Creation
In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax was playing Chainmail, a wargame that bore some precursors of Dungeons & Dragons. In order to give his players as many different challenges as possible, Gygax was always on the look-out for new monsters. Although he was able to draw on pulp fiction and sword and sorcery stories for many of them, he also looked through dime stores for figurines that could be used in battle. On one of those occasions, he came across a bag of small plastic toys euphemistically labeled "dinosaurs". Several of these were odd enough to catch his eye, and he used them to represent several new monsters, including the bulette and the owl bear. One of the figurines looked like an absurd lobster with a propeller at the end of its tail, and Gygax could think of no fearsome powers for such a monster. After some thought, he came up with the amusing idea that this non-lethal creature would not attack characters in order to eat them, but rather to eat their hard-earned possessions.
- When I picked up a bag of plastic monsters made in Hong Kong at the local dime store to add to the sand table array ... there was the figurine that looked rather like a lobster with a propeller on its tail ... nothing very fearsome came to mind ... Then inspiration struck me. It was a "rust monster." —Gary Gygax
Read more about this topic: Rust Monster
Famous quotes containing the word creation:
“There’s something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)