Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs magically captures precisely why I loved and loathed Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s — enough so that I hard-baked its existence into my debut novel set during the same decade. The game was a lifeline for some early teens like me, except when we got into trouble. And maybe we wouldn't have so much if we had stuck to dice rolls and maps. 

Although reading the book is like watching a car accident play out in painfully slow motion, it clarifies what went wrong with the company behind the game. The nutshell version: Everything went wrong. 

Like Briggs, I saw the names of those creators whose bylines appeared on rule books and modules as the heroes and demigods they helped bring to life. Back then, I couldn't for the life of me understand how the likes of Gary Gygax, Zeb Cook, Lawrence Schick, Tracy & Laura Hickman, Frank Mentzer, Jeff Grubb, and David C. Sutherland III (to name a few), could build a brilliant game but not a brilliant company. 

I never understood why they continually released new worlds and boxsets, expecting us to reboot everything all the time when the World of Greyhawk was perfectly fine. (We used to reconcile some of it by expanding the number of continents on Oerth to explore or, like the creators themselves tried to do, thinking of every new installment as another plane of existence.) All I really needed was another way to expand the one where the campaigns I ran always began. 

But even more than that, reading this account of what happened more than 40 years later and through the lens of a creative strategist — someone who has worked almost four decades as a journalist, copywriter, creative director, communication strategist, content creator, and author — drives a few points home. Wannabe executives shouldn't manage companies that make products they don't understand for a target audience they don't even like. In fact, one of my few complaints about the book is that Briggs is too much of an apologist for Lorraine Williams. She doesn't deserve it.

Over the years, I've worked with several wannabe executives like her—people who don't understand that a brand is the relationship it has with its employees and customers. The result is always the same. They want to bully the creative process like they might buy curtains, constantly crowing about what they "like" and never about what makes sense. The result is always the same. They drive good people away and inflict pain on all those who try to stay, using every tactic they can think of in the book — empty promises, fake promotions, future profits, and even legal pressure — to get their way and feed their own egos. It's kind of pathetic, really. These people who promote the idea of faking it until they make it, never realizing they're faking it at the top as much as they did at the bottom. 

All in all, Williams delivered a brilliant case study (captured by Riggs) into how one should never run a company (especially a creative one). And, the person who eventually saved the D&D product line (Peter Adkison) expressly demonstrates how to right a sinking ship simply by being a decent human being who knows how to let creative people be creative. When you do, the cash usually takes care of itself. This certainly seems to have been the case for Wizards of the Coast (even as a subsidiary of Hasbro).

Slaying The Dragon is a solid accounting of how a garage-based upstart can grow up too fast and come crashing down (not to mention a cautionary tale for someone like Gygax). You won't have to be a D&D fan (like me, with a closet full of books, modules, and figures I can't seem to part with) to pull something worthwhile out of this book. It's a great rags-to-rags story for commercial creatives, game makers, and entrepreneurs of all kinds. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it was hard to watch someone sabotage themselves at every turn. 

Ironically, the game did some good despite who ran it into the ground. It made me a better storyteller.