increment said:
Thanks, Gary, for your lightning-fast reply. By Rod Walker's zine, maybe you mean Erehwon? I know he went on to more professional magazine work...
Yuppers! It was indeed backwards Rod's
Erehwon to which I also subscribed.
Have you seen my story that was, I think, in
Erehwon? It was about John Bedpan, Cheif Orderly at the Bronx Home for Criminally Insane Physicists. He was a secret agent under the direction of Rod Perambulator, had a secret office behind the cleaning supplies room off the men's bathroom. IIRR after all these years, Perambulator was thrown into the arena by Ming the Merciless, there to face the terrible, one-horned anthropoid monster, the Treadikoid. However, Flash Gygon leaped unexpectedly into the pit, tore the clever mask from the Treadikoid to reveal the treacherous John Bedpan, and thus saved Rod from a hideous fate.
Sounds like my questions were too easy for you! Well, if that didn't tax you too much, perhaps I can sneak in a couple more...
How did the term “role-playing game” come to be the label for this genre of games? The term doesn’t seem to have been much used until 1976, and then suddenly it’s everywhere. Did it start from anywhere in particular, that you can remember?
The initiator of the well-coined name is unknown to me. At best I spoke of players assuming the role of a character in the game. Whomever it was deserves a laud, as it was a boon to the game genre.
What prior wargames would you say had the biggest influence on the system mechanics of OD&D (and Chainmail, where OD&D takes its lead from there)? Of course there really was no wargame like D&D, but it must have a few evolutionary ancestors you found valuable.
Thanks in advance again!
No game I had played before I devised the Man-to-Man rules for the
Chainmail rules book influenced that design. I made it all up off the top of my head, just as I did the Fantasy Rules section. Inspirational sources were historical for the former, mythical for the latter.
It is noteworthy, though, that the radius of a fireball and the stroke of a lightning bolt corresponded to a heacy catapult's area of attack effect and that of a cannon in the 1:20
Chainmail rules.
Cheerio,
Gary