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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 3222389" data-attributes="member: 307">Then, if the classes were truly based on archetypes, one would expect that the classes and rules pertaining to classes would allow one to make a broad range of literary characters without routinely breaking them. But you can't. You cannot make the Grey Mouser with the rules. You can make Cugel. You cannot make Merlin, but you can make Rhialto.They were relatively unknown then too.Vance, at the time, was clearly a second tier fantasy writer. Toklien, LeGuinn, Lieber, Howard, and even Burroughs all ranked clearly ahead of him in the genre at the time. Several other writers were in the same category as Vance. I knew lots of people who had read a fair amount of the available fantasy fiction, and none of them had read Vance before looking at the "list of books" in the back of the 1e DMG.For Anderson, he was well known, and probably in that upper tier group, but Three Hearts and Three Lions is not one of his signature works. Sure, it is a good read, but if you were deciding to read some Anderson, you would start with about a dozen other books first, well before you ever got to that one.Yes. That seems to me to be an indication of which books the fantasy archetypes that inspired this collection of imitator fantasy would be best drawn from.And I'm not talking about these types of novels as the sources for archetypes. You may notice the characters I am looking at - Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, Gandalf, Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot, Robin Hood, Aragorn, and so on.I still think not, because the examples used to describe the basis for the classes were obscure in the genre of fantasy even then.And yet, when trying to translate Fafhrd into 1e AD&D stats, they didn't make him a high level bard.</blockquote>

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