NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9692815" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Deities & Demigods - so much to unpack there.An older friend of mine who was pivotal in getting me into RPGs had one of the coveted 1980 printings, complete with the two “lost” chapters.  He claimed that he and his power gamer buddies had indeed run the book as a module, slaying various gods and looting legendary artifacts like Gungnir and Mjolnir, as was the style at the time. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😁" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f601.png" title="Beaming face with smiling eyes    :grin:" data-shortname=":grin:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />I enjoyed the book and read it cover to cover, but even as a kid I was interested in archaeology and mythology, so I had my doubts about its historical accuracy.  The advice on how to integrate the pantheons into the game was vague and unhelpful.  Clerics of Poseidon were forbidden to ride horses, but what about hippogriffs or pegasi?  Sumerian clerics were supposed to rival orcs and hobgoblins in their hatred of “demi-humans” like dwarves and elves, but why?  None of those beings even existed in Sumerian lore!  There was virtually no provision for thematic abilities or spell lists, so your Babylonian priest or Finnish runesinger still had to carry a mace like the standard issue D&D cleric, a Knight Hospitaller with the serial numbers filed off.  Not until the AD&D 2E PHB did we get even optional rules for customized specialty priests.If the gaming content was questionable, the artwork was very much on point.  Erol Otus did the amazing cover illustration of dueling clerics, with matching avatars of their gods battling it out in the deep blue evening sky above them - a warrior in violet armor and winged helmet throttling a green winged serpent.  Definitely worth an image search if you have never seen it.  Some of his lurid drawings of the Cthulhu Mythos beings are squatting in my head to this day... <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🐙" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f419.png" title="Octopus    :octopus:" data-shortname=":octopus:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />I had the sixth printing which changed the title to Legends & Lore, a dubious attempt to escape the notice of “Satanic Panic” critics, and featured new Jeff Easley cover art depicting Odin riding his eight-legged horse Sleipnir across the sky.  One of my gaming friends was of Bengali descent and pointed out that it was pretty odd that D&D had game stats for Hindu deities still worshipped by real people today, and I had to agree.  For that matter the same could be said of the Chinese and Japanese chapters.  That was probably one of the first times I really thought about how TTRPGs portray real world cultures.Fun fact: the infamous Lovecraft and Moorcock material need not have been deleted.  Chaosium had indeed licensed those properties for their games, but was graciously willing to compromise if TSR merely included an acknowledgement in the foreword, which was done in the second printing.  In a later fit of pique TSR thought it better to remove the material altogether rather than so much as mention a competitor.  So the only real losers here were their own customers, and the only real winners were anyone with an early copy to sell to collectors.  Some later printings still included the acknowledgement but not the actual disputed chapters, resulting in an inaccurate page count, index, etc.  The whole affair was an unfortunate example of the sort of peevish attitude and general incompetence sometimes exhibited by They Sue Regularly back in the 1980’s.</blockquote>

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