D&D General Reassesing Robert E Howards influence on D&D +

[Ralif Redhammer]

One thing I have noticed about Conan stories is how easily they inspire adventure ideas for D&D, at least for me. I can read Lord of the Rings, and get some inspiration. But every time I read a Conan story (even if it is one I have read many times before), I find myself inspired to work out some adventure location, NPC, complete adventure, etc.

Absolutely. You can really see how many of Conan's stories influenced early D&D dungeon-crawling. And REH really knew how to create a setpiece location.

 

[occam]

To a degree. When it comes to "Fight or Flight" situations, Conan nearly always goes with fight. The few exceptions were particularly deadly and sanity blasting supernatural weirdness. And the original Barbarian class was definitely drawing on Conan's go-for-the-throat battle focus. But over time it's picked up other influences, such as Wolverine's signature "berserker rages", that exaggerate the effect far more than Conan or the other pulp heroes did.

There was a pulp-era character who lines up with the modern D&D barbarian perfectly, IMO, but it isn't Conan: it's Tarzan. The lack of armor, wilderness survival capabilities, quick reactions, and (significantly) primal rages are all there. The alignment is so close that I wonder if 3e's designers had that example in mind, even though I think the concept is more easily traced through the Norse berserker and its 2e implementation.

I agree that there's very little, if any, modern D&D barbarian in Conan the Barbarian.

 

[Kurotowa]

There was a pulp-era character who lines up with the modern D&D barbarian perfectly, IMO, but it isn't Conan: it's Tarzan. The lack of armor, wilderness survival capabilities, quick reactions, and (significantly) primal rages are all there.

The shirtless Barbarian seems to come mostly from Frank Frezetta art and the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Which, let's be honest, are often more of an immediate influence than the original stories.

 

[Clint_L]

This conversation is making me want to re-read some of those old Conan stories. But they're treasured memories from my youth and I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This conversation is making me want to re-read some of those old Conan stories. But they're treasured memories from my youth and I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed.

I'm working my way through the Kurt Busiek comics again and strongly recommend them.

 

[Kurotowa]

This conversation is making me want to re-read some of those old Conan stories. But they're treasured memories from my youth and I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed.

You have to take the good with the bad. Sometimes you'll have wonderfully evocative stuff right next to stuff that reminds you that the stories are 90 years old. Sometimes you'll have a story it's clear REH really cared about, and sometime it's obviously something he slapped together quickly because he had bills to pay.

They're an interesting historical record of the genre. They're a useful inspiration for your world building, though less so for PC concepts. Conan is very much the omni-competent solo hero and not a good model for an ensemble character like in D&D. They're a fun read, as long as you keep an eye on the attitudes that are very much of their time.

 

[Mannahnin]

Agreed. I think the prose mostly holds up and the stories are often still great. There's bits of unpleasantness, though I would say less so than with, say, Lovecraft.

 

[CapnZapp]

So while many people see the influence of Tolkien on DnD, Gary Gygax himself said that while the success of Tolkien did encourage him to develop the game, the overall influence was minimal. Instead he sites Conan the Conqueror as seminal influence on his “concepts of adventure”.

Conan was first recreated for Greyhawk (D&D Supplement IV) as a Fighter Level 15/ Thief Level 9 and this concept added to things like magic resistance, animal instincts and rage eventually developed into the Barbarian class. He even went on to inspire a couple of early modules and his own TSR RPG

But it was Sword and Scorcery inspired concepts of adventure that really carried DnD to what it is - over-the-top characters engaging in hard combat in a world of flashy magic. REH also had Conan come across various guarded wizard towers, lost cities with monster haunted dungeons, warring factions, which became the site based dungeons of DnD.
Its certain that Hobbits and Ents and similar were lifted from Tolkien, but Gygax calls these influences superficial as being based on the same mythologies rather than being wholesale adaptions. Gygax further claims that the seeming parallels and inspirations of Tolkien in DnD was contrived as an attempt to attract Tolkiens readers to the game even though Gygax opined that it was well nigh impossible to recreate any Tolkien-based fantasy within the boundaries of the game system.
The original forward to the game states “These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard’s Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste.”

No mention of Tolkien there, as Gygax considered the Rings trilogy tedious and “considered in the light of fantasy action adventure, Tolkien is not dynamic.” and as such REH was a much better foundation to an interactive ‘fantasy action adventure Game’, than Tolkiens LotR.

Anyway what do you think, just how important is Howards Conan and other such pulp writers to DnD
(PS while Tolkien may be cited in discussion, lets not make this a debate about the merits of Tolkien v REH)

Thank you for this.

While Conan is important to me, I think Howard's influence over D&D is small, especially today.

Personally I don't mind a fleshy grotesquely unequal world, and in fact, this is what draws me to S&S. If I want to play in a world with equal opportunity, I can go for a bog-standard D&D world that (comparatively speaking) is Disney-levels of sanitized.

If you like to use D&D like games for Sword & Sorcery gaming, 5th Edition is in some ways better than previous editions (talking about AD&D and 3E here), but still not my ideal choice.

My latest campaign used the DCC rules in the world of Xoth. The DCC ruleset is wonderful in some regards, but too fiddly in others. The best thing about the DCC ruleset is the basic fact that its existence made all the wonderful adventures in the DCC lineup possible (the 3E and 4E adventures in the DCC lineup are much much weaker).

 

[Dioltach]

This conversation is making me want to re-read some of those old Conan stories. But they're treasured memories from my youth and I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed.

I still really enjoy the original REH stories. The man could really write. His prose is very evocative, and he makes his characters believable.

I've tried a few of the stories by other authors, and none of them come close at all.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Agreed. I think the prose mostly holds up and the stories are often still great. There's bits of unpleasantness, though I would say less so than with, say, Lovecraft.

Howard was a man of his time, place and ethnicity, but does not appear to have had Lovecraft's outright xenophobic pathologies.