François Froideval Passes Away

French RPG creator and developer François Froideval has passed away at the age of 66. Born in France, Froideval is best known for his work as an early French RPG pioneer, serving as the editor in chief for the French RPG magazine Casus Belli. He moved to the US in 1982, where he worked for TSR for four years as an assistant to Gary Gygax. Froideval co-wrote Oriental Adventures and Monster Manual 2 alongside Gygax. After returning to France, Froideval continued to translate various D&D rulebooks into French until 1989. Gygax also credited Froideval for the creation of a comeliness stat to measure the attractiveness of various characters and NPCS.

Froideval later transitioned into video games and then comic books, where he wrote 22 volumes of Chronicles of the Black Moon, a dark fantasy series. The last volume of the series was dedicated to Gygax and was published shortly after Gygax's passing.

 

[Yaarel]

Chronicles of the Black Moon is responsible for much of the planet of the Greyhawk setting, Oerth, for the regions of Oerth that are beyond the Flanaess subcontinent.

 

[Sionainn | Twelvefold D&D]

Froideval picked out the Time-Life Jurassic map which became Mystara.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

A lot of the canon Western Oerik is also based on his campaign, the Greyhawk community has crosschecked the Dragon Annual map against Froideval's comic and found the names and geography match up for the most part.