Canonfire!

Sun Feb 22, 2009 7:07 am Rary the Medium

OK, this a silly question:

Gary Gygax told the tale that when Brian Blume created his magic-user PC, he named him "Rary", because he could combine the name with the level title "Medium", and called his PC the "Medium Rary".

So.

Maybe, because I'm french, I don't grasp the point : is there a pun or something like that ? What is supposed to be with "Medium Rary" ?

Thank you to explain me this mystery for a foreigner.

Sun Feb 22, 2009 8:07 am

It's a pun on "medium rare," which is a way of cooking meat. According to this Wikipedia article, the French equivalent is a point.

"Rary" is pronounced like "rare-y," rhyming with the English words "scary" or "berry," and sounding like the English word "rare."

Sun Feb 22, 2009 11:09 am

and in portuguese is "ao ponto". :D

funny how fisrt time i heard GH name i thought that they were silly.

now i think they are cool..

things you learn from time

Sun Feb 22, 2009 9:40 pm

Funny topic! Ah those were the days. As we've seen in more recent Greyhawk eras from the reviled 'joke' Castle Greyhawk to the more serious themes of Carl Sargent and Living GH, they could not possibly get away with the silly characters and place names that EGG and friends did.

Medium Rary. It's weird. Having been familiar with that character for so many years I forgot about that origin and have always taken his name seriously.

Sun Feb 22, 2009 11:25 pm

By the way, I've always found it difficult to name a PC when creating it.

In my group, we have a lot of silly named PCs.

Mon Feb 23, 2009 5:29 am

Yes my one hope is that these silly names sound better to our foreign players. It's the excuse I always use for justifying the Grand Duchy of Geoff - it probably sounds really cool in French. Please don't shatter that illusion.

Mon Feb 23, 2009 6:12 am

Oh yes, The Grand Duchy of Geoff sounds really "medieval" in French - Le Grand Duché de Geoff.

It makes me think of "Geoffrey" an old Firstname misused nowadays...

... and what does it means in your language?

Mon Feb 23, 2009 6:38 am

It means "Geoffrey," the same as over there. I had a friend in high school whose name was Geoff (short for Geoffrey), so that was "his" country. His PC, Uvoigpo (speaking of silly names, we used to randomly generate ours), was supposed to be from there.

Mon Feb 23, 2009 9:49 am

Are you all saying there's no place in GH for the Celestial Empire Of Wayne?

Or, the Royal Dukedom Of Clive? Shocked

Such a lack of imagination. Happy

Mon Feb 23, 2009 10:11 am

Mon Feb 23, 2009 10:58 am

Mon Feb 23, 2009 1:46 pm

We generally mix words of something on hand (such as a text book) and then chop them up a bit:

Thus "Advanced Math," became "adv/ anced math".

Mon Feb 23, 2009 10:51 pm