François Marcela-Froideval

Greyhawk Creator

François Marcela-Froideval
François Marcela-Froideval
Nationality:	French
Born:	10 December 1958, France
First Greyhawk work:	Oriental Adventures

François Marcela-Froideval is a French role-playing game creator, video game producer, and comic author. He is an author and co-author of some early D&D books and former assistant to Gary Gygax.

Writing in Role-playing Games

Froideval, appearing at a signing with his Black Moon Chronicles hardback.

François Marcela-Froideval was born in 1958 and started writing around the age of 15. He studied law and literature, and started getting involved in mind games, war games and role-playing in France in the late 1970s with the Jeux Descartes club.

Froideval had a major influence on the introduction of role-playing games in France, mainly as editor-in-chief of the Casus Belli role-playing magazine. He also created the Federation of Strategic and Tactical Simulation Games, of which he was the president.

He left for the United States in 1982 to join TSR,inc., where he worked for four years. His writing contributions include several Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules books and monster manuals in collaboration with Gary Gygax, like Oriental Adventures.

In 1986, Froideval would return to France, and oversaw the distribution and translation of TSR products in France until 1989. He wrote the scenario of several French videogames, working for Infogrames (Drakkhen) and Cryo Interactive (Dragon Lore series).

He currently writes scenarios for the Black Moon series, spin-off series, and other French comic series.

He was one of the three authors who established the French term for a "munchkin", Gros Bill, from the nickname of an overly powergaming player once in Froideval's group.

Black Moon Chronicles

In 1989, he wrote the first Chroniques de la Lune Noire or "Black Moon Chronicles" comic album with illustrator Olivier Ledroit, and the serie sproved to be enormously popular in France. He kept writing that volume until the end of the series in 2008, after which a second volume and several spinoffs followed. The reason this is significant is the names of the nations he used in the first volume of the series (books 1-14) were later canonized as part of Western Oerik on the Sutherland map of the World of Greyhawk™ found in Dragon Annual #1 (1996). The nations were created while Froideval lived and worked with Gary Gygax at TSR, inc. While those names were canonized on that map, nothing more was ever done with them in officially published sources, for the most part. Those included the Empire of Lynn, Tharque and Tharquish Dominions, Ishtarland, the Elvanian Forest, Kingdoms of the Marches, Elven Lands, Erypt, and the Gulf of Ra.

Froideval dedicated the Black Moon Chronicles series to Gary Gygax in the last issue of Volume 1, End of Times (Nov 2008), with this dedication:

{quote|

Cette série est dédiée à E. Gary Gygax, le premier grand rêveur, l'inventeur du jeu de rôle, celui sans qui l'heroïc-fantasy et la science-fiction ne seraient a l'heure actuelle qu'un genre mineur presque oublié. À ce géant discret qui a fait rêver des millions de joueurs.
A mon maître, a mon ami. Puisse-t-il éternellement vivre dans les univers qu'il a patiemment tissés.
In loving memory.

}} {quote|

This series is dedicated to E. Gary Gygax, the first dreamer, inventor of the role-playing game, without whom the heroic fantasy and science-fiction genre would only be today a minor, almost forgotten genre. To this quiet giant who made millions of players dream.
To my master and friend. May he live forever in the universe he so patiently built.
In loving memory.

}}

External links

• Francois Froideval at Dargaud (publisher) website (in French).
• Francois Froideval at Lambiek Comiclopedia (Lambiek.net).
• Francois Froideval at Bedetheque (in French).
• Francois Marcela-Froideval: Pen & Paper RPG Database. Pen-paper.net. Archived from the original on March 3rd, 2019. Retrieved on 14 January 2023.

References

Citations