dungeons-and-dragonshistory-of-gamingmagic-items
While looking over the rules for Ioun Stones a question came to mind. What inspired the Ioun Stone?
It is present in nearly all editions of D&D, and also made it into Pathfinder. This Pathfinder part intrigues me, as it indicates that the Stones and the name were probably heavily inspired by an outside source. What was that source?
There's an episode of the 1970s Kolchak: Night Stalker series that includes a shapeshifter called a rakshasa. It also involves a vulnerability to blessed crossbow bolts/piercing weapons, which isn't part of Hindu tradition (I think Ravana, greatest of the rakshasas, was actually killed by a round thrown weapon called an asthra). Here's a summary of the episode.
Gygax confirmed the inspiration in a forum Q&A post in 2005:
I was a fan of Kolchack, the Night Stalker, when it first aired, and sure enough they had a rakshasa as a monstrous evil on that show. I liked the idea of the demon being destroyed by a blessed wooden crossbow bolt, that being akin to the stake through a vampire's heart, so I went with that in the MM.
Nowadays I'd be less prone to allowing so easy an answer to the threat of a rakshasa, although not many adventuring parties are equipped with a crossbow and blessed bolts.
Cheers,
Gary
And that's all most sources will give you, because they're drawing from an article (Ed Greenwood's "Ecology of the Rust Monster" in Dragon #88, later quoted by another article of the same name in issue #346) which is actually about the rust monster, and only passingly mentions the owlbear. In fact, the original quote is so vague it's hard to tell if they actually mean to say the owlbear shares the same origin as the rust monster (a plastic toy).
But Tony DiTerlizzi gives us photos of the actual toy which inspired this freaky creature, and so here it is, the original owlbear:
It comes from a pack of early 1970s cheap plastic toys depicting "prehistoric animals," most of them entirely made up. Look, you can see the bulette and the rust monster, too:
The origin of these toys is from Hong Kong, where they made these toys to resemble monsters from the 1960's famous UltraMan TV show. source
Best Answer
The Ioun Stone comes from Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, which is where the "fire and forget" spell casting of D&D came from too, as well as some of the spells such as prismatic spray. The stones are harvested from the core of neutron stars that are being sliced away by the Nothing at the edge of the universe and are therefore rare and difficult to obtain. Their origin is dealt with in the story "Morreion" in the collection Rhialto the Marvelous.
They were introduced in The Strategic Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 10 (Winter 1975; no author given, although there is a reference to Vance approving the design/inclusion and I know he and Gygax corresponded) and first made their way into the rulebooks with the original DMG, as far as I can see.