Giants in the Earth

[Glyfair]

Some of the GITE articles were kinda headscratchers. Best example: Tarl Cabot of the "Gor" series fame. I'm no prude, and i personally don't have a problem with the character being in GITE, but it surprises me now that "Gor" made the cut in Dragon, given the general subject matter of the series.

The early books were pretty standard lost world fantasies, not really focusing on the slavery issue. After the first few books the focus shifts more in that direction.

 

[Glyfair]

Here is my attempt at a list of the characters. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do tables, which is the best format for this sort of thing on message boards. Some day I'll sit down and work it out.

Edit: Moved to first post

 

[Maester Luwin]

Hey everyone! This was also a favorite of mine. It did inspire me to read many ah book. I dicovered Poul Anderson that way & he has been one of my favorites ever since. Thanks Maester Luwin

 

[S'mon]

I teach copyright law, it actually makes me feel physically sick that things have gone so far that now magazine publishers won't even do this kind of thing for fear of being sued by some a******. Copyright law was never intended to prevent this.

 

[Fedifensor]

Didn't Dragon do a detailed writeup of an author's world for a recent issue? I think it was the World of China Mieville, based on the brief descriptions on Paizo's website. If they can do that, why not writeups for other books, and the characters in them.

 

[kenobi65]

Didn't Dragon do a detailed writeup of an author's world for a recent issue? I think it was the World of China Mieville, based on the brief descriptions on Paizo's website. If they can do that, why not writeups for other books, and the characters in them.

I'm pretty sure that that was done with Mr. Mieville's permission (after all, an interview with him was among the articles in that issue).

It would not surprise me if Mr. Mieville had some level of editorial approval over the content of that issue (and I'm 95% positive that that is NOT something that was done with the old GITE series). I'm not sure if I can see WotC being willing to go through those hoops with author after author on a regular (monthly) basis.

 

[WayneLigon]

This happened a great deal before the lawyers all got involved in everything. Most magazines would have some kind of writeup from various sources. Different Worlds had Champions and Superworld writeups for the New Teen Titans, Dragon had Top Secret stats for all the famous literary/cinematic spies, you'd see various other fictional worlds modeled and statted out, etc. It wasn't unusual at all. Then around, oh, 1985 that seemed to change. I don't know if there was a big lawsuit that got settled out of court and the warning circulated through the industry, or if the lawyers just deemed it was too big a risk.

I actively disliked most of the Giants in the Earth series since in order to either model certain abilities or prevent PCs from wiping out well-known characters in seconds, they were given ridiculous amounts of levels in various classes. (All it really showed you was that it was impossible for your character to ever hope to be as cool as a novel character without breaking the rules). I mean, look at that list above. Richard Upton Pickman, a scrawny little painter in modern Massachusetts is a ninth level fighter? I mean, really now. There were some later writeups that were not so silly, though that came near the end of the column's life.

 

[Glyfair]

I actively disliked most of the Giants in the Earth series since in order to either model certain abilities or prevent PCs from wiping out well-known characters in seconds, they were given ridiculous amounts of levels in various classes. (All it really showed you was that it was impossible for your character to ever hope to be as cool as a novel character without breaking the rules). I mean, look at that list above. Richard Upton Pickman, a scrawny little painter in modern Massachusetts is a ninth level fighter? I mean, really now. There were some later writeups that were not so silly, though that came near the end of the column's life.

Actually, Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay cover that in the article in #37 (in reply to a comment from Gygax). The original column was based on a campaign that was a D&D game (i.e. OD&D) in which higher level characters were more common. They try to straddle the line between D&D and AD&D in levels.

They go into more details (such as why the immortal Kane would be as low level as he was), but that's the gist.

 

[WayneLigon]

They go into more details (such as why the immortal Kane would be as low level as he was), but that's the gist.

I've read it. It's a bunch of who-ha that runs on for an entire page and basically boils down to 'We just wrote a bunch of stuff based on some wonk-fest bizzaro-world OD&D game some guy ran for us in college'.

 

[Glyfair]

Characters that I read about specifically because of their appearance in GitE (as of Dragon #37, where my index is up to):

Cugel the Clever, et. al
Eric John Stark
Kane
Shadowjack

and soon

Tros of Samothrace (just ordered the book in the last few days)