#steve marsh

Terminal Mind - Sense Of Rhythm

Throughout the years that TSR published D&D and AD&D as separate game systems, the company often didn't explain the distinction clearly. By 1981 D&D wasn't simply a "basic" intro, it also allowed a complete campaign to be played through the highest levels of character progression, including building and managing a stronghold, while accomplishing this in a much more compact rules format.

* Long Live Rock Archive

Always fun to eat with two great guys like Steve Marsh and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten to talk some business and catch up in general. (at Counter Cafe East)

In a book that already has various giant eels and blood-sucking giant leeches, two kinds of lamprey hardly seem necessary. Why bother? I have a theory. The lamprey and its giant cousin might be the most midwestern monsters in the entire Monster Manual. How so? I got two fancy Latin-type words for you: Petromyzon marinus. The parasitic sea lamprey has been spreading through the Great Lakes fisheries since the mid 19th century, and helped to wreck native fish populations in Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior in the 1930s and 1940s. Mentions of the sea lamprey in Wisconsin newspapers* jump from 8 in the 1930s to 122 in the 1940s, peaking at 370 in the 1950s and staying at well over 100 through the 1970s. Efforts to control them with electricity, poison, and barriers were tried. The lake trout population collapsed, in part due to sea lamprey predation, and alewives took over. It's easy to imagine the Gary Gygax heard about the sea lamprey invasion growing up in Chicago and Lake Geneva during the Forties and Fifties, just as I did in Michigan in the Seventies. Given that, the lamprey seemed like a particularly midwestern menace to me, something that would never have made it into the Monster Manual if not for the game's midwestern origin. Would D&D have giant hallucinotoxic cane toads if it had been invented in Australia, I wondered. Or hordes of locust-like swamp nutria if it were from Louisiana? Unfortunately, my whole cockamamie theory founders on a crucial fact: The lamprey is probably a part of D&D because of Steve Marsh, whose notes for an elemental plane of water were adapted for the Blackmoor supplement. Marsh is thanked by Gygax in the preface to the Monster Manual "for devising the undersea encounters which originally appeared in BLACKMOOR, as I have radically altered them herein." Steve Marsh grew up in Las Vegas. Shoot, call that the one that got away. Eel's well that ends well. * That link probably won't work without authentication; try your library to see if they offer access to the NewspaperARCHIVE database (assuming you are for some reason desparate to read grainy scans of articles about gross fish). Lamprey David C. Sutherland III Gary Gygax, text Monster Manual Of further interest: Don't think the Great Lakes' sea lamprey problems are over, either. While the quagga mussel currently rules the watery desert of Lake Michigan, the sea lamprey is resurgent in the warming waters of Lake Superior. But don't call it a comeback. "Evolutionarily primitive, [lampreys] are hard to kill", as is noted in Blackmoor.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPFQrYX3zQs)