After getting the boot from TSR and returning to the scene with the rocky New Infinities Productions (their lone RPG product was the atrocious Cyborg Commando), Gary Gygax got in on the “books about RPGs” biz with Role-Playing Mastery (1987). What a strange book. Bizarrely, the cover painting is credited to Estados Unidos, which, I am not a Spanish speaker, but seems to mean United States. I can’t find anything more on them. (Readers have informed me it is Vincente Segrelles, which is kind of obvious in retrospect)

This is less a guide to RPGs than it is a guide to how Gygax wished RPGs had turned out. It isn’t that his view of the hobby is completely delusional or anything, only that his thoughts really only apply to a narrow segment of old-school players. He is obsessed with the idea of “mastery.” For the player, this boils down to what we now call rules mastery, which is deep, internalized knowledge of how the many facets of a given system operate and while there is nothing really wrong with this, again, it’s a certain sort of player, with a certain amount of time and a certain level of devotion who is even going to attempt rules mastery. For Master GMs and Grand Master GMs, he sees them not only as the cream of the crop in terms of running games for their home group, but also these weird cultural ambassadors for the hobby. And it is all written in the most tedious manner, which oscillates between addressing new players and old in a gambit that seems designed to alienate everyone.

I don’t even think there is much value in reading this book in hopes of gaining any particular insight into the Gygax of the ’70s. That’s not who was writing this. This is Gygax defeated and diminished and trying desperately to convince his readers that this was not the case.