Wizards of the Coast still owns Dungeons & Dragons - and Hasbro still owns Wizards of the Coast - but the legendary company that created the role-playing game, TSR, has returned to the material plane and summoned its first product, a gaming magazine appropriately named Gygax.

In the early 1970s, starting a role playing campaign required considerably more effort than it does today. Manuals had to be ordered by snail mail, gamers made their own miniatures instead of buying them off the shelf, and players often tinkered with rules to create ingenious variations.

The artwork from this 1974 edition of D&D is eye-gougingly bad, but it harkens you back to an era when 20-sided die made kids worship Lucifer and life was all about playing hooky to go to the REO Speedwagon-Styx show.

Jess Burgess looks out over Killian Court on the M.I.T. campus, where students created a giant 20-sided die last week as a memorial for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax. 20-sided dice are a crucial part of that game. If you couldn't get over to Cambridge, Mass, to place flowers at the foot of the giant die,…