Recent content by increment

You're not wrong or crazy. "Making of" was not a peer-reviewed history book. That said, it's a book of facsimile sources, more of a reader with bare-minimum context than a historical narrative.

I'm not attempting to support that argument, totally agreed that in the era of Gygax's "Women's Lib" comment she wasn't dubbed Tiamat in the text. I was just throwing in a source that may shed light on why circa 1977 the pre-existing Queen of Chaotic Dragons acquired the name "Tiamat" - it might...

It's only relevant in so far as this thread has wrapped itself around the relationship of "historical" Tiamat to the Tiamat in D&D. I'm only suggesting the possibility that the name Tiamat got attached to something chaotic through a source that TSR folks provably knew, something that didn't...

TSR drew a number of its ideas about monsters in the mid-late 1970s from the Lehners' Fantastic Bestiary. It identifies Tiamat (on page 189) as a "serpent-monster of chaos." Not gendered, and possibly not a direct inspiration for the account in 1975 Greyhawk, but still might be a factor in how...

I know, what's next - a cookbook?

This. "Rule Zero" wasn't a patch slapped on to a rigid boardgamesque ruleset, it was a holdover from an era of miniature wargame design when people self-consciously published a loose framework or set of guidelines with the intention that players (and referees) around the table would flesh them...

Instead of one sentence, here's two: Because we got off on the wrong foot long before this thread, I will not be induced to post sources that support or refute your thesis here, despite your generosity in posting receipts, nor am I really inclined to bump this thread with my responses. If for...

Um, I was not trying to produce any tangible evidence that the publication of Chainmail preceded the "Northern Marches" description letter. Why would I? We all knew that Blackmoor emerged out of Arneson's area of the C&CS game, which this letter describes, and we knew the C&CS game preceded the...

I did not enter this thread to opine on your thesis, but just to explain why PatW said what it did (though I have apparently broadened that to include whether the "Northern Marches" piece changed my thinking). Regarding Sir Jenkins and when he gained his honorifics, PatW here followed FFC pg25...

I am familiar with that general line of reasoning, sure, but I see it as poking at the timeline over when work towards the "Great Kingdom" blossomed into the thing that we call the "Blackmoor Campaign." There's no doubt there was work towards the "Great Kingdom" before Chainmail came out, and...

Rather then establishing when Chainmail went on sale, I'd say that the April IW establishes when you could have ordered Chainmail if your only way of learning about it was through the IW - there was no IW sent in March. But as I said above, Dave Arneson was not "just anybody," and he had other...

I wish. My DB#9 does not have a postmark; some were mailed in separate envelopes. It seems pretty random which were and which weren't.

So, having been pointed to this thread a number of times now, let me start out by saying that the OP and I have a bit of history from another forum, and I am weighing in here with due dread of causing cross-forum drama. Sorry for that. Dates for these early games are nearly always problematic...

Art & Arcana probably serves as this quite nicely.