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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7905270" data-attributes="member: 996">Apart from anything being adequate reason for backlash at the time, D&D does have a history with monster lore.  In the early days it was haphazard, whatever Gary or Dave or whomever thought of to write down about the monster.  Thus, like, Gnolls being half-troll/half-gnome in one version, and hyena-persons in another, or purple worms possibly originally being purple wyrms (that was interesting, never heard that one before, but it just came up in some thread).  Then there were random bits of lore lifted straight from mythology, from other source of inspiration, and from Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings.But, then, right at the height of the fad, we started seeing Ecology of ____ Articles in Dragon. And those got really detailed over the years, and they were very popular, IIRC.  And 2e had a lotta settings, each lavishly developed, including monsters' places in each of them.Finally, 3.x let you build monsters with the same loving detail as PCs!So, yeah, the pendulum had swung awfully far over in the direction of drowning monsters in detail and swaddling them in fluff and enshrining them in setting-specific lore.</blockquote>