History
In their current form, templates were first introduced to the Dungeons & Dragons game in the Third Edition Monster Manual and since then numerous templates have appeared in each new monster supplement, and often in the monster sections of other rulebooks.
Technically, the earliest template introduced for use with the AD&D game system - quite different than those currently in use with the Third Edition game - was published in the First Edition game's Dungeon Master's Guide, which features tables to aid in the "random generation of creatures from the lower planes". Subsequent other First Edition handbooks, notably the Monster Manual II, as well as Dragon Magazine, featured additional early monster generation templates.
Read more about this topic: Creature Template (Dungeons & Dragons)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)