On the cusp between "first wave" and "second wave" of
AD&D rule books, the first printings included the
Cthulhu mythos, the
Melnibonean mythos, and the
Nehwon mythos, all of which had to be pulled from later printings because they ran into
copyright issues. Of little use in "normal" gaming, the
DDG gave
game stats for each
deity. Now gamers could answer such burning questions as "
Can Nyarlathotep beat up Loki?"
DDG was a favorite volume of my AD&D collection, despite its relative uselessness. First, it helped establish
culture in ways that other core reference works did not, with its
comparative mythology approach. Second, I loved the
art. I even made enlargements of some of the more outlandish deities (
Yog-Sothoth springs to mind) and carefully colored them with magic marker, back when I had access to a
photostatic camera.