D&D General The word "Dweomer" by Gygax

[Undrave]

I think the term went by the wayside alongside other High Gygaxian terms such as philter and demihuman with 3E.

Demihuman sounds a little insulting so it's a good thing it's not around anymore...

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Agreed. For all the nostalgia the word evokes, it's problematic terminology.

Though, I got a chuckle when I was reading the old Realmspace sourcebook recently and saw that the halflings of Anadia refer to all the other races as "demihalflings."

Demihuman sounds a little insulting so it's a good thing it's not around anymore...

 

[Willie the Duck]

Ever play V:tM?

Everything is written using the most obscure words possible.

I see you and raise you Immortal: The Invisible War. At least in VtM they are real words.

 

[James Gasik]

I see you and raise you Immortal: The Invisible War. At least in VtM they are real words.

Hell no, I fold you win. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

 

[Charlaquin]

It really does feel more medieval and fantastical, two hallmarks of DnD. American history doesn't have it's own medieval history period to draw on so we have to borrow it from others. It's easiest to steal from the British due to the limited language barrier.

Also, I'm from the US west coast where we believe we don't have an accent. Except we do. It just lacks anything that would make it remotely interesting.

Everyone who speaks has an accent, we just have a tendency to think of our own accents as being accents, because they’re normal to us. But yeah, the US west coast accent is pretty close to the neutral American accent, which again, is a radio thing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's a good word, but it's also pretty obscure. My assumption is that they cut down on words that were weird seemingly only for the sake of being weird. "Dweomer" is further hampered by being hard to look up. Even with ready access to the internet, common dictionaries don't define it. None of Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and Collins Dictionary give a definition. And several of the extant definitions/uses today clearly only came about because D&D used it (most places that define it explicitly reference "games" as a usage context).

When I first googled it I got results from LoTR (Gandalf knows a Dweomer, Saruman is called Dweomer-wise by the Rohirrim, the Witch King is called a Dwoemerlak) and Norse reference to IIRC dwarven magic.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When I first googled it I got results from LoTR (Gandalf knows a Dweomer, Saruman is called Dweomer-wise by the Rohirrim, the Witch King is called a Dwoemerlak) and Norse reference to IIRC dwarven magic.

Could be a difference of what we googled. I was looking specifically for definitions, rather than uses, and nearly every place where it's given a definition explicitly mentioned its use in gaming. I'm not at all surprised Tolkien used it though--nor would I be surprised if that had some impact on why it was used by Gygax and Arneson.

 

[Burnside]

One of the levels of the 5E Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage adventure is called Dweomercore. It’s an evil Hogwarts.

 

[Orius]

"Dweomer" is the reason it took me a while to understand what was behind the infamous dawizard typo. I thought it was another weird word.

 

[Mannahnin]

Dweomer, dwell, dwindle and dwarf are all from Middle English, tracing antecedents back to Old English, Proto-Germanic, and then Proto-Indo-European. Old words.

As a child, Gygax equipped me well to out-nerd everyone in any trivia contest when the question about the "only" three English words starting with "dw" comes up.