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From: Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd
Subject: Land of the Lost and DnD
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2024 22:20:01 +0200
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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