Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8455061" data-attributes="member: 7026594">The Irish Filí were elite (very high social rank) poets, historians and philosophers to kings.  They recorded history and great deeds, recounted major tales and poetic epics, performed before feasts and battles, and also acted as seers, having magically prophetic visions.  Musicians were a somewhat related but lesser-ranked profession.  Later, perhaps after Christianity took firm hold and kings were spending to support Bishops rather than high-ranking magical poets, the functions seem to have merged a bit.Literary and historic examples of bards or bard-like figures include Taliesen from the Welsh tradition, Amergin from the Irish, Poul Anderson's Cappen Varra, Manly Wade Wellman's Kardios the Atlantean, and for the "incompetent but good-hearted" trope, Fflewddur Fflam from Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. And trumping Cappen Varra and Kardios, I would say the most prominent example from pulp fiction that Gary was probably thinking of when he included Wellman in Appendix N of the 1E DMG, Silver John aka John the Balladeer.Taliesen and Amergin are famously poets and their magic is connected to or invoked by their poetry.  Morgan Llywelyn did a fun book about Amergin in '84, Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish.Cappen Varra and Kardios are generally non-magical swords & sorcery protagonists, solving their issues with their wits and their swords, though using music and song as well to win friends or antagonize enemies.Here's a short Cappen Varra story from 1957.  CV is possibly the original lothario bard and is almost the archetype of the D&D-style rogue bard.  A charming scoundrel, carrying a light blade and decent with it, a romantic with a list of former loves as long as your arm.<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29542/29542-h/29542-h.htm" target="_blank">The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Valor of Cappen Varra, by Poul Anderson</a>Fflewdur Fflam is nonmagical himself, a poor king of a tiny kingdom one can walk across in a day, who dreamed to be a bard and went to the bardic council to become one.  This being a fantasy quasi-Wales, these "real" bards are implied to be powerful, wise and magical, and they gift him The Truthful Harp.  Which magically plays well despite his lack of talent, but snaps a string every time he speaks an untruth, which is a great frustration to him as he's a born storyteller and exaggerator.John the Balladeer is a bit of an outlier, his stories being set in the Appalachian Mountains of the US, sometime after WW2 or the Korean War, one of which John's a veteran of.  But these are horror/fantasy stories nonetheless, and Goodman Games has taken inspiration from them for a recent DCC campaign setting (The Shudder Mountains) and series of modules.John is a wandering musician and historian, a writer and collector of songs and folktales.  He's in some ways the opposite of Cappen Varra- humble, devout, confident but pretty quiet about it.  Restrained around women.  A crack shot (though that latter rarely comes up), good with his fists as well as his silver-stringed guitar.  In each story he usually comes up against some supernatural menace, and resolves it using folklore, faith, quick wits and bravery.  He performs songs in pretty much every story, and often employs them in defeating evil.Here is a compilation of John the Balladeer stories, starting with an intro to the writer and the character. The first story is O Ugly Bird! (1951), and I recommend them all. They're quick reads, too. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><a href="http://baencd.freedoors.org/Books/John%20the%20Balladeer/John_the_Balladeer.htm" target="_blank">John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman - Baen Books</a></blockquote>

Verification