Where's the American Fantasy RPG?

L. Frank Baum's Oz series established American Fantasy as a genre, and yet it hasn't had much influence on popular tabletop role-playing games despite several fantasy authors providing the inspiration for co-creator Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons. Why not?

L. Frank Baum's Oz series established American Fantasy as a genre, and yet it hasn't had much influence on popular tabletop role-playing games despite several American fantasy authors providing the inspiration for co-creator Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons. Why not?

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

American Fantasy Defined

As described in The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, the tenets of American Fantasy include a contrast between real world struggles and a fantasy land (Kansas vs. Oz), the Garden of the World set in the midst of the Great American Desert (Oz), and pastoral qualities that encompass the heartland like corn fields, crows, wildcats, and field mice. Baum's Oz is different in character but similar in texture to American agrarianism.

There is technology too, always at the cusp of becoming ubiquitous, with objects taking on a life of their own. Baum was uneasy about the impact of technology on society: concerned about the impact of "flying machines", worried about what would happen to premature children in "incubators", and wary of slick-talking characters using gimmicks and puppetry (the titular Wizard of Oz). Judging by the abuse Baum heaps on an animated phonograph, he wasn't a fan of recorded music either.

As Brian Attebery puts it in The Fantasy Tradition:

"Oz is America made more fertile, more equitable, more companionable, and, because it is magic, more wonderful. What Dorothy finds beyond the Deadly Desert is another America with its potential fulfilled: its beasts speaking, its deserts blooming, and its people living in harmony."

Gygax and Dave Arneson were following a European tradition, itself descended from historical battles of interest in Chainmail, infused with their own American influences, such that little of Oz appears in D&D. At least not overtly.

Ozian Elements in Plain Sight

Jack Vance's influence on D&D is significant. From the "Vancian" spellcasting system to the Eye and Hand of Vecna, Vance's work permeates the game. Vance was a big fan of Baum's work and cited him as a major influence. One character recreates the Land of Oz in The Madman Theory (written by Vance under the pen name Ellery Queen), but Baum's influence goes beyond that work and appears in the Dying Earth series, as explained in Extant #13:

"...I speculated that the Phanfasms inspired the village of Somlod, as seen through the lost lenses of the demon Underheard (Cugel the Clever), and that Sirenese society, in The Moon Moth, was inspired by the Whimsies. Among the scarce commentators on Vance there seems little interest in the Baum influence, while influences which are minor or even nonexistent are often emphasized, such as Clark Ashton Smith."

Cugel, whose adventures take place in The Dying Earth setting, has more in common with the Wizard of Oz than Dorothy of course, and his adventures would go on to form the thief archetype in D&D, as per Gygax:

Of the other portions of the A/D&D game stemming from the writing of Jack Vance, the next most important one is the thief-class character. Using a blend of “Cugel the Clever” and Roger Zelazny’s “Shadowjack” for a benchmark, this archetype character class became what it was in original AD&D.

The Dying Earth wasn't a fantasy world, but a post-apocalyptic one set long after technology had fallen into decay. And that's a hint of where we can find Oz's influence.

Talking Animals, Weird Technology, and Untold Wonders

D&D has strayed from its cross-dimensional sci-fi roots, but one game has never wavered from its focus on a post-apocalyptic world filled with strange beasts, ancient technology, and hidden secrets: Gamma World.

The parallels between Gamma World and Oz (where animals can talk, characters can play robots, and humans are relics of another world), as filtered through Vance, finally gives Baum his due. If Baum was so influential on Vance, why hasn't there been more discussion of the parallels? The editor of Extant #13 explains:

"Given Vance’s own repeated and enthusiastic declarations regarding Baum, as well as the obvious parallels between Vance’s favorite Oz book (The Emerald City of Oz) and several of his own stories, I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that this lack of interest suggests an enthusiasm about certain subject matters and styles rather than an interest in Vance as such. I also suspect the Baum influence lacks appeal because he seems old fashioned, quaint and childish. The fashionable taint of the weird is absent."

This may be why Gamma World has struggled to find its audience like D&D has. Where D&D's tropes are so embedded in pop culture to be ubiquitous these days, Gamma World—like Oz—has alternately been treated as ludicrous, deadly serious, or just plain wacky ... the same criticisms leveled at Baum.

It seems we already have our American Fantasy RPG, it’s just a little “weirder” than we expected.
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca


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MGibster

Legend
What American public schools did you go to? Canterbury Tales taught in junior or high school? Beowulf? You had one hell of an English department if that's true. I'm pretty sure that none of those works appear in the overwhelming majority of American public school reading lists. You're lucky, anymore, if Tolkien appears on any of those reading lists.

I went to middle school and high school in Plano, Texas. In fact, all seniors in Plano were required to recite the first part of the prologue from the Canterbury Tales to their English teacher. It's been 26 years and I still have most of it memorized. (However, I cannot spell it from memory.) And maybe not everyone went to a wealthy school district like I was lucky to, but I can't help but think people like Gygax, Arneson, and others were exposed to Arthurian. Mark Twain was influenced by Arthurian tales and one of the oldest brands of flour in the country is King Arthur. It's a part of our culture too.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.


But, at the end of the day, it's hard to draw on American fantasy because of the technological level. 18th and 19th century technology means no more castles, widespread gunpowder use, widespread professional armies, and a world that is far more full than the previous few hundred years.

I tend to agree with you here. I can suspend my disbelief for dragons, fireballs, and all manner of intelligent humanoid species living on the same continent, but I can't wrap my head around shooting someone and only doing 1d8.
 

MGibster

Legend
For the record, Gygax strongly disagreed, including here at EN World, as I recall. I was skeptical about that until I started reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (don't bother with the last few books, for the record) and it was genuinely shocking how much they are D&D, decades beforehand, to the point that Leiber, if he had wanted to be a jerk about it, could have likely had a good case against TSR.

I was reading a Conan story last year and I could swear that during his exploration of an ancient abandoned holy city he behaved exactly like an AD&D character. The way he checked for secret spaces in walls and altars was very reminiscent of dungeon crawling adventures.
 

Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Didn't say Europe doesn't have factions. I said factions in an RPG likely mean more to American gamers as US history and media constantly bombards up with gangsters, criminal organizations, racial gangs, competing law enforcement, high school cliques, secret societies, class warfare, corporate warfare, and political drama.

My friend joked that why Americans like "Game of Thrones. You can root for your favorite gang."

Europe definitely has a huge number of factions, knightly Orders, Merchant guilds, church sects, heresies, Hunting clubs, Fencing Schools, Public Schools, street gangs, isolated villages, pagan cults, outlaw lairs, banks and Company.

The difference I think though is that Europe has a much deeper ‘Institutional tradition’ which works to constrain the work of factionalism within it - the monolithic Church and the Imperial Courts are the two (or so) most obvious institutions which defined the social boundaries of Europe.

The European crusades can be viewed as factional, the 3 Musketeers was about factionalism, and of course the Protestant Reformation was creation of a new faction. In Europe pretty much every nation is a faction and then you get the rise of Mercantilism - the Company v the Crown too.

I think the difference with the Americas is that those Institutions had to all be established new and they had to stake out their new territorial borders. Things like the Church and Crown had a huge advantage of course, but even rebel groups like the Puritans, Amish and Irish were able to find a place - hence the whole ‘American Liberty‘ narrative.
Of course, the Crown lost ground after the American Rebellion and private institutions and Company, filled the gap staking their claim in American society creating the whole - Pioneer Individualism narrative too
 


Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
Europe definitely has a huge number of factions, knightly Orders, Merchant guilds, church sects, heresies, Hunting clubs, Fencing Schools, Public Schools, street gangs, isolated villages, pagan cults, outlaw lairs, banks and Company.

The difference I think though is that Europe has a much deeper ‘Institutional tradition’ which works to constrain the work of factionalism within it - the monolithic Church and the Imperial Courts are the two (or so) most obvious institutions which defined the social boundaries of Europe.

The European crusades can be viewed as factional, the 3 Musketeers was about factionalism, and of course the Protestant Reformation was creation of a new faction. In Europe pretty much every nation is a faction and then you get the rise of Mercantilism - the Company v the Crown too.

I think the difference with the Americas is that those Institutions had to all be established new and they had to stake out their new territorial borders. Things like the Church and Crown had a huge advantage of course, but even rebel groups like the Puritans, Amish and Irish were able to find a place - hence the whole ‘American Liberty‘ narrative.
Of course, the Crown lost ground after the American Rebellion and private institutions and Company, filled the gap staking their claim in American society creating the whole - Pioneer Individualism narrative too

I think that might it. American factions tend to carve out their own area of control, have closer "power levels" to other factions, and are more likely to come together democratically. Since the US never had a Crown or Church to stamp down on factions, American factions tend to have more independence. Even when there are more power factions,there are multiple ones and struggle with each other.

You see this in WoD and the MTG settings. Ravnica feels very American in its fantasy.
 

Azzy

ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ (He/Him/His)
...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?

Maybe because rules that allow the flexibility to recreate the wide range of superpowers tend to be a bit onerous (from general mechanics to decision paralysis in character creation) for the new player. Champions is probably the best example of this.
 


Cadence

Legend
Supporter
I have tried to watch the Pokeman cartoon several times. ... I just dont get it.

The first thing is notice that there are apparently no non-Poke animals in the world.
Then google up Beyblade and Bakugan and try to stand watching a few episodes of them. (WTF!?!?!)
And then go back to Pokemon and ponder the mysteries of how all the police and nurse characters are like clones, why the world full of dangerous wild Pokemon has kids running free starting at 10, and attempt to decide whether or not Bewear is as awesomely powerful as it seems.
 

Aldarc

Legend
What American public schools did you go to? Canterbury Tales taught in junior or high school? Beowulf? You had one hell of an English department if that's true. I'm pretty sure that none of those works appear in the overwhelming majority of American public school reading lists. You're lucky, anymore, if Tolkien appears on any of those reading lists.
Seems fairly normal. We read Beowulf (translated). Had to memorize the general prologue of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and read the rest in modern English. We also covered important sections of Paradise Lost. I grew up in a small, rural Southern Appalachian town. The largest town in the county is about 17-18K people.
 
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