The people Gary Gygax touched didn't know the man, or sometimes even his name. But his creation, Dungeons & Dragons, once dominated their lives in basements and bedrooms.

When news broke that Gygax had died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisc., at age 69, the Internet —blogs in particular — filled with reminiscing about goblins, wizards and polyhedral dice.

Associated Press (ENLARGE)

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax.

• Read the obit • Comment in our blog

"It opened the floodgates for all the geekery in my life," said Seth Miller, senior manager of digital marketing for Turner Inc. in Atlanta.

"It wasn't just you being weird, it was a community being weird," he added.

The original dungeon master, Gygax co-created his geek gateway in 1974; it was a pre-digital phenomenon, appealing mainly, but not exclusively, to the young, the male, the obsessive. A good D&D game was as much about social bonding as it was defeating Orcs. A dungeon master would map out an elaborate world, and players would assume roles, such as cleric, paladin or elf, and set forth while a sometimes endless saga played out, over nights and sometimes weeks, on tabletops with little pewter figures.

Although it's been replaced many times over by more technologically advanced games, D&D can still cast a spell.

"We play three games a month," said Marne Mercer of Dunwoody, a DeKalb Police Department detective. "I take a lot from role-playing. The ability to be a complete other person in a game allows you to snap into other mindsets. As a police officer, it helps me out," she added.

Just like some violent video games today, D&D was a popular target in its heyday, recalled Thomas Strickland of Alpharetta.

"There was heavy metal music, and there was the evils of Dungeons & Dragons," said Strickland, an information architect for UPS. "I had a lot of Southern Baptist friends, and their parents had definite problems with them being exposed."

No one quite claims that everything they need to know they learned playing D&D, but Strickland said the game's lessons can be valuable.

"The boundaries of D&D were limited only by the imaginations of the people playing," he said. "If you can dream it, you can do it. That can apply not just to the games you play but to the kind of work you do, and what you do with your life."