What were Gygax & Arneson & pals looking at for early D&D?

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OgreBattle
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What were Gygax & Arneson & pals looking at for early D&D?

Post by OgreBattle »

And their playtester pals and freelancers too, lets just gather all the info online here


This article:
kotaku dot com/dungeons-deceptions-the-first-d-d-players-push-back-1837516834

-Mentions playing Afrika Korps
-Mentions Dave Arneson had Rules Referees to handle rules lawyering
- "Braunstein" a game I hadn't heard of before, 60's RPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunstei ... ying_games

"Wesely's Braunstein drew inspiration from Diplomacy, a game requiring players to negotiate in between turns.[citation needed] The idea of a referee was derived from Strategos: The American Game of War (1880), by Charles Totten.[1] Totten's book also inspired Wesely with the idea of having a game master who invented the scenario for the evening's battle. Wesely discovered the idea of "n-player" strategy games from The Compleat Strategist (1954) by J.D. Williams. Wesely also read and cited as influential, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (1962), by Kenneth E. Boulding."

That's cool, sounds like it began as a person scale 'Model UN' kind of game
You know, I never hear "Model UN" brought up as a role playing game, but it's possibly the first one I played in elementary or middle school.


Various threads on Ultraman monsters as early D&D, it's confirmed by the artist but not sure which monster is which
enworld dot org/threads/the-ultra-mysterious-history-of-d-ds-iconic-monsters.672346/

Tim Kask of Dragon magazine says he was given the miniature that became the Bullete by Gary:
dragonsfoot dot org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=37952&p=774183&hilit=rust#p774183


This page has Ultraman monsters including the bulette inspiration:
enworld dot org/threads/the-ultra-mysterious-history-of-d-ds-iconic-monsters.672346/

I found the ultraman kaiju name before but forgot it, it's a quadraped and the back opens into a fin for something.


Someone mentions "slimes were based on a Japanese monster movie", I think they mean The Green Slime" (?????3? ????? (Ganm? Daisan G?: Uch? Daisakusen, 1969) which was a Toho Hollywood joint production with space slime that turns into... pretty much a D&D roper!
twitter dot com/HokutoAndy/status/1319677767915507713



I'll add to this when I find other articles.
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Post by tussock »

There's also the original Appendix N in 1st edition.
EGG, 1e DMG, Appendix N wrote:Inspiration for all of the fantasy work I have done stems directly from the love my father showed when I was a lad, for he spent many hours telling me stories he made up as he went along, tales of cloaked old men who could grant wishes, of magic rings and enchanted swords, or wicked sorcerers and dauntless swordsmen. Then too, countless hundreds of comic books went down, and the long-gone EC ones certainly had their effect. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies were a big influence. In fact, all of us tend to get ample helpings of fantasy when we are very young, from fairy tales such as those written by the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang. This often leads to reading books of mythology, paging through bestiaries, and consultation of compilations of the myths of various lands and peoples. Upon such a base I built my interest in fantasy, being an avid reader of all science fiction and fantasy literature since 1950. The following authors were of particular inspiration to me. In some cases I cite specific works, in others, I simply recommend all their fantasy writing to you. From such sources, as well as just about any other imaginative writing or screenplay you will be able to pluck kernels from which grow the fruits of exciting campaigns. Good reading!

Inspirational Reading:

Anderson, Poul. THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD
Bellairs, John. THE FACE IN THE FROST
Brackett, Leigh.
Brown, Fredric.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. “Pellucidar” Series; Mars Series; Venus Series
Carter, Lin. “World’s End” Series
de Camp, L. Sprague. LEST DARKNESS FALL; FALLIBLE FIEND; et al.
de Camp & Pratt. “Harold Shea” Series; CARNELIAN CUBE
Derleth, August.
Dunsany, Lord.
Farmer, P. J. “The World of the Tiers” Series; et al.
Fox, Gardner. “Kothar” Series; “Kyrik” Series; et al.
Howard, R. E. “Conan” Series
Lanier, Sterling. HIERO’S JOURNEY
Leiber, Fritz. “Fafhrd & Gray Mouser” Series; et al.
Lovecraft, H. P.
Merritt, A. CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al.
Moorcock, Michael. STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; “Hawkmoon” Series (esp. the first three books)
Norton, Andre.
Offutt, Andrew J., editor SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III.
Pratt, Fletcher, BLUE STAR; et al.
Saberhagen, Fred. CHANGELING EARTH; et al.
St. Clair, Margaret. THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
Tolkien, J. R. R. THE HOBBIT; “Ring Trilogy”
Vance, Jack. THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al.
Weinbaum, Stanley.
Wellman, Manly Wade.
Williamson, Jack.
Zelazny, Roger. JACK OF SHADOWS; “Amber” Series; et al.

The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game. For this reason, and for the hours of reading enjoyment, I heartily recommend the works of these fine authors to you.
Some of the explicit stuff is Paladins/Trolls from Three Hearts and Three Lions, the Thief and Wizard are from The Dying Earth, Stormbringer had the intelligent, possessing, and cursed weapons, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser essentially describe the intended gameplay for early D&D from the Gygax end of it, obviously Tolkien has hobbits and friends, plus the Balrog/Balor. Plane hopping from Jack of Shadows. Fighters are supposed to be Conan, and Gygax kept trying to improve them so they could play like it. Lovecraftian stuff abounds, but particularly Mind Flayers.

Sabrehagen's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_East_series is quite an obvious tie to stuff in Greyhawk, the crashed spaceships and so on, a lot of Gygaxian worldbuilding is really about lost ultratech after they accidentally blew the world up and created magic and monsters.

Like, the stuff published in the late 60's, early 70's, they were totally riffing off it, there's Psionics because The Blue Star was republished in '69 and had those powers in a retro-future Psi story.

There's stacks of orientalist Hindu stuff in it, but also typical mid-70's western veiw of a great deal of worldwide mythology (even Christianity). Also just plain gamist inventions like the Gelatinous Cube and company is the reason the stacks of corpses and their kit vanish between dungeon expeditions, and it's invisible because that's why you didn't see it on the way out.

Plus, like, they played their other early games at the same time, with the same characters, and had conversion rules for traveling between them. So a bunch of their inspirations are only realised in Metamorphosis Alpha and whatever the western was.

Everyone one of those books, the ones I've read it's so obvious how they fit into the early game, the others are ... the wikipedia articles would obviously fit into a classic D&D story of heroes thrown into danger and learning to work together and the stuff they can do and the stuff they face is mostly from there, that I can tell..
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Not seeing any obvious influences from Burroughs Pellucidar (Mars yes, Venus maybe), Lanier's Hiero's Journey (always thought that was comparatively obscure) or Zelazny's Amber.
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Post by Dean »

tussock wrote:Also just plain gamist inventions like the Gelatinous Cube and company is the reason the stacks of corpses and their kit vanish between dungeon expeditions, and it's invisible because that's why you didn't see it on the way out.
I absolutely love that. I never thought of that and think that's really clever. I wonder if there's more stuff like that where they added something to the fictional space to make the world make more sense (by some definition of the word sense)
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Post by OgreBattle »

Thanks, totally forgot they had a recommended reading list
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Post by hogarth »

Didn't Gygax claim at one point that there was only minimal inspiration from Lord of the Rings and that any mention of hobbits, ents, orcs and half-elves was only coincidental?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

That sounds like something he said in response to the notorious C&D from the Tolkien estate that resulted in TSR removing a number of infringing terms from their products.
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Post by Harshax »

Yes. Definitely legal spin, but I think it only covered hobbits and ents. Orc was a word long before Tolkien and anything can be half-something.
Last edited by Harshax on Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The infringing terms were balrog, ent, hobbit, nazgûl(!) and apparently a lot of miscellaneous references to Tolkien by name.

Someone made a list of the changes to the text following the C&D letter. There's a bunch of minor non-Tolkien edits as well.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Changing ent/tree-ent to treant seems a bit half-hearted.
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Post by hogarth »

Harshax wrote:Orc was a word long before Tolkien and anything can be half-something.
The word "half-elven" was used approximately zero times before Tolkien. The word "orc" meaning "a brutish, aggressive, ugly and malevolent race of monsters" was used approximately zero times before Tolkien. That doesn't mean it's copyright infringement to use those terms, of course. But clearly they were directly inspired by Tolkien.

Oh yeah, I forgot about undead barrow wights.
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Post by Harshax »

A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc. And I remember reading somewhere that it was as a slur used in Europe for Huns or Mongols.

Whether the word half-elf was used before Tolkien is pedantic. Elf is a word that existed before Tolkien and a person, place or thing having half the quality of something else is also a thing, since forever.

The topic is interesting, because I think the lawsuits by the Tolkien Estate and Moorcock sent TSR down the road of trying to copyright Hit Point and Armor Class, which choked out all derivative products and was such a specter over Gygax’ head that when he was ousted, his later games like Danjerous Journeys renamed every familiar gaming term to insulate the author from copyright infractions.

From a 10,000’ you can see the progression of the gaming industry over 10 years that ended with the OGL in 2000.
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Post by hogarth »

Harshax wrote:A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc.
If you can find a couple of pre-Tolkien sources that talk about a race of orcs, I'd love to see them. Bonus points if they hate elves.
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Post by Krusk »

hogarth wrote:
Harshax wrote:A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc.
If you can find a couple of pre-Tolkien sources that talk about a race of orcs, I'd love to see them. Bonus points if they hate elves.
Beowulf.
Mythological monsters with names similar to "orc" can be found in the Old English poem Beowulf, in Early Modern poetry, and in Northern European folk tales and fairy tales. Tolkien stated that he took the name from Beowulf.[T 1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc

But that whole entry is filled with pre-tolkien use of the word, many of which were as goblin/orc style monsters who worked as rivals for fairies. Its even got a section devoted to Tolkien's stated etymology.
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Post by Harshax »

hogarth wrote:
Harshax wrote:A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc.
If you can find a couple of pre-Tolkien sources that talk about a race of orcs, I'd love to see them. Bonus points if they hate elves.
I won’t vouch for the legitimacy of this website:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/orc

But the recommendation to also look up “orca” can very easily be extrapolated to cover orca hating elves.
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Post by hogarth »

Krusk wrote:
hogarth wrote:
Harshax wrote:A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc.
If you can find a couple of pre-Tolkien sources that talk about a race of orcs, I'd love to see them. Bonus points if they hate elves.
Beowulf.
Beowulf has exactly one mention of some unspecified bugaboos called "orcneas". I applaud your imagination for turning that into an entire specific race of creatures that are the same as those in Tolkien and D&D.
Last edited by hogarth on Wed Feb 03, 2021 4:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Sigil »

It's used once in Beowulf, but if you bother reading the wikipedia entry it very quickly states:
Orc, in Anglo-Saxon, like thyrs, means a spectre, or goblin."[3][4] The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal defines ork in the closely related Old Dutch language as a verslindend monster ("devouring monster"),[5] and points at a possible origin in the Old Dutch nork "petulant, crabbed, evil person".[6]
And provides sources if you want to go look up some old books.
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Post by Krusk »

hogarth wrote: I applaud your imagination for turning that into an entire specific race of creatures that are the same as those in Tolkien and D&D.
And I your unwillingness to do the most minimal amount of effort to learn about a topic you asked for information on.

Scroll down on the link provided or my post that you quoted.
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Post by WalkTheDinosaur »

I'm legit unclear on whether Tolkein orcs are just another word for goblin, or orcs are a kind of goblin, or goblins are a kind of orc. I vaguely remember some speculation about him trying to stick to a specific language group for all his naming conventions and trying to retcon Goblin to Orc because it didn't fit, but I can't back that up.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The short answer is that they're the same thing. 'Goblin' is the English translation of the Westron word 'orc.'
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Aren't hobgoblins also orcs, but are bigger than normal goblins, though?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Hobgoblin is a blanket term referring to any of 'the larger kinds' of orcs.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Came across a 1800's document where a european describes samurai armor as having the visage of a hobgoblin, perhaps that influenced D&D Japanese Lawful Evil hobgoblins
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Re: What were Gygax & Arneson & pals looking at for early D&D?

Post by Also Eikre »

I have a certain sociological fascination with TTRPG design, which pretty much comes down to the fact that when you give a person limitless options, they behave within the purview of what they think is the list of correct options. This sounds kind of dumb and obvious, but when I say "correct," I don't mean that it's an course of action that has been rationally chosen after affirmatively deciding priorities and then making a continual risk-to-reward assessment. It's "correct" in the sense of just being "what we do." So, when it comes to TTRPGs (and this is a corollary for how people handle everything else in the world, too), people's assumptions about how they're supposed to behave is a matter of socialization upon which game designers, their rules, and larger community of DMs seem to assert a weaker influence than they should have the power to exert. I think if I backed up into considering social sciences more generally, this is something I could rant about at length, but I can give you some practical examples: There's the murderhobo trope, where player decisions are heavily weighted to total eradication and pillaging of any and all conceivable foes, and the related phenomenon where players seem to have an intractable blind-spot concerning the potential to just... Stop fighting and run away. It's not weird that it turns out this way, everyone here can see why it happens; this is a game, and people have a reasonable expectation that they can apply the go-to tool in particular game-states, and they have a reasonable expectation that the game is going to be fair and that when they apply the go-to tool that they may prevail with it. But you've seen this turn out to be sort of a bummer, right? DMs would like to think that as long as they're putting in the effort to adjudicate a game with limitless possibilities, that they'd actually get taken up on the deal. Sometimes you need to take your players aside and say, "look I don't want to tell a story about your shitty murderous cretins," but the dream is that you can implicitly communicate the fact that the players need to choose something other than violence by just giving them an encounter where it's obviously not a productive choice.

So anyway. I remember reading a blog post not long ago (which itself had probably been published a little while back) which explored the idea that the community that played 3E, basically, was mislead into hard-wiring their campaigns to a four-encounter-per-level Jedi curve. The article was set to demonstrate that a constant grind of strictly level-appropriate encounters was the assumption of neither the people writing the edition, nor the earliest 3E campaigns. So it goes: If you're thinking of the game world naturalistically, you would expect adventurers who are gradually growing more competent and powerful to stop being challenged by most of the things they see in their day-to-day activities. The sorts of obstacles that used to give them trouble would still be everywhere, but easily surmounted. Actual threats would thin out as they started to approach the upper echelons of power. It would be reasonable for people at level 13 to have like eight or ten encounters with level 3 jackasses between every actual level-appropriate obstacle they face.

Under that assumption, different things start to make sense- I mean, when the game is resolute that mowing these guys down doesn't give any kind of challenge or reward, I suspect that leads you to make your own fun. See what it's like talking to people who are absolutely fucking terrified of you, for once. Impulsively declare yourself as lord of the local kobolds and set them to the task of building you a wicked throne room. That's just what you get to do with those guys instead of having an interesting fight with them, so fuck it, you know? And maybe some of the divisions of responsibilities that aren't working out anymore hold up better when that's the arrangement. Like, the Fighter's vaunted capacity to swing his sword all day instead of running out of spells is clearly a bullshit "ability" in the context of the optimal method of playing the 3E campaigns that people actually played, but if you back up a little bit and see it in an abstract where killing everyone in the room without expending party resources is a very potent way of affecting the session- but by no means the indisputably right call- then, being designated as the guy who gets the final say on whether that's happening can be pretty satisfying.

But none of that comes together quite as well if there isn't the same confluence of unspoken mindsets about what the hell you're even supposed to be doing in the first place. At some point in D&D's development, Final Fantasy came down the line and obviously it put people in a very different mood for what an adventure is supposed to look like. You keep pressing forward and keep finding that the enemies are always exactly as tough as they need to be for a fair fight. It's not hypothetically acceptable for a thief to be a guy that spends a lot of time trying to stay out of fights, that motherfucker needs to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with everybody else and demonstrate exactly one quarter of the full combat potential that the party can assert, because those fights are the game. But then it's similarly kinda bullshit for that Thief to want a ten-minute spotlight where he sneaks off alone to go achieve something that the rest of the party would blow his cover on, because he already got his moment when he rolled an unreasonable number of d6s in a toe-to-toe brawl with a fucking dragon.

I'd be interested in a discussion about how implicit values affected the games people actually ended up playing and articulating how to get some of those things back in a designer's toolbox. Through all the infusions of influence, and the mismatches between original designer intent and the direction that they end up going in for subsequent splatbooks, the cultural conditioning that players end up showing up with when they come to the table for the first time, and even the nudges of editing and compositional choices- there's a lot to sift through.
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Re: What were Gygax & Arneson & pals looking at for early D&D?

Post by Whipstitch »

I think another big reason many campaigns fail to feature anything but Tolkien skinned mayhem is that DMs sorta give up and get into this lazy mindset where player characters are seen as really the only part of the game that matters. I understand how people get there--nobody likes spotlight stealing DM NPCs and we've made all the jokes about how player characters look at a lovingly crafted web of intrigue and usually just see a bunch of lootable corpses. Hell, I'll admit to having mailed it in and prepped for no more than beer, pretzels and dead orcs myself on many occasions. But even so I think that if you're actually trying to produce a real gaming product with its own unique identity then you have to go through the trouble of building Mecca even if it'll be sacked in the end. Because ultimately you can't expect the PCs to be the ones that demonstrate what is "normal" for your campaign setting, since players are within their rights to build characters that are pointed exceptions to the norm and they may all have different ideas about how Homebrewdistan is supposed to work in the first place. NPCs, however, can do the dirty work of setting cultural norms like rules of engagement/terms of surrender. Just remember to take some cleansing breaths when Mike the tiefling sets those NPCs on fire anyway.
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