A blog about hobby gaming, in particular tabletop RPGs.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
What is in a name?
I was reading over the Faces of Evil supplement for Planescape last night and I was reminded of house TSR had decided not to call the demons and devils by those straight forward titles to avoid the whole hysteria about how D&D got kids into cults and whatnot. They instead used the names ta'nari and baatezu. While it has no impact on how any such creatures got used in play, it made the fluff different. In hindsight, my take is that this wasn't all bad and giving the creatures alien sounding names for their races is kind of cool. I like how in 3rd edition they pretty much made use of both the plain titles (to organize them in the monster manual) and the fancier TSR ones and even used those names to distinguish between different categories of demons for instance. What do you think?
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It really didn't make much of a difference at all because everyone playing continued to refer to those creatures as demons (or daemons, haha) & devils anyway. Whatever moniker you choose they still made great villains that were begging to be obliterated by magical fire or cold steel. Umm, why aren't we gaming right now? I look back so fondly on the days role playing at the coffee table in my parents living room after school. Nothing will ever surpass that in my book.
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