Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!newsfeed.xs3.de!ereborbbs.duckdns.org!.POSTED.p4fc72407.dip0.t-ipconnect.de!not-for-mail From: Kyonshi Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd Subject: Land of the Lost and DnD Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2024 22:20:01 +0200 Organization: Erebor InterNetNews Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: c3066ed76bae8bcc0e476efb157ff758 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2024 20:20:02 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: ereborbbs.duckdns.org; posting-host="p4fc72407.dip0.t-ipconnect.de:79.199.36.7"; logging-data="23685"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ereborbbs.duckdns.org" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 3056 Lines: 37 My son got really into Land of the Lost (1974) despite it's atrocious greenscreen effects. At least the claymation is actually decent. Funnily enough the series shapes up to be much more well-written than I remember from my childhood. I think the German dub I watched it with might have had something to do with that. I wonder how much it shaped fantasy roleplaying as a hobby, because it came out at exactly the right time, just around the time Dungeons and Dragons came out, and it has all the proper tropes of a weird scifi-fantasy game: There's a weird pocket dimension of lizard people, apemen, dinosaurs, and aliens. There's a lost city with an eldritch god lurking in the tunnels below. There's a psionic lizard sorcerer/scientist, weird artifacts, yetis, unicorns, and confederate soldiers hiding in caves. There's a subgame of figuring out useful combinations of crystals to create effects. (although the way they keep forgetting combinations they already used until the next episode is a bit stupid) It feels like someone just threw everything at the wall and looked what stuck, which likely is exactly like the series came to be. One just has to look at who actually wrote the series and the conclusion they just raided a local science fiction convention for writers: Walter Koenig, Larry Niven, Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad,... There was some A-list science fiction talent involved in writing this, and the worldbuilding of the first two seasons is quite amazing. Less so for the third one where one of the main actors got replaced and they forgot how some of the established laws of the world actually worked. It occurs to me that this is one of those series that definitely shaped the way people played the game, but which wouldn't have taken into account for e.g. Appendix N because it was out of Gygax' own experience. But Arneson said the whole idea of the first fantasy campaign came about with a bunch of old horror movies, and the whole idea of the monk as a class was due to the success of the Carradine Kung Fu series. It might be interesting to see what stuff did actually shape the hobby back then