Looking at various D&D inspirations this week. First up, Voyage of the Space Beagle, by A. E. van Vogt. This one is a Timescape edition from 1981, but the book has been kicking around since 1950. It is actually four separate stories revised to form a novel. The story we’re interested in is “Black Destroyer,” which first saw print in the July 1939 issue of Astounding.  

The plot: a weird cat-like creature called the Coeurl has hunted the creatures of its planet to extinction and it is starving to death when a human spaceship lands. The highly intelligent creature starts playing, er, a cat-and-mouse game with the crew, killing them one by one. Its plan is to kill off them, steal the ship and fly back to Earth and a new food supply. Things escalate, the Coeurl builds its own ship but gets outmaneuvered and opts to kill itself rather than give the humans the satisfaction. It…isn’t the greatest story (though Isaac Asimov credited it as starting the Golden Age of Science Fiction, so what do I know?).  

The Coeurl, of course, is a big black cat with a bunch of tentacles sprouting from its shoulders – a clear inspiration for the Displacer Beast in Dungeons & Dragons. The basic plot the story, and van Vogt’s next one “Discord in Scarlet” which is basically the same except the creature in question wants to lay its eggs in the ship, were an inspiration for Alien and proved so close that van Vogy collected $50k from 20th Century Fox in a lawsuit.