Tag Archives: Monster Manual

The Stories (and 3 Mysteries) Behind D&D’s Iconic Monsters

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Like every other kid who discovered Dungeons & Dragons in the late 70s, the Monster Manual suddenly became my favorite book. I studied the pages, and then turned to books of mythology to learn more about cyclopses, manticores, and harpies. But not all the monsters came from myth. Some started with Gary Gygax and other D&D contributors. Of these original monsters, Wizards of the Coast reserves the most evocative as part of D&D’s product identity:

  • beholder
  • gauth
  • carrion crawler
  • displacer beast
  • githyanki
  • githzerai
  • kuo-toa
  • mind flayer
  • slaad
  • umber hulk
  • yuan-ti
Signed Greyhawk Cover

The Original Beholder

The leap of imagination required for some monsters seems short. When Gary needed “something new” to populate the underworld, he imagined fish men and called them koa-toa. When Dave “Zeb” Cook needed memorable foes for an overgrown, forbidden city in the jungle, he made snake men called yuan-ti. D&D features a long history of frog men, but Charles Stross says a literal fever led him to imagine the extra-planar, chaotic slaad.

The gauth just offers a junior beholder to pit against lower-level adventurers. But where did the beholder come from?

Many of D&D’s classic monsters have better stories behind their inspiration.

Beholder

One of D&D’s original players, Rob Kuntz eventually joined Gary Gygax as co-dungeon master in the Greyhawk campaign. Rob credits his brother Terry with a wild imagination and the idea for the beholder, originally called the eye of doom. Terry provided most of the game stats. Before the creature appeared in the Greyhawk supplement, Gary explained that “All I needed to do was a bit of editing to make it a great addition to the terrible monsters to be found in the D&D game.”

Bugbear

Bugbear, Ghoul and Friends

In the original D&D books, the bugbear sports a pumpkin head. Gary recalls describing the creature as having a fat, oval head like a pumpkin, which led the artist to draw an actual pumpkin head.

Carrion Crawler

In the early days of D&D, Gary hosted games 7 days a week. During weekends, adventuring parties included as many as 20 players with their characters, hirelings, and henchmen. Rob Kuntz ran sessions too. All these expeditions delved the mega-dungeon under Castle Greyhawk. “When the encounter was eliminated I simply drew a line through it, and the place was empty for the foreseeable future. I’d give Rob the details of any session he was not at and vice versa.” Rather than imagining a dungeon piled with rotting corpses of monsters and adventurers, Gary conceived dungeon scavengers like the carrion crawler. “I needed something nasty for the clean-up crew, so I thought this one up.”

Displacer Beast

Cover by Gil Kane

Although Wizards includes the displacer beast in D&D’s product identity, the monster owes its appearance to an alien in the 1939 story “The Black Destroyer” by author A. E. Van Vogt. In the tale, a character describes a thing called a “coeurl” that looks like “a big cat, if you forget those tentacles sticking out from its shoulders, and make allowances for those monster forelegs.” The beast first appeared in the Greyhawk supplement, but the coeurl lacks the displacer beast’s defensive power. That power comes from the Displacer Cloak, which appeared in the original D&D books.

Mystery: The cloak and beast’s displacement power seems like a defense that Gary could have taken from a golden-age science fiction story. Did Gary invent the notion, or did he adopt it?

Drow

The first hint of dark elves comes in D&D’s fourth supplement, Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes (1976), by James Ward and Rob Kuntz. “These elves dwell beneath the earth, and cause trouble for anyone wandering through their territories. They live and cause evil upon Svartalfheim.” Perhaps inspired by the mention, Gary offered more hints in the first Monster Manual. “The ‘Black Elves,’ or Drow, are only legend. They purportedly dwell deep beneath the surface in a strange subterranean realm. The Drow are said to be as dark as faeries are bright and as evil as the latter are good. Tales picture them as weak fighters but strong magic-users.” The word “drow” comes from Scots dialects and refers to a sort of malevolent being. Gary remembered pulling the name from an old, unabridged dictionary. In Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1978), the drow made their first appearance. Gary gave them powers “to highlight their unique nature and potency.”

Mind Flayer

Gary credits the form of the mind flayer to the cover of the Brian Lumley book, The Borrowers Beneath. “The cover made me think: Now what sort of nasty bastard is that? So without a qualm I made up the Illithid, the dread mind flayer, so as to keep the players on their toes—or to have their PCs turn theirs upwards.”

Mystery: None of the editions of The Borrowers Beneath that I’ve found show a humanoid, tentacle-faced creature that resembles a mind flayer. The most common cover shows tentacles erupting from the ground. In another reminiscence, Gary said the cover that inspired him showed a humanoid creature. What cover actually inspired the mind flayer?

Update: The fellow in the upper, far right corner of this cover for Brian Lumley’s The Caller of the Black strikes me as the most likely inspiration for the mind flayer. Wisconsin-based Arkham House published this edition in 1971, so Gary very likely saw this picture before inventing the monster.

Githyanki

Although Wizards claims githyanki as part of D&D’s product identity, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has a claim to them too. For D&D, science fiction author Charles Stross took the name githyanki and a bit of backstory from Martin’s SF novel Dying of the Light. “I’ve always felt slightly guilty about that,” Stross said. “Credit should be given where credit’s due.” Martin’s githyanki never develop beyond an unseen threat with limited intelligence. But like the D&D monsters, the originals were living, psychic weapons and former slaves of an alien race. Stross credits another legendary author with additional inspiration. “The Illithid/Githyanki relationship probably slid into my mind as a result of reading Larry Niven’s The World of Ptavvs, which features a psionic master/slave race relationship far in the past that nearly killed all the sapients in the galaxy when it turned hot.”

Bulette

Before D&D, Gary’s Chainmail games required miniatures. Back then, no one sold fantasy figures for gaming, so he improvised. He converted a plastic stegosaurus into a dragon. “I haunted the dime stores looking for potential additions and eventually found figures to represent ogres, elementals, etc.” Some of the improvised figures came from bags of assorted, plastic critters sold in those dime stores. The labels marked the toys as “Prehistoric Animals” but few resembled anything from natural history or even mythology. For pictures of the creatures and their packages, see a post by artist Tony DiTerlizzi.

When Gary’s gaming group switched to D&D, they stopped using miniatures, but the strange creatures remained as inspiration.

Gary and his fellow gamers probably never saw the Ultraman television show produced in Japan in 1966-1967, so they never knew the likely basis of the creatures. Most of the toys were knock offs of Kaiju, giant monsters from Japanese entertainment.

Inspiration for the Bulette toy probably came from the creature Gabora, which appeared in episode 9 of Ultraman, “Operation: Uranium.”

In the Greyhawk dungeons, the beast made a couple of cameo appearances, charging down a hall and bowling over adventurers. The players called it a landshark after its back fin and a current series of Saturday Night Live sketches where a “landshark” knocks on doors to deliver a “candygram.”

When editor Tim Kask needed content to fill a page in the first issue of The Dragon, Gary told Tim to write stats for the landshark. The name puts a French spin on the creature’s bullet shape. As for the monster’s appetite for halflings and their ponies, Tim was showing a bit of spite for players who always played hobbits and favored ponies named Bill.

Umber Hulk

Ultraman episode 7, “The Blue Stone of Vallarge,” featured another burrower named “Antlar.” A knock off toy for this Kaiju probably led Gary to devise the umber hulk. The creature’s crude, insectile eyes inspired the monster’s signature confusing gaze.

Owlbear

Some have tried to find a Kaiju that resembles the owlbear toy, but even the closest match takes blurred vision and a big leap of imagination. The toy’s bowl-shaped hair stands out as its most distinctive feature. As badly as the toy resembles an owl or a bear, it also badly resembles a Kappa from Japanese mythology.

Owlbear Toy and Kappa by Toriyama Sekien

Rust Monster

No creature resembles its dime-store inspiration more than the rust monster. The toy lacks teeth and claws, so when Gary made it a monster, he needed another way to menace adventurers. In the original game, powerful undead drained “life energy levels” when they hit. Life draining terrorized players, and Gary saw the power as a test for clerics, ranged attackers, and players too reckless to run. “I don’t agree with those wimpy whiners who are afraid of a few living dead,” he teased. The toy’s tentacles led Gary to imagine a way to threaten something players prized even more than their levels—their magic weapons and armor.

Mystery: Of all the toys, the rust monster ranks as the oddest. How did a four-legged bug with a propeller tail wind up bagged with kaiju and mythological creatures? Did a Hong Kong designer aim for pure whimsy or imitate some other creature?

Basic and Advanced—Why Gary Gygax claimed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a different game (Part 6)

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The Story of Basic and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
Part 1: The time Dungeons & Dragons split into two games
Part 2: Dungeons & Dragons’ new audience versus its original rules
Part 3: Dungeon & Dragons goes two directions
Part 4: Dave Arneson takes a job at TSR
Part 5: Was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons a different game?
Part 6: Why Gary Gygax claimed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a different game

In 1975, a surging number of Dungeons & Dragons players craved products for the game. TSR head Gary Gygax hired his Dungeons & Dragons co-author to assist. In January of 1976, Dave Arneson moved to Lake Geneva and joined the staff. Gygax seemed eager for the help.

Dave Arneson (photo Kevin McColl)

During Arneson’s time at TSR, he produced little for the company and nothing for D&D. Through all of 1976, Arneson earned just three credits: for an article on WWII naval combat that appeared in Little Wars magazine, for an introduction to the Valley Forge war game, and for ‘special effort’ on the Lankmhar board game.

Arneson did manage to publish several issues of a newsletter for his Napoleonic miniature campaign. He even printed the March 1976 edition on TSR’s mimeograph. For Arneson, the Blackmoor campaign that turned into D&D just provided a break from his true passion: Napoleonic armies and especially sailing ships. He could not match Gygax’s fervor for fantasy or role-playing games.

At the same time, booming demand for D&D products left the rest of TSR’s tiny staff frantically busy. While Arneson took a big cut of D&D’s profits and contributed nothing new, TSR needed money to grow and struggled with cash flow.

Gygax had welcomed his long-time collaborator, but the relationship between D&D’s creators soured.

After 10 months, Arneson left TSR. Arneson’s friend Dave Wesely told one account of Arneson’s exit. When Arneson refused to accept a reduction in royalties, TSR demoted him to shipping clerk, leading him to quit. (See Empire of Imagination by Michael Witner.) Even if the account isn’t accurate, it probably reflects Arneson’s take.

Gary Gygax (photo Alan De Smet)

From Gary Gygax’s perspective, he had labored for years on D&D. He had turned 20 pages of notes into the original rules. He had bet every cent he could scrape together on publishing an odd, risky game. In supplements and magazine articles, he enriched D&D. He defended it in letters and editorials. His friend Frank Mentzer wrote that for D&D, Gygax “paid the costs in stress on himself, his marriage, family, and friends.” Arneson had only planted an idea.

Gygax wondered why Arneson should get a cut of royalties for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Even while working at TSR, Arneson had given nothing new to D&D or AD&D. “Gygax felt that Arneson was but one of many contributors, and felt that the revenues should go to those who built the company and fueled the D&D boom…himself first and foremost.”

When the AD&D Monster Manual reached print in December 1977, the book gave no credit to Dave Arneson. Perhaps Gygax considered the book a supplement. D&D supplements only credited their writers.

When the Player’s Handbook arrived August 1978, Arneson only gets a thank you among 20 other contributors. The Dungeon Master’s Guide never mentions Arneson. As it reached stores in 1979, Dragon published Gygax’s editorials positioning AD&D as a new and incompatible game. Soon, the TSR catalog featured listings for an “Expert” extension of the basic rules. Before, the basic rules led to AD&D; now they lead to a separate game.

In 1979, Dave Arneson sued TSR for royalties.

From Dave Arneson’s perspective, D&D came from his ideas. He had started with a sort of miniature game that had existed for generations and that appealed to nobody (rounding down). Then he had added the concepts that made a revolutionary game. With some help from Dave Wesely, Arneson invented a game where each player controlled a single character, and where a referee enabled players to attempt any action. With some help from Dave Megarry, Arneson discovered the fun of looting dungeons. Arneson’s fantasy game added characters defined by numeric attributes, and characters who could improve through experience.

Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax each argued that D&D’s success rested on his contribution. Both were correct, but that didn’t make sharing the wealth any easier. The court fight lasted until March 1981. The settlement granted Arneson a royalty of 2.5% of the cover price of core AD&D books. (In 1985, Arneson sued TSR again. His lawyers argued that the Monster Manual II—a collection of new monsters—rated as a “revision” of the Monster Manual. Stop laughing. The court agreed.)

Despite the legal battles, TSR gave basic D&D as much support as AD&D. Early in the 80s, the basic game outsold the advanced version. Even as players in the States started to dismiss basic D&D as a kiddie version, the basic line thrived internationally.

Creatively, D&D thrived too. While D&D played well as written, AD&D suffered from cumbersome rules that most ignored. Also, Gygax treated AD&D as his baby and kept strict control over its products, but when designers worked on basic D&D, they enjoyed more creative freedom.

In 1985, Gary Gygax set aside any animosity left in the wake of lawsuits and approached Dave Arneson to do modules for D&D. Arneson submitted 4, starting with DA1 Adventures in Blackmoor. The series sold well, but Gary soon lost control of TSR. According to Arneson, new TSR president Lorraine Williams “did not want Gary or me involved with TSR in any way anymore. So, no more Blackmoor modules.”

Many tout the Rules Cyclopedia as the best version of D&D ever to come from TSR.

In 1991, the last of the basic D&D product line, the Rules Cyclopedia, reached stores. TSR vice president James Ward later explained that the reasons for dropping the line were “mainly financial ones. TSR didn’t have to give a royalty to Dave Arneson if no product was made for D&D.”

Until 2000, all D&D products would appear as part of the AD&D line. After Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, they dropped the “Advanced” brand for the game’s third edition. In 30 Years of Adventure, Wizards CEO Peter Adkison wrote, Arneson “was supposed to get a royalty off of any product TSR published in the Dungeons & Dragons line. Previous owners ‘got around’ this royalty by publishing everything as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. To me this seemed silly. I talked with Dave, and we agreed that he would release all claims to Dungeons & Dragons if I simply gave him a big check. I did.”

The split between basic and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons showed an unflattering side of Gary Gygax. But that side didn’t last. Gary founded TSR as a passionate gamer eager to collaborate—and share credit—with any fellow gamer in a tiny hobby. D&D’s success fostered an ugly side. James Maliszewski from Grognardia calls this persona TSR Gary. During this era, TSR Gary became a shameless promoter of TSR interests, a scornful dictator whose proclamations often defied common sense. In the early 80s, I saw TSR Gary at Gen Con, rushing through crowds, flanked by an entourage. My memory my be off, but I recall hearing the Imperial March play.

In his later years, Gary grew open and generous. Despite his standing, he always gave time to interact with gamers. On enworld, he humbly acknowledged every grateful fan and answered every question. At Gen Con, I spied him at an open table, behind the DM screen, taking fellow gamers into a dungeon. The man even invited random gamers from the Internet to drop by his house to game.

Sometimes, when I feel cynical, I suspect that people never really change. But aside from working with Dave to give D&D to us, the thing I like best about Gary is that he changed, and for the better.

Basic and Advanced—Was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons a different game? (Part 5)

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Late in the spring of 1976, Gary Gygax started work on a complete revision of Dungeons & Dragons. In Gygax’s TSR office, he and collaborator Tim Kask cut up several old copies of the D&D rules—copies much like the one that recently sold for $22,100 on ebay.

“The first day,” Kask recalled, “We sat with legal pads and dissected the elements of the game into various categories: combat, characters, magic, monsters, artifacts, spells, abilities, and on and on.”

They tacked rules clippings to bulletin boards, sorting them by category. “Then, category by category, we examined the game,” Kask wrote. “We looked for loopholes, inconsistencies and instances of what I’ll call ‘game-illogic.’ We looked at balance issues.” As they tinkered with hit-point totals and with the damage inflicted by weapons and spells, they playtested hundreds of battles.

After seven or eight days consumed by the work, Gygax and Kask produced a plan for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

They planned for three AD&D books that roughly matched the three booklets in the original box set. Men & Magic became the Player’s Handbook, Monsters & Treasure became the Monster Manual, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventure became the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

To actually write the books, Gygax needed years. He wanted hardcovers, but the expense of printing just one title would stretch TSR’s resources. Sales of the first title had to pay for the second, and the second for the third. If gamers chose not to splurge on pricey hardcovers—if they kept photocopying the original rules or if they turned to imitators—then TSR might sink.

Gygax chose to write the Monster Manual first. He figured that current players of the game could use new monsters with few adjustments. Also, the book’s design made writing simple. Every day, between other duties, Gygax would write monsters and throw the stats into a box for employee Mike Carr to collect and type.

When J. Eric Holmes’ introductory manuscript reached TSR, Gygax faced another decision. The new Basic Set would only take characters to level 3. Where should they go next? “Sending them into the morass of ‘Original’ D&D put us back on square one, with all the attendant problems of rules questions, misinterpretations, and wildly divergent play,” Gygax wrote in the March 1980 issue of Dragon. “Would it be better to direct them to AD&D, even if it meant throwing out what they had begun with the Basic Set and making them start a fresh? Faced with a choice between chaos and a clean slate, we opted for the latter.” This explanation comes from 1980, when Gygax had other reasons for claiming that AD&D stood as a different game.

In the summer of 1977, when TSR had a manuscript for basic rules and just outlines for a Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, did Gary plan to create incompatible games?

He made a bid for compatibility. “Pieces and parts of the various components of AD&D were grafted into the Basic Set rules manuscript so that D&D would be more compatible with the Advanced game. Readers were directed to AD&D throughout the Basic Set.” His sales plan for the AD&D Monster Manual depended on players using it in their original D&D games.

But Gygax also expected differences. He and Kask had already tweaked some spells, damage, and hit point numbers. Because the Thief class highlighted the inconsistency where non-humans could treat their race as a class or could adopt a class, Gygax probably planned AD&D’s complete separation of race and class all along.

In a 2005 comment, Gygax wrote that he never intended the Holmes Basic Set to serve as in introduction to AD&D, and that he never intended to meld the two games.  But after decades of saying that AD&D was a separate game, perhaps his claim pushed aside any memory of his original plan. I suspect that if basic D&D had started as something more than introduction, TSR would have released an Expert Set in 1978. Instead, the expert rules came in 1981 when TSR needed them to bolster a legal case.

In the end, AD&D never proved as different as Gygax claimed. His new version of D&D remained roughly compatible with the original. Supposedly, AD&D featured strict rules while original D&D featured room for customization, but everyone—even Gygax—changed and ignored AD&D rules to suit their tastes. Later, Gygax wrote, “I just DMed on the fly, so to speak, and didn’t use the rules books except for random encounters, monster stats, and treasure.”

Next: Why Gary Gygax claimed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a different game

Basic and Advanced—the time Dungeons & Dragons split into two games (Part 1)

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Dungeons & Dragons Basic SetIn the fall of 1977, I found a copy of the blue, Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and devoured the rules. The game electrified me, but one thing also baffled me. The rules kept sending me to ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS for more rules, classes, spells, monsters, and on and on. I wanted to feast on ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS right now—except it did not exist yet. A few months later, the new AD&D Monster Manual reached the hobby shop alongside a “Collector’s Edition” of the original D&D rules. The Monster Manual proved as exciting as the Basic Set, but the original rules puzzled me. Their explanations rarely made sense. What did Outdoor Survival or Chainmail have to do with anything? The old rules wasted pages on castle construction, naval combat, and other things that never came up in the game. At least the box included some higher-level spells. For the highest-level spells, I learned that I needed to buy more books.

The AD&D Player’s Handbook would not reach stores until the next summer. That book collected all the game’s classes and spells, but lacked most combat rules. For those, D&D fans needed to wait another year, until the summer of 1979. Until then, we blended the rules sets, combining the combat system in that Basic Set with the monsters and characters in AD&D with the magic items in the original books.

All these rules mixed together well enough that I failed to notice the seams. When Gary Gygax printed an editorial in the June 1979 issue of The Dragon, his claims baffled me. “ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a different game. Readers please take note! It is neither an expansion nor a revision of the old game, it is a new game.”

After almost two years blending three sets of D&D rules, I could not imagine why Gygax chose to argue this point, but he kept at it.

“It is necessary that all adventure gaming fans be absolutely aware that there is no similarity (perhaps even less) between D&D and AD&D than there is between D&D and its various imitators produced by competing publishers.”

To me, Gygax’s claims seemed silly. Even though his editorial reached me at about the same time as the Dungeon Master’s Guide, my friends kept playing as before. Nobody played AD&D by the book; we picked the rules that suited us.

Years later, I would learn the reasons for Gygax’s puzzling insistence.

Next: D&D’s new audience versus its original rules

Why the Temple of the Frog, Dungeons & Dragons’ first printed dungeon, seemed unplayable

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In the winter of 1977, the Dungeons & Dragons basic set introduced me to the game. Hooked, I sought everything I could find for the game. The new Monster Manual delivered a treasury of creatures—with pictures! The white box gave spells to 6th level, and then Supplement I Greyhawk raised spells to 9th level.

But Supplement II Blackmoor disappointed me. My dungeon had no room for aquatic monsters. Monks broke my notion of fantasy. Assassins invited trouble. A strange dungeon obsessed with frogs stole half the pages. Anthropomorphic frogs belonged in children’s books; not in this daring new game.

I resolved to overcome my bias against monstrous frogs. As far as I knew, no other dungeons were in print, and Temple of the Frog came from the creators of the game. Surely the temple showcased the best of my new passion, and I decided to run it for my friends.

Temple of the Frog begins with pages of backstory. Eager for a peek at an dungeon from D&D’s creators, I skipped past the dense history to the underground’s room key.

So my trouble started on that first level, where the party could easily stumble into an encounter with 200 soldiers, part of an army housed in connected barracks. On the next level, the breeding pool contains over a 1000 killer frogs. Few of these rooms include interesting content, just hordes of soldiers, frogs, and coinage. Even if my players could handle the threats, I saw no way to make it fun.

I kept setting the temple aside and then returning to it, hoping to unlock whatever secrets enabled D&D’s designers to play this adventure. I never cracked it. I did not realize you couldn’t play the temple as a D&D adventure, because it still fit the style of Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign and the Chainmail mass-combat rules that spawned it. Even some of its terminology reached back to Chainmail, with creatures who “take 3 hits” rather than “have 3 hit points,” and trolls who “fight as” ogres.

The temple vexed me, but I had skipped the introduction, so I never even saw the strangest parts. The high priest, Stephen the Rock comes from a sci-fi version of our world. His +3 flying battle armor and +3 shield combine to grant 18(00) strength, 18 dexterity, invisibility, and protection from any magical, mental, or energy attacks. His +3 sword shoots lightning. He enjoys instant communication with 179 ring-bearing henchmen. Blackmoor’s version of Kang the Conqueror has a medical kit that heals any damage short of an anatomical jigsaw puzzle and a communication module that teleports to anywhere on the planet or to an orbital scout ship.

Blofeldpleasance67The high priest is a super villain. The Temple of the Frog exists as a lair fit for plotting world conquest. Like any villain’s lair, this one comes with a messy way of disposing of Mr. Bond and the henchmen who fail to kill him. Rather than piranha, alligators, or laser sharks, the temple’s trap door leads to killer frogs. Add a monorail and Blofeld could move in.

Between his wish-fulfilling gear and ordinary name, Stephen the Rock shows his origin as a villainous Mary Sue.

Dave Arneson’s campaign started as miniature battles with the players taking all the sides, hero and villain. In 1973, he collaborated with Stephen Rocheford to create a nefarious persona for the game. Pronounced Rockford, Stephen’s last name gained him the nicknames Rocky and the Rock, which led to a name for his baddie. Stephen recalls, “Dave approached me to invent an evil character that would be different from the norm in this world. Ergo, I thought and settled on a character that was not of this world of Blackmoor. My inspiration eventually was from an old episode of the original Star Trek television series. In it, Captain Kirk found a planet of Nazi’s and found the earthling, an historian, who founded it in the hope eliminating it’s excesses and organizing this society for the betterment of all in the name of efficiency. I told Dave Arneson and he was delighted.”

“My character was a soldier (I was an Army Officer) who crash landed in Blackmoor with several others from a spaceship. He found a village organized around a group of monks. They and the villagers thought the stranger was a very powerful wizard; in fact he was a man who used a phaser and so overawed the indigenous people that he was proclaimed the High Priest of the Monks of the Swamp.”

Dave Arneson’s friend from the era, Jeff Berry, thinks H. P. Lovecraft inspired the frog theme. “You just had to have frogmen and other servants of the Old Ones infesting the [swamp],” he writes. “It gave the players something to do when they weren’t exploring the dungeons.” Dave’s exact inspiration may be the frog-like deity Tsathoggua, as described by Clark Ashton Smith in his story “The Seven Geases.” Plus, legend says that Dave used a ceramic frog from his mother’s garden as a game prop.

As Stephen’s account continues, he seems like someone playing a character in a one-on-one role-playing session. “I set about to organize a theocracy based on the worship of frogs, which were in great supply in the swamp. These frogs were bred and genetically improved over time until some special breeds grew to enormous size. A temple was erected and an Order of Monks reorganized around this hall of worship.” Stephen’s Roman Catholic upbringing led to the temple’s Catholic flavor, complete with a pipe organ and papal robes.

Eventually, rumors of a secret society in the swamp led the heroes of Blackmoor to investigate, but they came unprepared for a confrontation with the “weird guy in the robes who shot an immensely powerful lightning bolt.” They woke later in the swamp with gaps in their memory.

Blackmoor’s heroes probably never returned to the temple, but if they had, the rules would have changed—literally—to Chainmail and its mass-combat scale. D&D historian Jon Peterson explains, “How could a party of adventurers be expected to assault a temple with twenty men at its gate tower, thirty at its main gate, ten men per corner tower and a thousand guards in reserve in case of trouble? Or to deal with the first level of the dungeon, where a given barracks room might contain hundreds of men? The answer of course is to bring an army, and stage a wargame rather than a dungeon crawl.”

To unlock Temple of the Frog, players needed to treat it as a James-Bond villain’s lair to be infiltrated. And after their spying ran its course, they would need follow Bond’s playbook and call in the commandos, ninjas, or their men at arms. Players needed Chainmail for that endgame.

No wonder this adventure vexed a generation of players.

Next: How did an adventure that did not work as a dungeon crawl—or even work with D&D’s rules—become the first D&D adventure in print?