D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[MGibster]

I can't say I ever saw much similarity between AD&D and westerns when I was a teenager. Other than having frontier at times, AD&D just never really hit on the points that define the western as a genre.

1. Stock characters such as the gambler, the prostitute with a heart of gold, prospector, and perhaps most importantly the gunslinger are missing.
2. Encroaching civilization in the form of technology (rail road, telegraph, cold beer) and the arrival of families, churches, and political institutions.
3. I don't recall a single boom town in any AD&D adventure. Maybe they existed but I just can't recall a single one.
4. The look of AD&D doesn't resemble what you'd expect to find in a western.

But I suppose you don't have to be a western to have been influenced by westerns. But from where I sit, D&D has never really much resembled a western as it doesn't touch on the same themes.

 

[Mordhau]

I can't say I ever saw much similarity between AD&D and westerns when I was a teenager. Other than having frontier at times, AD&D just never really hit on the points that define the western as a genre.

1. Stock characters such as the gambler, the prostitute with a heart of gold, prospector, and perhaps most importantly the gunslinger are missing.
2. Encroaching civilization in the form of technology (rail road, telegraph, cold beer) and the arrival of families, churches, and political institutions.
3. I don't recall a single boom town in any AD&D adventure. Maybe they existed but I just can't recall a single one.
4. The look of AD&D doesn't resemble what you'd expect to find in a western.

But I suppose you don't have to be a western to have been influenced by westerns. But from where I sit, D&D has never really much resembled a western as it doesn't touch on the same themes.

The point, which seems to be continually getting lost, was not that D&D resembles westerns in any of those ways. The point was that it resembles westerns in particular structural ways such as outlined in my post above, or in the article linked by another poster, or in the role that Orcs often play,

People keep wanting to pick out certain specific features of westerns and say 'D&D doesn't have these things' therefore it is nothing like a western. It's a bit like claiming that D&D was not influenced by the Conan stories because it's not really about the themes of cycles of barbarians rising to civilisations falling to decadence and then repeating against the backdrop of an uncaring universe of cyclical catastrophes. It's ultimatly irrelevant.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It took me a while thinking about it, but I think we're missing something in the D&D / Westerns comparison.

We're all thinking about the modern popular Westerns with cowboys and saloon towns that are common for our generation.

However, we're missing the fact that Cowboy movies are the survivors of a larger Western genre that was about the greater founding of the American west rather than the Dying Days of established and eroding boom towns me have today.

If we cast our eyes back, we have Settlers stories like Wagon Train! (exclamation point not negotiable), Little House on the the Prairie, Grizzly Adams, and Have Gun, Will Travel, which are set in an earlier time when homesteads that were far-flung with forts being the only major settlements and bandits and large predators being rampant and unchecked.

This is where I see a lot of connections with the Points of Light concept that was around D&D a long time and was solidified in 4e.

 

[MGibster]

The point, which seems to be continually getting lost, was not that D&D resembles westerns in any of those ways. The point was that it resembles westerns in particular structural ways such as outlined in my post above, or in the article linked by another poster, or in the role that Orcs often play,

I just don't agree that the role orcs often play is derived from the western. If anything, the role of a barbaric outsider coming down to wreck your stuff was thousands of years old by the time the western as a genre was developed. Very few AD&D adventures resemble stories from the western genre.

We're all thinking about the modern popular Westerns with cowboys and saloon towns that are common for our generation.

Let's be careful here, what do you mean by "our" generation? I was born in the 70s, after the domination of the western in popular entertainment had ended, but I always enjoyed watching old television shows and movies westerns. The funny thing is, starting with Ft. Apache in 1949, the American Indians started being portrayed in a sympathetic light as complex people who were getting a raw deal. Certainly not in all movies or television shows, but the era of the Indian as a simple bad guy you could knock off with impunity was coming to an end.

The funny thing is that I rarely saw orcs being treated in such a sympathetic light or as complex people in D&D supplements. There were occasional examples of domestic life, but for the most part they just existed to provide us with experience points.

 

[Maxperson]

The point, which seems to be continually getting lost, was not that D&D resembles westerns in any of those ways. The point was that it resembles westerns in particular structural ways such as outlined in my post above, or in the article linked by another poster, or in the role that Orcs often play,

People keep wanting to pick out certain specific features of westerns and say 'D&D doesn't have these things' therefore it is nothing like a western. It's a bit like claiming that D&D was not influenced by the Conan stories because it's not really about the themes of cycles of barbarians rising to civilisations falling to decadence and then repeating against the backdrop of an uncaring universe of cyclical catastrophes. It's ultimatly irrelevant.

"Armed groups of common people who are complete strangers can arrive in town and walk around with their weapons and it's apparently ok, and they don't get bailed up for being brigands or vagabonds."

This reason applies to many more places than western frontier towns. Hell, you could walk around armed anywhere in the U.S. during that time period, civilized or western frontier. There were also many other countries where you could do so as well.

"In early D&D it was an assumed aspect of play that your perfectly ordinary common Fighter could find an area of land inhabited by 'monsters', 'clear it out' and establish yourself as a lord. Now calling yourself a lord may be vaguely Medieval/Early Modern, but the rest of it is all manifest destiny and claiming the frontier. (And completely at odds with any medieval conception of nobility)."

As you point out, this is just as easily vaguely medieval, just like....................D&D. It's also not at all the western frontier. You could claim land, but you had to register with the government. You couldn't just grab it on your own and rule it. You were also subject to the laws of the city/town, county, state and/or country. You weren't really a law unto yourself like in early D&D.

Did you have any reasons that are western frontier town specific? Because you need that if you want to tie D&D frontier towns to western U.S. frontier towns.

 

[Hussar]

What land? Bag End. Besides, it’s not like being a gentleman has a lot of significance. Yet, it’s pretty clear Sam is as much a one as Frodo ever was afterward.

So, a commoner then?

 

[Maxperson]

It took me a while thinking about it, but I think we're missing something in the D&D / Westerns comparison.

Like actual specific connections

If we cast our eyes back, we have Settlers stories like Wagon Train! (exclamation point not negotiable), Little House on the the Prairie, Grizzly Adams, and Have Gun, Will Travel, which are set in an earlier time when homesteads that were far-flung with forts being the only major settlements and bandits and large predators being rampant and unchecked.

The problem here is that I've never in my entire time playing D&D took part in a caravan or wagon train going to settle an area(wagon train). Little House on the prairie is a town, not a fort and frontier towns are not explicitly western. Grizzly Adams is a hermit and hermits exist in every nationality. A D&D hermit is not tied to Grizzly Adams in any way. Have gun - will travel is about a mercenary, which were all over Europe and Asia. Frontier forts are not specifically American. The British, French and Spanish created many in the new world.

Nothing you've listed here is explicitly in D&D or tied specifically to western frontier towns. You can draw a connection to western frontier towns, and you can draw connections to other non-western frontier towns.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Like actual specific connections

It's not about looking for unique or specific connections, just inspiration.

And we know that at least Kung Fu, another Western, was on the radar of early designers because that's where the monk comes from.

 

[Mordhau]

Let's be careful here, what do you mean by "our" generation? I was born in the 70s, after the domination of the western in popular entertainment had ended, but I always enjoyed watching old television shows and movies westerns. The funny thing is, starting with Ft. Apache in 1949, the American Indians started being portrayed in a sympathetic light as complex people who were getting a raw deal. Certainly not in all movies or television shows, but the era of the Indian as a simple bad guy you could knock off with impunity was coming to an end.

The funny thing is that I rarely saw orcs being treated in such a sympathetic light or as complex people in D&D supplements. There were occasional examples of domestic life, but for the most part they just existed to provide us with experience points.

If Native Americans need to be treated sympathetically because opinions about them are changing then it's hard to actually continue to use them to fill the same kind of roles they used to fill as faceless attackers.

Now, if for example you had read a book by a British guy who had characters travelling through the wilderness and getting attacked by these evil creatures called Orcs...

 

[MGibster]

This reason applies to many more places than western frontier towns. Hell, you could walk around armed anywhere in the U.S. during that time period, civilized or western frontier. There were also many other countries where you could do so as well.

This is actually a myth. Even in the old west, most municipalities had ordinances prohibiting people from walking around town while armed. Like many common western tropes, reality is often quite different from what we see in the stories and everyone walking around with guns really contributes to the wild and lawless atmosphere for a good story.

 

[Faolyn]

The Realms has lots of frontier. There are wild areas within most countries and the far north is entirely frontier. Those modules don't exist in a vacuum. They get plunked down in the Realms or wherever and while there is wilderness around them, it's not endless in each direction. In one of those directions, not too far away, is civilization.

Same with any real-world frontier. It's just that some people didn't (and don't) accept other people's civilization as being real. You know, like Old West settlers ignoring the existing Native American civilizations.

Unless you're really trying to say that it's only a frontier if there are no intelligent beings?

 

[Maxperson]

It's not about looking for unique or specific connections, just inspiration.

Sure, but you can't show inspiration. You can only assume that the hermit in question is inspired Grizzly Adams and not the Indian Guru.

And we know that at least Kung Fu, another Western, was on the radar of early designers because that's where the monk comes from.

And Paladins were inspired by Charlemagne. Clerics by the European Catholic Church. Rangers by Tolkien(English). Fighters pretty neutral. Wizards? Not from Westerns. Assassins? Also not from Westerns. As for Monks, can you show that it was from Kung Fu the Western and not from Chinese Kung Fu movies in general? Or is that another assumption?

 

[Faolyn]

Sure, but you can't show inspiration. You can only assume that the hermit in question is inspired Grizzly Adams and not the Indian Guru.

And Paladins were inspired by Charlemagne. Clerics by the European Catholic Church. Rangers by Tolkien(English). Fighters pretty neutral. Wizards? Not from Westerns. Assassins? Also not from Westerns. As for Monks, can you show that it was from Kung Fu the Western and not from Chinese Kung Fu movies in general? Or is that another assumption?

...OK, do you get that nobody is saying that D&D is a 1-for-1 match with westerns? We're saying that the game took some inspiration from it.

 

[MGibster]

And Paladins were inspired by Charlemagne. Clerics by the European Catholic Church. Rangers by Tolkien(English). Fighters pretty neutral. Wizards? Not from Westerns. Assassins? Also not from Westerns. As for Monks, can you show that it was from Kung Fu the Western and not from Chinese Kung Fu movies in general? Or is that another assumption?

I'm pretty confident that monks were inspired from the same sources that inspired the creation of Kung-Fu. But I wouldn't doubt it if Cain also served as an inspiration for the class.

 

[MGibster]

...OK, do you get that nobody is saying that D&D is a 1-for-1 match with westerns? We're saying that the game took some inspiration from it.

Okay, but it seems to be a pretty weak inspiration seeing as how D&D doesn't really resemble a western in either tone or setting.

 

[Mordhau]

The Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about the concept of "Adventure Space" a sort of imaginary space where adventures can happen, which frontiers of all kind definitely fit into (but which are not solely frontiers -Cyberpunk in a way is a dystopian future adventure space). So for Howard, Adventure space was sometimes inflected by Westerns and sometimes by stories of the middle east. For British people of a certain time, Adventure Space would have been the colonies, India or Africa. Space can be an adventure space, often inflected by both of the above kinds of colonial adventure space. (It has often been pointed out how much some space opera stories are structurally westerns to the extent that Firefly went and paid deliberate homage to that idea). One of the thing that defines an adventure space, is not that you can tell one story in it, but that you can imagine a whole lot of stories, en endless amount of stories being told in the same space. This is the space where stories (plural) happen. So of course these kinds of spaces are very important to rpgs (and to pulp fiction where a lot of stories needed to be churned out very quickly.)

In terms of D&D if the western is not the main influence in terms of adventure space, then what is? These things evolve, they don't emerge out of immaculate conception. The Lord of the Rings is one influence, but it is one story, it is the story of one world. And while the Lord of the Rings had lots of imitators, and created in a way a kind of epic fantasy adventure space, that space had a major problem in terms of repeated stories - because the type of story that it was, was the story of the epic decision point of a whole world - so every Tolkien imitator had to make their own world.

So these would seem to me to be the main adventure spaces that influence D&D.

• The Western (In the broadest sense of an imaginative frontier, a not quite settled place that is someone out there)
• The 'oriental' (because orientalist) colonial adventure space (which by the time of D&D was already being forgotten other than by being translated into the Sword and Sorcery Adventure Space.*
• The Lord of the Rings/ Epic fantasy adventure space (which I feel is important but incomplete on it's own).

You can see the process of recasting and reskinning adventure spaces in various works of fiction. Rosemary Sutcliffe wrote adventure stories about Roman Britain and it's fall and aftermath (and apparently a big influence on her was Rudyard Kipling, which should tell you a lot about which adventure space she used to structure her own adventure space). David Gemmell wrote books in a world that was very Sword and Sorcery in detail, but his stories were clearly lacking in the existential themes of sword and sorcery and instead very much focused on the moral themes of westerns. In the 1950s, (or 60s) there was a Robin Hood TV series on American TV that apparently everyone knew was basically a western. Star Trek was sometimes referred to as "Wagon Train to the Stars".

*I feel that this particular influence mostly fell away due the uptake of the epic fantasy aesthetic style which is much more familiar in terms of basic detail (Northern wilderness) and moral themes (Good vs Evil) to most Americans.

Edit: Not all stories have an adventure space or need one. It is not a universal feature. As I said above, Cyberpunk has become a sort of adventure space, where we can imagine an endless series of stories taking place (whether they are good stories or not is immaterial). In contrast, try to imagine a 1984 adventure space. How many stories can you really tell in that world/set-up? (Not that you need more than one).

 

[Maxperson]

Same with any real-world frontier. It's just that some people didn't (and don't) accept other people's civilization as being real. You know, like Old West settlers ignoring the existing Native American civilizations.

Unless you're really trying to say that it's only a frontier if there are no intelligent beings?

No. I'm saying that beyond will be a dragon territory, perhaps a mind flayer in a cave, etc. Generally it's just individual monsters or a few monsters of a type. If it's say orcs or hobgoblins, then it's the frontier of the human country, but there's civilization beyond.

 

[Maxperson]

...OK, do you get that nobody is saying that D&D is a 1-for-1 match with westerns? We're saying that the game took some inspiration from it.

Sure. I also get that nobody has shown any kind of proof that inspiration has come from it. Every example has had multiple non-american west examples that could have equally been the inspiration. If you're going to claim inspiration, you have to show specific evidence of it or if you can't show evidence, show a quote from a designer saying that's where they got the inspiration.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm pretty confident that monks were inspired from the same sources that inspired the creation of Kung-Fu. But I wouldn't doubt it if Cain also served as an inspiration for the class.

Maybe, but the Monk abilities seem more Chinese Kung Fu fantastic than Kung Fu the series. The old Chinese Kung Fu movies had monks moving faster than normal. Cane didn't move particularly fast. He also didn't strike super quickly like they did in the movies. Nor did he do super damage with a single strike, but I've seen those old Kung Fu movie masters destroy a tree with a finger strike.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

It took me a while thinking about it, but I think we're missing something in the D&D / Westerns comparison.

We're all thinking about the modern popular Westerns with cowboys and saloon towns that are common for our generation.

However, we're missing the fact that Cowboy movies are the survivors of a larger Western genre that was about the greater founding of the American west rather than the Dying Days of established and eroding boom towns me have today.

I think you're onto something here.

If we cast our eyes back, we have Settlers stories like Wagon Train! (exclamation point not negotiable), Little House on the the Prairie, Grizzly Adams, and Have Gun, Will Travel, which are set in an earlier time when homesteads that were far-flung with forts being the only major settlements and bandits and large predators being rampant and unchecked.

OMG! Talk about a flood of memories from when I was a kid!
I remember religiously watching those shows. In particular, Grizzly Adams struck a chord that still resonates deep in my soul to this day. It even did with my parents...my brother is named after the main character. And Ben...geeze. As child, the idea of living in the forest with a pet grizzly bear? A freakn' GRIZZLY BEAR?!? ...SQUEEEEEEE!!!...

Now, looking back on what I remember (that was 45'ish years ago when I was a pre-10'ish year old), the whole "living off the land, fighting off the wild creatures, wary of injury, hard manual labour ever second of the day just to not die that night..." ...yup. Sounds like D&D to me!

This is where I see a lot of connections with the Points of Light concept that was around D&D a long time and was solidified in 4e.

Ditto. As I said, I think you're on to something.

^_^

Paul L. Ming