D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Paul Farquhar]

not fantasy its design goals are so far removed as to be unuseable for dnd at any point

This is like, someone who has never played D&D!

D&D is full of influences from horror, science fiction, westerns, superheroes, pirates, you name it, it’s appeared in D&D somewhere - some were even called in Appendix N!

 

[Mind of tempest]

This is like, someone who has never played D&D!

D&D is full of influences from horror, science fiction, westerns, superheroes, pirates, you name it, it’s appeared in D&D somewhere - some were even called in Appendix N!

I mean, its design goals are so different that it would be like trying to dnd run doom. It is just is too far removed.
Anything else is a mix of MMO media and standard Japanese fantasy tropes stuff that is better implemented ease where

 

[TiQuinn]

There is not fantasy and not fantasy its design goals are so far removed as to be unuseable for dnd at any point.
It is pure distilled solo power fantasy without anything to make it good. It is like eating Styrofoam.
dnd is collaborative; it is inherently not is also does not really have much originality to lend to the game.

Naruto would be easier to stripe parts from.

Given Romatasy is either mostly humans or hot super naturals in the same vein as the passing 00-10's fad of urban fatasty romance books minimal berely anything worth striping from that which is making me miserable I feel like history has some how ended and I missed anything worth doing.

 

[Stormonu]

Most of my influences for D&D have been movies, not so much books. My exposure to Conan for the longest time was the movie versions and Marvel comic (Conan the Barbarian and some of Savage Sword of Conan). I never started reading the actual stories until just last year, but Conan has always been in forefront of my ideal Barbarian-class character. Lately, I've gotten my hands on the Lankhmar books, and have been (slowly) reading it. I've come to realize that reading is a real pain and takes an enormous amount of concentration to stay with I just can't muster any more. For me, it is agonizingly slow to read vs. how fast I can consume auditory or visually.

I used to read a fair number of books up until college (in the '90s), then switched to listening to audio books for some time. Since after the Harry Potter and Eragon book series, I don't think I've done much reading at all. Almost exclusively now, movies and Youtube fan videos are my source of ideas.

 

[Imaro]

...(obviously there are some ethically problematic parts).

Except for the overt racism, the writing holds up quite well.

I find it interesting how non-chalantly Howard's racism is dismissed by some... Honestly I don't find Howard foundational to D&D, even in reading older editions I failed to see what exactly his stories contributed at a foundational level to the game or why they are held in such high regard by some. If anything I think Lieber, Vance and Moorcock were all more influential and foundational to D&D, but whatever.


Personally I'm seeing a move (at least amongst those I know) towards more non-western based fantasy drawing from traditionally less acknowledged mythologies, a large dosage of fantasy manga, and even videogames like the new Monster Hunter Wilds as insopiration for their games. I'd love to see more of this become part of official D&D.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

would be like trying to dnd run doom

Like this you mean?

D&D in Doom, Doom in D&D, neither is much of a stretch.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Brandon Sanderson, Seanan McGuire, Sarah J. Maas, Ilona Andrews...

Not to mention the amazing selection of manga that even stores in Ballarat are now carrying...

Here's last year's Goodreads top contendors for

Fantasy
View attachment 398440

Romantasy
View attachment 398441

Young Adult Fantasy
View attachment 398442

Science Fiction
View attachment 398443


See which category has the most votes?

I dunno if Goodreads nominations are very representative of what people are actually reading, I feel like they get gamed quite a lot, but I'd definitely agree that people like Sanderson, Maas, Bardugo and so on are pretty clearly getting read quite a lot.

Maas is interesting because whilst her most successful books are pretty MoR "teenage assassin" romantasy (the first one is basically "teenage assassin Twilight"), they inexplicably keep getting banned by school districts in the US, which I can only believe is happening solely because they're so popular, because there sure isn't anything remarkable in the first book apart from a franker and more realistic depiction of exercise and period cycles than is common in fiction (which probably helps make the protag more relatable to a lot of the readers).

The romantasy 'Court of X and Y' style?

There's definitely a lot of that selling pretty well, often but not always intersecting with YA stuff.

I was actually kind of blown away by one of T. Kingfisher's books (which do not intersect with YA, indeed the audience is probably 30+), which was totally a romance novel that happened to have a fantasy setting but what a good setting! What good characters! Oh they're making out again! Tell me more about the berserker paladins!

D&D in Doom, Doom in D&D, neither is much of a stretch.

Right?

Literally the next Doom game is called Doom: The Dark Ages, and seems to be heavily over-the-top quasi-medieval fantasy themed, even!


(Personally I think this should be the direction for a revived Quake 1 not Doom but I'm not running id software so who cares what I think!)

 

[BookTenTiger]

Will a reference from the National Endowment for the Arts be suitable?


"At 45.2 percent, the 2012 share of adults who read novels or short stories was much lower than the share who had read any books in general. By 2017, 41.8 percent of adults had read novels or short stories in the previous year, and by 2022, the share was 37.6 percent."

So, fiction reading rates are dropping, in general, from 45.2% down to 37.6% over the decade 2012-2022.

"In 2017, the share of women reading novels or short stories was down to 50.0 percent, and, in 2022, to 46.9 percent. Men readers saw their fiction-reading rate slip from 35.1 percent in 2012 to 33.0 percent in 2017 and then to 27.7 percent in 2022. The net result is that the difference in fiction-reading rates for men and women remains at just over 19 percentage points, as observed ten years earlier. "

Men do read fiction at notably lower rates than women. Men are not dropping faster than women, though - the difference has been about 19% for the past decade.

The Men-Women Split in Reading is Real—and Persists Amid Historical Rate Declines

What does the data tell us about reading rates by gender?

www.arts.gov

Oof, that's rough.

 

[Charlaquin]

You and several others in this thread for the most part read like you are simply listing media that have personally influenced your thinking about fantasy.

Nah, my personal list would look pretty different. It would have some crossover, but there would be a lot on my list that isn’t on this one, and a lot of things that are on this list wouldn’t be on mine. This list is based on what fantasy media I know the “normies” I regularly interact with have consumed.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If anything I think Lieber, Vance and Moorcock were all more influential and foundational to D&D, but whatever.

I mean, if we're talking hard-to-get past I honestly found the grimy incel-adjacent ultra-misogyny in some of Vance's works harder to deal with than the casual but not very deep racism and misogyny in REH's Conan stuff, but I haven't read all of either. That said I do think Leiber and Moorcock are more influential on D&D than either (save for the magic system).