Cool,
I am checking out the Wikipedia article now. I recently got a couple of Chalker's novels in the mail and tried starting to read the first one last night, but it was too much of a struggle. Might try again when I am not so tired ;)

Markovian and Well of Souls are the only one I noticed too.

Edit:
[quote=Wikipedia]Mavra and Zinder crashland in the Southern Hemisphere after their ship is disabled while flying over a non-tech hex, [/quote]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiles_at_ ... l_of_Souls

8)


-Havard

I went over the first one this weekend, and even got a good quote with the description of the Well by Chalker (basically, a big magnetic wall), but the pin I had put in the book fell out. :(

Thanks, Aldy - this is one of the key questions: How much literary tradition can really exist in something that is build interactively and more or less spontaneously?

For Gygax, the external authorities were always important, but that's because he had to position himself inside the market.
Arneson didn't have to do that, and so his answer is way more direct.

FWIW, I think the recent discussions on behalf of that, over on OD&D '74, were profoundly misguided: As one user there, "ritt", pointed out, reading too much into it seems sort of contrary to the spirit of the hobby. D&D is "oral literature", but it did not start as a meta-literary exercise, or anything alike. I also don't think it's very wise to think of th St Pauls group as "game designers", as per the modern understanding of the word - or that humor of all sorts was not one of the main goals of their get-togethers. - Actually, I find the thought that these were just a couple of friends who wanted to have a good laugh pretty good; that's the same reason me and my folks get together, after all... :)

Thanks! :) it's one of the reasons why I have mostly withdrawn from that sort of debates, actually. Most scholars - or, rather, internet pundits - in the field seem to critically underestimate the value of improvised storytelling when they talk about gaming - or rather, they ignore it because ignoring it allows them to create more reliable models with specific source material. And while that is convenient, I don't think it's the right direction, at all.

The way more interesting question would be to determine the daily vernacular of nerds in the '70s. You know, what the vernacular, conversational standard was when it came to fantasy literature: Did people know "Conan the Barbarian", and did they refer to him the same way we do, now? - Stuff like that. Much harder to investigate, though.

:)