Thread by @ghirapurigears

I want to talk about Giant Space Hamsters for a second.

https://twitter.com/wizards_magic/status/1411038258184785927

Boo, the first hamster in magic, might catch folks who aren't familiar with Baldur's Gate off guard. It's a hamster. why do people care?

And what's with the text on Minsc that allows him to make Boo into a 'giant' hamster?

So first off, let's talk Minsc and Boo. In the game, Minsc is a neutral good human ranger you can get in your party. Sometime in his past he took a bunch of blows to the head and consequently is kinda absentminded

We're not really told much here, but his intelligence score is 9 (where 10 is the baseline +0 modifier, and 18 is the best starting stat) so we kinda get the idea that his egg was scrambled pretty good

Minsc's boon companion is Boo, a hamster that he carries with him. Their signature move is Minsc throwing Boo and screaming "Go for the eyes, boo! the eyes!" to great effect

But Minsc believes that Boo isn't just a mere hamster, oh no. Minsc claims that Boo is a Giant Space Hamster. Miniaturized.

And everyone is like, wtf bro, but also understanding because, well, Minsc is beloved and kind and if he wants his hamster to be a miniature space hamster, it don't hurt none.

but why would he think that? What is a giant space hamster? To answer that, we have to pull way back to the setting's eye view of the entire cosmos of D&D

Brace yourselves, cause this is gonna be complicated for a bit. This story has a bit of Cosmos level 'to make a loaf of bread you must first create the universe' about it.

So back in the beginning of D&D the intention was that there was the default campaign setting of Oerth (greyhawk) for the modules, but that players would naturally create their own settings

One of these players was a young man from Toronto named Ed Greenwood. He started playing D&D and creating stories in places called Waterdeep and Shadowdale, and he began to write articles about this place in the official D&D magazine, Dragon.

Greenwood wrote a *lot*. Like, reams and reams and reams. And his articles were amazing and made the reader think there was a whole ass world here beyond the pages.

So D&D was puttering along, with Greyhawk and The Known World (aka Mystara) as their main campaign settings, and in 1984 Tracy Hickman, fresh off his success of the amazing I6 Ravenloft module, conceives of a world based around Tiamat and Dragons, called Dragonlance

Dragonlance was not the first connected module series, but it was the first to be built with the idea of an overarching plot that the players really couldn't deviate from. Earlier modules had been more sandboxy, with a ton of open room for exploration

Dragonlance instead went with the idea of a full 16 volume modular track that would carry a party from level 1 to saviors of the world, while fighting against the rise of a Dark Goddess in a world where the powers of the divine had long since left, bringing back the spark of hope

It was a singularly amazing and unique experience. Cinematic like the best television serials and pulp novels, and rich and full of characters and heart. It was Light, Good, Hopeful, and Triumphant. It was also very, severely constrained.

Hickman didn't want a lot of the tropes of D&D to be in his series, so there were no orcs, no illithids or beholders, none of the gods and named figures of lore, no halflings (replaced by the childlike innocence of kender), and a much more tightly linked pantheon.

TSR, looking for a new home base to anchor their core modules and act as a default setting for AD&D, looked at Dragonlance, the novels and stories that made it up, and decided that it was amazing and incredible but not open enough to anchor the whole core to.

boy, y'all are in for a long ride today. sorry to your timelines in advance =)

No, i didn't intend to write an entire history of D&D to explain a miniature giant space hamster, but i really did

So, 1986. Jeff Grubb, one of the legendary designers of D&D modules and my favorite dragonlance novel Lord Toede, is looking for a new setting. Greyhawk doesn't work for political reasons between Gygax and his ex, DL doesn't work because it's too squeaky clean

Grubb goes digging through old Dragon issues, and stumbles upon the works of Greenwood. According to lore, Jeff went to Ed and asked "Do you just make this stuff up as you go, or do you really have a huge campaign world?" Greenwood replied, "Yes, and Yes"

Impressed by the answer, and by the acres of text Greenwood had secreted away, TSR chose the Realms to be the new default. It was a HUGE world, epic, open, and full of infinite variety. And unlike DL, FR had blank space aplenty for folks to add or customize to their desires

Enough so that TSR was able to basically import nearly all of Greyhawk into Forgotten Realms wholesale. Folks like Lolth, for instance. But players wanted to know how this worked?

Well, folks, when you have gods and demons and monsters and worlds, how do you connect them? And here comes the notion of the planes to the rescue.

So D&D created a multiverse. a planar system called the Great Wheel. In it there were the Prime Material planes, ethereal, astral, various heavens and hells and elsewheres.

So high level mages and powerful beings could cross through the various portals and passages to get between the worlds. Krynn, because it was *so* different, was sealed off into its own cosmos and unconnected to the great wheel (also because of politics and beef)

This is also why you could have named spells like Bigby's Hand and Tasha's Laughter and whatever all over the place. FR also had more demons and beholders and angels and just openness than my beloved DL, and though i hated it at the time, they were right to pick FR over DL.

So now we're at the end of the 80s. The great D&D scare happens and suddenly angels and devils and evil gods and so forth are reaaaal bad for business, and D&D scrubs them all out. DL, made by the devout Mormon Tracy Hickman, was pretty much pre-cleaned so it escapes scrutiny

Planescape is still a few years out (deeper into the edgy 90s), but the idea of intraplaner travel still appealed to players and designers, and they needed a way to do it that wouldn't raise eyebrows

Jeff Grubb is once again tasked with figuring out a solution. He reaches back to the ancient history of pulp that gave rise to D&D, and comes back with Pirates. Space Pirates.

Suddenly, the planes weren't just independent worlds connected by the astral, they were Crystal Spheres floating in the "phlogiston", a big 'ocean' of flammable something that spanned the multiverse.

Crystal Spheres basically encapsulated everything about a campaign setting- the planet, the stars, the moons, everything, and they floated as islands in the phlogiston. Think hyperspace from Star Control, for instance

and the way to traverse this Phlogiston was through Spelljamming Helms, giant galleons that were captained by spellcasters who could ride the waves of sea and space

Spelljammers, it should be noted, were *fucking rad*

The big bads were Illithids, who flew giant space Nautiluses.

Spelljammer also had the greatest race of any game ever, the Giff. Look at this fuckin' Reginald and tell me you aren't 100% here for whatever he wants to do.

Ok, so Jeff Grubb comes up with Pulp Space Pirate adventures and plops all of the extant settings into the Spelljammer framework. So there's Realmspace, Greyspace, and Krynnspace, among others

Krynnspace, by the way, was immediately declared non-canonical by Dragonlance, because it immediately broke *all* of the rules of things that made DL unique, and brought in stuff we had strictly kept out.

And in spelljammer and planescape canon, the designers struck back by calling Krynn a desolate backwoods full of ignorant scrubs that no one wanted to go to anyway. Petty inter-office squabbles that gave fodder for fandom wars for decades =)

And it should be noted, Jeff Grubb was also intimately familiar with DL, and wrote a bunch of shit for them too, so he knew exactly what he was doing =)

But as far as the Realms and Spelljammer was concerned, Krynn was fair game. So what did that mean?

Let's go back to the 70s for a second, and talk about D&D's races. We had humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, half-elves, half-orcs, and gnomes. So basically Tolkien plus gnomes. And Gnomes had kind of a weird identity that never seemed to click

Elves had the forest magic stuff down, dwarves were the underground stocky fighters and crafters, halflings were thieves, half-orcs were bruisers, so what did gnomes do? Well, uh, they basically talked to badgers.

Gnomes in base D&D were kind of a joke that didn't have a punchline. No one could figure out what they were here for, and Tracy Hickman in his reimagining of D&D decided he wanted to fix that

Orcs were out because they were basically stale enemies and all over the place, halflings were out because Hickman hated the idea of a race that was literally just typecast as thieves and amoral burglers, and gnomes...well

Dragonlance was unique in that alongside the modules existed a novel line that told the same story, so that players could play through the books they read

And part of that meant that DL had a deep and well developed world before the modules even came out so that the novels would have something to work with

So the team at TSR, which was Tracy, Margaret Weis, Jeff Grubb, Doug Niles, Harold Johnson, and others who would go on to be known as the luminaries of the hobby, sat and tried to figure out how to fit as much D&D as they could into Tracy's world

and Jeff Grubb, the actual hero of our story, had been a civil engineer before his life as one of my all time favorite designers.

Grubb and Hickman and Niles sat and worked on what to do about the various core ideas. This gave birth to Draconians, the magic system of colored robes, the pantheon, kender, and in a flash of insight, a race of flustered civil engineers whose projects always did weird shit.

this race would go on to change the face of gaming forever, because they created an archetype that went on to be used as *the* template for gnomes in western gaming. These were the Tinker Gnomes of Krynn. Hydrodynamics!

Gnomes were no longer lithe little forest dwellers who sang songs to burrowing mammals and wore pointy red hats. They were now a race of tinkers and inventors, folks who were cursed with a drive to create and innovate and forever develop, but never get it to work.

Their inventions were Rube Goldberg monstrosities, steam driven nosehair trimmers and lava powered automatic carpet cleaners that also made toast.

Here, for instance, are the pages detailing gnomish device construction from the Dragonlance Adventures sourcebook

So, we end up with this amazing race of mad scientists who build insane inventions that have all sorts of unintended consequences, and they're an immediate hit. So much so that even the Realms ends up slowly changing their gnomes to being more tinker inventor types

You might be more familiar with their expression in another rather popular game

Fast forward back to spelljammer. Jeff Grubb is trying to make an interplaner universe, and of course he goes back to his roots and grabs the most perfect D&D race for a spacefaring adventure possible, the Tinker Gnomes

The Gnomes were naturally a magically resistant race and the traditional spelljammer helms, driven off of arcane power, didn't work for them. So, in true gnomish fashion, they sent it to committee.

After lengthy arguments, explosions, and inspirations, the gnomes came up with the perfect design. A big wheel tied to their thrust engines. It worked for water mills, right?

How do you run the wheel? Well, originally they decided to grab teams of gnomes to run together, but this had problems, namely that the gnomes kept getting tired asynchronously and would either trip their companions or get flung out of the wheel and crushed in the gears.

The gnomes went back to committee. What kind of passive animal could they use to run, in a wheel, for a long time?

hmm. HMM.

Selective breeding and years of painful research led the gnomes to create a breed of rodents that were perfectly content to run in giant wheels for hours at a time.

These Harnessed-Astronomical-Mammalian-Semisentient-Transportation-Enabling-Rodents, or HAMSTERs for short, were immediately bred to the size of bears and set to work

They also provided, and this is canonical, a food source that spread through the multiverse called Space Hamster Meat, or Spaham.

Eventually though, TSR decided that space pirates floating through glop with giant hamsters and British Hippos being chased by angry squid men was maybe a bridge too far, and lacked a centralized hub for PCs to congregate in, and so they created Planescape and shelved the Jams

But in Ed Greenwood's Realms, nothing is ever forgotten, nothing is ever too much. And those space gnomes and their rodentia gigantus found their way to lore and legends of Faerun.

And at the campaign table of Bioware designer James Ohlen, a mentally unstable ranger with his pet hamster Boo was born, finding his way into the first major D&D video game in decades, Baldur's Gate. And from there, Minsc and Boo became heroes of our hearts and games.

And now, twenty something years later, we can once again commence Butt Kicking for Justice! Go for the eyes, Boo! The Eyes!

and with that, our journey through the planes comes to an end. A final quote from our hero to send us off.

"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right Boo?"

CODA- You know who else Jeff Grubb created, and told the story of? magic.wizards.com/en/articles/ar…

(i came up with the acronym but it is absolutely the kind of bullshit a tinker gnome would do)
((i adore tinker gnomes))