Poll of the Day > Why is it called Melf's Acid Arrow

(+) Yeah! (+)

Who the heck is Melf

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They are who the acid arrow belongs to.

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helIy posted...

They are who the acid arrow belongs to.

I need more than that if Im gonna return it

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I guess I found it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melf

just some elf nerd

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Wow, his parents just put an m in front of his race name...

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Hi! I'm Elfo!

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PyroBlade1985 posted...

Mhuman
Mdwarf
Mhalfling
Mgoblin
Morc

OK, Morc sounds cool.

nanu nanu

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The mage who created the spell:)

He was a mage elf, or......melf!!!

Best name evar.

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Because it's an arrow, made out of acid, created by a spell, which was invented by Melf.

Hard to get much simpler than that.

A lot of D&D spells are named after the mages who created them. And a lot of the mage names either come from the names of characters that people played in Gygax's original campaign, or were named by later developers (like Snilloc's Snowball is named after Snilloc, which was basically just Collins backwards, because Dave Collins invented the spells, and Jim Ward named spells after the wizard Drawmij).

There are quite a few spells named after Tenser, and that's Ernest (one of Gygax's sons) rearranged. Melf was just "Male Elf" (because Luke, Gygax's other son, was like 5 when he first played, and the part of the character sheet for Sex/Gender was right next to the part for race, so it read like M. Elf, so he called him Melf). Otiluke's another mage named after Luke. Gygax's daughter Elise played Ahlissa, and had a kingdom named after her. Gygax's friends Rob and Terry Kuntz played as Robilar and Terik.

Those were simpler times.

Though Richard Garfield deliberately homaged that naming convention when he made Magic: the Gathering. Most of the Djinn and Efreet cards from Arabian Nights are different people's names spelled backwards or shuffled up, and the card Nevinyrral's Disc is named after Larry Niven.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Hard to get much simpler than that.

okay but Ive never heard anyone talk about this melf character

and why is it still called that even in other campaign settings

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Mead posted...

okay but Ive never heard anyone talk about this melf character

and why is it still called that even in other campaign settings

In the SRD it is just called Acid Arrow. https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/acidArrow.htm

Mead posted...

and why is it still called that even in other campaign settings

Its a legacy name basically. It was called that early on so it kept getting called that across editions of the game. As pointed out, the SRD makes the name generic, as do alternate rules systems related to D&D like pathfinder.

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Would Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound retrieve Melf's Acid Arrow?

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Mead posted...

okay but Ive never heard anyone talk about this melf character

Then presumably, you either don't play D&D, haven't been playing long, or just don't bother looking back at stuff from the past.

You probably don't even know about The Gazebo or the Head of Vecna!



Mead posted...

and why is it still called that even in other campaign settings

Because the D&D reality is a multiverse. Melf's from Greyhawk, but so is Mordenkainen (who was one of Gary Gygax's personal characters). And Mordenkainen's shown up in Barovia (Ravenloft), Faerun (Forgotten Realms), and even Earth (Ed Greenwood used to say that he'd occasionally meet up with Elminster and Mordenkainen and discuss metaphysics).

Basically, magic gets around, so the names get around as well. It's not a case that a dozen different mages invented the exact same spell in a dozen different universes.

Also, the books basically tell you straight up you can rename any spell if you want. And you can always have players who rename their own spells to imply their wizards are pretentious. Like Jim Darkmagic from Acquisitions Incorporated casting "Jim's Magic Missile".
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Then presumably, you either don't play D&D

well I do and have for decades

so neener

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Filthy lies.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Filthy lies.

they treat me like a dinosaur because Im always trying to use 3.5 rules and stat rolls

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I like to confuse friend and for alike by shouting "parkour" just before casting Pass Without Trace.

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WhiskeyDisc posted...

I like to confuse friend and for alike by shouting "parkour" just before casting Pass Without Trace.

My goblin bard used to sing songs to help the rogue with stealth checks:)

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Mead posted...

they treat me like a dinosaur because Im always trying to use 3.5 rules and stat rolls

I still reference a lot of 3.5 terms since that is the system I played the most time under. Still my favorite rule set for character creation.

WhiskeyDisc posted...

I like to confuse friend and for alike by shouting "parkour" just before casting Pass Without Trace.

Not a lot of Jim Butcher fans in your group?

My favorite D&D name gag remains Rary. His player -- another one from the Gygax group -- wanted to make a medium-sized human so that he would be ... Medium Rary.

I doubt he envisioned Rary becoming the James Bond-style supervillain that he eventually became in Greyhawk canon, but there you go.

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I_Abibde posted...

My favorite D&D name gag remains Rary. His player -- another one from the Gygax group -- wanted to make a medium-sized human so that he would be ... Medium Rary.

That wasn't the joke.

In early D&D, every class had level titles. So when you were a level 1 Fighter, you'd be a Veteran, once you advanced to level 2 you'd be a Warrior, at level 3 you became a Swordsman, etc. And the implication is that people in-universe would call you that, so if you meet someone who is introduced as "Vicar Johannes", he's a level 4 Cleric.

One of the Magic-User (aka the proto-Wizard) titles is "Medium". So Brian Blume named his character Rary so that, when he reached that level, he'd be "Medium Rary". And then he never played that character again, so he would be that forever.



I_Abibde posted...

I doubt he envisioned Rary becoming the James Bond-style supervillain that he eventually became in Greyhawk canon, but there you go.

To be fair, Brian Blume kind of deserved it.

He was one of the three co-owners of TSR - Gygax and Don Kaye established the company, but needed a money man investor, and Brian Blume had the cash and was willing to support them, so they made him an equal partner after-the-fact. But then Don Kaye died, and they needed to find someone to buy out his ownership stakes. Brian Blume talked Gygax into transferring Kaye's stake to Brian's father, who later gave control to his other son, Kevin.

So basically Brian and Kevin Blume controlled 2/3rds of a company they didn't establish and for which they didn't actually create any IP. And then they used that control to marginalize Gygax in the company, pretty much ran it into the ground financially, and then vindictively sold off their shares to Lorraine Williams when Gygax tried to force them out to fix things.

Lorraine Williams basically ran the company even further into debt (not helped by the fact that, as many people have pointed out, she never actually liked D&D and tended to pursue more exploitative sales tactics that alienated gamers), until she ultimately had to sell it off to Wizards of the Coast (who had a shit-ton of cash from the success of Magic: the Gathering). Most of D&D's current success was built on WotC's much better management - in the mid-90s, the game was almost completely dead both in terms of sales and popularity.

So if later writers who actually liked D&D and were respectful to Gygax's creation of it wanted to throw in little jabs at the people they saw as responsible for almost killing the company, it's hard to fault them. That actually started before the Blume's sold their shares - at least one artist got in trouble because in one module he drew a multi-headed monster with faces that kind of looked like the Blumes.

It's kind of telling that Rob Kuntz always complained that they made his character Robilar a villain (so much so that later writers actually retconned the whole thing and made it an evil doppleganger of Robilar instead), but always seemed pretty okay with the idea that Rary was probably a traitorous dick.
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Looks like I misremembered the background to Medium Rary. That one is my bad.

And I read about the Lorraine Williams side of that story, but I was unaware of the Blume brothers side. Miracle that TSR survived as long as it did, honestly.

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rjsilverthorn posted...

Not a lot of Jim Butcher fans in your group?

17 books in plus side stories is a pretty hard sell for people with jobs, wives, and kids.

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Wouldn't an arrow just melt if it was made of acid?
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