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Currently On Hiatus: Please Enjoy A New Reader Question Every Weekday!

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Curiously, the monster’s name is imensely familiar with the tabletop RPG public, due to its namesake being one of the most iconic monsters of Dungeons & Dragons.

Your comment resulted in me learning something today, so I thought I’d share.

I always thought that “namesake” meant “the thing for which something is named.” In fact, it is simply “a thing that shares the name,” and I had reversed the meanings of “namesake” and “eponym” (as in “eponymous”) in my mind.

(And of course, this Reader Question also taught me something new, as I thought the Tarrasque was one of the monsters in D&D that weren’t based on any particular real-world myth.)

Note that the mythical creature is the Tarasque (one r) while the D&D monster is the Tarrasque (two r).

The D&D Tarrasque was created by François Marcela-Froideval (FMF), a French comic book writer who worked at TSR during the 1980s and became a close friend of Gary Gygax then.

I’ve been wanting to see this for a while, but could we see an Irish Otter (according to Irish lore the otter is nearly invincible and only has a single weak point just below its arm)?

What would it be like if a Nemean Lion and an Irish Otter both basically dueled each other?

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