Older Than They Think / Tabletop Games

• Much confusion has resulted from Blizzard Entertainment's popular Warcraft franchise being heavily "inspired" by Games Workshop's comparatively obscure Warhammer tabletop war game. A new round of this ensued when a Warhammer MMORPG was announced with, unsurprisingly, more than a few similarities to the mega-popular World of Warcraft prompting this Penny Arcade strip. In fact, the similarities are so close that there are persistent unfounded rumors how Warcraft started as a Warhammer game, but Blizzard couldn't gain Games Workshop's support and dropped the IP (and Warcraft has moved quite far away from Warhammer Fantasy Battles a while now).
  • Naturally, both drew on others as well. Warhammer Fantasy took from Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons.
  • One of the odder names in the 40k lore is that of the Primarch Lion El'johnson, of the Dark Angels chapter of the Space Marines. This is actually a Genius Bonus: The real Lionel Johnson was a poet, whose most recognized work — The Dark Angel — is all about the pain of his struggle between his homosexuality and his devout Catholic faith. Given that the DA's backstory is all about how half of their brotherhood fell to Chaos, and that the Imperium is Super-Catholicism on steroids (complete with its own Inquisition), you do the math.
• The similarities between StarCraft and Warhammer 40,000 are likewise often cited as the source for their comparisons; in truth both were created independent of each other. They did however draw from the same sources, like Heinlein, Dune, and Starship Troopers.
  • In addition to this, the whole concept of Warhammer 40,000 was initially a parody of grimdark settings in general and Warhammer Fantasy in particular. Unfortunately, the joke was so subtle that many people reveled in the dark and serious atmosphere of the new game, and somewhere along the line even the writers seemed to forget that the Imperium were not supposed to be the good guys. This had the unfortunate result of attracting bigots and neo-fascists who thought they were in good company.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The displacer beast (a catlike monster with tentacles sprouting out of its back) is based off of an alien called Coeurl from A.E. Van Vogt's short story Black Destroyer (later compiled into the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle). So are the "coeurl" enemies in the various Final Fantasy games (although they've generally got elongated facial barbels rather than back-tentacles), and Mughi from Dirty Pair. Perhaps ironically, the displacer beast is not included in the open game content.
  • It's common for people to assume that the D&D "gorgon" is a case of Sadly Mythtaken, as it (a metal-scaled bull with petrifying breath) bears very little resemblance to the gorgons of Greek myth, and the more classically-styled gorgons are named "Medusas." However, the idea is actually much older than D&D, with the bestiary History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, published in 1698, describing a very similar creature. The writer apparently identified the mythical gorgon's traits with those of the catoblepas (a bull-like creature native to Ethiopia with poisonous breath), and theorized that they were the same creature or closely related—hence, the "gorgon", as shown off in the book, is essentially a composite of the two myths. The only real changes made for D&D were removing its bowed head and changing the poison breath to petrifying breath.
  • The illithid are also counted as "product identity" and you can get sued for using them... Gygax got the idea from a creature on the cover of Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath, which was, needless to say, inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's most famous character, Cthulhu.
  • The meenlock is a direct lift from the 1973 film Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.
  • The D&D "frost worm" is identical to a wormlike monster fought by Conan the Barbarian in his original adventure novels — specifically the short story "The Lair of the Ice Worm" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The remorhaz, as evidenced by its name — the original Conan Ice Worms were also known as Remora — draws inspiration from the same source.
  • Xill are based off of Van Vogt's Ixtl (right down to the very similar name), which can be found in the same anthology as Coeurl.
  • Some 4th edition versions of the vampire that do not die in sunlight, including the class, have been accused of ripping off The Twilight Saga, even though Dracula didn't die in sunlight either.
    • Most folk vampires were capable of being active in the daylight. They were simply unable to use their powers or were weakened.
    • Even within D&D, sun-immune vampires had been part of the CD&D rules since the introduction of the nosferatu variant, and the Ravenloft setting had them ever since AD&D 2nd Edition.
  • Tarrasque, often considered a D&D invention, is a medieval mythical beast. It had to be pretty popular if there was even a type of cannon named after it, but it simply wasn't used as often by fantasy authors as griffons and dragons were. Ditto for catoblepas and the dragon turtle.
  • It's assumed that since 4th-5th edition added so many playable races (plenty of which being traditionally "monster races"), that it was the first module to really allow players to play something non-human or a "monster race". Except that fan favourite races such as tieflings and Drow were originally "monster races". Splatbooks giving non-homebrew stats for playing as a "Monster PC" have existed since Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
  • 5th edition added "Leonin" and "Loxodon" to Dungeons and Dragons. These were actually from Magic: The Gathering - not made up for 5th edition.
  • And finally, the game itself has been played since the Seventies, and has since then managed to exert its influence on both video gaming and fantasy literature.
• Some newer gamers complain that Magic: The Gathering rips off Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Magic was first printed in 1993, Pokémon in 1996, and Yu-Gi-Oh! in 1999; in fact, the card game of Yu-Gi-Oh! was clearly a Bland-Name Product version of Magic upon its introduction.
  • Magic was not the first Trading Card Game; a baseball card company published rules to a game you could play with baseball cards...in 1904.
  • In June 2020, Wizards declared that overtly racist or offensive Magic: The Gathering cards would be banned from all sanctioned play, and the art scrapped from their website. This is not new; for example, they did a similar "purge" for Fourth Edition in 1994-1995 in which they stopped printing and created soft bans (e.g. no longer legal in Standard) for cards with questionable content. Examples include banning cards directly dealing with demons (e.g. Demonic Hordes), or have questionable art (e.g. Earthbind, where there was a naked female that had translucent wings, bound BDSM-style). Also one card, Unholy Strength, was bowdlerized: older editions up to Revised had a pentagram in the background; Fourth Edition onward did not.
• The first modern wargame (i.e. close simulation of a real battle with set rules of conduct) was "A Tactical Wargame" designed by Lieutenant Georg von Reiswitz in 1812. It was actually not a pastime but an educational tool for officers. It also featured a modular board (that looked much like modern "Carcassonne": http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-42723-2.html), arbiter (gamemaster), multiplayer mode (up to 10 players) and both constant (tables) and random (dice) elements.
  • The first truly recreational wargame, designed for that purpose, was published as Little Wars by H. G. Wells in 1913.
• Players of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game think that the concept of "hand-traps", as they are commonly called (as in cards, usually monsters, that a player can activate from his hand during his opponent's turn, like Honest, Maxx C, and Effect Veiler), is a relatively new concept that started in the GX-era with Honest. In truth, there are a few that appeared before that one, and even Kuriboh, a card that was included in one of the first available boxed sets, has an effect that qualified.