The Deck is Full

The Stewardship of Dungeons & Dragons

Part I: The Deck is Full

Recent developments at Wizards of the Coast have convinced me that a question I have been circling deserves to be asked directly: How much should a designer's contemporary social worldview influence the stewardship of a fifty-year-old fantasy game?

I use the word stewardship deliberately. Nobody working at Wizards of the Coast today created Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created something that grew beyond them, passed through generations of designers and players, and eventually became an American cultural institution. The people working on D&D today have every right to contribute to that legacy. They should. Rules improve, mechanics evolve, and new settings are written. Every generation should strive to leave something worthwhile behind. There is a significant difference between contributing to a heritage and remaking that gift in the image of the person who is tasked with writing in the current day.

Authority is not given to you to deny the return of the King, Steward.

Denethor was a steward too, and he managed to let the armies of Mordor creep all the way to the gates of Minas Tirith while despairing over what he had been entrusted to defend. A steward has obligations in both directions. They cannot treat an inheritance according to their whims. Neither can they neglect it or stand idle while it is diminished. The duty is to preserve what is worth preserving and improve what can genuinely be improved. The goal is to hand the baton to the next generation in as good a condition or better than you received it.

Makenzie De Armas provides an interesting starting point for examining that distinction because she is not a peripheral consultant who can be dismissed as irrelevant to the game. She is a game designer with substantial Wizards credits. Her work includes mechanics, monsters, and adventures. Her credits reach into the current core of Dungeons & Dragons. Whatever disagreements I have with her design philosophy, it would be disingenuous to pretend she doesn’t know anything about game design. My objection is more fundamental than that. I am interested in what De Armas believes belongs inside the game she has been entrusted to help design.

Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate about that. We can take her at her word.

The clearest example is The Book of Many Things, the 2023 sourcebook built around one of the oldest and strangest artifacts in Dungeons & Dragons. I have written previously about the history of the Deck of Many Things⁠, and its history matters here. Gary Gygax (with Rob Kuntz) introduced the Deck in Supplement I: Greyhawk in 1975. The concept was beautifully simple. A character encountered a mysterious deck of magical cards and chose whether to draw from it. Players knew that the consequences could be extraordinary, disastrous, or sometimes both. The Deck changed through subsequent editions, as D&D does, but its appeal endured. It was dangerous, enigmatic, and unpredictable. Most importantly for the present discussion, for decades The Deck of Many Things survived without explaining who made the thing.

That absence of an explanation was not a defect waiting for a future designer to repair. Mystery has value. The world feels larger when the characters wandering through it do not possess a Wikipedia entry explaining the provenance of every sword or magical artifact they encounter. The Deck of Many Things belonged comfortably to that tradition. It existed. It was enormously powerful. Nobody really knew where it came from. Draw a card or move along.

Then came The Book of Many Things, and the mystery acquired a creation story. The process by which that story developed is interesting because De Armas and project lead Jason Tondro have been open about it. While examining the traditional twenty-two cards, they saw that Euryale was the only card bearing a proper name. They began there, and in doing so approached the mythological figure of Medusa partly through a distinctly contemporary interpretive lens. In an official D&D Beyond interview⁠, De Armas explained that the team wanted to honor the way the Medusa symbol has been reclaimed by some survivors of sexual assault and violence. She described their approach to the Medusa as a symbol of “protection and sisterhood and defiance.”

That decision deserves more attention.

Of all the ways De Armas and Tondro might have approached Euryale, they chose an interpretation centered partially on survivors of sexual assault and violence. To be fair, that interpretation did not simply materialize out of contemporary politics. I own a physical copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the story is right there in Book IV. Ovid describes Medusa as a celebrated beauty and tells us that Neptune violated her in Minerva’s temple, after which Minerva transformed Medusa’s famous hair into serpents. Anyone claiming that the victimized Medusa has no basis in classical literature is wrong.

Ovid, however, was not writing at the beginning of the Medusa tradition. Some seven centuries earlier, Hesiod’s Theogony already knew Medusa as one of the three Gorgons. She is the mortal sister of Stheno and Euryale, daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Dwelling beyond the Ocean toward the realm of Night. Hesiod also knows of Medusa’s union with Poseidon, describing the two lying together in a meadow among spring flowers. There is no beautiful-maiden-violated-in-Athena’s-temple transformation story. Medusa is already a Gorgon.

That distinction matters because mythology does not hand De Armas and Tondro one mandatory interpretation of Medusa that they were simply obligated to reproduce. It hands them traditions separated by centuries, and they made a choice among them. They treated the Medusa tradition like a buffet table, selecting from centuries of contradictory mythology the elements they wanted to place on the plate. That is their prerogative as storytellers.

Nevertheless, once we understand that a selection was being made, we are permitted to ask what guided it. This is our prerogative as fans.

Of all the many traditions surrounding Medusa and the Gorgons, the modern designers were drawn specifically to an interpretation that could be understood through sexual violence, victimhood, protection, sisterhood, and defiance. Those are not themes I am assigning to them after the fact. De Armas herself discussed “protection and sisterhood and defiance” when explaining the team’s thinking. Perhaps other considerations influenced their choices as well, but what they chose to emphasize fits remarkably well with the contemporary social worldview De Armas openly describes elsewhere. What did not serve that interpretation was left at the buffet table.

That is precisely why the choice matters. The argument isn’t that De Armas and Tondro invented the victimized Medusa. Ovid prevents us from making that argument, and anyone with a copy of Metamorphoses can check it for himself. The argument is that they inherited centuries of competing traditions, selected among them, and produced a version remarkably compatible with their own stated contemporary concerns. That is not a neutral transmission of mythology. It is an interpretation.

This is the larger problem I am trying to describe. The frightening things inherited from an older tradition increasingly seem to require reconsideration. We see something similar in the content warnings attached to older editions of the game and in the growing use of tabletop safety tools. The monster needs context. The villain needs understanding. Evil needs an explanation, and with enough explanation perhaps evil was never really evil at all. There are wonderful stories to be written around tragic monsters and misunderstood villains, and mythology itself is full of them. But fantasy also needs the courage to let a monster remain a monster. Sometimes the thing with snakes for hair that turns men to stone really is the thing the heroes should be afraid of. If every old monster merely awaits the proper contemporary context to reveal that generations before us misunderstood it, how far are we prepared to carry the rehabilitation? Do we invite Lucifer over for crumpets next?

From Euryale came Asteria, a new character who would become the first canonically autistic character in Dungeons & Dragons. This was not an interpretation subsequently imposed on the character by fans. It was intentional from the beginning. “We made her autistic,” De Armas explained in that same D&D Beyond interview⁠. She drew upon her own experiences with autism while developing the character, incorporating details involving eye contact, sensory preferences, clothing, earplugs, and overstimulation. Asteria’s avoidance of eye contact also provided an obvious advantage in developing a relationship with a medusa, whose gaze is rather famously something one should avoid.

Taken by itself, there is nothing objectionable about an autistic character appearing in Dungeons & Dragons. There is nothing objectionable about an autistic designer drawing upon her own experiences when creating a new character. Writers have been putting themselves into their characters for as long as human beings have told stories. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with examining Medusa through a modern interpretation. The important question is not whether any of these subjects may appear in fantasy. It is why these particular contemporary concerns became part of a newly constructed mythology attached to an artifact created almost fifty years before them.

Asteria’s story eventually brings her into conflict with Istus, the goddess of fate. She refuses to accept the destiny prescribed for herself and Euryale, and the confrontation ultimately becomes connected to the creation of the Deck of Many Things. Fairness requires an important qualification here: De Armas herself gives Jason Tondro full credit for the idea of connecting Asteria’s confrontation with Istus to the creation of the Deck. That distinction matters because this series will eventually turn its attention toward Tondro. I have no interest in blaming one designer for another designer’s decision merely because it makes for a cleaner accusation.

What interests me about De Armas’s contribution is the philosophy she describes surrounding the character. She talks about Asteria in terms of identity, about the experience of other people defining who someone is supposed to be, about questioning authority and asking why something must remain the way it has always been. Those themes obviously resonated with her personally, and they became part of the story constructed around Euryale and the Deck itself. The designers did not merely create a new character who happened to be autistic. They constructed a modern narrative around identity, autonomy, fate, and resistance to imposed expectations and connected that narrative to one of the oldest artifacts in the game.

This is where my disagreement begins, because the Deck of Many Things did not need this.

That statement should not be mistaken for an argument that Dungeons & Dragons must remain frozen in 1975. It has always changed, and the Deck itself has changed repeatedly. Cards have appeared and disappeared, mechanics have been rewritten, artwork has changed and different editions have interpreted old material differently. There is no contradiction between appreciating the game’s history and believing its mechanics can improve. But changing a saving throw is not the same thing as deciding what an ancient artifact means. Updating Armor Class is not the same thing as constructing a creation mythology around something that spent decades without one.

Expanding an old mystery is not the same thing as explaining it.

Nor do I think contemporary designers should be forbidden from exploring subjects that matter to them. Quite the opposite. If a designer wants to create an autistic warrior whose friendship with a Medusa becomes a story about fate, identity and self-determination, create her. If a designer wants to build an entire fantasy world around those ideas, build it. Create a new artifact. Create a new mythology. Give us something strange enough and compelling enough that people will still be arguing about it fifty years from now. Dungeons & Dragons desperately needs people willing to create the next Deck of Many Things.

What is troubling is the increasingly common impulse to establish ownership over inherited fantasy by reinterpreting it through the cultural priorities of the present. The temptation is understandable. Creating something new is difficult. An old name already has an audience, history, and emotional weight attached to it. A designer who attaches a new story to the Deck of Many Things instantly receives fifty years of accumulated significance that an entirely new artifact would have to earn. Stewardship ought to impose a degree of restraint precisely because of the legacy it carries.

This standard cannot apply only to designers whose politics or cultural assumptions we may or may not agree with. Suppose Wizards hired a devout traditionalist Catholic tomorrow and gave him responsibility for the Forgotten Realms. If he began retroactively explaining old mysteries through explicitly Catholic theology, rewriting established characters to illustrate his beliefs and attaching his contemporary religious concerns to artifacts created forty years earlier, the same question would have to be asked. The fact that I might personally sympathize with some of his beliefs would not give him greater ownership over Ed Greenwood’s creation. Stewardship means recognizing that the thing temporarily placed in your hands is not a blank check.

Every creator inevitably brings a worldview to his work. Gary Gygax certainly did. Dave Arneson did. Tolkien’s beliefs and interests permeate Middle-earth. Appendix N exists precisely because Dungeons & Dragons emerged from a particular collection of literary influences, historical interests, and personalities. There has never been a culturally neutral version of D&D, and pretending otherwise would be foolish. The distinction I am interested in is between creating from one’s worldview and using stewardship of somebody else’s creation as an opportunity to retrofit that creation to one’s worldview.

That is why Makenzie De Armas is worth discussing even though I disagree with much of the philosophy surrounding her work. She can design games. This is not an argument about whether she deserves a seat at a design table. It is an argument about what obligations come with sitting at that particular table when the material spread across it was created by other people half a century ago.

Sometimes an old rule should be rewritten. An old monster can be improved. Perhaps an old setting contains contradictions that later designers can resolve beautifully. Stewardship cannot, however, mean embalming Dungeons & Dragons and displaying it behind glass after electroplating the corpse⁠.

Occasionally, the unexplained should remain unexplained. The blank space on an old map is valuable precisely because it's not filled yet. A designer should resist the impulse to define what Gary and the boys never bothered explaining. Instead of asking how an old piece of Dungeons & Dragons can be made to express the concerns of 2026, the better question is what wholly new thing today’s designers can create that players in 2076 will consider worth preserving.

There is also a reason this question about stewardship cannot be left with The Book of Many Things and dismissed as an argument over a book published three years ago. De Armas is now among the designers working on the return of Dark Sun, another piece of inherited Dungeons & Dragons with a long history and a particularly difficult identity to preserve. She has discussed her work on the Defiler Sorcerer and the problem of translating Dark Sun’s life-draining magic into the modern game. That puts the question I have spent this essay asking squarely in the present tense. TTRPG Insider’s interview with De Armas and Greg Bilsland on adapting Dark Sun⁠ is worth reading in full.

I have already written about my concerns with Wizards’ announced changes to the setting in Keep the Chains: Dark Sun, Slavery, and the 50 Million⁠. My argument there was not that terrible institutions should be celebrated simply because they appeared in an old campaign setting. It was almost exactly the opposite. Dark Sun used slavery, tyranny, and ecological devastation to show us a civilization that had gone terribly wrong. Depiction is not endorsement, and removing an evil from a fictional world does nothing to defeat that evil in the real one.

As a fan, De Armas’s involvement therefore worries me. Not because I believe she is incapable of designing a sorcerer subclass, and not because a designer must share my worldview before being permitted to work on Dungeons & Dragons. It worries me because The Book of Many Things gives us an unusually well-documented example of how De Armas and the designers around her approach inherited material. We know that when confronted with competing traditions, contemporary interpretation can become part of the selection process. Dark Sun is a setting where those choices will matter enormously.

Athas does not need to be corrected any more than the rest of Dungeons & Dragons does. It should be developed, expanded, and made playable for another generation. Athas should not cease to be Dark Sun simply because parts of it are uncomfortable to modern designers. Its brutality, slavery, ecological devastation, and tyranny are not accidents left behind by unenlightened writers. They are part of what made the setting what it is.

It is the Ship of Theseus problem applied to a campaign setting. Replace every plank and you can still call it the same ship. But at some point, you have to ask what, exactly, you preserved.

That is why De Armas’s involvement concerns me. Stewardship is not about whether I personally like the steward. It is about whether we trust the steward to recognize the difference between something that genuinely needs improvement and something that merely makes the steward uncomfortable. After looking closely at what happened when modern designers were handed the Deck of Many Things, I think it is sensible to watch with scrutiny what happens now that some of those same hands have been placed on Athas.

These are the questions this series will seek to answer: What did each designer inherit? Did their changes serve Dungeons & Dragons, or did they use the game to attend to something else? Most importantly, did they leave the game better than they found it?

Criticism alone is not stewardship either. If something has gone wrong with the direction of Dungeons & Dragons, eventually somebody has to talk about what comes next and who is capable of bringing people back together. That question became considerably more fascinating at the D&D Vision Keynote at Gen Con⁠. Wizards presented a future that deliberately reaches into the game’s history even as it attempts to move D&D forward.

Joe Manganiello’s D&D Icons initiative may be the most interesting part of that effort. Luke Gygax is working on a new Greyhawk book using material left behind by his father. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are returning to Dragonlance, and R.A. Salvatore is returning to Drizzt and the Forgotten Realms. It is a good start if they stay the course. Those entrusted with Dungeons & Dragons’ future should, at the very least, remain in conversation with the people and traditions that built its past.

That is why what happens next matters. It is not sustainable to celebrate D&D’s history on a stage at Gen Con while permitting the designers who helped splinter faith around the direction of the game to continue unexamined. If stewardship means anything, respect for D&D’s inheritance has to survive contact with the books that actually reach our tables.

There are people around this game, including Manganiello and Luke Gygax, who are capable of bridging divisions that have hardened over years. Eventually this series is going to turn toward them, not because I expect these men to ride over the hill and magically fix Dungeons & Dragons, but because criticism without a constructive destination eventually becomes shouting. Somebody has to ask what reconciliation looks like. What should be preserved? What shouldn't? Will people who love different eras of this game recognize that they have something worth protecting together?

Can they unite the clans?

We will get there. First, however, there is another steward whose influence deserves considerably more scrutiny. Makenzie De Armas and the Deck of Many Things were a useful place to begin.

Next time, we need to talk about Jason Tondro.