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:
“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
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Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
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—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)