Creative Origins
Gary Gygax's son Ernie originally had a character he called "Erac", in addition to other well-known characters Serten and Tenser. Later, he created a wizard who, due to a personal issue as part of his backstory, refused to reveal his name, simply referring to himself as "Erac's Cousin". Gary Gygax knew that Ernie liked the Barsoom stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and at one point, whisked Erac's Cousin off to a very Barsoom-like Mars, where the inhabitants refused to let the wizard use magic. Erac's Cousin was forced to become a fighter instead, and learned to fight proficiently with two weapons simultaneously. Eventually he was able to teleport back to Oerth, but when he acquired two vorpal blades, co-Dungeon Masters Rob Kuntz and Gary Gygax decided he had become too powerful, and lured him into a demon's clutches. The demon took him to an alternative plane that drained the magic from the vorpal blades, destroying them.
The profile of Erac's Cousin was published in TSR's Rogues' Gallery in 1980, and Gary Gygax mentioned Erac's Cousin in several articles in Dragon magazine in 1980 and 1981.
When Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR in 1985, the rights to most characters used in his stories and columns, including Erac's Cousin, remained with TSR, and Erac's Cousin was mentioned in further material by both TSR and Wizards of the Coast.
Read more about this topic: Erac's Cousin
Famous quotes containing the words creative and/or origins:
“Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor—because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.”
—Angela Davis (b. 1944)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)