As if he was wishing to prove the satanic panic around D&D in the 1980s right, E. Gary Gygax Jr. recently appeared to state on various social media sites that he wanted to shoot up a school. A company associated with the Gygax son has since denied he made the posts, blaming hackers. Gygax Jr. himself has been silent on the matter.

Gygax Jr. recently found himself at the centre of a trans rights controversy after making comments during an interview that led to him being labeled as dismissive of gender identity. Company and personal social media accounts linked to Gygax Jr. doubled down on the position in the aftermath, even going so far as to call a trans woman “disgusting” on Twitter.

Bringing us to the school shooter incident. Gygax Jr’s Facebook and Twitter accounts both posted stories of a childhood where bullies had made the then young Gygax Jr. wish he could shoot up his school.

It didn’t take long for even more backlash to erupt following these statements. Shortly after the [now deleted] company account associated with Gygax Jr. claimed that the social media accounts were not under the control of Gygax Jr. at the time, but rather under the control of rogue agents, and that their posts should be dismissed. 

Gygax Jr. himself however has not made any statements on the matter despite a promised apology video.

“Nothing to do with D&D”

In recent years, Dungeons & Dragons, now owned by Wizards of the Coast, has made several changes to become a better and more welcoming game compared to the game of the past where you would receive negative modifiers in game for playing as a female character.

E. Gary Gygax Jr. has made it very clear that he does not support these changes, nor is he in any way involved with the development of the more recent iterations of the game.

In distancing himself from the newest versions of Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax Jr. has gone so far as to dismiss the 50 million plus players D&D 5e, the massively successful current version of the game as “lemmings”.

Whether or not E. Gary Gygax Jr. makes a statement regarding his social media account’s activity is yet to be seen. We certainly hope that these disturbing posts genuinely were the work of nefarious hackers.