D&D = American + European Fantasy

Dungeons & Dragons draws on a rich mythology from the works of European authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock. And yet D&D was also influenced by American authors like Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, and R.E. Howard. The end result is that D&D's tone sits somewhere between the two. Photo by Jorge Martínez on Unsplash European Folklore The bones of D&D have obvious...

Dungeons & Dragons draws on a rich mythology from the works of European authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock. And yet D&D was also influenced by American authors like Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, and R.E. Howard. The end result is that D&D's tone sits somewhere between the two.

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Photo by Jorge Martínez on Unsplash
European Folklore

The bones of D&D have obvious roots in European myths and legends; we see it in the dwarves, elves, hobbits, and orcs of J.R.R. Tolkien and the fairies, giants, and dragons that are scattered throughout the Monster Manual. Colleen Gillard explains how British fantasy flourished by staying in touch with its pagan roots -- and was even influenced by the landscape:

Landscape matters: Britain’s antique countryside, strewn with moldering castles and cozy farms, lends itself to fairy-tale invention. As Tatar puts it, the British are tuned in to the charm of their pastoral fields...

But D&D has many influences, not the least of which are co-creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, who brought their own American sensibilities to the game. For a fantasy role-playing game that is distinctly European, look no further than Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, now in its Fourth Edition.

American Influences

American fantasy, like the Europeans, was influenced by its terrain:

America’s mighty vistas, by contrast, are less cozy, less human-scaled, and less haunted. The characters that populate its purple mountain majesties and fruited plains are decidedly real...

But perhaps the strongest difference is a sense of control over one's destiny. This belief, carried over with America's earliest settlers from Europe, reinforced that self-enrichment was a moral right, as outlined by Max Weber:

...Weber wrote that capitalism in Northern Europe evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of modern capitalism.

No wonder then that Gygax strongly adhered to a leveling system in which heroes can rise to success through the accumulation of wealth at significant risk. This was how heroes like Conan, Fafhrd, and the Gray Mouser did it, and it draws on a long tradition of American folklore:

Popular storytelling in the New World instead tended to celebrate in words and song the larger-than-life exploits of ordinary men and women: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, even a mule named Sal on the Erie Canal. Out of bragging contests in logging and mining camps came even greater exaggerations—Tall Tales—about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, the twister-riding cowboy Pecos Bill, and that steel-driving man John Henry, who, born a slave, died with a hammer in his hand. All of these characters embodied the American promise: They earned their fame.

Unlike in European fantasy where boys become kings (or in Harry Potter's case, orphans become wizards), characters in D&D aren't usually born heroes; the very nature of leveling systems and experience points ensures they earn it.

A Motley Mix

Adding these two influences together creates Dungeons & Dragons, a rich tapestry of fantasy that draws on the works of European authors and then throws in American sensibilities where the heroes are in control of their destiny -- or at least their skills and attributes.

For all their American influences, D&D heroes are still small in the weave of the world. In early D&D games, they died by the handfuls at the whim of dice, a lesson distinctly at odds with American determinism.

D&D has come full circle to influence the fantasy that created it. You can see its motley pedigree's fingerprints on sweeping fantasies like Game of Thrones. As the fantasy genre continues to flourish and the world becomes more interconnected, it seems likely that we'll see more works that draw on other cultures...D&D included.
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca

Sadras

Legend
Museums might over-emphasize this piece of history. Partly because towns and guild became very important later, partly because this fits a marxist view of history that is still in vogue in Europe.

...(snip)...

Don't read this to say ancient cities did not have industry (they did), but it was not their core function. Such industries generally catered to the military and made luxuries for the elite.

Bold emphasis mine.

I do not view the D&D period as a fantasy representation of ancient times given the level of technology already included within the PHB, so I was referring to a medieval period where guilds were important. I even mentioned the Gazetteers which reflects a similar outlook.

EDIT: That is not to say that one cannot create a game set in ancient times and just remove parts of the equipment tech and knowledge that do not make sense for the period.
 

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Shasarak

Banned
Banned
You are right, that we in our world never had any "real" evil beings that lurked on humanities frontiers, like orcs or armies of hobgoblins.

Historically there have always been "real" evil beings lurking on humanities frontiers we even remember the famous ones like the Huns and the Vandals who are exactly like a rampaging army of Orcs that essentially can appear from nowhere.
 

pemerton

Legend
You are right, that we in our world never had any "real" evil beings that lurked on humanities frontiers, like orcs or armies of hobgoblins.
JRRT's orcs are fairly clearly modelled on "eastern hordes" - with their "bandy legs" and their scimitars. (He also has Easterlings and Wain-riders for good measure.)

I imagine that for people living on the west coast of Africa c 16th through 19th centuries, there was some sense of "real" evil beings that lurked on their (seaward) frontier.

Likewise for those who were displaced in processes of settler colonisation.

In this sort of respect, I think D&D's perspective is relatively indifferent between American and western European.
 

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
Historically there have always been "real" evil beings lurking on humanities frontiers we even remember the famous ones like the Huns and the Vandals who are exactly like a rampaging army of Orcs that essentially can appear from nowhere.

Further back in human history, packs of hyenas are a good example.
 

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
But D&D also incorporates an adversarial sense of "Civilization" vs. "Wilderness (and its native inhabitants)" that borrows more heavily from an American settler and colonial mindset. The stories are less about squabbling feudal lords, duty, or even faith, but about treasure-seekers fighting the "uncivilized." And as someone mentioned, a lot of D&D adventures follow common tropes of Westerns: frontier town threatened by savage natives, sheriffs, territorial governors, etc.

There are areas in Europe that were decidedly like this.

When the Vikings were at their peak (8th - 10th Centuries), the Atlantic and Baltic coasts and even the rivers of Russia were raided heavily by the Vikings. Of course, the old cycle of raiders from the steppe was key to much of Late Antiquity (Huns) and the Middle Ages (Mongols), with many examples in between. The Reconquista in Spain is another example. The Borderlands between England and Scotland were notorious, too, from the 14th to 17th Centuries. The borderland in Eastern Europe between Christendom and the Ottomans was also pretty heavily raided---the Siege of Vienna in 1683 was the last really big push by the Ottomans and it nearly took Vienna. There were lots of raiders from the Barbary Coast, French pirates from Dunkirk that raided the English coast, the Chevauchee during the Hundred Years' War. Europe had plenty of borderlands, internal frontiers, and areas of lawlessness. Whether current European museums highlight this or not, it's a key part of European history and identity and much of the American colonial culture is a transplanted mixture of the Reconquista and English Borderlands.
 

Grainger

Explorer
On reflection, I think the point is more about the style/feel in which RPGs present such border conflicts/zones, which in old-school RPGs was often - IMO - rather American West in feel. I don't get that so much from current D&D (though my exposure to campaign content is limited), although I saw a modern let's play recently with town Sheriffs and Deputies etc. (this being down to the individual DM, not anything produced by Wizards of the Coast).
 

Shasarak said:
When you say there was nothing truly evil then how do we explain societies like the Ancient Assyrians? Its like the guy who tried to explain how great slavery was.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire – I assume that’s what you’re referring to – was predicated on open markets and free trade.

The literary depiction of the Assyrians – as unusually cruel and sadistic – is mostly an artifact of Judahite scribes writing during the Persian and Hellenistic periods, who were busy building an ethnic mythology and needed villains to occupy certain roles. Much of the remaining epigraphic evidence for their “wickedness and immorality” is of Neo-Babylonian origin; the successors to Assyria also had a large polemical axe to grind.

There is no archaeological evidence of substantial depopulation during the Assyrian conquest and occupation of the Levant in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. There is enormous evidence for infrastructure improvement and effective taxation.

There was forced population resettlement – mostly of the elite classes. Unlike the Babylonians – who preferred people to remain in ethnically homogenous enclaves after they’d been cleansed and relocated – the Assyrians broke up ethnic groups and sent them all over the empire. It was a much more imperial vision, in fact – ethnos was basically irrelevant.

Were there widespread acts of cruelty and barbarity? Surely.

Was this unusual? No, not even remotely.

Shasarak said:
Historically there have always been "real" evil beings lurking on humanities frontiers we even remember the famous ones like the Huns and the Vandals who are exactly like a rampaging army of Orcs that essentially can appear from nowhere.
Again, this is a literary or propagandistic representation. Consider how you’ve framed this statement; you have excluded the Huns and Vandals from the category of “Humanity” – this is not reasonable.

And we remember precisely nothing. We have a paucity of biased ancient accounts by those who saw successive waves of migration as a threat to the classical legacy of Europe – later “Christendom.” Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Alans, Turks, Mongols, whatever. It’s just regular “us” and “them” stuff.

They were all human. Really. Just like us.
 

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
They were all human. Really. Just like us.

Indeed, in human times that's quite clear. Fantasy worlds are, of course, not actually human and you can have the "truly" evil in the forms of demons, devils, Far Realm, etc. Whether orcs and goblins qualify is a choice that the DM probably should think through.

In my own campaign world I forked those races: Goblins and giants are distant relatives of fey. They tend to be nasty and focused on conquest but are no more inherently anything than other fey. Orcs and trolls, by contrast, were creatures that were corrupted by Far Realm manifestations and were, therefore, inherently evil, although half orcs weren't and often suffered substantial prejudice because of it. This is just one way of handling it---there are many others.
 

Derren

Hero
The one thing in D&D which I think is more European inspired than American is the existence of ruins, dungeons and a fallen empire that had better technology or magic than what is available now.
 

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
The one thing in D&D which I think is more European inspired than American is the existence of ruins, dungeons and a fallen empire that had better technology or magic than what is available now.
That's certainly a big aspect of D&D that's not remotely American.
 

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