I am a DND fan and a Hindu, but Jason Tondro (a Senior Designer for Dungeons & Dragons) was quoted as saying:
Were players expected to fight Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism, kill him, and loot his ‘Plus 3 sword of demon slaying’?
Were players in the Original DnD actually meant to slay Vishnu for a reward? I always thought Gary Gygax to be a leader in the community. Did he apologize for it?
Game statistics for the Hindu deities appeared in Gods, Demi-gods, and Heroes (1976), followed by the AD&D 1st edition Deities & Demigods (1980) (aka Legends & Lore). These books provided game statistics for Vishnu, meaning that technically he could be slain by a sufficiently powerful group of adventurers.
Vishnu himself is never slain in any official D&D adventure module or sourcebook, and adventure modules for players of sufficient power level to slay a deity are very rare. The closest is OP1 Tales of the Outer Planes (1988), where the player characters can fight a planetar (an angel-like being) in the service of Vishnu, named Sattyamasagraha. If they defeat this being, Vishnu revives him as an avatar of Vishnu, which is a being of appearance to Vishnu and invested with some of the deity's power.
A very powerful adventuring party might kill this avatar of Vishnu, and some D&D parties back in the day may have thought they were fighting Vishnu himself. However, it's just an avatar, which by D&D rules means that even if it is slain, Vishnu himself is still alive.
Gary Gygax was no longer with TSR when this work was published. If you're seeking an apology, the author of this particular encounter was Ray Winninger.
The Bounding into Comics web article quotes "current WotC designer Jason Tondro" as saying in "the preface to the game’s recently published history book, Dungeons & Dragons – the Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977":
“The cultural appropriation of original D&D ranges from the bewildering (like naming every 6th-level cleric a ‘lama’) to the staggering; Gods, Demigods, and Heroes (not reprinted in this book) includes game statistics for sacred figures revered by more than a billion people around the world. Were players expected to fight Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism, kill him, and loot his ‘Plus 3 sword of demon slaying’?”
Taking this quote at face value (I haven't read the actual preface), the answer is clearly, No, this was not the expectation.
Gods, Demigods, and Heroes (1976) was OD&D Supplement IV, by Robert Kuntz and James Ward (and not, as it happens, by Gary Gygax). The only explanatory text indicating how it was to be used comes in the Foreword by Tim Kask, where he says:
What the authors have done in this volume is to attempt to set down guidelines that will enable you to incorporate a number of various mythologies into your game/campaign.
By 'incorporate mythologies', Kask means to say that here are real world divine beings described with OD&D stats, the purpose of which is to enrich the campaign background by providing gods for the PC's and their foes to worship. The stats argue for relative power level among the gods, which will be reflected in the levels of their clergy and the numbers of their adherents in the campaign world, but they are not explicitly set up as combat challenges for the PCs. Indeed, Kask later says:
This volume is something else, also: our last attempt to reach the "Monty Hall" DM's. Perhaps now some of the 'giveaway' campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are. This is our last attempt to delineate the absurdity of 40+ level characters. When Odin, the All-Father has only(?) 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?
In other words, if the PC's are at the level to actually fight these gods, then there is something "wrong" with your campaign.
In first edition, this work was updated to Deities and Demigods by the same authors, with entries largely reprinted from the original. The Foreword, this time by Gary Gygax, repeats that the purpose of the work was to bring a grounding of religion and alignment into the background of the game, most especially for players of the cleric class. Gygax makes a slightly different second point, however. He does not say that it is 'foolish' for PCs to rise to the level of gods - but that if and when they do, they should be treated as gods and no longer as PCs, that is, removed from play.
Gods, Demigods, and Heroes contains beings from ten pantheons, starting with Ancient Egypt (which is represented on the cover) and continuing with what is variously called the 'Gods of India' but also 'Hindu Mythology', (Ancient) Greek, Celtic, Norse, Finnish, Hyborea, Melnibone, "Mexican and Central American Indian", and "Eastern". Among the Hindu gods, Vishnu is just one of eighteen divine beings. So, there is no directive to fight Vishnu specifically (nor do I think that is what Tondro was implying). From the description of Vishnu, however, it is unclear how PCs would even be able to fight, since:
His primary power is the ability to make any creature or being unable to commit violence of any type within 30 yards of his mind (no saving throw applicable). Vishnu can also make a double strength prismatic wall, as per Greyhawk, shapechange. and teleport.
Thus as presented, Vishnu could simply will any PCs close to him to not fight, use a prismatic shield to protect himself from ranged attacks, and then teleport away.
If Tondro's hyperbolic thesis is that all of the beings presented in Gods, Demigods, and Heroes existed as creatures for the PCs to slay and loot, he picked a particularly bad example.
So, to Tondro's rhetorical question, 'were PC's expected to fight Vishnu?' the answer is clearly No, they were not.
Yes, of course. Even though the explicit instruction in both works was that they were not designed with the purpose of PCs fighting gods, they nevertheless presented gods with defined statistics, thus making such a thing possible within the rules of the game. Most old school gamers know of someone's campaign in which the PCs fought gods, even if they did not do so themselves. In his 1991 book Heroic Worlds, Lawrence Schick says of DDG: "Unfortunately, the book is usually used merely as a sort of Monster Manual that describes very high-powered monsters. This usage is encouraged by the book's format, which emphasizes the gods' physical abilities over their religious significance." And RPG historian Stu Horvath in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground apparently "noted by listing the deities' hit points and other game statistics, the book tacitly encouraged high-level power gamers to take on the deities in combat."
Ultimately, it was not the explicit design intent of such works to encourage PCs to fight gods, but it did enable it. Tondro's question (if accurately quoted) is self-serving and probably deliberately disingenuous. Was assigning statistics to real-world religious figures sacrilegious? Sure, but no more so than a game in which those figures already play a role that serves an explicitly fictitious narrative. And no more so than calling a collection of divine beings still worshipped by living cultures a "mythology". But was it "staggering cultural appropriation"? That strikes me as protesting a bit too much from the current IP holder and beneficiary of the early game's legacy. One could also note that the 5e game explicitly includes the Norse gods, divine beings worshipped by real world contemporary neopagans, and Tondro doesn't seem to be clutching his pearls about that.
In addition to Quadratic Wizard's great answer, I'd like to suggest a few additional points.
As an example, back in the day, I played AD&D. I owned Deities and Demigods, (1980). It contained references to, well, deities and demigods, from many religions, organizing them into "mythos", examples being the Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, and Indian mythos, to name a just a few. Vishnu is included.
That is just one example. If you search DM's Guild for "deities" you will find many other such books from previous editions. Modern D&D contains many cultural references to religious figures; as a trivial example, the Nine Hells and the Abyss are fictionalizations of religious material.
You can buy a PDF of the old books I mentioned above on DM's Guild. Many include the following note in the catalog entry:
We (Wizards) recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website does not reflect the values of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.
And it's not just a phenomenon of the 20th century. There was a TV show a few years ago, "Supernatural". Apparently it depicted multiple deities from many different world religions. This blog post "Oh, My Pop Culture Vishnu: Hinduism in Pop Culture" discusses in particular the representation of Hindu figures in this TV show (and also the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and ends with an apology:
So I’ll say it again, for everyone who is a follower of Hinduism let me apologize on behalf of Hollywood and all America media. We are very, very sorry.
There are also many, many TV shows, movies, and books that in some sense depict Christian figures. The list is nearly endless, but three TV shows that come to mind are "Touched by an Angel", "Lucifer", and "The Good Place".
As a single example, there was a Hindi language TV show a few years ago, "Devon Ke Dev... Mahadev", which depicted Shiva.
Humanity has an insatiable appetite for fiction. Religious figures have appeared in fiction since early humans sat around fires telling stories. Sometimes such religious figures are treated with what the author considers respect, sometimes not.
But whether D&D, movies, or TV, or books or anything else, and regardless of culture, it's fiction and it's art. As an art form, one quality that is inherent to fiction, is that sometimes people are offended. Sometimes the creator intended that, sometimes they didn't.
There are no examples of fighting or slaying Vishnu. Though there is an example of slaying an avatar of Vishnu in Tales of the Outer Planes. I could not find a specific apology by Gygax or anyone else in relation to that.
However, Dungeons & Dragons has been "growing up" over the past 5 decades. For instance, there was mention of using the pronoun "he" throughout AD&D 2e when referring to a player or the DM. In subsequent editions, it started to change so that it would be more inclusive and alternate pronouns to include "she". The language became more inclusive. Some of the art also, but -personally- I think that that is still up for debate.
I can see that there is a discrepancy of how the subject of faith in D&D has not been equitable.
I've not seen any officially published adventures or source books where you fight Jesus or even a apostle, or an avatar. Do you imagine the uproar?! I expect this is because of the place of origin of D&D in the Unites States. Also, it's good to remember that in the 80s D&D got a bad rap in the US for promoting satanism and witchcraft and all kind of hocus pocus. [1] So, I'm pretty sure that even having the avatar of Jesus would have gone down very badly.
But, I think there is another point to bear here and that is that in D&D's fantasy-based faith systems almost all examples are to do with a pantheon of gods.
I've played D&D since AD&D 2e and I've enjoyed playing clerics. I have chosen various gods to serve both from the D&D fantasy pantheons, which are usually based on the various fantasy races. I have chosen from pantheons that are based on mainstream religions from the past as well, such as the Aztec or Greek pantheons. There is a point to specifically mentioning this because in most of these cases these gods are not part of a main stream religion any longer. However, Hinduism is!
In the AD&D 2e book Legends & Lore (L&L), published in 1990, you can see a wide variety of pantheons to choose from including Greek, Aztec, Arthurian and Norse. However, they also include: Indian "Mythology". Interestingly, they did not include Vishnu, any avatars of Vishnu or incarnations such as Rama or Krishna.
Still, the fact that in Legends & Lore they include gods such as Surya is still culturally insensitive - as well as calling it "mythology".
Ironically, in the introduction to the pantheon it actually mentions this: "Hinduism is still practiced by 500 million people or more." It would be interesting to see how the gods that are included in this section were chosen but we'd have to ask James M. Word and Troy Denning.
If you want to read more about how Indian "mythology" was portrayed in AD&D 2e, I would recommend reading that chapter in Legends & Lore, pp. 122-137.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_controversies
