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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vigilance" data-source="post: 3792405" data-attributes="member: 4275">Agreed.Now, on to the niggling! That may be true.However, being more popular 70 years after your death than you were 40 years after your death, when you were more popular than you were 20 years after your death, when you were more popular than when you were alive, says something.Get what I'm saying? Howard's popularity is increasing over time.That's a sign that his work is not a product of its time, which is what separates great literature from the rest. Again, the trend I illustrated above explains why this isn't necessarily true.If you expose people to good work, they just might like it!Also, when talking about designing a game, a lot of these people have been exposed to Howardian sensibilities whether they know it or not.It's embedded in D&D's DNA every bit as much, if not more, than Tolkien. In fact, I'd argue that removing Tolkien would be easier than removing the influences of Howard, Leiber or Vance.There was a LOT of killing people and taking their stuff in Conan. In Tolkien? Not so much. Again, I disagree. Conan has much more in common with many of D&D's most popular playstyles than any of the ones you mentioned.Conan didn't want to save the world. He wanted to die rich and famous. That's much more in line with the basic "loot tombs" aspect of D&D than taking your most powerful magic item off to be destroyed and inheriting most of your other items from your famous uncle. Exactly. Whether you think Howard is great literature or not, you can't argue that the dungeon crawls and city adventures in D&D seem very much like Howard, and the wilderness adventuring and epic questing seem very Tolkien-esque (and, I'd argue, Arthurian).This argues for its continued inclusion as an influence to D&D, whether high school kids necessarily know where the influences came from or not.</blockquote>

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