TSR Appendix N Discussion

[overgeeked]

That's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Arthur Dent, plain and simple.

Also portal fantasy, isekai fiction, etc. Fish out of water stories are popular for a reason.

 

[Parmandur]

The riddle game I'm less sure about, but the concept of trolls (or Jotun, or Jotnar, giants, where Troll was at times a more general term for a magical being; traditional Norse folk magic is called Trolldom) turning to stone from sunlight derives from traditional folklore. I think Tolkien and Anderson drew from the same corpus of folk tales, in that detail.

Wel, based on the timing of being introduced to Tolkien by his wine drinking buddy in Poul Anderson's essay, here's a hypothesis: maybe he was describing a scene from his latest story to his friend, who was like "Oh, you mean like the Hobbit?" and it escalated from there.

 

[Hriston]

The riddle game I'm less sure about, but the concept of trolls (or Jotun, or Jotnar, giants, where Troll was at times a more general term for a magical being; traditional Norse folk magic is called Trolldom) turning to stone from sunlight derives from traditional folklore. I think Tolkien and Anderson drew from the same corpus of folk tales, in that detail.

Have you read 3H&3L and The Hobbit? If you have, then you should recognize that the point of resemblance isn't the mere fact of trolls/giants turning to stone when exposed to sunlight. In both cases, that's just some lore the characters use to their advantage. The real resemblance is in the gambit played out in both sources to delay the trolls/giant through trickery long enough for the sun to rise. Now maybe there are bodies of folklore in which tales of this type can be found. I'd be happy to learn of a reference to one. But I don't recall ever hearing of any myself.

 

[Hussar]

Also portal fantasy, isekai fiction, etc. Fish out of water stories are popular for a reason.

The problem with that is, many players use the "Fish out of Water" archetype as an excuse to never actually engage with the setting and create endless "Man with no name" characters.

Give me a character that's actually ground IN the setting every time thanks. Portal fantasy, isekai fiction etc. has been absolutely done to death. It's not 1974 anymore. We can assume that genre readers are actually genre savvy enough now to not need their hands held by some non-fantastic stand in whose sole purpose is to ask the "What is it?" questions every time something comes up.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Arthur Dent, plain and simple.

Also Bilbo in The Hobbit.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

We can assume that genre readers are actually genre savvy enough now to not need their hands held by some non-fantastic stand in whose sole purpose is to ask the "What is it?" questions every time something comes up.

If players come to my game expecting GenericFantasyland they are going to be asking "What (tf) is it?" on a fairly regular basis.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

3 Hearts & 3 Lions is basically a how to manual for D&D! If someone brings up alignment? 3H&3L. Monsters? 3H&3L. Tolkien Elves? Nope, 3H&3L. Dwarves? Nope, 3H&3L. It's about 70% of D&D with the 20% coming from Moorcock, Lieber, Lovecraft & Vance and Tolkien being a 5% maybe? Some monsters and Halflings. The other 5% is the rest of appendix N.

Given The Hobbit was '37 and LotR was '54-'55, while Three Hearts and Three Lions was '61, I think it's still accurate to trace much of what these things are back to Tolkien.

Particularly because Three Hearts and Three Lions has references to "Mirkwood" and (especially) "wargs," a term Tolkien invented by crossing two ancient words (Old Norse vargr and Old English wearh) which had related meanings. It may be the case that Anderson's re-adaptation of Tolkien's ideas are key to their adoption into D&D as we understand it today, but they're just that, adaptations, from the Tolkien original. Elves as human-size, beautiful fae people are still Tolkien's creation--but, like any great idea, it quickly grew beyond the limits of its creator's work.

Tolkien, one might say, created the crossbreed. Anderson ensured that that crossbreed did not remain only on a few orchards, but spread far and wide. And now we all get to enjoy its sweet taste.

 

[Hussar]

If players come to my game expecting GenericFantasyland they are going to be asking "What (tf) is it?" on a fairly regular basis.

Really?

You don't have PHB races? Your humanoids aren't drawn from the Monster Manual? The equipment the characters are carrying is entirely new and never seen before?

In 1974, you did have to kinda explain the difference between an orc and a goblin. What the heck was a cleric? And no one probably knew what a troll was. Now? While there might be some specifics that genre readers won't know, they are probably genre savvy enough to know most of it.

 

[Dioltach]

Elves as human-size, beautiful fae people are still Tolkien's creation--but, like any great idea, it quickly grew beyond the limits of its creator's work.

Tolkien would have been aware of the elves in Sir Orfeo. Who are beautiful, human-sized fae.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm reading that piece by C. S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction," now and it's kind of interesting. Some good insights and advice for critics. If only more of them would have read this piece and listened to his advice.

One part that's stood out so far is this paragraph that I think it applicable to D&D (and RPGs in general).


Pick one: fantastical PCs or a fantastical setting.

Play the characters as if they're real people in a real situation.

I have a great deal of respect for C.S. Lewis, but I must make some disagreement with his conclusions, here.

That is, he has taken as an assumption that the only purpose of fiction is to find the familiar in the strange. And that is, quite often, what fiction is striving to do! But there is a mirror as well: finding the strange in the familiar. And you really do need to have some things that are out of the ordinary in order to do that. You can have un-ordinary protagonists in un-ordinary circumstances, if in the telling, you exploit the reader's ignorance of what is ordinary and what is not. I've used this device myself repeatedly, as did Isaac Asimov, one of the undisputed greats of science fiction. Susan Calvin is far from an ordinary human being, by her own admission, and yet she's central to the telling of most of his robot stories. Likewise, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told stories with a decidedly un-ordinary protagonist, which could not meaningfully have been told about a perfectly ordinary person--and yet several of them are quite outside the ordinary as well, even if they are not supernatural proper (consider The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Silver Blaze, or The Dancing Men.)

If the purpose of one's fiction is to make the audience feel what it is like to transition from ordinary to extraordinary and back, then of course one must start with something ordinary--perhaps painfully so, to make the transition to the extraordinary thrilling as well as narratively necessary. If the purpose of one's fiction is to draw the audience into discovering that what they thought would be strange is in fact not so very different, or that what they should find familiar is in fact alien when seen from another direction, then other avenues open. And there may be other purposes still.

I am reminded of the way Syme describes having seen Sunday from the back, which made him seem monstrous, and then separately from the front, which made him seem like a doting father playing make-believe with his children. "We have seen the world only from the back," or something like that. Only a mooning poet like Syme could say such a thing--and only in such a cacophonoous adventure could it be said. A perfectly ordinary man would not have Syme's reaction; a perfectly ordinary situation could not have inspired Syme so, idiosyncratic though he may be.