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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Doug McCrae

Legend
Yeah, the influence of Mark Twain on the American psyche shouldn't be underestimated. I'm sure that if you took a close look you could also find it in fantasy texts.
I think A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was an influence on L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and the Harold Shea series he wrote with Fletcher Pratt.

According to Clute and Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) Twain's novel "provided the most important precedent for modern timeslip stories".

Mendlesohn and James's A Short History of Fantasy (2009) says of Three Hearts and Three Lions "[Poul] Anderson uses this novel as a way of offering twentieth-century comment upon a medieval fantasy world much in the tradition of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court".
 


Cadence

Legend
Supporter
Shoot here in Alabama in 70s and early 80s Bewulf and Canterbury was covered. I think in JR high it was like two weeks using translations. In High School The evil English teach made us memorize it and recited back to her individually. Any non old farts in South want to update us?

A few years younger and in northern Illinois. In the mid 80s it was covered up there. I want to say we had a year of British literature and a year of American literature in high school (Sophomore and Junior years?).

It feels like US high schools were very in to the literary canon to the exclusion of a lot of other voices until recently. The senior HS course I had through a local college had a lot of variety (from the classics to modern with some in translation) and it feels like it's been trickling down.

Also, RE: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was in 1978 -
 

Totally agree, although I found Vance much more difficult to read than CS Lewis/Narnia.

Narnia is more "traditional" as far as fairy tales go. Dying Earth is bonkers. It's kitchen sink world-building and Vance's writing is very flowery. Dying Earth has more of a Spelljammer/Planescape vibe than the implied setting of D&D.
I always thought it was clear that Vance was used as the seed material for magic in D&D not because it was an especially popular or influential book series, but because the magic in it was well suited to being converted to a tabletop RPG.

A system where wizards could only cast a fixed, well defined number of spells each day, that they have to choose in advance, and those spells do specific, clearly defined things. It's certainly friendly towards turning into an RPG mechanic, more friendly than magic from Tolkien or Lewis, or various works of folklore.
 

Shoot here in Alabama in 70s and early 80s Bewulf and Canterbury was covered. I think in JR high it was like two weeks using translations. In High School The evil English teach made us memorize it and recited back to her individually. Any non old farts in South want to update us?
I can tell you that in the mid 90's in rural Kentucky, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were standard works for Senior-year High School English class.

We had to read them in the original dialects instead of translated (albeit with generous translation notes provided for many words and terms), with part of the point being to be shown how much the English language has changed over the centuries and how something being 600 to 1000 years old means something is only barely understandable to a modern audience.
 

I can tell you that in the mid 90's in rural Kentucky, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were standard works for Senior-year High School English class.

We had to read them in the original dialects instead of translated (albeit with generous translation notes provided for many words and terms), with part of the point being to be shown how much the English language has changed over the centuries and how something being 600 to 1000 years old means something is only barely understandable to a modern audience.
That supports the impression I get from TV, movies and online teaching resources I have plagiarised researched. Whenever I see a US English Lit class on TV and I think "that's way more advanced than anything we do in the UK" (I can't speak for Scotland though).

How old is "senior year"? Back when I was at school in the 80s I did The Pardoner's Tale, but even that little bit of Chaucer has gone now.
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
Well they didn't teach Beowulf nor Canterbury on the eastern side of Brooklyn.
I got the Illiad and Odyssey though.
I guess they thought "Bro, the dude stole my girl. Gather the crew and we''ll @#%$ him and his crew up" relates to New York youth.

I will neither confirm nor deny that I've fought in a large melee over SOs.
 
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MGibster

Legend
How old is "senior year"? Back when I was at school in the 80s I did The Pardoner's Tale, but even that little bit of Chaucer has gone now.

Senior high school students in the United State are typically 17-18 years old. Even though we covered some of Chaucer when I was a senior in high school, we sure as hell didn't cover the Miller's Tale until I was at university. :)
 

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