This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we crack open an ur-Monster Manual, Ernst and Johanna Lehner’s 1969 A Fantastic Bestiary. Essentially a Dover clip art book (and reissued by Dover under a different title) with some light historical context, there are textual clues that seem to indicate it was an important reference work for Gygax and company. And I think it might have partly inspired the idea of a highly illustrated hardcover book of monsters!
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Love the show! Stu’s shout-out to Daniel Cohen took me back to my 1970’s childhood when I read every Cohen book our public library had. (About 5 or 10, as I recall.) I thought Stu’s list of Cohen titles was going to appear on this webpage? Anyway, keep up the good work!
I forgot to link them in the show notes, but the Cohen bibliography is in the sidebar, which you have to scroll down to on mobile. The brief essay on monster manias should be top of the Essays!
Stu:
For lists of works by published authors I always turn to the Library of Congress and their website. They have a great search engine that lets you quickly find published works with ISBN numbers. They have 193 published works listed for Daniel Cohen so not the 200+ you mentioned in the podcast, but it’s going to get 98 percent of the way to a complete listing. Check out: catalog.loc.gov
Maybe they have 1 or 2 listings that you didn’t find elsewhere.
Good call, awesome resource!
Friendly correction: Qi-lin is the Chinese name for the Ki-rin. It is “kirin” in Japanese. I don’t know that much about the monster but I know there isn’t really an “el” sound in Japanese.
Yup, I garbled my thoughts. Kirin is the Japanese version of the Quilin. The important part, which might not come through at all, is the hyphen! That appears in the Bestiary and Eldritch Wizardry/Monster Manual, but not anywhere else I have been able to find.
Stoked for your forthcoming monster book!
Thanks guys, drawings of old monsters rule. Stu, if you want to know the history of wer-sharks let me know.
Do you think the Rakshasha appears in the Monster Manual because of the Night Stalker T.V. show.
The Rakshasa is 100% from the Kolchak episode. I just started re-watching the series and my suspicion is that quite a lot things from Kolchak filtered into D&D.
Is the wereshark not originally from Maze of Peril? …wait a minute…I just noticed your last name. Any relation J. Eric Holmes?