Maus and Lankhmar

[Havard]

Hehe, thanks, man, and my apologies - didn't want to seem like I was whipersnapping or whatever;
it's just that we need to expand the corpus of our research if we are to understand the setting in all it's depth.

Not at all mate! If you hadnt questioned the conventional wisdom, would we have made these discoveries?

However, the question would likely be, which of this is Arnesonian, and which of this was added by the staff at TSR?

I am not too interested in that actually. IMO Blackmoor was always a shared creation, with contributions from players, publishers, editors etc. But its always nice to examine Arneson's interests, since he is the true creator and at the settings core.

As to Leiber, I've always evaded him; his prose is little above the usual dime novel or bluebook, and his ideas are fairly unoriginal if one knows later fantasy (at least from what I recall).

Not really fair to call them unoriginal when you compare them to works that were published later though, is it? But I see what you mean. I thinking about picking up the comic book version since they apparently are illustrated by Mike Mignola.

His body of work is extensive, though. For our BM-related research, I would recommend we focus on the first eight (!)
anthologies of F&GM, published until 1968.

Thanks! I will keep this in mind

As to how influencial he might have been, just check this cover:

Sweet. We could have both the Frogmen and the Sahuagin right there. Interestingly Froglin and Sahuagin were connected in Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor.

-Havard