Over the Academic's Shoulder: Queen of the Spiders and American Masculinity

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.