Octopus Overlords

So Monte Cook just posted a link to the final battle from a Vincent Price movie called the Raven. He had this to say:

If you want to know where D&D's magic missiles come from, it's right here. (I'd take a guess that a few other D&D spells were influenced by that too, but I only know for a fact about magic missile.)

Link to the video
https://youtu.be/GKm7NloL8bA

Theres spoilers in that video!

True, if you plan on watching the whole movie, then maybe skip watch it

I think I saw a Prismatic Spray in there too.

That was the cheesiest and most anti-climactic wizard battle I have ever seen.

I remember another movie that must have been done at around the same time (it had the same sort of effects and I'm pretty sure Vincent Price was in it too). There was a whole deal about casting spells with just motion and not having to say anything. Sometime near the end someone they thought was down makes gun fingers and shoots the crap out of some other wizard. It was a much better interpretation of what I thought Magic Missile would be like. None of this movie's hand-wavy shoo fly garbage!

So were the Magic Missiles the ones that were shaped like daggers? Or the ball things that exploded? I assume they were the daggers, because it looked like he used a shield spell to block them.

And why didn't they include a "Summon Cannon" spell in the game? Best Spell Ever!

I've always seen Magic Missile as looking like the glowing super-balls from Hawk the Slayer.

By the way, if you did not notice, the man with the Raven on his shoulder (watching the battle at around 2:12) is a very young Jack Nicholson.

And Boris Karloff

I thought it was from the 50's short story "Mazirian the Magician", which I started recently, but never finished.

Lots of D&D spells in that.

It could be, just taking Monte Cook's word here. He was involved in D&D enough and had enough contact with Gyax and Anderson that I will take his word for it

Most of the iconic D&D spells had their roots in translating war game stuff to a squad-based fantasy tactical game. For example, lightning bolt acted like it did originally (a line which bounced off walls) because it used the rules for cannons, while fireball used the rules for catapults. Those two examples are straight from Arneson's mouth, for the record.

Also, the reason we use d4s, d8s, d10s, and d12s is because Gygax and Arneson could only get dice as complete sets for use in their beginner box. There was no real market for dice outside of gambling (which used d6s exclusively) and dice used for teaching math and statistics, which were sold in sets.

Zurai wrote: Also, the reason we use d4s, d8s, d10s, and d12s is because Gygax and Arneson could only get dice as complete sets for use in their beginner box. There was no real market for dice outside of gambling (which used d6s exclusively) and dice used for teaching math and statistics, which were sold in sets.

and the battleaxe arbitrarily caused 1d12 damage because the dodecagon die was (extremely) underutilized in the game.