Um, Okay, But What the Hell is Gygaxia?

Gygaxia is, of course, the universe of Gygaxia the game. It is known as Gygaxia for a very special reason pertaining to the way it came into existence.

Most roleplaying games concoct elaborate, contrived backstories for how their particular setting got to be the way it is. A game might suppose that a meteor hit the earth in the middle of the 21st century, for instance, or suppose that JFK didn’t actually get shot, or maybe that the second gunman was a crack-smoking monkey. One game might imagine what space travel would have been like had it been invented a century earlier, while another might ponder the implications of a world run by Richard Simmons clones. Gygaxia, however, avoids all this pretentious fact-inventing and just gives it to you straight. Here’s how the world of Gygaxia really came about.

The game’s humble beginnings stem all the way back to the real world in the 1970s, when various individuals were busy starting game companies with incomprehensible acronyms and defining roleplaying game theory as it is currently understood. Most critical to our story is a man whose first name was “E.” E. had a vision, and that vision involved dungeons. It involved a lot of dungeons. It involved utterly obscene amounts of dungeons, in fact. Less importantly, it also involved some dragons.

E. was determined to make his reptilian, underground dream a reality. Unbeknownst to him, however, somewhere along the path between this prototypical insight regarding the significance of dungeons and the fully developed idea that would someday come to be known as “Greyhawk,” something went terribly, horribly awry. As his game was refined, the piles of discarded ideas began to mount. And as the stress of the creative process mounted, certain concepts began to form unbidden from beneath the reaches of E.’s consciousness. Deep within the bowels of E.’s brain, abandoned ideas mingled with essential game concepts, forming bastard impressions unbefitting a respectable game setting.

No one really knows what happened after this, but according to legends encoded only within the most arcane lost texts of dark magic, the moment of Gygaxia's creation was at a gathering of gamers. Late in the night, long after the sugary drinks had been sucked down and the corn chips chewed beyond recognition, the pent-up sweat and hormones of these gamers mingled with this swirling mass of half-sane concepts just as E., unable to deal with the powerful buildup of these tortured ideas, unconsciously tried to force them out of his mind. It was likely then that these concepts which had hitherto been teetering dangerously on the brink of creation finally snapped into being. The world of Gygaxia came to be.

In the early days, Gygaxia was a simple, if nonsensical, place (see History of Gameality). As time passed, however, the essential insanity of a world consisting mainly of dragons and dungeons mingled with the nonsensical nature of the contradictory and haphazard way it had been created. Increasing levels of strangeness began to accumulate as other game developers developed (and sometimes discarded) various ideas which added to the pile of bastard Gygaxian concepts. Thousands upon thousands of subjective in-game years passed, and this weirdness snowballed into the world of Gygaxia that we know today. Unknown until recently, Gygaxia was discovered in the very beginning of the twenty-first century by Limestone Publishing, which added elements, refined the concept, and made it available for gaming for the very first time.

Even today, Gygaxia has a lot in common with most other fantasy universes. Like many such places, for instance, the barbarians of Gygaxia tend to roam the plains in their underwear. Its evil wizards often plot nefarious schemes against the forces of good from towers. Its knights in shining armor typically rescue damsels in distress from ferocious dragons. Its peasants normally scrape a meager existence from barren soils. And its adventuring parties of thieves, priests, warriors, and wizards raid dungeons and kill ferocious monsters. However, in Gygaxia, one might also find evil wizards roaming the plains in their underwear, barbarians forging melodramatic plots from towers, or knights living in hovels guarded by evil peasants who battle brave damsels keen on rescuing the knights. Adventurers are just as common as well, though Gygaxian monsters might be a little weirder, or at least have a better developed sense of their basic rights.

A good default for playing in Gygaxia is to assume that any new place you visit looks like a typical fantasy area in most respects, but with some kind of bizarre twist, such as the ones listed above. Occasionally, however, things can get really strange. It may be possible to visit the heavens (the realm of the gods) or any number of various afterlives. Notably, the game mechanics are sometimes accessible to beings in Gygaxia (albeit not often or easily), as are other universes (though some may be protected by powerful copyright barriers which have to be circumvented using complex magical rituals). Even the real world is a potential destination. So if you want to, travel to the universe of your favorite movie or roleplaying game, or to your player’s bedroom.

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