D&D General Greyhawk, Eberron, and Genre in Campaign Settings

I can't wait for Greyhawk to be legal on the DMs Guild so I can publish my Greyhawk - Eberron Mashup stuff on the guild, like the gnome paladin inspector solving the tabaxi murder mystery on the Greyhawk City - Dyvers lightning rail line.
 

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I think a key point is that there is not a hard line between "pulp" and "noir". Pulp fiction was written quickly, sold cheaply, and intended purely to entertain. And many of those stories where morally ambiguous, tinged with post-war cynicism, political corruption and organised crime. But, aside from the classic (Hayes code influenced) Hollywood movies, a lot of that material isn't much read. And of course there are good reasons for that, as a lot of it doesn't stand up very well, such as Leslie Chateris's Saint stories (starting 1928*). The other reason is a huge amount of it is in a medium that is almost lost - the Radio Serial. There used to be a huge number of these, some can still be found in the BBC Sounds archive, such as the Paul Temple serials (Frances Durbridge) very much both pulp and noir.

There is a feature of Eberron that makes it inherently noir-ish compared to other D&D settings - the absence of real gods. In other settings there is always the possibility of a literal Deux ex Machina popping up to make an absolute ruling on good and evil. That doesn't happen in Eberron. Nor do the dead find reward or retribution in the afterlife. All dead spirits go to the same place, were they fade away (Greco-Roman style).



*An important year for Eberron, being "Ten years after the Last War". Eberron is basically fantasy 1928.


**at the time WW1 was referred to as "The War to End all Wars". We now know that didn't happen, the use of the "Last War" by Keith Baker is intended ironically.
 
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I think a key point is that there is not a hard line between "pulp" and "noir". Pulp fiction was written quickly, sold cheaply, and intended purely to entertain.
I think part of the issue is that "pulp" has changed meaning over time. It used to mean what one can also call "low-effort" fiction: churn out entertaining fiction quickly, get it printed on cheap material and sell it at low cost. This was more of a business/quality term, and could span a number of genres. But over time, it has morphed (at least in gaming circles) to basically mean "Indiana Jones-like": competent characters having exciting adventures, often in exotic places, often exploring past wonders. This is the genre Eberron is aiming for.
 

I think part of the issue is that "pulp" has changed meaning over time. It used to mean what one can also call "low-effort" fiction: churn out entertaining fiction quickly, get it printed on cheap material and sell it at low cost. This was more of a business/quality term, and could span a number of genres. But over time, it has morphed (at least in gaming circles) to basically mean "Indiana Jones-like": competent characters having exciting adventures, often in exotic places, often exploring past wonders. This is the genre Eberron is aiming for.
I don't think it's meaning has changed, most D&D adventures are pulp in the original sense, typically being simplistic derivative narratives of little literary merit (very much including my own adventures in that).
 

Pulp sounds like "adventures in 30-40's years". "Noir" would be about investigation in the dark corners of the city. Bruce Timm and Tim Burton's Batman could be "noirpunk". Comics about vigilantes in the golden age shouldn't be tagged as "noir" because the action is too epic and too clear the line between good and bad.

New Cappena may be closer to "fantasy noirpunk".

My opinion is Dark Sun may be closest to Sword and Sorcery style, because morality is grayer and characters need more effort to survive, even without fight against enemies, the victory against the evil demands more sacrifices and there aren't inmediate rewards for the heroes.

My doubt is how the world of Greyhawk could be technologically frozen if now there are trade contact between different wildspaces.

* I like the idea of a Greyhawk mash-up, being mixed with other franchise. How would be mixing Greyhawk and Dark Sun? The idea is so... horrible than even Vecna would want to created a demiplane to test it.
 

I think Eberron's use of 'pulp' as a descriptor was also in many ways meant to invoke comparisons to Raiders of the Lost Ark... one of the most popular and well-known "recent" films which was described as being part of the 'pulp' genre. Thus for most people who never got into or really cared about genre definitions (and might not be able to name anything specific from the genre as originally conceived), the example of 'pulp' for them was Raiders, and a large part of Eberron was meant to be a setting where people would do things like was done in Raiders-- go out into jungles and explore ruins for relics and "business concerns", rather than trying to gain personal wealth (like traditional D&D was about.)

It's not a 1-for-1 comparison obviously (as nothing related to genre ever is)... but I just suspect that when you bring up Raiders and D&D in the same sentence... most people's thoughts immediately go to the opening scene and the trap-filled dungeon where Indy's looking for a relic for "the Museum!"... and one of the main thrusts of Xen'drik and dragonmarked houses / other Eberron organizations was to give a space for that sort of adventuring-- get hired by a group to go into the jungles to find some relic to bring back for said group.
 

I don't think it's meaning has changed, most D&D adventures are pulp in the original sense, typically being simplistic derivative narratives of little literary merit (very much including my own adventures in that).
I mean, yes, you're not wrong. But when Keith Baker specifically gives "pulp" as one of the inspirations for Eberron, he's not talking about Conan or Elric. He's talking about Indiana Jones.
 

I mean, yes, you're not wrong. But when Keith Baker specifically gives "pulp" as one of the inspirations for Eberron, he's not talking about Conan or Elric. He's talking about Indiana Jones.
It wasn't juat Baker or Wberron, "pulp" in this particular odd sense was juat in the air in the Aights: see also, Spirit of the Century.
 

I mean, yes, you're not wrong. But when Keith Baker specifically gives "pulp" as one of the inspirations for Eberron, he's not talking about Conan or Elric. He's talking about Indiana Jones.
Indiana Jones isn't pulp, it was inspired by pulp. And one of the differences between Jones and it's source material is it's less noir-ish. It's the literature of that particular post-war time period that is important to Eberron.
 

While I think discussion of genre can be helpful, the fuzziness of the definitions of genres (and especially sub-genres) and the lack of applicability in certain situations with regard to TTRPGs can lead to more heat and less light. So, going back to Greyhawk, it is fundamentally a Sword & Sorcery setting, but that doesn't mean that you are required to play it that way. The influences are there, but whether you engage with them or not is your choice.
While this is fair, there's something to be said for the faults of swimming upstream (or, ahem, relieving oneself upwind, as it were). If what you're trying to do is deeply, fundamentally at odds with the written setting conceits, you're probably going to have a bad time. Athas is an intentionally dark, gritty, low-fantasy survival-focused setting. Trying to run a classic "clean" high-fantasy (e.g. "Paladins & Princesses") game in Athas is...well, It's not that you can't make it work, but why would you ever want to? Likewise, the Sixth World setting of Shadowrun is a fantasy cyberpunk corporate dystopia; you can choose to play it low-level or high-level or anywhere in between, but you're almost certainly going to have a bad time if you try to play a "hearth fantasy" type game--and, likewise, you're going to have a bad time if you try to play a black trenchcoat ruthless chromed-up street sam in Humblewood.

Yes, genres and styles suffer from the sorites paradox, the "I know it when I see it" problem. But that doesn't mean the "influences" can always be brushed aside and ignored. There are greater and lesser degrees of influence, greater and lesser departures. A really strong influence, like the cyberpunk of SR, is going to resist departures that might be otherwise relatively mild. A dramatic departure, like trying to run a magical-girl anime story in Athas, may always be a square peg no matter how much you polish the round hole.

Avoiding those sorts of fool's-errand efforts is precisely where genres and styles and other loosey-goosey things are useful. They're signposts to help point you toward the things that, even if they aren't a perfect fit, will at least not fight you every step of the way.
 

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