[Blog Carnival] Gandalf was only a 5th level wizard

I was perusing a very old issue of Dragon Magazine (#5, back when it was still called The Dragon) and thought this article perfectly fit the subject of this month’s blog carnival.

Click to see enlarged view.

While this article might at first blush seem a bit tongue-in-cheek, much of it is a serious analysis of Gandalf’s feats and how they lined up with the magic rules defined in OD&D. It even suggests that Gygax & Arneson misjudged the level of various spells.

The article is also quite revealing when put in the context of much of the early material that appears in The Dragon: That is that many people were very focused on D&D as a sort of Middle Earth simulator. There are actually heated debates in some of the letters to the editor about the nature of elves within D&D, in relation to their Tolkien counterparts. You also see a lot of use of the Tolkien IP in games advertised in the magazine, as well as some of the articles published – thus, there are references to “hobbits,” multiple examples of LotR inspired games (including one that is a blatant rip-off of the book’s plot without ever explicitly stating it’s LotR), etc. I’m not sure what the state of the Tolkien IP holders (I assume his heirs) back in the 1970’s but nowadays the lawyers would be having a feeding frenzy over these kinds of things.