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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9035929" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I always heard that Gary preferred sword & sorcery works like Dying Earth, Conan, and Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, but knew he needed to include what everyone else loved to sell the thing. Fundamentally, I don't know that it matters what the true story is. He put in a bunch of Tolkien in the work, or at least where two paths diverged often sided with the Tolkien interpretation. Elves are Tolkien-esque (a bit shorter than humans instead of a bit taller, but still magic, arrows, keen-eyed, and stealthy (later books adding the retreat to misty isles, and so on). Orcs are straight Tolkien (until they diverted into pig-men for a while). Dwarves are unmagical (compared to, say, Doli from Chronicles of Prydain who has innate magic; or the all the magic of norse myth dwarfs). Halflings are, well, Hobbits (folklore has all sorts of little folk, but A/D&D kept hewing to the Tolkien-specific ones, splitting off gnomes and brownies and whatnot into other MM/PHB/Gazetteer entries). He held his ground on the things he considered important like Dying Earth(-ish) magic and Three Hearts and Three Lions-like trolls.I think another thing to note is that Gygax was also influenced significantly by Napoleonic wargames, Western pulps, and the instance of people abandoning their actual wargame to run around the dungeons underneath the battle collecting loot. Fantasy literature (and favorites and disfavorites within it) may not really have been that important to him. Tolkien vs. Howard or Leiber might well have been 'sure, let's have them all, I don't care'-ish to him -- just a thin veneer to pull over the fun little treasure-hunter game he'd discovered captured everyone's imagination. At least that's my takeaway of him giving equal billing to monsters he created out of whole cloth based on some discount plastic Kaiju monster toys to monsters based on all the different fantasy novels in the common consciousness at the time. Honestly I don't even know if the fantasy genre was important or not. Early TSR certainly tried to do a bunch of wargames and TTRPGs from other genres. If some of the rest of them had taken off, we may have heard just how important he considered no double-action revolvers in 1860s westerns instead.I think everyone can agree that EGG was very capable of making statements that suited his needs more than fastidiously represented the truth. This is a well-covered area on this board. It's still a far-cry from what LaNasa and co. are accomplishing with Goblinz (that is how we got on this tangent, right?).</blockquote>

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