I did "Nuthin" Wrong

Creating pulp-y monsters for fun and profit

When I created Midwest Fantasy Wargame: The Primeval RPG, I wanted to get back to the Appendix N roots of the hobby. Even though Appendix N is a Gygax thing (allegedly), we know that Arneson consumed monster movies on TV and at least the Gor novels by John Norman. One thing that has always bothered me in D&D is the hyena-like Gnolls. Great monster concept, but completely disconnected from the Appendix N roots.

The first version of Midwest Fantasy Wargame relied solely on Dunsany’s story. (Cf. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, Book of Wonder, “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles,” William Heinemann, London, November 1912, available at https://biblioklept.org/2015/04/16/how-nuth-would-have-practised-his-art-upon-the-gnoles-lord-dunsany/).

Thus, my monster description looked like this:

And the stat block was Gnoll, AC 5, MV 9”, HD 2, AL Chaos. Gnolls do appear in Arneson’s FFC on p. 30 as a wandering monster on the 2nd and 3rd levels of Castle Blackmoor™’s dungeon with AC 5 (recall Arneson’s armor class scale goes from first class AC 1 to worst class AC 8) and with 6 or 7 Hits to Kill (most likely the average of rolling 2d6, i.e. they have 2 Hit Dice). Arneson also had a magic sword table on FFC p. 46 that referenced “Hobgoblins and Gnolls” as Chaos type creatures. Gnolls do not appear on the wilderness encounter matrix on p. 23.

In OD&D LBB#2 p. 3 Gnolls are also listed as having AC 5 (which should actually be AC 6 due to the offset in Gygax’s AC 2-9 system), movement 9”, and Hit Dice 1+1/2 (weird!). The description on LBB#2 p. 8 is also interesting as it, too, mentions Hobgoblins along with misspelling Dunsany’s title.

For the 2nd edition of Midwest Fantasy Wargame, I found another story about Gnoles written by Margaret St. Clair. St. Clair is another Appendix N author. I have read both of her works cited in Appendix N and they did not impress me as much as her short homage to Lord Dunsany. (Cf. Margaret St. Clair, The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles, 1950 as republished in David G. Hardwell (compiler), Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, Longmeadow Press, Stamford, Connecticut, 1993, pp. 259 - 263, available at https://archive.org/details/masterpiecesoffa0000unse_e7p2/page/258/mode/1up.)

I liked her homage so much, I decided that this short story should also be “canon” in the implied setting for Midwest Fantasy Wargame. Thus, my revised monster description reads as follows:

By the way, if anyone has not seen a Jerusalem artichoke, you may be in for a rude shock. This Gnole looks NOTHING like a hyena. (Photo by H2ase - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24805030.)

Your players may not be prepared for the horrors that await them in the dungeons and untamed lands of pulp-y adventure.

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Originally published on Substack on April 11, 2026.