Adventures in Fiction: Ray Harryhausen and the Look of Fantasy by Brett Brooks Our Adventures in Fiction series is meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page. With Halloween right around the corner, this seems like a perfect time to celebrate Ray Harryhausen. As one of the most celebrated special effects wizards in the history of cinema, his impact on filmmaking goes beyond reproach. Many of the most talented directors of the last fifty years directly cite him as a profound influence, including Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, James Cameron, Edgar Wright, and Steven Spielberg. But what about role-playing games? How did he affect those? We’ll discuss that in a moment, but first, some background. Ray Harryhausen’s career began under the tutelage of another master of cinematic effects, Willis O’Brien. O’Brien is best known as the special effects creator on the original King Kong film, which inspired Harryhausen while he was in high school. He arranged a meeting with O’Brien, took some sculptures of his dinosaurs, and O’Brien kept Harryhausen on his radar from there out. During that same time, Harryhausen became close friends with another creator who would rise to prominence, a writer by the name of Ray Bradbury. During WWII, he served under an aspiring filmmaker named George Pal, who then introduced him to another director working for the military, Frank Capra. Capra recruited him for the SCPC, the Special Service division, helping him make films for the US Government throughout the war. On some of those films—most notably one entitled Snafu—he worked with another up-and-coming talent named Theodore Giesel (better known as Dr. Seuss). After the war, Harryhausen and O’Brien first worked together on the Academy Award-winning Mighty Joe Young. And the rest, as they say, is history. And if his story ended there, it would certainly be enough—but of course, it doesn’t. The visuals and dynamics created by Harryhausen weighed heavily on the minds of others, which evidence indicates included the imaginations of Gary Gygax and the other people responsible for the creation of Dungeons and Dragons. Ray Harryhausen is credited as being the special effects wizard on sixteen films, and all of them...