Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/11/frazzetoid-otus.html
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Does it scale up?
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This stuff makes me happy. My father spends all day in retirement going over spread sheets. I hope to be 3D printing miniatures and painting them (and hopefully making/playing various games).
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Depends on your campaign. A certain campaign set in Wilusa featured direct intervention by deities with the possibility of mortal heroes fighting them and even defeating their avatars.
Anyway, Erol Otus FTW. I had the second edition, but coveted a friend’s 1st, especially for the Moorcock mythos. I wonder what those go for these days…
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I used it as a resource for creating campaigns. After all, nothing gets people killing each other like religion.
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Good for him if he’s happy. Perhaps the sheets are arcane spells or rituals that he uses to venerate the god Nasdaqus or prevent TYO from manifesting materialy in this plane.
So you plan to spend part of your day going over sheets of statistical data? And the difference is?
I’ll be there with you for a time, looking at character sheets for hours on end, memorizing data, plotting character growth. We’ll look at numeric data, make calculations and think of the possibilities. I still have my first figurine bought from a company that I would later work for and is now long gone. The local library has 3d printers, and I think we would have spent a lot of time on TinkerCad free making objects for our games. We did fairly well with pen tops, bottle caps, rocks and the occasional unpainted figurine.
Wait, retirement… I’m never going to retire.
Plus, I am also fairly sure down the lien that I’m going fail a saving throw vs. death with a large penalty due to health care coverage while battling the recycling bins. (I look up and as my youngest attempts to climb bookshelf with one shoe while carrying a toy recycling bin and a ribbon. It’s a prophecy now.)
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That’s just sweet!
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You have children? I hope you are teaching them how to survive in the coming post apocalyptic hell scape. Me I’ll be in underground lair painting minis.
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Hey, I have that book. Unfortunately the back cover is damaged.
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In the pantheon of TSR book covers, IMNSHO it can’t hold a candle to the original Player’s Handbook cover by Trampier:
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A great use of tumblr now that it is tamed
Behold! The Erol Otus Shrine
http://jrients.tripod.com/otus/otus.html
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What was the old one called? Gods, Demigods & Heroes? That one was useless too, but cool.
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That’s the one that need a 3-d model.
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“and a more valid copyright claim over the use of Elric of Melnibon mythos”
From Jim Ward of TSR
Deities & Demigods
I’m going to print this out once a year for the rest of my years. I absolutely hate it when ignorant people say TSR/me acted in copyright infringement for the Melnibonean and Lovecraft sections of the book.
When I was given the assignment for that book I listed the various pantheons that I wanted to use. Gary noted that maybe the Lovecraft and Elric sections might be a problem. He gave me the Arkham House and Michael Morcock addresses and I immediately wrote them explaining what I was doing and asking for their permission to include their material. Wonder of wonders I got two letters back giving me permission to use their work. I foolishly gave those two letters to the lawyers at TSR. They might still be in some lost file at Wizards. I would kill for them now.
Anyway we printed up the book and it sold great. We then got a cease and desist letter from Chaosium. I don’t blame them a bit, however they didn’t know about the two letters. TSR would have won a court case hands down. However, the company wasn’t rich at that point and Brian Blume didn’t want to go to California, get a California lawyer, and spend time and money winning the case.
I went nuts because I had done way more than I was supposed to in clearing the way for those two licenses used in the book I wrote. I even offered to write two more pantheons free of charge, but the Blumes didn’t want to bother. I fumed for years.
Now, when people talk on line about TSR in copyright violation it presses my maximum angry button. Maybe some of my facebook friends can pass along this word as time goes on so that my blood pressure levels can say in the normal range.
Now this might seem like a rant and it is. However, when people say TSR was in infringement they are calling me a plagiarizer. I consider myself a very honorable man. I would never, ever steal material that was not my own. I will not put up with that moniker. Thanks for listening.
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I loooved Dieties and Demigods, I had frankly forgotten all about it, but the cover gave me flashbacks! And The Monster Manual of course!
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I read that book cover to cover many times when I was a wee one. It wasn’t directly useful in any of my campaigns, but I did learn a lot about mythology and the gods.
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There’s a pretty good summary post over at David Hartlag’s D&D blog.
Long story short: Arkham House and Moorcock are probably the parties that screwed up (the former because it doesn’t seem to understand how something could be a game and a book, the latter because he granted granted permission without consulting his agents). The only recourse for Chaosium would be to sue them, which makes for a bad business relationship. TSR compromised by graciously thanking Chaosium for their “permission”.
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Pretty much what James Ward has said on other occasions, when speaking on the subject in depth.
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