In addition to being a Dungeon Master, I am an academic. I recently completed my Master's degree in Literature, and I bring both the writing skills and imagination of my education to my games. But I also bring my loves of TRPGs to my academic work. Years ago, when completing my Bachelor's degree, I convinced a professor to let me write about Gary Gygax's Queen of the Spiders supermodule for a Gothic literature class. I set out to compare how Gygax's adventure uses classic tropes of horror to achieve its goals, but my analysis showed much greater trends than that; I ended up writing about gender roles and the fears of the 1970s as motivating factors in the development of the campaign. I felt a little guilty afterwards, dissecting some of my favorite art with a critical eye, but I still stand by this piece. If you're interested in how classic D&D monsters represent the fears of American men in the 1970s, please enjoy this piece.
Cultural Fears at Play: The 1970s Crisis in Masculinity and Dungeons & Dragons
Created in a decade remembered for its turbulence, the popular game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) appeared in 1974 and spawned a legacy of role-playing games which continues today. Its success raises questions about the culture in which it became so popular—what about the act of pretending to defeat monsters was so attractive to the young men of the 1970s? The answer lies in the anxieties these young men felt and the ability to deal symbolically with those anxieties by playing D&D. By defeating monsters which represented a morally weak society and shifting gender roles, players of Dungeons & Dragons reasserted masculinity in the cultural setting of the 1970s.
Dungeons & Dragons was initially published in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, who adapted the idea for the game from miniature wargames, a hobby most popular in the 1970s. In 1986, Tactical Studies Rules, the company which owned Dungeons & Dragons, published Queen of the Spiders, a module—a book which contains instructions, maps, and narrative for a Dungeon Master, the game’s storyteller, to present to a group of players. The game proceeds as the players interact with the Dungeon Master’s narration and experience the story presented in the module. Queen of the Spiders collected three smaller modules which had been published between the years 1978 and 1980, so although published in 1986, it is truly a product of the 1970s. D&D co-creator Gygax authored Queen of the Spiders, which was ranked the #1 best module in the history of D&D in Dungeon magazine in 2004, chosen by 16 of the industry’s most respected designers from over 400 modules published between 1975 and 2004 (Mona). The conventions and innovations in Queen of the Spiders have influenced the medium of modules greatly since its publication. However, despite the important place that Queen of the Spiders holds in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, little has been written addressing it or its significance to the culture of the 1970s. The importance of D&D to 1970s society reveals that the game’s values connect with a larger set of ideas present in the culture of the time.
The narrative of Queen of the Spiders begins with the revelation that the players are the victims of a conspiracy, the perpetrators of which can be discovered in the kingdom of Sterich. Upon arrival in Sterich, the player characters find a vast black sphere enveloping the capital city; the rulers of Sterich direct the players to do battle with the giants in the lands surrounding the city to determine both the source of the mysterious black sphere and the identity of the conspirators. The players fight three tribes of giants, discovering along the way that the conspirators are the drow, a mysterious race of elves which lives beneath the surface of the earth. The players find their way through strange underground caves, completing puzzles and fighting monsters, until they arrive in the drowish city of Erelhei-Cinlu. In this city, they confront their conspirator, a drow named Eclavdra, and discover that the evil drowish goddess Lolth is the source of the black sphere over Sterich and that Lolth intends to destroy the world. The players finally enter Lolth’s realm and do battle with her. Defeating Lolth in effect saves the earth from her grasp, and the king of Sterich handsomely rewards the players for their heroism.
Queen of the Spiders presents the players with a host of enemies which they defeat in combat. The two most common enemies encountered in the module—the giants and the drow—take on significant meaning in the cultural atmosphere of the 1970s because of the qualities they embody. The giants represent a morally weak society, while the drow, a thoroughly evil race of elves, are defined by their greedy, corrupt, and matriarchal society. Queen of the Spiders addresses the anxieties associated with 1970s masculinity by giving players the opportunity to act out against and defeat enemies which represent those anxieties and to reclaim the traditional forms of masculinity through the rules of chivalry.
Overcoming Fears by Defeating Monsters
The concerns of the young men of the 1970s form the narrative core of Queen of the Spiders. The majority of players of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s were young men (Holmes 122), and the game offered an attractive safe space for many of them to enact masculine behaviors. Through the creation of a shared narrative populated by monsters which evoked anxiety-inducing traits, Queen of the Spiders gave these young men the opportunity to assert their masculinity in the face of threats to traditional morality and gender roles.
The uncertainty of masculinity in the 1970s explains a great deal of the appeal that D&D had to the young men of the era. The game succeeded mainly with younger men, as John Holmes notes in his early history of fantasy role-playing games (122). D&D’s early success with this demographic resulted from the cultural atmosphere of the 1970s. David Novitz suggests that the self-doubt many boys had in the wake of shifting gender roles and second-wave feminism might have been eased by games like D&D, which allowed for creativity and individuality (159). This line of thought can be taken further, though: the conquest of anxiety-producing ideas assuaged the fears of many of the young men of the 1970s. Monsters in D&D provided these young men with the perfect medium for combatting cultural fears.
In order to understand the effect of overcoming an enemy which represents an anxiety-inducing quality, it is vital to know how Dungeons & Dragons operates. Players of the game control one character each, their respective characters forming parts of the narrative as the game progresses. When the Dungeon Master, a player who controls the game world, describes the setting and actions to the other players, they each choose what to do in response to the world. If the Dungeon Master describes a monster approaching the players, the players can (and often do) choose to enter combat with the enemy and defeat it. The presence of choice in D&D matters a great deal because the characters’ actions reflect the thoughts and feelings of the players themselves—the narrative of the story is shaped by the players. Thus, when the characters in the game kill an enemy, it is a direct extension of the players’ desire to kill that enemy and what it represents.
Monsters in D&D are more than obstacles for the players. Each monster exists in a state of inherent conflict with the players’ characters. In his book Monster Theory, Jeremy Jerome Cohen states that “the monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a resistant Other” (x). The monsters in Queen of the Spiders represent opposition to the players in many important moral ways in addition to their surface-level differences. In terms of morality, Ashley M. Donnelly defines the Other as opposed to and outside of “our collective moral code”; people imagine the Other as inherently different because of such vastly dissimilar reckonings of what is right and wrong (18). Donnelly goes on to say that a text which destroys the offensive Other “not only justifies our system of beliefs, but also makes us feel safe and secure from that which we perceive as a threat” (18). The extermination of monsters in D&D allows for just such an assertion of safety for those who defeat the menacing Others because the moral distinctions between hero and monster are central to the players’ experiences.
The values of the young men in the tumultuous decade of the 1970s were represented by the images of traditional masculine heroes reaching back into far earlier times. The traits that a traditional masculine hero needs consist of fierce individualism, a sense of selflessness, and strict morality—ideas each closely related to the code of medieval chivalry. In the book Of Giants, Cohen describes the code of chivalry as a system which “represents a kind of hypermasculinity, an exaggerated and idealized version of maleness” (83). In the culturally uncertain time of the 1970s, the overtly masculine power of chivalry appealed to many young men, and a game based in fantasy like Dungeons & Dragons provided the most natural context for reenacting chivalric behavior. Other twentieth century texts are also fascinated by the morality of chivalry. Jopi Nyman, writing about the hard-boiled fiction of the 1920s, asserts that the idealistic code of honor observed by many men of the period was “a gendered one which belongs to the romantic era with knights, maidens, and threatening dragons” (136). Nyman’s statement is just as true of the men of the 1970s, who took refuge in a playground of fantasy filled with those very knights, maidens, and dragons. The deeds of the players are not the only important expression of chivalry’s values, however; the monsters in Queen of the Spiders embody the inverse of these values. The giants and the drow both represent qualities which are entirely opposed to the players’ chivalric code.
The Giants and Moral Weakness
A primary enemy in Queen of the Spiders is the group of giants the players seek out at the beginning of their journey. The giants live in tribal units, leading decadent lifestyles and pledging themselves to cruel kings. Through their conspicuous consumption, greed, and brutality, the giants’ immorality is central to their depiction. These traits were particularly odious to the young men of the 1970s, whose chivalrous conceptions of masculinity demanded a strong sense of morality.
The first group of enemies the players confront are giants, tribes of massive human-like beings which have terrorized the kingdom of Sterich for months. The giants are allied with the mysterious group which conspires against the players and the kingdom of Sterich, so the players must go to the giants and learn more about their shadowy foes. Three tribes of giants—the hill giants, the frost giants, and the fire giants—provide the most opposition to the players. The players infiltrate the caves in which each of these tribes live and defeat the giants. The giants are formidable opponents in battle due to their size and ferocity, but the most remarkable aspect of the battles is that the players fight in the giants’ homes. Due to this staging, the players encounter the giants in their natural habitat, which allows the players to learn about how the giants live. As the players observe in the giants’ homes, Queen of the Spiders characterizes the giants as morally weak.
One of the most immediately apparent facts of life for the giants is their excessive consumption. To some extent, the fact that giants consume a good deal is logical—they are giant, after all. However, the text repeatedly emphasizes the sheer magnitude of the giants’ consumption. In one room, “a whole ox, two sheep, and four pigs” roast over a fire, and several “tables are full of various sorts of meat, cheese, bread, and drinking containers” (22). Each time the players find giants eating or drinking, the giants engage in massive feasts marked by descriptions of excess. The giants do not merely need large amounts of sustenance—they revel in gluttony. The giants seem to spend all of their time eating and throwing great feasts—the players stumble into the hall of the hill giants in the middle of a celebration with vast amounts of food and drink. An illustration from the module depicts a giant carrying a great platter with a complete cow to a table; another giant behind him hauls a huge plate with fruit piled high upon it (26). The excess of this feast, like similar displays amongst the other giants, serves to highlight the obsession with consumption criticized in 1970s culture. Made monstrous by its association with the giants and their archaic lifestyle, excessive consumption is portrayed by Queen of the Spiders in a negative light.
To the people of the 1970s, such incredible consumption had become a topic of national discussion. The extent to which Americans affected the environment was in the national consciousness. In his 1977 Inaugural Address, President Carter spoke directly to the need for less conspicuous consumption. Cautioning Americans to be mindful of their habits, Carter said that “‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better.’” Carter’s address broadcast a clear idea of what sort of values mattered to the nation. The giants of Queen of the Spiders seem not to listen—only one year after Carter’s speech, the massive humanoids feasted and reveled in their excess. This selfish behavior on the part of the giants runs directly counter to the selflessness so important to the code of chivalry.
The giants also notably live in tribes ruled by immoral kings. Each tribe’s leader spends his time engaged in wicked acts. The hill giants are beholden to a powerful chief who keeps many slaves; the frost giants owe fealty to a mighty jarl who surrounds himself with heaps of treasure; the fire giants live under the rule of a cruel king who enjoys torture and hoards jewels and gold. Gygax presents each giant ruler as more selfish and unscrupulous than the last, ramping up the dramatic impact of each battle. The giant kings are the final battles in their respective homes, making them the climax of each chapter of the module. The defeat of the immoral giant leaders is celebrated for the players with the gain of treasure and more power, which rewards them for their triumph over non-chivalrous monsters.
The necessity of moral purity and selflessness to chivalrous behavior makes the monstrous kings obvious targets for conquest. The 1970s, though, had particular relish for defeating morally bankrupt officials. The Watergate scandal of the early 1970s shook Americans’ faith in political leaders like never before. Historian Bruce Schulman characterized 1970s Americans as believing that all politicians behaved criminally and that it was merely Nixon who had been caught (47). Many believed that leaders should represent the most moral of all men, but the Americans of the early 1970s saw precisely the opposite come true. The presentation of the immoral leaders of the giant tribes spoke to the sense that there was no integrity or morality in the men who led people. Fighting back against the giants allowed young men to symbolically confront the anxiety that society had become immoral.
In the section of Queen of the Spiders in which the players fight the giants, the gluttony, greed, and clear-cut immorality of the monsters and their leaders is prominently displayed. The giants are monstrous because of their appearance and violence, certainly, but just as monstrous to the players of the 1970s was the reprehensible lack of morality in the giants’ society. While the morally stagnant giants behave without concern for an ethical code, players held to the strict code of chivalry as an expression of their masculinity. The giants as an enemy allowed players to both overcome the weak morality of the giants and assert a more powerful morality through their own actions.
The Drow and Societal Corruption
Possibly the most dangerous enemy in Queen of the Spiders is the drow, a race of elves which lives under the surface of the earth. The drow embody intense political and individual corruption, resulting in a dystopian society. Additionally, the drowish matriarchy represents fears about increasing female power. In the cultural world of the 1970s, young men were especially sensitive to concerns about corruption and female empowerment. The drow provide a monstrous image of these anxieties which the players could defeat in order to assert their chivalry-based masculinity. Elsewhere, as in James and Mona Rocha’s essay “Elf Stereotypes,” the significance of the drow has been considered in the light of racial anxieties. In Queen of the Spiders, however, the drow are characterized by anxieties about women: the power of females in drowish society is subverted by depictions of monstrous motherhood, sexualized women, and manipulative female characters.
In Queen of the Spiders, the drow are the epitome of evil. Gygax describes the dark elves as “cruel, corrupt, and contemptuous of ‘lesser’ races” and never says a kinder word about them (4). The drow are marked on a physical level as rotten—they are “a fell race” who retreated to the depths of the earth, and they “conspire and plot to enslave and destroy the surface realms” (3). The drow live in Erelhei-Cinlu, an underground city populated by all manner of degenerate and violent monsters. The city and its people are not just malicious; they are also wasteful and indulgent. Queen of the Spiders deliberately designs everything about the drow to make them the most objectionable and offensive monster possible to 1970s ideologies.
Where the giants are corrupt because of the moral weakness of their leaders, the drow represent a far more extreme political corruption. In Erelhei-Cinlu, eight “houses” of the drow, large merchant groups, fight for political dominance. Further dividing the drow politically are sixteen “clans,” familial groups which complicate the factions even more. A complicated system of alliances govern how these houses and clans interact, and Queen of the Spiders characterizes the drow as a people very involved in their constant political warfare (4). The drowish infatuation with political strife and underhanded attempts to best one another does not paint a picture of a moral society. The political corruption of the drow begets spiritual corruption as well. In notes about one of the houses of drow, Gygax notes that the most powerful of the houses changed their religious affiliation as a political maneuver (87). For Americans in 1978 when Queen of the Spiders was published, the memory of Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the fallout from Watergate was fresh, and as discussed above, a great many people believed that all politicians were completely corrupt. Anxiety and resentment toward such corruption affected many of the young men of the 1970s. Robert Bellah’s “Mythic Individualism” describes a fight against a society which is “corrupt to its core,” and says that this struggle is a central aspect of the American identity (145). This struggle, mirroring the concerns about American political corruption, could be acted out by young American men by fighting the drow. The drow, monsters often defined by their intense involvement in underhanded and selfish politics, allow players of Queen of the Spiders to defeat representations of utter moral bankruptcy.
The political situation in Erelhei-Cinlu is not merely intensely factional and focused on power rather than compassionate governance; it is also fueled by financial assets. The drowish political factions are merchant groups, portraying politics as inherently tied up in money. The very reason the players find their way to the drow in the first place is that a drowish factional conspiracy intends to make a political power-play using the players. The plotting drow force the giants to terrorize the kingdom of Sterich in the hopes that a group of powerful adventurers like the players will make their way to Erelhei-Cinlu. There, the drowish conspiracy contends, the characters will hopefully weaken rival groups, and the conspiratorial group will gain wealth and political capital. These ruthless and deceitful dealings powerfullly evoke the tactics used in the Watergate burglaries, which shook 1970s American society to its core. Queen of the Spiders provided the young men of the 1970s an opportunity to defeat the morally repugnant drow and to realize their own ideals of masculinity by combatting a corrupt society.
The Drow and Femininity
Queen of the Spiders presents the drow as an incredible evil, and their immorality is entwined with their matriarchy. The most powerful drow are females. The main conspirator the players pursue throughout the module is the female Eclavdra, a high official in a political faction in Erelhei-Cinlu. Every aspect of the drowish society is deemed evil, so the concept of a society dominated by women becomes evil as well. Eclavdra and the drow are certainly depicted as wicked, but the spider goddess Lolth, patron of the drow, is unquestionably the worst of all. Of the pantheon of official D&D deities published in Deities and Demigods, Lolth was among only three goddesses out of a total of twenty-four deities (Ward 90-97), so her femininity demands attention. The evil which characterizes her maligns her identity as a female. The Demonweb Pits in which she resides are composed of souls suffering eternal punishment for terrible sins (100). Lolth’s evil defines her, as does her gender, which conflates the two for players. Queen of the Spiders focuses much of its attention on the depravity of the drow, and an emphasis on their femininity is frequently paired with descriptions of that depravity. By presenting the matriarchal drow as evil, Queen of the Spiders creates an enemy which is offensive to the morality and masculinity of chivalry.
The shifting gender roles of the 1970s give context to the undermining and vilification of powerful women. The women of the 1970s made social, economic, and political gains through the efforts of the women’s liberation movement. Schulman points to gains that women made in the 1970s which gave men cause to fear for their traditional sense of gender roles—for instance, between 1971 and 1978, the share of high school athletes who were female more than quadrupled (161). The women’s liberation movement’s gains and the shifting gender roles of the 1970s led many young men to feel uncertain about their own place in the world while women seemed to become more and more powerful in society (Schulman 182). Of course, these gains did not place women in a more powerful social position than men, but the changes were enough to frighten men (Schulman 163-64). In Queen of the Spiders, the creation of a fictional society which allowed women so much power that men were displaced altogether results in a dystopian society. One portion of Erelhei-Cinlu contains “sorority houses” in which an organization of female warriors lives (79)—fears about how men could exist in such a society were an exaggerated but potentially recognizable representation of a world in which increasing amounts of women attended college, played sports, and participated in politics. Many young men used Queen of the Spiders to attempt to cope by symbolically defeating a society of powerful women.
Several aspects of femininity are undermined in Queen of the Spiders. The narrative of the module casts female characters as monsters and never as allies. William White’s account of hegemonic masculinity in role-playing games argues that such games often push female characters away from the central focus of the story’s narrative or masculinize them, both actions which subordinate women to men (20). White’s analysis is often correct, but in the particular case of Queen of the Spiders, Lolth and the drow are central to the narrative and are infrequently masculinized. Rather, the module makes them monstrous enemies by emphasizing and demonizing their femininity. The image of Lolth is frequently given incredibly monstrous qualities which speak negatively to her maternal femininity. Revered by many drow as the “Queen Death Mother” (55), Lolth is viewed as the matron at the head of the wretched drow. Because she is the source of the monsters, Lolth herself is also an evil—if not an even greater evil. Such vilification occurs frequently in media, as described by Barbara Creed in her book The Monstrous-Feminine. Creed describes the archetype of the “archaic mother,” which is imagined as “the abyss, the all-incorporating black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed” (27). Creed’s image bears a striking resemblance to the black sphere which engulfs Sterich as Lolth attempts to consume the world. Such portrayal of a maternal figure in evil and monstrous terms denigrates femininity. By making Lolth a figure whose womanhood and motherhood are monstrous, Queen of the Spiders depicts femininity as a repulsive characteristic, implicitly asserting the value of masculinity in its place.
Queen of the Spiders demonizes Lolth’s femininity by making her physical appearance monstrous. As the goddess of drow and spiders, Lolth has the ability to change shape at will between the form of a drow and a massive spider, occasionally taking a spider form with a drow’s head. Lolth’s appearance, then, is liminal in that it is situated in a space between two distinct forms. Kelly Hurley, summarizing the work of Julia Kristeva, describes liminality as central to the grotesque and abject (139). Lolth’s ability to change shape makes her an abject figure and thereby repulsive to her viewer. Casting Lolth as a grotesque figure makes her other characteristics—femininity and motherhood—seem monstrous by association. Queen of the Spiders provides young men made anxious by a massively powerful woman with an enemy who they can righteously destroy because of her evil intentions and abject appearance, providing an opportunity for them to assert their masculinity.
Sexualized images of Lolth further subvert her claim to legitimate powerfulness. When Gygax describes Lolth, she is a “compellingly attractive female” (114). On the cover image of the module, three women in incredibly skimpy outfits gaze open-mouthed at the viewer, the all-important Lolth center among them. Behind the three barely-clothed women are three adequately-dressed male monsters, none of whom are presented in a sexual manner. These three male figures are clothed fully and are each visually disgusting, making them in no way sexually appealing. A later illustration of Lolth depicts her in an even more revealing outfit than does the cover. In only a bikini with a cape, Lolth stands beside a massive, drooling monster (93). The image of Lolth next to the hideous creature emphasizes the lengths to which the artists went to depict Lolth as sexually enticing. Other female characters are given the same sexualizing treatment. When Gygax introduces Eclavdra, the motivating force behind the players’ involvement in the story, her clothing is described in such a way that it adds to her image as a wispy, attractive woman. Eclavdra is simply “a strangely attractive female drow dressed in silver-embroidered black garments, with a small black metal cap which allows her silver hair to float free” (44). Comparatively few male characters are described in terms of physical beauty or clothing. Furthermore, neither Lolth nor Eclavdra must be attractive for the plot to function at any point. The only reason for their attractiveness is to present them as sexual objects for the game’s largely male audience to enjoy. The sexualization of major female characters in Queen of the Spiders is a strategy which subordinates women, thereby reasserting hegemonic masculinity in the manner that R. W. Connell describes (8). By depicting female characters in such intensely sexual manners, the module places masculinity in a position of preference.
The presentation of the drow as sexually objectified women is consistent with how practically every woman in the game is presented. Several illustrations throughout the module depict women in highly sexualized manners, as in one instance in which a female adventurer in a skimpy outfit screams at the sight of encroaching monsters; her male ally gently pushes her onward, unafraid of the danger (30). The female adventurer’s clothing appears bafflingly unlikely as an outfit and is only upstaged by the physically impossible pose in which she stands. Both impractical clothing and inane pose serve to accentuate her sexual attractiveness. Another image depicts the monstrous non-drow inhabitants of Erelhei-Cinlu, many of whom are inhuman beasts. Among them are two vampires: one male, shrouded save for his face, and one female, bare save for her breasts (84). The contrast between the male figure, which truly only depicts a bare hand and face, and the female figure, which leaves very little to the imagination, highlights the degree to which Queen of the Spiders intends to sexually objectify female characters. Such illustrations are commonplace in D&D modules, but they contribute particularly to hegemonic masculinity in Queen of the Spiders. The repeated visual portrayal of women in a sexual manner undermines the power of women, which in turn asserts the power of masculinity.
The sexualization of women in Queen of the Spiders is achieved not only through visual images, but also through the description of female characters. Gygax describes most female characters as physically attractive in lieu of giving them personality characteristics. What few traits they are given note how the women are manipulative, often with implications of seduction. Late in the module, the players encounter two “beautiful human women wearing silken gowns” who seem to tenderly aid the players (118). These women are in league with Lolth, however, and do their best to harm the players. The evil disposition of these women is doubly offensive to the male players who are likely initially receptive to the attractive and affectionate female characters; when the women turn on the players, their manipulativeness is associated with their femininity. Another instance of female manipulation occurs at a juncture where the players have a choice to make. Discovering an imprisoned drow woman chained in a prison, the players have the option to rescue her. This woman, Gygax parenthetically tells the Dungeon Master, “will of course betray them at first opportunity” (69), leaning heavily on “of course.” Gygax provides no other information in relation to the drow’s motivations—only that she will protect her own life and attempt to kill the players. Again, the female character behaves dishonestly, linking her femininity to her immorality. The first “sighting” of Lolth herself is actually an illusion cast by Lolth to fool the players (115). Again and again, the women who the players encounter are manipulative. Queen of the Spiders contains only one instance of a male character, a dwarf named Obmi, attempting to mislead and betray the players, and Obmi is provided with enough backstory and detail to give depth to his encounter (39). Obmi is not portrayed as a dangerous man because of his masculinity—rather, he is a complex enough character to be given individual motivation. In contrast, nearly every female character in Queen of the Spiders deals dishonestly with the players without any further explanation. The simplistic presentation of female characters as immoral subordinates femininity. These instances of subordinated femininity undermine women, in effect promoting masculinity.
Through the drow’s depiction as an intensely evil and corrupt culture, Queen of the Spiders provides an image of a greedy, violent, and permissive society which glorifies the power of women. Each of these characteristics makes the drow a monster which represents male anxieties about the society of the 1970s. Defeating the drow provided young men the opportunity to assert their masculinity by triumphing over femininity and acting in suit with the moral code of chivalry. Queen of the Spiders also subordinated women by associating female qualities with evil and by reducing female characters to sexualized and manipulative figures, placing masculinity in a position of power.
Conclusion: “Only By Confronting Her”
The introduction to Queen of the Spiders contains instructions for the Dungeon Master, explaining the stakes of the story and how the conflicts of the story should be presented to the players. Gygax explains the dramatic escalation from the discovery of the conspiracy to the conquest of the giants, leading into the city of the drow and finally to Lolth herself. The final sentence of this summary explains that the players are able to free the world from its doomed fate “[o]nly by confronting her” (3). For many of the young men playing out the story, the enemy of “her” was a monster they had been fighting for years. Queen of the Spiders presented a mythologized imagining of the cultural anxieties that young men struggled with so much, complete with the opportunity to become heroes along the way.
In his history of the 1970s, Edward D. Berkowitz describes multiple leading male characters in successful television shows as men who seemed to be “displaced in time” (206). This diagnosis would have fit the feeling of many of the young men of the era. Born into a time in which the American conceptions of war, national identity, gender roles, and political participation were massively redefined, young men were unsure of how to behave in the strange new world of the 1970s. Asserting their masculinity through classical means in the form of chivalry provided men an opportunity to carve out a more comfortable place for themselves in the turbulent world. Queen of the Spiders presents depictions of enemies which make monsters of the most frightening aspects of their time and allowed young men to be heroic, even if on a tiny scale.
In 2012, BBC News published a retrospective piece on the success of Dungeons & Dragons. The article estimated that over 20 million people across the globe had played D&D since its creation in 1974 and that over $1 billion had been spent on game materials (Waters). Queen of the Spiders appealed to the audience of young men in the late 1970s, but modern D&D players are more diverse than ever. The countless games which were born from D&D’s inspiration have similarly impressive and varied audiences. Over the last nearly four decades, something about D&D and its family of games has continued to strike a meaningful chord with players across the globe. Contemporary cultural anxieties more than likely form the basis of recent modules, and investigation of these modules may shed light on modern society as well.
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