D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Vaalingrade]

Here it is

He is soooo mad that awesome things exist.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

The DMG actually shows that Alaska isn't the inspiration. Adventurers bringing back lots of money is.

DMG page 90: "An active campaign will most certainly bring a steady flow of wealth into the base area, as adventurers come from successful trips into dungeon and wilderness."

That means that the PHB quote was just Gygax looking for a real world example of the inflation inspired by successful adventurers so that players could better understand what he was saying.

Because in D&D there are no lawless frontier towns which need protection from bandits. There are no adventurers-for-hire riding in with their weapons proudly displayed. There is no wilderness. The characters never have to create their own justice, because the local law officers take care of everything. Nobody ever rides off into the sunset. And the sudden influx of gold being compared to the Alaskan gold rush was for illustrative purposes only, and not meant to parallel the Western Frontier at all.

Also Gygax never read any westerns, he never read Howard - who never wrote any westerns - and he wasn't a libertarian steeped in 1940s and 1950s nostalgia.

Go look in the mirror. The thing in the middle of your face is your nose.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Also, the Mandalorian is not even remotely a space-western.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Gygax apparently claimed that it was inspired partly by a book series called The Destroyer, whose protagonist was a cop from Newark who was trained in a fictional Korean martial art and who was also an avatar of Shiva. Whether Gygax was correct, I don't know.

That is the series Remo Williams was based on

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That is the series Remo Williams was based on

Yes. It was based on Remo Williams.

Also, the Cleric was not really based on really clergy (although the edged weapon thing Wass added by Gygax due to inspiration from Bishop Odo), but Hammer Horror vampire hunters.

And so on. Here's the list-

D&D General - D&D History 101: Origins of Classes

So I wanted to do a short series on some of the history of D&D, and I thought I'd start with a fun and relatively easy one- the original class system, as codified in the AD&D (1e) Player's Handbook of 1978. For those of you unfamiliar with that 1e PHB, it was a...

www.enworld.org

@Mordhau

If I wasn't busy, I'd love to engage your post a little more (Mikhail Bakhtin FTW!). I would say that I agree that the "western" (broadly construed*) had a profound influence on early D&D, but I also think that early D&D had more influences for the adventure space- and that the orientalist/Said sense was, in fact, not one of the primary ones other than as a pale reflection as might be picked up from the gestalt of the western and/or pulp fiction that was read.

But maybe this isn't the thread to develop that thesis?**


*It's similar to someone noting that Star Wars is fantasy, not "science fiction." Many of the concepts of the "western" are hard-baked into the American ethos- even moreso for people who were adults in the 1970s.


**I'm unfortunately preoccupied though the New Year other than the occasional brief post. So ... Happy Holidays to All, and Happy New Year if I don't get to say it!!

 

[Helldritch]

D&D a western? Don't get me laughing.

The lonely village in the wilderness is not an exclusivity of westerns. The little village in Europe, Australia, Africa, South America and Asia say hello to you. These little villages are literally all around the world. And almost all of them have... a tavern or an inn... Even today you can get in these little villages in Europe and all around the world. Heck, I live in America and and just a few miles from town you have small villages with less than 800 souls and they do have a bar...

The "wild" in D&D is exactly that, a wild unexplored or unsettled piece of land. Here be dragons is not an elucubration in D&D, it is a real thing. Empires fell to hordes, dragons, magical disasters and any other causes.

Take an old dragon. Angry at the settling of its land. The beast wait for the dead of winter, set aflame the village's food resources and housing. The people will die from cold and starvation. Cruel, but efficient. In the spring, the dragon comes back to pick on the survivors and to get whatever riches they might have had.

Many empty zones in the world's of D&D are empty for a good cause. Dragons, giants, orcs and so many other treaths exists that "civilization" is often destroyed. And this is where we get our beloved dungeons to explore. Maybe an evil cleric got mad and buried the castle/town in an earthquake? Who knows.

But one thing, American Westerns are not the inspiration for D&D as a whole. For some scenari? Sure, I could believe that. For the whole game? No way....

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is where I see a lot of connections with the Points of Light concept that was around D&D a long time and was solidified in 4e.

Some thoughts on points of light. Obviously this is just my point of view from my neck of the woods playing D&D from the 80s to the 90s (and pre-internet that varied a great deal), but when they introduced the whole points of light thing, I had a very negative reaction to it (it was one of the elements of 4E that just didn't land well for me). I just never ran D&D as anything resembling points of light. I mean there might be wilderness to cross, there might be distant civilizations and cities to find, but points of light seemed very artificial to me. Not like it was an attempt to emulate something like frontier movies, but like it was just a product of putting game considerations first and creating the flavor from there. I am not saying there was zero western influence on D&D, just that I never saw it or ran it in a way that felt like the points of light structure. And when I did try to connect points of light to real world history, my mind went more towards ancient cultures setting up colonies (like Greece and Phoenicia----Carthage started as a Phoenician colony as I recall). Not saying points of light was bad. I just didn't find it fit what I was doing with my campaigns the new edition rolled out. My campaigns did have wilderness, but the people and monsters inhabiting them were more like germanic and Scandinavian tribes. And the 'frontier space' was more like regions between empires (not even necessarily uncivilized, just maybe different from what the players were used or places where existing law had less reach).

And again, I think a lot of time people confuse content for message in these discussions. D&D is a game, and the conceit of the game has worked well for people over the years (whether that is venturing into the wilderness to adventure or venturing into dungeons). I am not particularly worried about the impact of killing evil orcs for instance in a game (however I would be worried if I were in a game and there were clear racialist themes being used: like some kind of blood and soil message or what have you). But a setting with evil monsters, even if those evil monsters are drawing inspiration from real world history and literature, I just don't really see an issue with that.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Not very different from Middle Earth, in other words.
Look, I'm not going to deny that there's an aspect of the American frontier to it all. But other big fantasy template worlds like Middle Earth and Narnia probably figure into it as well.

Agreed, but I often wonder was Tolkien also using the "King is the Land" type idea. That the health of the kingdom is tied to the health of the King. Arnor is largely depopulated due to the absence of a king. Gondor is in decline (slowly) under the Stewards and loosing population. it is remarked in the LOTR of the declining armies of Gondor.
Even Rohan is doing poorly while the Kings mind is poisoned by Wormtongue and its fortunes revive on Theoden is revived.

 

[Umbran]

Go look in the mirror. The thing in the middle of your face is your nose.

Mod Note:
Rhetorical question: In making this personal, you hoped to accomplish... what, exactly?

How about you... just don't do this next time? Thanks.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

D&D a western? Don't get me laughing.

The lonely village in the wilderness is not an exclusivity of westerns. The little village in Europe, Australia, Africa, South America and Asia say hello to you. These little villages are literally all around the world. And almost all of them have... a tavern or an inn... Even today you can get in these little villages in Europe and all around the world. Heck, I live in America and and just a few miles from town you have small villages with less than 800 souls and they do have a bar...

The "wild" in D&D is exactly that, a wild unexplored or unsettled piece of land. Here be dragons is not an elucubration in D&D, it is a real thing. Empires fell to hordes, dragons, magical disasters and any other causes.

Take an old dragon. Angry at the settling of its land. The beast wait for the dead of winter, set aflame the village's food resources and housing. The people will die from cold and starvation. Cruel, but efficient. In the spring, the dragon comes back to pick on the survivors and to get whatever riches they might have had.

Many empty zones in the world's of D&D are empty for a good cause. Dragons, giants, orcs and so many other treaths exists that "civilization" is often destroyed. And this is where we get our beloved dungeons to explore. Maybe an evil cleric got mad and buried the castle/town in an earthquake? Who knows.

But one thing, American Westerns are not the inspiration for D&D as a whole. For some scenari? Sure, I could believe that. For the whole game? No way....

Show me a little village in Western or middle Europe that is more than 20 miles from another village. D&D villages are often really isolated, many days ride through untamed wilderness to the nearest other place of civilisation.