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Good insight. I never thought of it that way but yes, each of the books could quite well be thought of as different campaigns set in the same world, with the final one being a weaker finale with a bunch of the original players being able to return---all except Susan's player, who'd bailed on...

D&D is indeed not Tolkien nor Middle Earth but your assumption that they would expend significantly more resources and want to grow their populations is just that, an assumption. There's no reason one way or the other that they would---it's really up to the world design and the cultures they are...

Well there are a lot of things that could account for the difference. Humans may have a much higher fertility rate overall and be willing to allow for more child mortality compared to elves and dwarves, who put in way more investment into their children. (I'm thinking of R vs. K selection and...

That's a really cool idea. In a lot of ways it might work with the notion of Chaos vs. Law a la Three Hearts and Three Lions, where the realm of Faerie was definitely inimical to humanity. The worlds might not really be quite the same and the presence of many from one race or another would set...

In one of my campaign worlds, elder races fertility (or lack thereof) was explained by the presence of taint from a Far Realm gate to which they were susceptible and to which humans weren't. Eventually the gate to the Far Realm was closed and the taint has alleviated, meaning that the cap on...

One of my campaign worlds has halflings as a dominant race/species in a pastiche of mostly 19th Century Europe. This world was quite intentionally designed to mess with things, though. Dwarves are pseudo-Italian, known for their cooking, leatherwork, fashion, and religion, the gnomes are...

Gygax most definitely assumed his personal taste was objectively justified! He was infamous for arguing that way in Dragon; frequently he'd change his mind a few years later and argue just as strongly that it was objectively justified!

I agree with you. His world building wasn't as detailed or as deep as Tolkien's. In a lot of ways it might better for an RPG because I think he left a lot more room for the "players" as it were and he mirrors what a DM is likely to do in a new campaign, adding on as needed. It's also not nearly...

Absolutely. The same happened everywhere that TV and radio came, which is to say pretty much everywhere. The nationalist projects of standardizing languages wasn't really completed until the advent of soap operas and TV news. One thing that's pretty funny is how rapidly the "trusted" standard...

It's true that many Americans are as clueless about dialects from different parts of the country. I currently live in NYC, but I've lived in a lot of places and can tell even fairly small dialect differences even among the generic broader patterns. For instance, the Lower Midwest, Chicago, and...

Certainly. It also might have simply been a parallel development.

Dwarves were faux-Scottish in 1990s Warcraft games, I believe.

Good point. As influential as THaTL is in D&D, though, I think it wasn't what made things shift, though. Hugi was early.

I can't recall the last time I used a royal PC in my campaign... except right now I'm running something where an NPC quest giver is the last descendant of the First Emperor (loosely modeled after Qin Shi Huang), the daughter from a union between the First Emperor and an Elven Queen, who bore him...

They're responsible for the mass Dwarven exodus from Germany and Scandinavia to Scotland. ;)

Not that I recall, and for good measure I just checked the summary on Wikipedia.

I've heard the Andy Serkis versions are good. I have the ones by Rob Inglis. One really great aspect of his version is that he's got an excellent singing voice and is able to bring the songs and poetry to life.

Yes indeed. The Hobbit is way more S&S than LotR. I don't think it's a coincidence that Gygax in Appendix N indicated that he was more influenced by the former than the latter . Absolutely. Things like the Great Plague, the Fall of the Dwarven Kingdom followed by another one when Smaug took...

I don't know I buy your characterization of Gone With The Wind as being so totally different than previous fiction and so influential, though it definitely did sell a lot of copies, I'll grant that. Conan predated GWTW. Robert E. Howard was dead (June 11, 1936) before GWTW was published (June...

We used taped together Hot Wheels tracks! Those stung but broomsticks must have really hurt. I agree about the broad sources but I think you miss some important points that are not Roman or Greek: Aragorn is very much a "true king" archetype very common to Medieval stories such as the Matter of...