Who wrote the Fiend Folio? F-K

Continuing to investigate the people who created the monsters in the best monster book.

Name	#	Monsters	Author Notes
Ferguson, Mike	5	Algoid, Ice lizard, Tiger fly, Trilloch, Vision	Publisher and editor of early UK fanzine Illusionist’s Vision. A couple Traveller articles in early White Dwarf. Many credits in various rpg product lines: d20, Pathfinder, BRP, Rifts, WFRP 2e, DCC.
Fiore, Albie	12	Berbalang, Carbuncle, Caterwaul, Dragonfish, Firenewt, Giant strider, Grimlock, Quipper, Sussurus, Vodyanoi, Yellow Musk Creeper, Zombie (yellow musk)	From RPGgeek.com: “Albie Fiore (c. 1946 in Southend-on-Sea, Essex - July 28, 2009) was a London game designer who was a long-standing editor of the regular Fiend Factory column in the Games Workshop Ltd. magazine White Dwarf, the editor of the magazine Games & Puzzles, and a compiler of the London Guardian's cryptic crossword. He co-authored the book Rubik's Puzzles and was known for composing puzzles and crosswords. He also worked as a contributor to the television show The Crystal Maze, a writer and researcher of children's comic characters such as Scooby Doo, an antiques dealer specializing in slot machines, and a chef on private yachts... He died at age 63 from complications from a lung tumor.” Also one of the designers of the Judge Dredd rpg and codesigner the Games Workshop ‘dungeon planners’ Caverns of the Dead and Nightmare in Blackmarsh.
Goodwin, Jeremy and Ian McDowell	1	Babbler	Jeremy Goodwin has several contributions to the zine Trollcrusher. Illustrator for module O2: Blade of Vengeance. UPDATE: Commenters have suggested that Jeremy Goodwin is the same person as Jes/Jez Goodwin, who illustrated CM6 When Chaos Reigns and has done art for Warhammer 40K. Ian McDowell will get his own entry in a later installment.
Graver, Trevor	2	Galltrit, Needleman	Multiple articles in the UK Traveller zines Dark Star and Alien Star. Some White Dwarf articles. One piece in the zine Illusionist’s Vision. An adventure in issue #10 of Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society.
Gygax, Gary	9	Booka, Demon (Lolth), Elf (drow), Jermlaine, Killmoulis, Kuo-toa, Mezzodaemon, Nycadaemon, Svirfneblin	Never heard of him.
Gygax, Luke and Gary Gygax	1	Bullywug	Luke is co-author of a variety of D&D/AD&D/Castles & Crusades adventures, probably most notably The Lost City of Gaxmoor. He also was one of the designers of the classic Gamma World adventure GW1: Legion of Gold along with his dad and Paul Reiche III.
Hall, Ronald	1	Terithran	Inventor of two AD&D oddities: the Attack Priority System (Dragon #71), the land dragons (Dragon #74).
Hellman, Stephen	2	Pĕnanggalan, Revenant	No further info available.
Hitchcock, Cricky	2	Gorilla bear, Xvart	Desert Raider, another monster in White Dwarf #12.
Home, Stephen	1	Lizard king	No further info available.
Jackson, Dermot	1	Bunyip, Meazel	No further info available.
Jones, Jonathan	3	Garbug, Volt, Witherstench	No further info available.
Kernohan, Hugh	1	Eye of fear and flame	Articles in early Scottish zine Underworld Oracle.
Key, Andrew	2	Gorbel, Imorph	Contributed to an issue of UK zine Demonsblood.
Korabik, Peter	1	Meenlock	No further info available.

RIP Albie Fiore

Who wrote the Fiend Folio? A-E

The cover of the original 1981 Fiend Folio says "edited by Don Turnbull." The monsters inside were written by seventy different people, half of whom contributed a single monster. I rarely think about who wrote my favorite Fiend Folio monsters. Who are these folks? Do they have other credits in the hobby? I've decided to try to find out. Here are my first batch of results.

Name	#	Monsters	Author Notes
Asbury, Brian	1	Xill	A.k.a Brian K. Asbury. Frequent contributor to the early UK zines Chimaera, Demonsblood, Trollcrusher. Several articles in the early days of White Dwarf, including an early Barbarian class (the first published?) and the infamous Houri class. Short story in issue 9 of Imagine. Kindle short story collection Purple Parables.
Atkin, Chris	1	Troll (spirit)	No further info available.
Barnes, Mark	2	Snyad, Thork	No further info available.
Boschelli, Louis	2	Devil dog, Giant (mountain)	No further info available.
Bowman, Ghee	1	Rothé	Now in the history department of the University of Exeter. Author of The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of Dunkirk.
Brown, Peter	1	Gryph	Other rpg credits appear in 90’s UK mags perChance, Valkyrie, and Role Player Independent. Some credits in Wargames Illustrated. Had a blog focusing on miniatures for a couple of years. Possibly the same Peter Brown who wrote the recently-published The Army of George II 1727-1760: The Soldiers who Forged an Empire (From Reason to Revolution).
Bulger, Brendan	1	Osquip	His monster the Greenmen (D&D stats for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ style green martians) appears in White Dwarf #27.
Chilman, R.K.R.	1	Ogrillon	According to an old school yearbook available online, this fellow was maybe 15 years old when the Fiend Folio was published. Not bad!
Cole, Russell	1	Troll (ice)	No further info available.
Donohoe, Jim	1	Lava children	Contributor to 3 issues of early UK zine Trollcrusher.
Eaton, Simon	2	Coffer corpse, Witherweed	Another monster of his, the Stormbiter (a sandstorm man), appears in White Dwarf #19.
English, M.	1	Clubnek	No further info available.

Hail Britannia! Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Britannia is one of my favorite 4-player board games. The map is the British Isles. One game covers the Romans to the Normans, with each turn playing out the movements of whole peoples into and out of history using very simple mechanics. Lots of fun and genuinely educational. And it spawned an array of similar games. I've player History of the World a few times, but none of the others. I'd love to try Maharaja, which applies the same concept to India. 

The designer of Britannia is Lewis Pulsipher, who is one of those people that doesn't always get the credit they deserves for their contributions to the early days of the gaming hobby. Not only does Pulsipher have several board game credits, but he was all over the early D&D scene. You can find multiple articles penned by him in Dragon, White Dwarf, Imagine, Different Worlds, and Adventure Gaming. I'm sure his work appears in other places that I am forgetting at the moment. He also has credits in the original Fiend Folio (a.k.a. the best monster book), supplying the world of AD&D with the bat (giant), the denzelian, the poltergeist, and the friggin' Elemental Princes of Evil! Surely inventing Cryonax, Prince of Evil Cold Creatures is worthy of entry into the D&D Hall of Fame. Just look at the guy!

If you don't think Tentacle Yetis
are cool, then I honestly don't know
why you're reading this blog.

Anyway, all this is a preamble to an idea I had for a new Britannia-style game. The game covers the entire pre-history of life on earth, as viewed through the lens of the Cthulhu mythos. Instead of factions consisting of Romans, Picts, Angles, Belgae, etc., they would be Elder Things, Flying Polyps, Mi-Go, etc., mixed in with the appearance of megafauna such as Inostrancevia, Tyrannosaurus, Smilodons, and such. The other gimmick would be that the map would change as the game unfolded.

Obviously, this would be easier to accomplish in a computerized version, but you could swap boards provided you had a clear system for annotating positions before each board swap and each map had analogous territories.

never memorize fireball again

I was googling something unrelated and stumbled across this nice Carjacked Seraphim post called Spontaneous Wizard Magic. Spontaneous clerical casting was introduced in 3E, if I recall correctly. The idea was that you didn't need to load up all your spell slots with various cure wounds spells. Instead, you could burn off any memorized spell and turn it into dice of heal. 

Jim at Carjacked Seraphim nicely applies that logic to magic-users. I think he is writing for 5e, but I actually think his concept would work at least as well for old editions. Assuming you don't mind the raw power this gives MUs. I'm kinda mulling over how it would work in a Basic/Expert game where the hard spell book limits were enforced. I.e. a second level MU could have at max two first level spells in his book, but if he was, say, an enchanter, he could turn any spell into Charm Person on the fly, whether he had that spell in his book or not.

Now you jerks will really fear my wrath!

here's a neat chart

Villains and Vigilantes was one of the great superhero RPGs from the period before the release of official Marvel and DC games in '84 and '85 respectively. Written by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee and illustrated by the latter, V&V had a lot of good stuff going for it. Unlike it's #1 rival Champions, V&V used both level mechanics and random generation. As a kid I though that made the point-buy based Champions the better game. But nowadays I look back at the period where I played a lot of Champions and wonder what the hell I was thinking spending so much time fiddling with all that math when I could have just rolled up some weirdo and started playing. (The short answer is that I liked the company of the people I played with, which trumps a lot of other considerations for me.)

Anyhoo, you can buy a bunch of V&V at drivethru these days. I think Jeff Dee has continued to revise the system but under different titles. I recall he had out a rulebook called Living Legends ten or fifteen years ago and I think Mighty Protectors is a more recent incarnation of V&V. But I don't know much about either of those. Today I wanted to share a chart from the second edition back in the day. This chart can be used for randomly determining the level of anyone the PCs encounter:

Need to know the level of the supervillains opposing the party? Just throw 4d6 and cross reference with the highest level on the team. This chart could be used in a D&D-type game easily enough to generate NPC parties or things like that.

The rules note that to use this chart for thugs and henchmen divide the result by five and round up. (This could result in a situation where the master villain of the scenario is 1st level but their right hand goon is 2nd, 3rd, or 4th level. That could be a fun dynamic to see play out.) For civilians divide by ten and round up. 

One other weird bit of trivia about V&V: although it would be super easy to begin character generation by throwing 3d6 five times for your PC's Strength, Endurance, Agility, Intelligence, and Charisma, the rules actually come with guidelines on how the GM should rate each of their players in this regard! I.e. the assumption was that you played a version of yourself in this game, only with superpowers. The only other game I know like that from back in the day is Timelords by Greg Porter. (Not to be confused with Time Lord, which was a licensed Doctor Who rpg.) I normally think of Greg Porter as the mind behind the delightfully schlocky Macho Women with Guns line, but he has a load of other rpg credits on top of that.

Die and die again

As I mentioned back in January, the main gaming I've been doing over the last year has been Tunnels & Trolls solos. Sitting around a table with folks has felt like a health hazard, while my entire job moving onto Zoom has reduced the appeal of online gaming. But I got my second dose of the magic juice today, so maybe I'll get back to a tabletop game sometime soon.

Meanwhile, I have killed a lot of characters in various T&T dungeons. Here are just some of the deaths that survive in my recent notes:

• Hundfric the Bold - killed by bloodbats
• Tandok the Soggy - gnawed to death by giant rats
• Rikulf the Dim - slain by a bored troll
• Nelatu One-Hand - turned to stone by a giant floating eye
• Kundrag the Exile - shivved by an Elvish gambler in a tavern
• Oon the Outlaw - murdered after getting drunk with a wench
• Gorp Scroggin-Schmogle - fell in a duel with a necromancer
• Myrric the Slayer - walked into a room full of lava and died
• Humot of the Blue Mountains - drowned by a giant octopus
• Rankin of Khazan - soul trapped in a painting forever
• Viktor the Shark - cut down by two undead knights

I've killed dozens more poor pitiful adventurers than just those listed. Very few have made it to second level before their untimely demise. Nelatu One-Hand up there is my only PC so far to achieve third level, although he lost his left hand to some very nasty monkeys prior to his unfortunate petrification.

Some things I have learned making all these T&T characters in batches and getting most of them killed:

• I don't mind sending waves of these poor bastards to their deaths, so long as the death isn't boring.
• I've lost a lot of PCs to bloodbats, which appear in multiple T&T solos. I'm getting to be like Samuel L. Jackson and snakes, only vis-a-vis bloodbats.
• One of the reasons I don't mind losing so many PCs is because I genuinely enjoy rolling up new characters. Sometimes I use the random function in a spreadsheet to roll up a ton of stats for a bunch of dungeon fodder, but sometimes I just roll dice 3d6 in order. Either way, I enjoy seeing the adventurers that emerges from random generation.

  

  Truth in advertising: You start
  the adventure butt naked.

• Also, all of those deaths really add a sense of accomplishment when you get a PC through an entire adventure. In my notes I have 17 PCs that I sent into the adventure Naked Doom. Only 3 made it out alive. I didn't stop at one success because I wanted to find out if there were multiple nonlethal end states. There's at least one branch of the adventure that I still haven't full explored.
• Despite my love of making characters and sending fourteen-seventeenths of them to their deaths, I've been repeatedly reminded how much I dislike buying equipment for new PCs. It just feels like a chore, especially for the seventh goon in a row you've sent into Buffalo Castle or Deathtrap Equalizer Dungeon or whatever. And in T&T you can't just buy every fighter a sword (normal) like in Basic D&D. Every weapon has a Strength and Dexterity minimum, so you need to look at the extensive weapons lists to find a weapon that you can both use and afford.
• As a result, I am drawn to T&T adventures that do the equipment selection for me. That's how I got on a such a Naked Doom trip. The premise is that you have been convicted of a crime in the city of Khazan and condemned to a trip through their punishment dungeon. You begin the adventure with no equipment or clothes even. No thought needed. Just lots and lots of deaths. Then there's Goblin Lake, in which you play a goblin equipped with a flint dagger, a ragged loincloth, and a little net suitable for catching normal-sized frogs. Gorp Scroggin-Schmogle above is one of the two goblins I got through Goblin Lake in one piece.
• There's also a couple of modules that come with a completely pre-made PC. Beyond the Silvered Pane and Sea of Mystery both come with pre-made, fully-equipped 2nd level rogue that you can name and let loose on the adventure. I haven't played them much though, as starting at 2nd level feels a little like cheating.

Goblin Lake features both a great
Liz Danforth cover and the excellent
Bluebeard font.