As of March 4, Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeous and Dragons, is dead.  For me, death is a funny thing.  I tend to react with detachment, but I realize it's not always appropriate.  This is a belated reflection, but a good one.

My love of storytelling itself was first tried and tempered in the dormitory halls of Andover - and in the upstairs apartment of Jodi Young, one of our teaching fellows, and her then partner, now husband, Alan.  Alan ran Werewolf and Dungeons and Dragons games for a group of kids including myself, and together we wrestled (sometimes quite literally) with issues like injustice, integrity, morality, subjective truth, pain and forgiveness.  Seeing those emotions pour out of my friends is what made me fall in love with actors in the first place.  Seeing someone facilitate that release with the steady confidence Alan showed made me decide to direct.

Gary's game made that experience accessible to everyone.  Part of my overall goal is to further that cause, and bring mass media storytelling back into the hands of it's audience like it was in the days of Homer and Socrates.  On the one hand, I'm grateful that storytelling media like this even exists, and it exists because Gary Gygax thought it up, wrote it down, and published it.  On the other hand, more than the theater, more than the movies I saw as a child, it was this kind of storytelling that really put the stories in my head into my hands.

For a man to give someone he's never met so much...  It shows us how good we can be, if only we let ourselves.

Thank you, Gary Gygax.  See you back at the tavern, where all adventuring souls take their ease.