No such thing as Strength 40 in OD&D, I suppose?
OD&D didn't have ability modifiers to hit and damage at first (a high STR only have a fighter better XP and carrying capacity).
Plus, the old White Box never having grapple rules. From what I recall you had to wait until BECMI and AD&D came out before you could wrestle.
Anyhow, isn't this discussion wandering a bit off track? We've converting monsters here not discussing old RPG history!
So perhaps the grey sqaarg was meant to start out as "a statue", which would just stand there doing nothing until approached or snuck past, upon which - surprise surprise - it would animate and attack, getting stronger and stronger?
I guess we'll never know what the grey sqaarg is truly about, though, unless someone can contact the author.
Well we've only got the White Dwarf text to work with. The monster's description plus the part of Albie Fiore's "module" that it crops up in says Squaarg's patrol around "beats" and try to incapacitate intruders. I'd guess their creators wanted to decide what to do with strangers who wandered into their mines themselves rather than discover a crushed body in the morning.
Or it could be a safety measure so the Sqaargs don't kill friendly visitors or members of the dwarf community who forgot the password.
The problem with the evil dwarf makers and the sqaarg gently putting people to sleep (lol again) has always bothered me, too, and I've always been tempted to just ignore its gentle approach and just let it have at it.
However, I must say that Cleon's quote has sort of finally solved it for me and so, henceforth, my sqaargs will continue to gently dissuade people from entering their masters' domains until the proverbial hits the fan for them.
Therefore, the evilness of its makers will have to be made evident by the fact that the sqaarg will force people to use the 1E non-lethal combat rules - which nobody alive today has ever understood - and that it is called a sqaarg.
I did wonder whether the Evil Dwarves could be Duergar, but those weren't a thing until the
Monster Manual II came out in 1983 a whole three years after
White Dwarf #21.
It did cause me to briefly consider having them be able to comprehend Undercommon as well as Dwarvish, but I went for the single language in the Working Draft.
In 1980 if a PC met an "evil dwarf" it was just a regular dwarf with an evil alignment, not a member of a malevolent race of dwarves. If my memory doesn't fail me there's at least one wicked dwarf fighter in published 1st edition modules from that period.
