I first was exposed to D&D by my sister.
She had tried out this crazy game where you got to face dragons and dangerous traps and
cast magic spells and she said, why don't you try this out as well?
D&D came out in the late 70s.
I was a child of the 70s.
So in a way I've grown up with D&D.
I got to experience a lot of those early adventures.
This again is a priest character I made.
My friend John McNally drew.
It was basically dungeons with monsters hanging out in them waiting for you to show up and
kill them and take their stuff and also see my little gnome book plate with my kid handwriting.
If I were to travel back in time and tell the little kid, Jeremy, someday you're going
to be working on this game full time, the little kid version of me would have said, no way.
This is what I get to do all day long, every day.
Be one of the stewards of something so beloved, it's so fanciful.
This adventure is described as being in Grey Hawk.
D&D at its heart is a storytelling game.
Everybody who plays D&D is a storyteller.
The Dungeon Master is the person who describes the scene, the various characters, to the
other players.
The Dungeon Master will say something like, you enter the great throne room and you see
before you the storm giant king sitting on his throne.
What do you do?
That's D&D at its heart.
What do you do?
There's a roll of a die, it's a 20 sided die.
Usually what will happen in those moments of question, are you going to succeed or fail?
It's in that space between rolling the die, describing what your character is doing, the
DM deciding what it is that then happens.
That's really where the magic happens, because it is there that a story comes to life that
no one expected.
That's what I like about it, it's a totally different experience than watching a movie
or something where you're more passive because you're building it as you go along.
It's problem solving, it's interacting with people, it's cooperating.
Community is even a part of the storytelling itself.
Every D&D story is about a group of people, what we call the adventuring party.
It's never about just the one hero.
D&D invites you to step into the shoes of another person, this character.
How would they respond to the circumstances that are placed before them?
What would they do to protect their friends?
What might they do to betray them?
D&D is about fighting monsters, D&D is about getting treasure, D&D is about the wizard
learning magic spells, but in the end really it's about weaving this entire world.
Despite how large our company is, every book in the end just ends up in the hands of three
people.
I'm the text guy, Emmy does the layout, and Kate, the art director.
Fifth edition for us was a big balancing act.
We wanted it to be something that looked modern and sophisticated, but also something that,
no matter what edition was your favorite, this would be your new favorite and you would
love this one.
And then of course we put in all the original credits.
As game designers, we often want to improve the game, but there's always a tension for
us between making the game feel more contemporary and keeping that feel from when the game was
first created.
This is where we rely on our fans to tell us what excites D&D players of all sorts,
whether they're hardcore improvisational actors, storytellers, or tacticians.
So what did people want?
People wanted a simple, elegant platform for storytelling, specifically in a high fantasy
world, but with just enough depth to make it interesting.
Not so simple that you could figure it out in an afternoon and all of its nuances were
exposed to you.
And so we can create a version of D&D that's big enough for all of its fans.
The game doesn't exist without the players coming together and creating it.
Here in Player's Handbook, speaking of Kid Jeremy is my favorite pages from the original
Player's Handbook.
It was a map of the cosmos, of what we call the D&D multiverse.
All of these realms of heaven and hell, different realms from mythology, all of them were somehow
connected.
Wait, I can tell a story about a world that is connected to both Olympus and Gladzheim.
The mythological connectivity is really at the heart of the magic of D&D and for many
other role-playing games.
D&D invites you to create myth.
It asks you to create a world and to imagine what happens in this world, what stories will
unfold there.
I started out thinking I was going to go on to be a college professor.
So I studied English literature, philosophy, religious studies.
That for me has always been a through line.
Why do we tell these stories?
We have this interest in meaning in the cosmos around us, and so often we explore that meaning
in our storytelling.
One of the things that sets fantasy apart from other genres is fantasy in many ways
is about the familiar being seasoned with the unfamiliar, the simple cottage with bread
and salt and flowers growing outside, but a dragon in the sky.
Fantasy needs to always have a feeling like even though it's wondrous and magical, I
feel like I've been there before.
In other words, D&D gets at something that J.R.
Tolkein talked about in his essay on fairy stories, that so much of fantasy is about
our yearning to connect to the world around us.
Every book that we create for D&D is unique, and that's true of our latest book, Tales
from the Yawning Portal.
A collection of seven adventures from the games past, updated for fifth edition D&D.
Kate began working on getting new images painted with a variety of artists to illustrate these
adventures.
I get to work with artists from all around the world.
I have no idea how they do the things that they do.
You did a great job.
They always surprised me.
When I throw all the art in, it pushes all the text out, and so I'll say, hey, Jeremy,
you've got to cut X amount of pages.
As my creative partners in book construction, Emmy and Kate know I will always sacrifice
text to make sure the layout is beautiful and we get all the art in.
Art for our books is vital.
Art is our reader's first window into the world that we're inviting them to explore.
We're able to convey that invitation to a world of fantasy in a split second.
We've made a very conscious effort in the player's handbook, for instance, to have about
a 50-50 split when it comes to the gender of the heroes and to show that those women
have as much agency and power as their male counterparts.
It was also vitally important to us to show that not all D&D heroes are white.
In most fantasy games, when you see the default human, it's a white man, and we made sure
to flip all of that on its head.
For our stories to feel authentic, for our stories to really tug at people, they need
to reflect that richness that we see in the world around us.
It's been gratifying to see that the community has embraced that.
This idea embedded in the heart of D&D, of the diverse group is the strong group.
We feel there's always more work, though, that we can do so that everyone feels there
is indeed a place for them at the D&D table.
We didn't want it to be a damsel in distress.
It still feels like Dungeons & Dragons.
That same D&D from back in the day, when people first were battering down doors and facing
the orcs hiding out in the dungeon.
Every book that you do, you hope that people will like it.
I want people to be happy.
I want them to feel like I'm building on something, not tearing it down.
We get super excited when we see people playing, like, in the live games, when just there's
so many people who are passionate about it.
The guards in the inner, like, yeah, get him!
Out of my game.
No!
Okay, so you just told me to clean up.
You know, that's a wonderful thing that we get to contribute to.
When I was a teenager, I worked at the game store in my hometown, San Luis Obispo, on
the central coast of California.
This is my original Dungeon Masters guide.
And we had Gary Gygax, one of the two creators of D&D, come for an entire day at the store.
This is the guide that I had signed by Gary Gygax in 1989.
The awesome job I had was to be his handler for the entire day.
Now, the inscription says, Jeremy, thanks for being so good a host to me.
Gary Gygax, 1989.
For me, that is the job I'm still doing.
That I am providing a place where his work can flourish.
Because he and Dave Arneson were the creators of this great game that so many thousands
of us still get to enjoy.
And so just like that day, I view my job as making sure Gary is happy.
