Monday, September 28, 2009

Yet More Gygaxiana

Randall over at RetroRoleplaying has links to even more early articles by Gary Gygax about D&D, this time from Len "Leomund" Lakofka's old Diplomacy fanzine, Liaisons Dangereuses.

Awesome stuff.

11 comments:

  1. Gotta love those magic-using dwarves and halflings from issue #76.

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  2. Wow, there's some crazy stuff there.

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  3. Wow, just goes to show how much better a good editor can make a publication. Anyone want to get out their crystal balls and do some "skyring"? It's not as if the word "scry" isn't in the dictionary, after all. We owe more to Kask, Jaquet, Carr, et al., than I realized.

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  4. I'd be curious if you'd ever get an interview with Len Lakofka in the future. He was a big mainstay in Dragon and he had an influence on the cleric class in UA, plus I remember his NPC classes very well.

    I remember him getting a little involved in the Internet in the late 90s, when people were interested in what he had to say. However, EGG informed me that as soon as he took a look at 3e, he gave up D&D altogether and went back to playing bridge.

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  5. I don't think I'll be using the "women and magic" rules - that's some documentary fodder right there.

    re "skrying:" I've seen it spelled both ways, although only scrying appears in the OED: I suspect it has become a shibboleth, like "magick," used by people who think they can do it, probably because of Dee and Kell(e)y's usage back in the 16th century before the invention of standardized spelling.

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  6. re "skrying:" I've seen it spelled both ways

    Yeah, but they don't spell it "skrying", they spell it "skyring". Consistently. Like 30 times, including the in the (admittedly cool) "ASCII-graphics"-style (I know, no ASCII yet) title.

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  7. they spell it "skyring"
    ...a new magic item?

    You know, I looked back at your previous comment several times to check what you'd written, and it was only on the last try that I managed to see "skyring" instead of "skrying." Perception's a weird thing.

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  8. IIRC "Women and Magic" raised some eyebrows even back in the day; I vaguely remember a letter to the editor printed in an early Dragon objecting strenuously to a certain article about female D&D characters.

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  9. Of course, you still have different ability limits for males/females in 1E PHB p. 15. Not quite as radical as this, though.

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  10. And, there's an article of the same title ("Women & Magic -- Ladies in D&D") in Dragon magazine #3, p. 7.

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