M.A.R. Barker, author of Tekumel, also author of Neo-Nazi book?

[AnotherGuy]

In the original gaming sessions Midkemia was invaded by the actual Tsolyani of the Tekumel setting. Feist changed it to Tsurani for publication for copyright reasons but you can read Magician and notice little changed except the names. Later novels made it more of a distinct thing.

Whose gaming sessions? Feist's?

 

[Zubatcarteira]

The meme is that all adventuring parties will at some point: kill the king/emperor/nobility, then try to kill god/the gods.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Whose gaming sessions? Feist's?

Feist was a member (not the founder) of a long established D&D group called the Friday Nighters.

From the linked article:

Feist was studying for a communications degree at California University during the mid-seventies, when he first decided to write a fantasy novel centring upon a young boy who becomes a great magician. While the concept itself was by no means original, the process that breathed life into the Midkemian universe and its myriad of characters certainly strayed from the norm.

Steve Abrams, met Conan Lamot and Jon Everson through the Triton Wargaming Club at the University of California. In 1975 Lamot returned from a trip away with the newly released fantasy war game, Dungeons and Dragons. Unhappy with the limitations of the game, the three modified the rules based on their own knowledge of medieval history. Lamot produced a guideline of the new rules which he named ‘The Tome of Midkemia’.

They met one night a week to play the game. Midkemia gradually grew as new cities and new players were introduced into the game. One of these new players was Raymond Feist.

Feist asked the other ‘Friday nighters’ (as they had begun referring to themselves as), if he could use Midkemia as the background for the book he was writing. “I had no grasp on how to tell a story”, he said in an interview with Examiner.com in 2013. “Using our gaming world as a background for the story made it easy for me to concentrate on the narrative, and not fret about world-building.”

Having received the group’s approval, Feist began introducing his characters into the world of Midkemia. Two years later he submitted a, “very lengthy novel”, to Double Day, who agreed to publish the book on the proviso that he shorten it by some 50,000 words. Feist did so, and in 1982 Magician hit store shelves.

Abrams, Lamot and Everson were the original creators of Midkemia (and actually manage the IP through "Midkemia Press". Feist's novels are effectively the backstory for the campaign world - his books are set ~1000 years before the college gaming sessions, detailing the "Riftwars" which were set in Midkemia's past. One of these Riftwars, the first, was the invasion of Midkemia by Tsolyani (in effect, D&D crossing over with Tekumel. When the novels got written, Tsolyani became Tsurani and Tekumel became Kelewan.

 

[Staffan]

Whose gaming sessions? Feist's?

My understanding was that Feist's books were based on the backstory of the campaign he and his friends were playing back in the day, but not on the actual gaming sessions. To make a modern-day analogy, it would be as if Matt Mercer or one of his players released a bunch of novels set during the Calamity rather than novelizing the current-day antics of Vox Machina.

 

[Umbran]

Even where people are unhappy with the liberal social forms that have replaced "feudal" ones, few of them advocate for a reversion to those past forms.

I dunno. There's several places we could name that were happy to have a despot step in when the elected government turned out to be a complete trash fire. The despot may also have been a trash fire, but... more honest about it, I guess?

 

[AnotherGuy]

Thanks for the link!

Abrams, Lamot and Everson were the original creators of Midkemia (and actually manage the IP through "Midkemia Press". Feist's novels are effectively the backstory for the campaign world - his books are set ~1000 years before the college gaming sessions, detailing the "Riftwars" which were set in Midkemia's past. One of these Riftwars, the first, was the invasion of Midkemia by Tsolyani (in effect, D&D crossing over with Tekumel. When the novels got written, Tsolyani became Tsurani and Tekumel became Kelewan.

So I got into the Riftwar series through the back.
Weirdly enough I had a friend who never read but did read, to my surprise, Magician and kept recommending it to me. I didn't get around to it but some years later I read Janny Wurts's Cycle of Fire Trilogy and quite liked her writing style. So I picked up the Empire series and loved Kelewan. Pug makes an appearance in the 3rd novel and I remembered that name from my friend - and so made the link. I still haven't read it, but its on my ever-growing to-do list.

 

[MGibster]

Well, let's look at this way. Show me another system where I, as a member of a higher strata of society, can, completely legally, murder someone of a lower strata, without any sort of repercussions as we would see in Feudal Japan?

And I'd have to remind you that feudal Japan, however we define feudal, is not feudal England in the 12th century or France in the 10th. Even in Japan itself, what they were doing in the 11th century wasn't necessarily the same as it was in the 14th century. Looking at Japan or any other kingdom/country and holding them up as the feudal standard is just an exercise in futility.

We spend the better part of a thousand years ending feudal systems, to the cost of millions of lives.

I've got two questions. Who is this "we" you're talking about? Feudalism, however we define it, was scattered throughout many different cultures, geographic locations, and time periods. And you make it sound like there was some concerted organized effort to end feudalism that took the better part of a thousand years. While I didn't specialize in medieval history, I would have expected to have heard of such a movement. What was the movement and who was involved? You also make it seem as though history is heading towards some great progressive goal and that just simply isn't the case.

And, even some of the most repressive regimes of the 20th century aren't even close to the horrors of feudal systems in history. Ghengiz Khan anyone? Feudal China?

I'd rather live in ancient China than today's North Korea, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany.

"Not necessarily a miserable existence" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement here.

Through no effort of my own, I have it pretty good living in the modern era so I don't give ringing endorsements for any period in the past. I would not be happy to suddenly be transported back to 19th century America, 13th century England, or 8th century BCE Greece. I'm no so keen on looking at the past through rose colored glasses, but at the same time I think it's a mistake to look at it as a crummy place where misery abounded (though that happened sometimes). They were human beings and they had joy, they had fun, they had seasons in the sun even if the stars they could reach were just starfish on the beach.

But, my point is, at no point EVER do D&D players step back and declare, "Nope, I'm going to play a Marxist revolutionary! Death to tyrants!!!" It's always, "Hey, isn't it grand that we're playing in a setting filled with horror and misery, but, we'll just lampshade all of those uncomfortable bits".

Yeah, you're right. I've never participated in a D&D game where the object was to overthrow the monarchy and install a dictatorship of the proletariat. But then in most "good" kingdoms, the people enjoy the same rights we expect in western liberal democracies. It's fantasy after all.

 

[Parmandur]

I dunno. There's several places we could name that were happy to have a despot step in when the elected government turned out to be a complete trash fire. The despot may also have been a trash fire, but... more honest about it, I guess?

Aristotle spent a lot of time thinking about that, and used his experience as a medical doctor to look at politics as beijg like the ebbs and flows of bodily health and sickness.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So what this feudalism discussion has to do with anything? That fantasy worlds are not perfect utopias is not a problem, that their creator is a nazi however is.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

So what this feudalism discussion has to do with anything? That fantasy worlds are not perfect utopias is not a problem, that their creator is a nazi however is.

And as a follow-on, "is there icky subtext in this world that I don't have the right eyes to see?".

(See also the Suck Fairy, who visits the books you loved when you were younger and adds sexism and racism that you discover when you return to them as an adult.)