Gygax, including The Hermit (2002) an adventure intended for d20 and also for Lejendary Adventures.
  By 2002, Gygax had given Christopher Clark of Hekaforge an encyclopaedic 72,000-word text describing the Lejendary Earth. Clark split the manuscript up into five books and expanded it, with each of the final books coming to about 128,000 words, giving Hekaforge a third Lejendary Adventures line to supplement the core rules and adventures. Hekaforge managed to publish the first two of those Lejendary Earth sourcebooks, Gazetteer (2002) and Noble Kings and Great Lands (2003), but by 2003 the small company was having financial difficulties. Clark had to ask Troll Lord Games to become an "angel" investor by publishing the three remaining Lejendary Adventures books.
  On October 9, 2001, Necromancer Games announced that they would be publishing a d20 version of Necropolis, an adventure originally planned by Gygax for New Infinities Productions and later printed in 1992 as a Mythus adventure by GDW; Gary Gygax's Necropolis was published a year later.
  Gygax also performed voiceover narration for cartoons and video games. In 2000, he voiced his own cartoon self for an episode of Futurama, "Anthology of Interest I" that also included the voices of Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and Nichelle Nichols. Gygax also performed as a guest Dungeon Master in the Delera's Tomb quest series of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach.
   During his time with TSR, Gygax had often mentioned the mysterious Castle Greyhawk which formed the centre of his own home campaign. But despite all of his written output over the previous 30 years, Gygax had never published details of the castle. In 2003, Gygax announced that he was again partnering with Rob Kuntz to publish the original and previously unpublished details of Castle Greyhawk and the City of Greyhawk in 6 volumes, although the project would use the rules for Castles and Crusades rather than D&D. As Gygax wrote in an on-line forum: "I have laid out a new schematic of castle and dungeon levels based on both my original design of 13 levels plus side adjuncts, and the 'New Greyhawk Castle' that resulted when Rob and I combined our efforts and added a lot of new levels too. From that Rob will draft the level plans for the newest version of the work. Meantime, I am collecting all the most salient feature, encounters, tricks, traps, etc. for inclusion on the various levels. So the end result will be what is essentially the best of our old work in a coherent presentation usable by all DMs, the material having all the known and yet to be discussed features of the original work that are outstanding... I hope." Since Wizards of the Coast, which had bought TSR in 1997, still owned the rights to the name "Greyhawk", Gygax changed the name of Castle Greyhawk to "Castle Zagyg", a reverse homophone of his own name, and also changed the name of the nearby city to "Yggsburgh", a play on his initials "E.G.G."
  The scale of the project was enormous: By the time Gygax and Kuntz had stopped working on their original home campaign, the castle dungeons had encompassed 50 levels of cunningly complex passages with thousands of rooms and traps. This, plus plans for the city of Yg
caption: Gary Gygax at Gen Con in 2003. He is sitting in the Troll Lord Games booth with Stephen Chenault.
exif: {}