Gygax Adventures: Tolkien Towns and Moorcock Dungeons

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

That was the more or less acknowledged convention in BECMI D&D as well - although IIRC in the original brown/white box editions the Elves were part of the "chaos" faction list.

Huh. My copy of Chainmail says that elves are neutral. My copy of Men & Magic has them either lawful or neutral, but it's one of the revised editions that talks about treants and halflings, and thus published after the Tolkien estate got on their case; I don't have the original edition.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Huh. My copy of Chainmail says that elves are neutral. My copy of Men & Magic has them either lawful or neutral, but it's one of the revised editions that talks about treants and halflings, and thus published after the Tolkien estate got on their case; I don't have the original edition.

Don't have it personally, but I recall an ur-grog showing screenshots on YouTube video - think it's the same one that has the pumpkin head bugbears...

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Huh. My copy of Chainmail says that elves are neutral. My copy of Men & Magic has them either lawful or neutral, but it's one of the revised editions that talks about treants and halflings, and thus published after the Tolkien estate got on their case; I don't have the original edition.

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Don't have it personally, but I recall an ur-grog showing screenshots on YouTube video - think it's the same one that has the pumpkin head bugbears...

Unlikely. The pre-publication draft of D&D has elves in the Law and Neutral columns of the alignment chart. If elves did appear in the Chaos column in some printing of D&D, it would have been an error.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Unlikely. The pre-publication draft of D&D has elves in the Law and Neutral columns of the alignment chart. If elves did appear in the Chaos column in some printing of D&D, it would have been an error.

At least in the old games. 3.0 had elves as Chaotic Good, in contrast with the lawful good dwarves.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

See also the D&D modrons, that look like Gary gave up on dime store plastic monsters and started gluing legs to his spare dice and the Slaad ... where apparently the infinite variety of chaos expresses itself entirely as a small range of colour coded frogs*.

I always had the feeling that Charlie Stross invented the Slaad back in the days of early D&D, when "Chaotic" was just "Evil (or maybe a bit more so)", and so just tagged them with the one word. Then Don Turnbull transcribed that one word straight into the print manuscript of the original Fiend Folio, and after that precedence was set. (Ditto the Githzerai, who were a human-derived race of monks, despite that monks always have to be Lawful.)