Things you didn't know about D&D...

[Zander]

I was surprised to learn from
this thread that the rust monster and bulette were originally plastic toys that Papa G discovered in the 1970's. He turned them into D&D monsters, but they didn't start out that way (I always assumed they had).

Here are a few more bits of D&D trivia:

The cover illustration of the later printings of the 1E PHB depicts a wizard casting a spell with some sort of small demons flying around him. The wizard's hood is curved all the way around at the top. But originally it was indented. They painted in the very top so that it wouldn't look like he had horns. If you look closely, you can see where the alteration was made. The French edition shows the original painting.

The 2E wizard spell cards came out in Japanese before they came out in English. The Japanese ones were published separately for each level. TSR (USA) didn't know about the Japanese version (until I told them) and had their lawyers check that it was licenced (which it was).

The joke in the D&D movie about female dwarves having beards and this being something to hang onto was originally in the 2nd series of the British comedy series Blackadder. The programme's writer was British comedian Ben Elton who plays D&D.

Any more trivia about D&D out there?

 

[Desdichado]

Actually, I knew that about the rust monster and bullette. Those toys used to come in a plastic bag with a bunch of dinosaurs and a few other "monsters" that mostly looked kinda silly. But I loved them as a kid. I had three or four bags of those.

 

[Henry]

...that the rust monster and bulette were originally plastic toys that Papa G discovered in the 1970's. He turned them into D&D monsters, but they didn't start out that way (I always assumed they had).

Of course - I just picked up these two yet again from a dollar store just three months ago. I used to have these toys years ago, back in the late 1970's, before anyone outside of the midwest had ever heard of D&D.

The cover illustration of the later printings of the 1E PHB depicts a wizard casting a spell with some sort of small demons flying around him. The wizard's hood is curved all the way around at the top. But originally it was indented. They painted in the very top so that it wouldn't look like he had horns. If you look closely, you can see where the alteration was made. The French edition shows the original painting.

For an extra ten points: that wizard was the good wizard Ringlerun, from the Dungeons and Dragons toy line of the 1980's. I have a copy of that PHB.

The Dwarves have Beards, and the Japanese spell cards I DIDN'T know about; it's not a surprise that a corporation's right hand often doesn't know what its left is doing.

Any more trivia about D&D out there? [/B]

A couple of minor ones:

The letters and periods for the initials "E.G.G." are spelled out in the floor plan for the 2nd level of the expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

I'll edit in later.

 

[Zander]

Re: Re: Things you didn't know about D&D...

The letters and periods for the initials "E.G.G." are spelled out in the floor plan for the 2nd level of the expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

Ooh... That's a good one. Didn't know that.

Here's another one I just remembered:

Some of the monsters in the recently released ToH were originally published in Games Workshop's magazine White Dwarf. They appeared in a column called Fiend Factory and found their way into the 1E Fiend Folio and evetually into the ToH.

 

[Psion]

Along the lines of the rust monster thing... you know how some people complain that they don't like how dragons in D&D are so stale and predictable? Initially, the additional colors of dragons were made because they thought that a simple fire breathing dragons were predictable. Three types of dragons were made (I forget which colors, I think it was red, blue, and green) were named after pieces from a boardgame.

 

[johnsemlak]

This site and www.acaeum.com are good sources for trivia.

A few I remember (probably nothing new for many regulars here)

TSR originally stood for Tactical Studies Rules, but for most of it's history it didn't stand for anything, officially.

the Module T1 was originally slated to be WG1 (it's referred to as such in the 1983 WoG set). I believe WG2 and 3 were to be sequals. However, no modules with the numbers WG1-3 were ever published, the line begins at WG4--The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. (There is a lot of other interesting info on bits like this at the acaeum)

 

[Henry]

Additionals -

Gary once revealed in a 1999 seminar on Greyhawk that his original inspiration for the City of Greyhawk was the city of Chicago, with its position on the Great Lakes, and its position as a central hub for business from all over the country.

He also said that the real reason Greyhawk was so detailed and alive was because one of his players (Rob Kuntz?) had a photographic or near-photographic memory, and remembered each and every scrap of detail about the city - so Gary worked to keep things interesting for him.


Other tidbits:

Our favorite dice we all know and love (d4, d8, d10, etc.) originally came from a teacher's catalog including plastic platonic solids for educational pruposes.

Gary and his group shamelessly stole from the names of people and places they knew for naming conventions all over the realms of Oerth. One of my favorite places is Allan Grohe's (grodog's) site ( http://www.rpg.net/ehp/imrryr/greyhawk.html ) which keeps a running chronicle of this stuff.

One the site DIDN'T chronicle is Boss Dahly, ruler of the city of Stoink in Cary's First Gord the Rogue novel. A direct "tribute" to Chicago's favorite "Boss."

 

[Piratecat]

Apparently, D&D didn't originally use all of the dice that came pre-packaged from their dice supplier overseas. After a horrifying attempt to remove the "useless" dice before inserting them into the boxes, Gary found it easier to rewrite part of the game to take advantage of all the polyhedrals.

Hey, if I remember correctly one of our British members (Upper Krust?) actually wrote the first shadow demon that was published in the Fiend Folio. Whoever it was also wrote two others, which were - err - less memorable. Anyone remember who that was?

 

[Mark]

Along the lines of the rust monster thing... you know how some people complain that they don't like how dragons in D&D are so stale and predictable? Initially, the additional colors of dragons were made because they thought that a simple fire breathing dragons were predictable. Three types of dragons were made (I forget which colors, I think it was red, blue, and green) were named after pieces from a boardgame.

6, IIRC, red, blue, green, black, white and golden. Despite having lots of new shapes to dice, for some reason six-siders were still very busy in OD&D...

 

[mikey6990]

Too add to the dice discussion. Dave Arneson told this story at DragonCon. It seems that they got the dice from a educational supplier in California. They had always removed the dice that they did not use (d12, d8?). When the game became popular, they did not want to take the time to remove some of the dice just to repackage them, so Gary rewrote some of the rules to use them. That is why early editions had so little use of some dice types.

Another interesting thing that Dave said was that there is a naval submarine training school located near Lake Geneva and during the early days, D&D became really popular among students and graduates of the naval training school. Dave always told people who asked him about the 'satanic' or 'cultish' aspects of D&D that at one time, every nuclear submarine in the US fleet had at least one D&D group. If D&D folks had wanted to take over the world, they could have. He said it always seemed to shut people up.

He was full of useless early D&D trivia.

Mike