![]() We dubbed this setting the “Known World,” to imply there was more out there yet to be discovered, because we didn’t want to paint ourselves into a corner. Plus in every land there would be hidden cults that worshiped Lovecraftian Elder Gods. ![]() We also added homelands for the nonhuman races: Orcs, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Lizard-Men, Deep Ones, Kzinti Catfolk, and Barsoomian Tharks, as well as a pirate kingdom, and areas where prehistoric creatures were the norm. We decided to plot out a single giant Pangea-type continent on which there would be fantasy-fictionalized versions of each of the above cultures. We decided we could do the same thing, adapting from historical sources, so our first task was to make a list of world cultures that would be useful templates for fantasy gaming. Howard’s Hyborian setting are based on real-world cultures, simplified and boiled down to their easily-recognized essences - clichés, in other words, but in tropes that were instantly familiar to Howard’s readers. Three early Ballantine Adult Fantasy volumesįor example, all the states in Robert E. ![]() Most fictional fantasy worlds, of course, are based on aspects of our own world and its history. So we knew what we wanted to create: a single world setting that would enable us to simulate the fictional realities of these, our favorite authors. We were both nuts about Clark Ashton Smith, Tom was a Michael Moorcock and Philip José Farmer fanatic, while I could quote chapter and verse from the works of Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. We had both read widely in world history and mythology, and enjoyed a lot of the same fantasy fiction we traded Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy books back and forth until we’d read them all, as well as everything we could find by Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Merritt, Haggard, Harold Lamb, Dunsany, Hodgson, Machen, and Zelazny. He DMed a session, I DMed a session, and suddenly we knew what we were going to create together: a fantasy world setting for D&D. In early ’74 Tom came back from an SF convention with Dungeons & Dragons in its original white box edition. We hit it off right away, and quickly decided we ought to collaborate on something - we just weren’t sure what. I first encountered Tom Moldvay in late 1973 at a meeting of the Kent State University Science Fiction Club. I was delighted to see them, as I thought all of our early collaborative work had been lost to history. ![]() Recently some old friends in Akron, Ohio, turned up a few pages of the pre-TSR homebrew Dungeons & Dragons rules created by Tom Moldvay and me in the mid-1970s. ![]()
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