Prime_Evil
Adventurer
I have noticed a definite shift in the expectations that new players have of the fantasy genre. When I started playing around 1980, most of the people that I was playing with were dedicated readers of fantasy fiction long before they became D&D players. These guys had read most of the classic works of Sword & Sorcery -- Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore et al. I think that between us, we had read just about every single book on the Recommended Reading list at the back of the 1st edition DMG. Curiously, the people that I played with back then tended to prefer this type of pulp fantasy to the high fantasy represented by Tolkien's numerous imitators.
Nowdays, the expectations that new players have tend to be conditioned by mainstream media. Many new players have seen video games, movies, and TV serials that use imagery derived from fantasy fiction without reading the original source material from which the images have been drawn. Heck, I have a couple of players that have never read the Lord of the Rings! (As an aside, trying to run a Ravenloft campaign for players of this generation can be interesting -- they tend to think in terms of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer rather than the classic horror films of the 1930s and 1940s).
I also think that a change in the nature of the publishing industry has helped to drive a change in the nature of fantasy fiction. The growth of large chain stores such as Borders or Barnes & Noble has killed off most of the small publishers who used to release Swords & Sorcery fiction in limited print runs. Very few publishers are producing collections of short stories anymore, and it should be remembered that most fantasy published in the US until the late 1970s was in the form of short fiction. It still boggles the imagination just how *short* such classic novels as Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' or John Bellair's 'The Face in the Frost' actually were. These days, the trend is towards sprawling multi-volume fantasy epics which maximise the return on the publisher's investment.
Nowdays, the expectations that new players have tend to be conditioned by mainstream media. Many new players have seen video games, movies, and TV serials that use imagery derived from fantasy fiction without reading the original source material from which the images have been drawn. Heck, I have a couple of players that have never read the Lord of the Rings! (As an aside, trying to run a Ravenloft campaign for players of this generation can be interesting -- they tend to think in terms of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer rather than the classic horror films of the 1930s and 1940s).
I also think that a change in the nature of the publishing industry has helped to drive a change in the nature of fantasy fiction. The growth of large chain stores such as Borders or Barnes & Noble has killed off most of the small publishers who used to release Swords & Sorcery fiction in limited print runs. Very few publishers are producing collections of short stories anymore, and it should be remembered that most fantasy published in the US until the late 1970s was in the form of short fiction. It still boggles the imagination just how *short* such classic novels as Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' or John Bellair's 'The Face in the Frost' actually were. These days, the trend is towards sprawling multi-volume fantasy epics which maximise the return on the publisher's investment.
