Archive | October 18, 2012

“I had spent the previous two days watching about five monster movies on channel 5’s ‘Creature Feature’ weekend, reading several Conan books (I cannot recall which ones, but I always thought they were all pretty much the same), and stuffing myself with popcorn, doodling on a piece of graph paper.”

– Dave Arneson

The Hammer horror films of the ’50s-’60s- and early ’70s were an essential part of the OD&D inspirational corpus. These films – their style, their motifs – had a profound effect on the game’s monsters and, as others have noted, even on some of the player’s roles. The righteous, undead hunting cleric could be based on many of the “vampire hunters” in these classic films. As we return to the original game and its original influences, revisiting these films, in all their glory, is vital.