This is a true story. It happened to my
brother and I, back in 1986. For almost twenty years, though, I thought nobody
else had experienced that thing besides us. It seems pretty obvious now: I was
dead wrong. It happened to LOTS of people.
It was the middle of the winter and I
returned home from the gaming store with the brand new Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play
core book. I was fifteen, and my brother was eleven – but I already ran home
games of AD&D for him whenever I wasn’t at one of my friends’ for some bigger
game. Thus, my brother was already familiar with most of the monsters from Monster
Manual and Fiend Folio. He sat down with me as I started browsing
through the Warhammer book. We were both very excited with that
wonderful new concept of “careers”, but after maybe 45 minutes or an hour, we
skipped to the monsters section – because we loved monsters. And that is
when it happened. Flipping the pages of that monsters section, we got to page
249.
My brother’s breath caught, and he said, “THAT’S
a lich in this game!!??”
I too was gobsmacked. It blew my
fifteen-year-old mind. A huge undead bird-lich? Wow, man! Holy crap!
Turns out, it was all a case of bad editing.
Look carefully at those two pages: on the left-hand side you have Undead,
Carrion, and Ghoul; on the right-hand side you have Liches
(plural), and then the picture for a Carrion (a large undead bird). That
picture should have been put on the facing page, next to the Carrion text, and
the Ghoul and Liches texts should have been on the right-hand page, without
pics.
But our minds were already blown – it was
too late.
Even though that image clearly depicts a
Carrion...
“Physique: Carrion are
skeletal flying beasts, mostly birdlike but with membranous wings and tails,
reminiscent of bats or pterodactyls. They stand about 7 feet high, with a
wingspan of 15-20 feet.”
Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (first
edition) hit the shelves in January of 1986. Ed Greenwood’s article in Dragon
magazine #110 – the very first occurrence of a “dracolich” – was published in
June of ’86. Five months later. That’s fact.
The rest is not fact, but speculation.
Still, it stands to reason that MANY players had the exact same reaction as my
brother (i.e. “THAT’S a lich in this game!!??”). Word got around, and
soon the idea of a “dragon-lich” had a life of its own. Greenwood decided to
write it down; if he hadn’t, somebody else would have.
So the dracolich was a happy accident. Its
unintentional creator was the Games Workshop editor who worked on that book in
1985. Paul Cockburn: that is the name printed in Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play’s
credits under “editing”.
Mister Cockburn, we salute you!