D&D General D&D Archetypes that spread out to other settings and media

The ones that alway amuse me is the ubiquity of armoured Clerics in Anime

And Slimes, I am aware that Nuppeppō exist it Japanese folklore but their existence in Anime is a fusion of folklore and DnD inspiration turned Otaku weirdness.

QuentinGeorge said:

Almost no one actually involved with Dragonlance the setting wants to connect them, it is a push from outside designers. Which makes sense because it cheapens Dragonlance as its own thing for the sake of "muh multiverse".

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If they wanted them to be unique stand-alone gods, they should have given them unique stand-alone designs and not gone "oh this character that looks 100% identical to Tiamat? yeah that's not-tiamat who's 110% different with no connections despite sharing her job description and personality"

It doesn't even work as a Powermaster Optimus Prime and Ginrai thing because canonically Ginrai's just using a stolen body intended for Optimus

Mecheon said:

If they wanted them to be unique stand-alone gods, they should have given them unique stand-alone designs and not gone "oh this character that looks 100% identical to Tiamat? yeah that's not-tiamat who's 110% different with no connections despite sharing her job description and personality"

It doesn't even work as a Powermaster Optimus Prime and Ginrai thing because canonically Ginrai's just using a stolen body intended for Optimus

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Weis and Hickman never accepted that Dragonlance was work for hire. In fact they were the outsiders (especially Weis) on a group project by TSR, managed by Gygax and with regular TSR bods such as Doug Niles making major contributions. I'm sure TSR always took it as read that the five headed dragon queen in Dragonlance was the same five headed dragon queen that was in the monster manual.

Its a huge contrast to Keith Baker, who has always been "well in my Eberron I would do this, but there is no canon version so you do you". And as such continues to have a good relationship with the IP owners.

QuentinGeorge said:

Almost no one actually involved with Dragonlance the setting wants to connect them, it is a push from outside designers.

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It was more of a group project, with simultaneous launches of both the Dragonlance modules and the Dragonlance novels. Weis is on record that the initial idea of knights riding dragons was thought up in the car, and several of the initial characters. But it's hard to tell how much cross discussion was involved. It is pretty likely they thought up a dark goddess character, and it was someone like Gygax that pushed the imagery of her having a five headed dragon avatar while thinking of Tiamat. Because it would fit.

Oh hey, wait. I just found this amazing article!

- Jeff Grubb

Paladine (by whatever name) – Draco Paladin in my campaign, and was the Platinum Dragon as described in the Greyhawk supplement (I think he gained the Bahamut name when he showed up in the first AD&D Monster Manual). When Trace was doing the original forging of Krynn, I tossed him my campaign’s godhead and he easily folded it into his mix. Draco Paladin became Paladine. He was the Paladin’s God in my campaign, and venerated by Fenetar the Paladin, run by Frank Dickos, the player who was the one who convinced me to set down my godhead in the first place.

Takhisis – Draco Cerebus in my campaign, the Chromatic Dragon, Tiamat. Draco Cerebus also went by the name Draco Cerebrint in my campaign (I think the name change came about because of the sudden appearance of a short, grey aardvark in the comics). Don’t know where Trace got the name Takhisis (May be Indonesian – Neraka definitely is) but part of his decision to rename was to separate DL’s cosmology from Greyhawk’s. (Another possibility – when I built my mythology (a time when Trace was first playing as well) neither Bahamut nor Tiamat were so named in the game books- so the idea of creating new versions of them unique to DL would not be too far a reach)). Draco-Cerebus may have had the anti-paladin as followers, but that class came and left from my campaign several times.

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I swear there was an old dragon magazine which went into the dragonlance gods which called out paladine = Bahamut and Takhisis = Tiamat. I prefer them being separate deities but there are obvious similarities.

Paul Farquhar said:

Weis and Hickman never accepted that Dragonlance was work for hire. In fact they were the outsiders (especially Weis) on a group project by TSR, managed by Gygax and with regular TSR bods such as Doug Niles making major contributions. I'm sure TSR always took it as read that the five headed dragon queen in Dragonlance was the same five headed dragon queen that was in the monster manual.

Its a huge contrast to Keith Baker, who has always been "well in my Eberron I would do this, but there is no canon version so you do you". And as such continues to have a good relationship with the IP owners.

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Weis posted the opposite to Facebook within the last month. W&H are very aware their work on Dragonlance was work for hire, always have been. They do seem to feel a strong sense of creative ownership as the primary novel writers, but know they don't own Dragonlance legally at all.

QuentinGeorge said:

I am so tired of the depicton of medieval people as having an inversion to colour. Guys, we have medieval art, we know how they dressed. You just don't think they looked cool.

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Yes! And that their dwellings were austere, like they lived in barren shacks or castles with exposed stone everywhere. They were human beings! And they were smart! They loved colour and art, and they also knew to use fabric as insulation. They also knew about and used paint. Everywhere.

(Same goes for the Romans and other civilizations that we think of as monochromatic because paint doesn't last as well as stone, cement, and mortar).

The idea of Lich is a combination of many different elements from many different folklores, especially the Koshei the Deathless, with Jewish term phylacery thrown in, and we can see its influences in modern media, especially after The Lich being the main villain of Adventure Time, we can see influences of D&D-style Lich on many villains like the Beast from over the Garden Wall or Emperor Belos from the Owl House, and even somewhat retroactively modern interpretations of Skeletor (even though Mumm-Ra is argurably more lichy of the two 80's villains)

The concept of a "Simple Sword & Board Fighter", which people annyoingly demand even unrelated games like Draw Steel to adhere to, which to be perfectly honest, I have hard time actually finding in fiction from before D&D, where most archetypical knights or warriors either fight with a two-handed weapon, or use shield exclusively on a horse, with a lance. And some characters who do use shield, like Captain America, are not what I'd call simple.

This one may be more going off the vibes. The thing I see sometimes in media is when the story introduces a group that seems to lack any sort of initial cohesion and just gives a feeling of a misplaced D&D adventuring party - people of all professions, walks of life and aesthetics vaguelly filling typical d&d archetypes and giving a feel of fantasy characters, often feeling very out of place in the setting, whose members are of different species or, in humans-only stories, at least different ethnicities. Sometimes its done on purpose like monster hunters in Perdido Street Station. I'm not sure whenever it was intentional with other examples, like mercenaries in Netflix Yasuke, which include a muscular Russian werebear woman, an African Shaman, a scantily-clad assassin, a catholic priest and a freaking robot. The show takes place in Japan soon after death of Oda Nobunanga, btw.

First time I have gotten this "mispalced D&D party" feeling from a group of characters, however, was Marvel Comics' the Black Order, who barely seem to have anything in common aside serving Thanos and even then sometimes they do mercenary jobs.