Friday, September 10, 2021

Random Roll: FF, p. 3

I will in future return to highlighting choice passages in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, but I recently came across a section of the Fiend Folio that I thought worthy of attention. In the foreword to that tome of creatures malevolent and benign, editor Don Turnbull talks about the process of putting together this "companion" to the Monster Manual. In doing so, he makes a number of intriguing statements, starting with the passage where he explicitly compares the FF to its predecesssor.

There is one major difference between the two volumes – the source of their contents. The Monster Manual is very largely the work of one person – Gary Gygax – who not only created and developed most of the Monster Manual monsters himself but also developed those he did not personally create.

Remember, this is 1981, by which point Gary Gygax reigns supreme over all things AD&D and I suspect that Turnbull's statement needs to be considered in that light. Even so, there is nevertheless merit to what he says about the contents of the Monster Manual. One can rightly quibble about how many of the MM's entries were created solely by Gygax. Yet, the larger point remains that Gygax's influence over that first published AD&D book was considerable.

The new monsters in the FIEND FOLIO Tome, however, are the creations of many people. Some time ago, the editor of a UK magazine asked readers to submit their monster creations to a regular feature which became known as the Fiend Factory. The response was quite enormous and many worthwhile contributions reached the editorial offices.

There are several things of note here, starting with the fact that the name of the "UK magazine" referenced above – White Dwarf – is never mentioned. This is despite the fact that the Fiend Factory feature of that periodical is mentioned. Likewise, one assumes, since White Dwarf was never owned by TSR, some sort of financial and legal arrangement had to be arranged whereby some of the content of the Fiend Factory feature would appear in this book. I wonder if the establishment of TSR UK played a role in the circuitous way that Turnbull speaks here (Games Workshop, publisher of White Dwarf, having previously been the distributor of TSR products in the UK).

Also notable is the fact that, while the text bolds the titles of TSR game book (and, in the case of the Fiend Folio, capitalizes them as well), there are none of the ubiquitous trademark or registered trademark symbols that started to appear in 1980. In any case, Turnbull continues:

As editor of the feature, I never lacked for new and interesting monsters to fill the Factory pages each issue – indeed (for a magazine has inevitable limitations on space) it very soon became evident that many worthwhile creations would not be published until long, long after their submission, if at all. At the same time, the readers were praising the feature and demanding more! So there was a goodly supply of, and strident demand for, additional AD&D monsters – and these two factors gave birth to the FIEND FOLIO Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign.

This volume therefore contains an overwhelming majority of monsters which were originally submitted for the Fiend Factory feature. A small fraction of them already appeared in the Factory (though not in as developed a form as they appear here) while a larger number have come straight from creation via development to this book without pausing at the Factory en route.

The second paragraph is very interesting to me. It's regularly stated that the Fiend Folio is largely a compilation of Fiend Factory monsters. If I'm reading Turnbull correctly, he's saying that many of them never appeared in the pages of White Dwarf at all and that he drew upon his large "slush pile" of submissions for many of the monsters that appear in the FF.

Later in the foreword, Turnbull talks about his own role in producing the book.

My own task has been quite a simple one – to select monsters for inclusion, to develop them as necessary and write the statistics and texts, to assemble them in coherent form and to produce the various tables. Perhaps selection was not so easy a task after all, for there were over 1,000 contributions to consider; I have been quite ruthless in selection to ensure that the monsters which finally did appear were of the highest quality and originality.  

"Over 1,000 contributions?!" That's considerably more than I would have expected.

To have sacrificed quantity for quality in this way is, I believe, what discerning AD&D enthusiasts would want me to have done. On the development side my efforts have been variable. Some "originals" were almost fully developed when they reached me and not a great deal of work was required to add the final touches to them. At the opposite end of the development spectrum, other contributions arrived incomplete and embryonic, with the tip of a good idea just showing above the surface, as it were; these needed development to "flesh them out" into complete and coherent form. A few names have been changed and a few characteristics altered (most for good and sufficient reasons, some out of sheer instinct) but substantially the task has been to build on creations rather than re-work them entirely. 

 Had I greater love for the Fiend Folio's monsters, I might take the time and compare their original appearances in the Fiend Factory feature to the versions that later appeared in the AD&D book. I may still do that, as part of my ongoing examination of the early issues of White Dwarf, but, if so, it will be in a haphazard fashion. Regardless, I think Turnbull's admission of the extent to which he was involved in the development of the book's monster entries is important. It's a pity he's been dead for nearly two decades, as I'd love to talk to him about the nitty gritty details of his shepherding the Fiend Folio to its final form. I suspect he'd have a few additional surprises to share with us regarding both the process and the extent of his own creative contributions.

21 comments:

  1. Some interesting statistics counted by yours truly:

    total number of monsters in the FF: 186.
    52 monsters (28%) in the FF originally appeared in White Dwarf (issues 2 and 6-13).
    25 monsters (13%) in the FF came from TSR in Lake Geneva.
    6 monsters (3%) came from the UK fanzine, The Underworld Oracle.

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    1. My thanks as well, I was wondering if I could search up that data online somewhere and here you've saved me the trouble.

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    2. Although it does raise another question - do you know how many total creature submission were published in Fiend Factory while WD was running the feature? I didn't start reading the magazine until well after that period, unfortunately.

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    3. Dick, I don't have numbers, but it would have been roughly 4 monsters an issue for 40 or so issues, so 100-200?

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    4. @Anzon - Sounds reasonable. Going by the ~1000 submissions received, that suggests that only 10-20% were published during the lifetime of the feature. So we were (hopefully) seeing the A and maybe B+ grade ones published, right? Makes you wonder what horrors were lurking in the slush pile, given some of the stuff that appeared in FF. :)

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  2. Huh. That is fascinating stuff. Especially when considering how many monsters made it into the FF that folks find overly whimsical or ridiculous. If "flailsnails" made the final cut, what ended up being left out?

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    1. Hey now, nobody disses the flail snail on my watch. :) It makes an absolutely terrific miniature:

      https://brokenstarsburningships.blogspot.com/2018/12/dreadful-things-mortal-arrow-flail-snail.html

      And that's not even the really neat shell option in that post - although I'll concede it's the more snail-like of the two on offer:

      https://www.mortalarrow.com/product/war-snail-flogging/

      Certainly no more ridiculous than a beholder, and you'll never hear people speaking ill of that sacred cow. Well, not often, anyway:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6EUjfRTOyo

      Definitely my preferred headcanon explanation for where the big eyeball came from.

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    2. Interesting - I see the same guy created the necrophidius, aka that thing that looks like an undead naga but isn't. Those are markedly less silly than my beloved flail snails.

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  3. I'm not especially surprised that WD had over 1000 submissions for Fiend Factory. In the pre-internet days far more people actually wrote to magazines rather than, say, using social media or a blog or whatever to vent their creativity.

    I'd be equally unsurprised to discover they follow Sturgeon's Law, given what actually did get published. I'm not as negative about FF as most folks but there are more than a few stinkers, and I doubt teh WD articles were much if any better.

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  4. I have little in the way of kind words for the FF. There is some great art in the back by the USA TSR artists, and a few excellent pieces by our long lost cousins across the pond.

    This is one of the rare times in AD&D that I would have PREFERRED that Gary came down with authority from "On High".

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  5. Talk of the FF and the monsters "quality" reminded me of way back in the day there was a series of blog posts or G+ posts (or both?) by a couple people about making a setting using only the monsters in the FF and what could be inferred about the world such a setting would be.
    An interesting thought experiment, but not sure it would be my cup of proverbial tea.

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    1. Gygax used monsters almost exclusively from Fiend Folio for WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun.

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    2. That's a very good point, Duglas. I have a vague recollection that Gygax did this deliberately, in an effort to draw attention to the monsters in the FF he liked and felt were good additions to AD&D. Perhaps it was mentioned in a Dragon article?

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  6. I would definitely be interested in seeing someone do a comparison of the Fiend Factory to Fiend Folio Monsters, though I will admit that I quite like the Fiend Folio more than most commenting. Sure, not every monster is a classic, but the MM1 has the masher so...

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    1. I'm with you, FF has an undeserved bad rep considering the number of quite cool monsters it includes alongside the stinkers. Be very interested to see a full list of teh published fiend Factory critters to compare and contrast what made it to the Folio, and to give us an idea how many things were from White dwarf's unpublished slush pile of submissions.

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  7. I feel I get more out of the Fiend Folio than I do the MM2. Maybe on some cold winter day I will go through the two and count monsters I find valuable.

    The MM2 has a lot of wasted space with stats for different dinosaurs and otters. A flail snail is better than an otter in terms of inspiration.

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  8. A thing worth remembering about FF is that it was completed by Games Workshop and supposedly ready to go in 1979 but got held up for two years in legal wrangling between TSR and GW that ended with TSR setting up their own UK division and Don Turnbull leaving GW to run it.

    Between 1979 and 1981 TSR US (under the direction of Lawrence Schick) did some further development - they definitely added some art (there are multiple pieces by TSR-US artists that show 1981 dates) and probably added the encounter tables in the back and maybe added some more monsters. The 1979 version was perhaps only 96 pages of material and TSR-US felt the need to pad that out to 128. I’d be very curious to know exactly what was added and whether anything was removed from the UK version (per Gary Gygax decades after the fact he directed Schick to excise some of the dumber monsters and replace them with new ones and he was annoyed when the new ones were duly added but the dumb ones were not removed) but it’s unlikely anybody involved remembers with any specificity at this late date.

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    1. This is very helpful information. Thank you.

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    2. Worth noting that Gygax (and in one case his son Luke) contributed a total of ten monsters to the FF, including Lolth, the drow, kuo-toa, mezzo- and nycadaemons, and bullywugs. Presumably all of those were TSR US additions, since I can't see either Gygax submitting designs to White Dwarf.

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    3. Most of those come from TSR’s 1978-79 modules (G3, the D series, and Schick’s kelpie from S2) so those could have been part of the original GW concept. The more likely late TSR additions would seem to me to be the TSR staff contributions that hadn’t appeared in modules - the Gygaxes’ bullywug, Schick’s aarakocra and tabaxi, Moldvay’s astral searcher, protein polymorph, and retriever, and Jean Wells’ caryatid column. Possibly the oriental dragons as well, since they had originally appeared in Dragon magazine (not White Dwarf), though they appeared in April 1979 which is early enough that they could have been picked up in the original 1979 draft just like the monsters from the early modules

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