Posted inFiction Games Mythology

“Dungeons & Dragons” — The Hypnotic Side

When Dave Arne­son showed Gary Gygax the new game he and his friends were play­ing, it prob­a­bly did­n’t occurr to either that they were on the brink of cre­at­ing not only a new game but an entire­ly new type of game, result­ing in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new gam­ing industry.

Dave Arne­son took the tra­di­tion­al minia­ture game, where minia­tures rep­re­sent­ed groups of indi­vid­u­als and start­ed using them to rep­re­sent indi­vid­u­als. He also added the ele­ments of char­ac­ter class­es and expe­ri­ence lev­els, allow­ing for char­ac­ter spe­cial­iza­tion and growith. This was a rev­o­lu­tion, in that play­ers could project them­selves into the char­ac­ter, devel­op­ing them over time and play. Since both he and Gary Gygax were avid mina­ture ship game play­ers, he shjowed Gary his game and togeth­er they cre­at­ed Dun­geons & Drag­ons.

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Posted inFiction

The “Lensman” Series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith

[amtap book:isbn=1568658044]

[amtap book:isbn=0739402625]

Descrip­tion: The “Lens­man” series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith is one of the clas­sics of the pulp era of sci­ence fic­tion. A bat­tle between Impos­si­ble oppo­sites, with whole civ­i­liza­tions as pawns and coun­ters in the game. There are bat­tles in space between fleets so large they dwarf whole solar sys­tems, weapons so immense as to stag­ger the imag­i­na­tion, and crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies that cov­ered galaxies.

Yet at the cen­ter of the series was the bat­tle between the sup­port­ive men­tal giants of the plan­et Arisia and the con­quer­ing Eddo­ri­ans from anoth­er uni­verse. The Arisians find the Eddo­ri­ans too tough to take on them­selves, but find their relent­less phi­los­o­phy of con­quest unpalat­i­ble, and resolve to oppose them. To that end, the Arisians began a slow, mil­lions of years long project to pro­duce the men­tal pow­er need­ed to final­ly elim­i­nate the Eddorians.That tale, told in var­i­ous stages, makes up the sto­ry line.

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Posted inCartoons and Anime People

“Warriors of Illusion”

His­to­ry: The name ‘Jack Kir­by’ is be one that every comics fan should imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize: the artist behind the cre­ation of some of the most rec­og­niz­able comics char­ac­ters ever, such as Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, the Fan­tas­tic Four, the Incred­i­ble Hulk, the Uncan­ny X‑Men., as well as draw­ing just about every major comics char­ac­ter in exis­tence for just about every comics com­pa­ny around. He was called Jack “The King” Kir­by and “The King of Comics“1 and deserved ever acco­lade giv­en him.

But there was a time when he was­n’t work­ing in the comics indus­try. Dis­af­fect­ed with both Mar­vel and DC, he went to Hol­ly­wood and worked for the Ruby-Spears ani­ma­tion com­pa­ny, where he helped cre­ate the visu­als for such ani­mat­ed series as “Thun­darr the Bar­bar­ian” 2 and “Mis­ter T” 3. But that was­n’t all he did: he cre­at­ed a large set of pre­lim­i­nary art­work for a num­ber of oth­er char­ac­ters and groups which have not seen the light of day until recently.

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