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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9670012" data-attributes="member: 7026594">"The Fantasy Supplement" was a reference to Chainmail.  OD&D references it in several places, and back in day Dave Arneson indicated that he used rules from it as the initial mechanics for his Blackmoor game, which was otherwise inspired in large part by Braunstein.  We found out a few years after Playing at the World came out that the Fantasy Supplement substantially cribbed from <a href="https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-precursor-to-chainmail-fantasy.html" target="_blank">Leonard Patt's rules for a Middle Earth wargame</a>.  This was a cool find and added weight to the argument that RPGs can't be credited to a single creator, since so many elements converged which were contributed by different creators.Supplement I: Greyhawk is credited to Gygax and Rob Kuntz (one of the few other people to make some decent royalty money off TSR) remember, so even that key work which underpins and contains so many ideas used in AD&D and later editions was a collaboration.I agree that Gary had some good ideas, but his biggest talent seems to have been his energy, passion, and willingness to put in the work and hours to assemble rules and adventures, often iterating on and expanding ideas (his own and from others), and to promote and sell them to a wider audience.Unfortunately that willingness to put in the work appears to have largely dried up in the early 80s, though he kept trying to make media deals happen while neglecting the health of the company, and his later designs seem mostly* uninspired or downright terrible (Mythus, Cyborg Commando).  His disintegrating marriage as he played Business Bigshot combined with his mother's death in late 1980 both seem like they might have contributed to him losing his way a bit and losing his creative passion.  Three martini lunches and marching powder also aren't usually a good recipe for creative productivity.*(I have recently started playing in a Castle Zagyg game, though, so maybe there's some more cool stuff in there, even if it is mostly iterating off his old Castle Greyhawk concepts?)</blockquote>

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