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Where to go if you had question for Jeff Directly


Cmiller

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Where would i go if I had a question to Jeff, our humble creator of the awesome games will played. I just wanted to ask him where he got on of the names for one the races in avernum. Specifically the Nephilim. Nephilim is used somewhere else. Perhaps that is where he might have gotten it. Or it could just be mere coincidence that he made it up himself without knowing.

 

Anyway yeah, can someone tell me.

 

Cmiller

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You could email him. But it's well established, I think, that "Nephilim" was essentially cribbed from religious texts (books of Moses, specifically, according to Wikipedia). Since biblical Nephilim are generally interpreted as giants or titans and there is no mention of cats at all, the name is apparently the only thing they have in common.

 

Edit: Whoops, Google sent me to some aggregated copy-pasta on Yahoo Answers containing the unsourced claim that

 

Jeff Vogel, designer and programmer of the games, has said that he invented the name for this race independently.

 

If you do email him and get an answer, please do post it to settle the matter. ;)

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One reason for people to have heard the Biblical Hebrew 'nephilim' was that Dragon magazine used to have a regular feature in which characters from well-known works of fantasy fiction were represented as D&D characters, with levels and stats assigned. The feature was titled, "Giants in the earth." The title didn't seem to make much sense. Most of the characters described didn't even live on Earth, let alone in it, and nor were they giant. But if anyone was curious enough to try to look up the phrase in any reference book — this was before Google, kids — they might learn that it came from a cryptic verse in Genesis about a never-afterwards-mentioned race of demi-gods who were 'the heroes of old'. The term 'nephilim' comes from that verse — it's what gets translated as 'giants'. It's not actually clear whether the nephilim are the heroes of old, or just contemporaries of them.

 

Anyhow, anybody into RPGs in 1980s might well have run into the word 'nephilim' in this way.

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Now the big question is: why hasn't jeff put "mice-men' in any of his games. Imagine the possibility for comedy, overshadowed by a serious conflict.

 

There are rat-men in, I think, The Za-Khazi Run in BoE/BoA. I know in BoE there's a monster graphic and a dialogue graphic depicting a rat man. I'm pretty sure there's no nephilim nearby though.

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