D&D General The D&D Multiverse: Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die

This is kind of responding to a necro here, but I wanted to note that the kitchen-sink elements in the broader play culture of OD&D seemed from my experience to well predate any common awareness of Gygaxian cosmology. I forget when that was first exposed to the public but I was seeing things we'd consider outside common fantasy tropes showing up by the time I got into the hobby, and that was early enough the only D&D supplement that existed was Greyhawk.
In the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set, there's a quasi-deity named Murlynd clad in garments of another place and time called the Old West whose "waist is girded by a leather belt containing weapons of technology as well as a dagger." These weapons of technology are called 45s, six-shooters, and hog-legs. Dude is a straight up cowboy. A magic-user/illusionist/paladin cowboy.
 

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The original 1975 Greyhawk? Supplement I?

Yup. While I was playing Blackmore, Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demigods and Heroes came out, but a lot of what I'm talking about occurred well before that.

What kind of stuff?

Science Fantasy and outright Science Fiction elements. This wasn't universal, of course, and probably was more common in the wilds of California, but it still came out before we had any idea of a cosmology (and frankly, in a lot of cases had already largely rolled our own--most of the demons didn't come out that early, after all (balrogs and hellhounds were about it as I recall--the rest came out in Eldritch Wizardry if I recall correctly). But in the day you'd still see things like various SF originated monsters and sometimes classes, and various bits technology as "magical" treasure (and some characters had seen it often enough to know the difference, even if they didn't thoroughly understand it).

My recollection is that Fantasy got much more codified as its own genre after Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey started their own imprint at Ballantine, particularly looking to piggyback on Tolkien's success. And that before that the genre lines were fuzzier.

It was fuzzy right carrying along. The original Witch World books showed that, as did things like The Empire of the East books. Not even counting things like the surviving Planetary Romance novels or things like the World of Tiers that Nevin mentioned above.
 

Science Fantasy and outright Science Fiction elements. This wasn't universal, of course, and probably was more common in the wilds of California, but it still came out before we had any idea of a cosmology (and frankly, in a lot of cases had already largely rolled our own--most of the demons didn't come out that early, after all (balrogs and hellhounds were about it as I recall--the rest came out in Eldritch Wizardry if I recall correctly). But in the day you'd still see things like various SF originated monsters and sometimes classes, and various bits technology as "magical" treasure (and some characters had seen it often enough to know the difference, even if they didn't thoroughly understand it).

It was fuzzy right carrying along. The original Witch World books showed that, as did things like The Empire of the East books. Not even counting things like the surviving Planetary Romance novels or things like the World of Tiers that Nevin mentioned above.
Sure. The fiction which informed D&D had much fuzzier boundaries than what the Fantasy genre later came to be defined by. And some of that science-fantasy mix continued on alongside D&D in the early years.
 

In the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set, there's a quasi-deity named Murlynd clad in garments of another place and time called the Old West whose "waist is girded by a leather belt containing weapons of technology as well as a dagger." These weapons of technology are called 45s, six-shooters, and hog-legs. Dude is a straight up cowboy. A magic-user/illusionist/paladin cowboy.

We saw more than one hero-out-of-place character like that, though keeping tech equipment intact could be a challenge depending on the game. I played a Technologist character who was, basically a weak fighter (used the cleric hit and hit dice tables) who got to build and keep up certain different items of weapons and equipment based on his level for a while (in his case it mostly added up to a classic .45 ACP automatic, as stab vest and some grenades because he never got to the levels to do anything fancy.

Out on the West Coast, it probably didn't hurt that the SF fandom part of D&D gaming (which overlapped with the wargamers and the SCAers fairly heavily) picked up the habit of linking campaigns together with worldgates early on so they could move characters from campaign to campaign when they wanted to, so the idea of alternate worlds was relatively embedded.
 

In the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set, there's a quasi-deity named Murlynd clad in garments of another place and time called the Old West whose "waist is girded by a leather belt containing weapons of technology as well as a dagger." These weapons of technology are called 45s, six-shooters, and hog-legs. Dude is a straight up cowboy. A magic-user/illusionist/paladin cowboy.
You can rob his house in EX2, The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror.
 

Sure. The fiction which informed D&D had much fuzzier boundaries than what the Fantasy genre later came to be defined by. And some of that science-fantasy mix continued on alongside D&D in the early years.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure when it became icky to get SF on your fantasy or vice versa (though you still see it but it seems to often be distained by "serious" fans of the respective genres).
 

Yeah, I'm not quite sure when it became icky to get SF on your fantasy or vice versa (though you still see it but it seems to often be distained by "serious" fans of the respective genres).
I think it's a combination of genre barriers rising in the wake of Tolkien and Del Rey, and D&D becoming self-referential, its own products and fiction defining and reifying its own boundaries. And then those calcified a bit.
 

I think it's a combination of genre barriers rising in the wake of Tolkien and Del Rey, and D&D becoming self-referential, its own products and fiction defining and reifying its own boundaries. And then those calcified a bit.

Well, D&D became its own thing after a while, as you say, and set expectations that the player base kind of hardened around. You still see that with people who are profoundly resistant to even basic black powder weapons in D&D, no matter what mechanics they use.
 

Yeah, I'm not quite sure when it became icky to get SF on your fantasy or vice versa (though you still see it but it seems to often be distained by "serious" fans of the respective genres).
I don't know that it's icky but there does seem to be a very cognitive dissonance for most fantasy fans that seems to make scifi stuff unfun, I don't seem to see that as much in reverse from Scifi fans when thier scifi get's a little fantasy. But that may be because star trek and star wars are full of that kind of stuff.
 

I don't know that it's icky but there does seem to be a very cognitive dissonance for most fantasy fans that seems to make scifi stuff unfun, I don't seem to see that as much in reverse from Scifi fans when thier scifi get's a little fantasy. But that may be because star trek and star wars are full of that kind of stuff.

I suspect its mostly because there's a shellack of SF paint over any fantasy elements, where its harder to have the SF elements in a fantasy story get a fantasy paint job (not impossible, but there's less common genre tools for the job).
 

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