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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8202984" data-attributes="member: 18">See, I don't agree, [USER=7029365]@turnip_farmer[/USER] and I think to make this claim you need a bit more evidence.Why?Because Warhammer is far MORE Moorcock-influenced than D&D, and the influence shows a far deeper familiarity with Moorcock's work than D&D, and further, Michael Moorcock was really big in UK fantasy AND prog rock/metal (he used to play with Hawkwind sometimes, helped write their lyrics, and also wrote three tracks for Blue Oyster Cult) at the time Warhammer was being created. Also if you're not both British and in at least your 40s, you obviously can't be expected to know this kind of thing, but also probably shouldn't be making sweeping statements about Moorcock's influence on GW that way.I would say the influence is extremely heavy.It's not just Elric.It's everything Moorcock had written at that time. Hawkmoon. Erekose. Corum. Nomad on the Timestreams. von Bek. Dancers at the end of Time. Other random short stories. Even some of the Jerry Cornelius stuff. I've read most of this stuff in my teens and the influence on Warhammer, both Fantasy and 40K, was absolutely truly vast. Incalculable. It's much bigger than Moorcock's influence on D&D, and it also covers a ton of stuff that wasn't influenced at all by Moorcock in D&D. I can give you examples if you really need them, but unless you've read Moorcock beyond Elric, I don't think they'll make much sense.Warhammer won't exist as we know it without D&D because the money from D&D was fundamental to the success early GW had. Not only would they not quite have had the same ideas, but they couldn't have expanded as fast. I mean, I'm so old, my first D&D books were indeed from a GW shop. But they were hugely influenced by Moorcock, gigantically. Moorcock knows it by the way, and isn't very impressed with them. He's made an analogy to the "stew thieves" Pratchett has spoken about. -i.e. there's a big pot of stew eternally going, and if you put something in, like a dead pigeon, you can get a bowl of stew or two. Pratchett talked about how some people only take from the stew, they don't add to it, and Moorcock feels GW fall into that category.It's also worth noting that, early on, if anything, the influence of Moorcock and Tolkien (and renaissance history) was much, much heavier than D&D on GW in creative terms re: Fantasy. And 40K has a ton of Moorcock influence that I would still be there without D&D. I don't think Law and Chaos in Warhammer comes from D&D, it's no much like how it is in D&D, whereas it's almost exactly like it is in Moorcock - Chaos even has exactly the same symbol, for example!So whilst I think Fantasy Battle and 40K would be different, I think in a lot of ways they'd be pretty similar, and I think real "no D&D" impact would be that GW would have a lot more difficulty getting "up to speed" financially in the 1980s.Sorry for the Moorcock/GW-related TED talk.</blockquote>

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