Wahoo vs. Traditional

[JeffB]

I'm def not into the very "plain jane" ala Harn or even Kalamar. And I like things as wahoo as Eberron (Most of it anyway), & Earthdawn. The Known World (one of my faves) is as far to the traditional as I prefer, and I'm defintiely NOT into wuxia/anime type wahoo.

However my tastes these days are definitely geared toward typical classic Swords & Sorcery ala Hyboria or The Young Kingdoms with some more wahoo elements of Glorantha & Tekumel (as far as being steeped in myth/religion and the cultures being decidely less "traditional D&D"). I have started work recently on just such a setting

Deities are very real, present, and their priesthood's influence is permeating in the lives of everyone.

No demi-humans (although I am working on a couple of "alien" type races)

The world is def POL- City States are common- many of these City states are POD(arkness)

Sorcery is more common than say Hyboria, but not everyday like typical D&D (however PCs are not restricted in choosing a magic wielding class)

Magic Items are rare, and cannot be bought at markets- they must be found, stolen, or won (Healing potions and the like are not magic, but salves, etc)

No such thing as full plate, and (light) crossbows are exceedingly rare (being a new technology).

Cosmology/The World is mythology based (e.g. "hell" is deep under the ground, "Heaven" is the stars, The Sun is a god, The Moon is a god, great battles involving deities have formed the Mountain ranges, or lakes, etc)

that sort of thing.

Probably more verbose than needed, but felt being specific may offer a clearer picture.

 

[Mallus]

Would Arduin be "wahoo"?

Absolutely.

I'm pretty sure the Grimjack comics would count, and my early-'80s D&D campaign was pretty much like that.

Grimjack? The guy who lives in Cynosure? Absolutely.

Empire of the Petal Throne is probably not wahoo, just unique, eh?

EPT takes place on an alien planet cast into a pocket universe. It has, what, a dozen or more sentient races, most of whom were once spacefarers (including terrestrial humans), who currently live in societies resembling the ancient Near East/Far East. There's 'science indistinguishable from magic', 'magic indistinguishable from science, and 'science that still is pretty clearly science' (like the remains of the planet-wide subway system --is that in the game? I've never played it, but I've read two of the novels).

If EPT isn't wahoo, then nothing is.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Birthright - Dragonlance - Greyhawk - Forgotten Realms - Eberron

Interesting thought experiment. I think we could even extend it by adding Spelljammer to the right of Eberron . . . Not just fliying ships, its D&D in SPACE! Plus guns!

Birthright - Dragonlance - Greyhawk - Forgotten Realms - Eberron - Spelljammer

Taken as a whole, Mystara would be at the Eberron/Spelljammer end of the spectrum. But if you could segment Mystara's Gazetteers up, Gaz 1 Grand Duchy of Karameikos would go to the far left of that wahoo spectrum. Dawn of the Emperors and Wrath of the Immortals would be at the extreme right of the spectrum.

Red Steel, where everything with an intelligence score gains literal super power abilities in addition to their normal D&D abilities, should be at the extreme Eberron of wahoo. Plus it has guns.

For me though, generally, whether a D&D campaign is traditional fantasy or wahoo fantasy is not whether PCs can do amazing things, it is whether every corner of society is saturated with amazing magic, and there is some homage towards ancient to medieval Earth cultures.

 

[Oni]

1) Fantasy elements that have no basis in traditional mythology. Traditional relies on Norse, Celtic, Greek, Indian, Chinese, etc. mythology plus the modern materials added by Tolkien, Gygax, and Arneson to the traditional larder of D&D fare. For example, in my two campaigns the PC's have recently been fighting werewolves, orcs, goblins, and ogres. Wahoo would be enemies like half-bat half-demons ninjas in spacesuits. Wahoo looks to other sci fi sources, or just straight invent their own stuff. Traditional looks to what "fits the feel of the campaign". Wahoo looks to what would be original.

Wahoo does not mean a total disregard for internal consistency, and it doesn't mean being random just for the sake of being random.

4) "Traditional" PC's have races and classes that are found in the PHB's of 1st-3rd edition. Human fighters are very common NPC's and occur as PC's fairly often too. "Wahoo" PC's go well beyond that -- in a true wahoo campaign, a human fighter would be seen as a choice sadly lacking in originality/optimization.

Nor is wahoo just an excuse for optimization.

 

[Pseudonym]

Interesting character creation method then. What system was it you played?

I am a big proponent of simulation and I have never seen anything this detailed. Sounds incredible.

Sounds a bit like the original Traveller.

 

[AllisterH]

Haakon1's post (not picking on you personally haakon1) is why I think the only definition of "wahoo" that makes sense is how much the non-traditional affects the NON-PCs/ major NPCs of the setting....

The farm herder, the merchant etc. These guys in Eberron are touched by the non-traditional aspects of Eberron whereas in Birthright for example, we got "classic" medieval peasants running around.

Even my placement of FR to the right of Greyhawk is incorrect in retrospect. If you go by the FIRST set of D&D novels for the Realms, namely the Drizzt and the Moonshae isle novels, the Realms are fighting with Birthright to be the "most traditional setting ever" in D&D lore.

It's only when you have the background peasants living around Waterdeep that you actually see much wahoo in FR IMO.

EDIT: Scale of traditional to wahoo

Where would Planescape fit in relation with Spelljammer? Or even Darksun, Ravenloft and Al-Qadim?

 

[Invisible Stalker]

Lots of fastballs, some curve balls, the occasional change up and the very rare screwball.

 

[Mournblade94]

You threw Celtic, Indian, and Chinese mythology in there... In fact, even Norse and Greek...

Real world mythology is so far on the "wahoo" side of the scale it is ridiculous. You only get the common idea of "traditional" fantasy from mythology if you tone it down and ignore half of it. I mean, among many other things Indian mythology involves characters like heroic monkey-men demigods who can carry a Himalayan mountain down to Sri Lanka in one leap. The Celtic hero Cu Chulainn's threw his spear, Gae Bulg, using his toes, and the spear is said to split into countless barbs upon contact, piercing every joint in its target's body. Norse mythology involves an evil ship of the dead made entirely out of human fingernails and toenails. Various kinds of mythology have stories of creation that would get me in trouble with the moderators if I related them here.

Mythology is weird. If you accept it as the basis for "traditional", then pretty much anything but the most outlandish stuff deliberately meant for ridiculousness and parody will qualify. Certainly the Dragonborn and various other controversial 4E elements would not be considered "wahoo" under such a definition.

This, of course, is a major reason why I dislike the "traditional vs. wahoo" distinction.

Deriving things from Mythology I can see as traditional because the tropes are from the established academy. Wahoo in that case would be anything BUT these... including hobbits.

But including atlantis...

 

[Doug McCrae]

To answer the original question, I love wahoo. Really, really love it. I love the strange, the weird. My favourite genre is superhero and I think what attracts me to it the most is that superhero worlds are so filled with crazy crap. The sheer number of superheroes and villains, the variety of concepts, the convoluted nonsensical character histories; science, magic, mythology, space, other dimensions, time travel all mixed up together in a big bowl.

It's interesting that a lot of people see the weirdness getting out of the dungeon and into the cities as a big marker of wahoo, because I don't see it that way at all. A particularly noticeable feature of superhero is that the real world is still there, much as it is in our world, co-existing along side all the weirdness. I know it makes no sense from a verisimilitude perspective, but I think it serves a useful purpose, that of contrast. If everything is weird, then nothing is. You need the 21st century world of iPods, happy slapping and cashback to juxtapose with the guys running at Mach 100 and lifting aircraft carriers.

For me the main markers of wahoo are quantity and variety of strangeness. So if there's like 10 different monsters in a setting that's Tolkienesque. If there's 300, as there are in default D&D, then that's wahoo.

 

[haakon1]

haakon1, by your definition, Alan Moore's Watchmen would be wahoo, because the superpowers have escaped the adventure and gotten into the setting, whereas most of the output of Marvel and DC would be less wahoo because in large part the world remains the same as our own.

I don't read comics, but from what I know, that's probably true. Of the recent comic movies, Spider Man is low wahoo (fantastic stuff is regarded by mundanes as fantastic, not commonplace), Bat Man is low wahoo (to get from a building to a plane, he used real 1950s technology as seen in "The Green Berets", rather than wahooly using an alien super stealth ray gun that turns him a sentient purple cloud), whereas X-Men is more wahoo.

Would you regard Malory's Morte d'Arthur as wahoo? He placed the technology of the 15th century, plate armoured knights, 1000 years earlier in the Dark Ages. Plate armour on King Arthur is the same as dressing a goblin in a spacesuit.

Not at all. Minor anachronisms -- and to most readers, 500 AD v. 1500 AD is all medieval, so no big whoop -- does not wahoo make. If somebody thinks "knights", they are likely in our culture to think "plate armor", and not care which centuries knights we're talking about.

Even "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" or "Army of Darkness" are not wahoo in their anachronism, because the disconnect of time travel and anachronism is the central point of the story. The medieval peasants in both are not ho-hum in their reactions to ideas of bicycles and boomsticks, neither of which are become normal to their world. The anachronism is special, one-time, clearly an alien intrusion in the world and reacted to as such by the NPC's, and central to the story of the PC's, rather than pervasive in the setting and taken for granted by the NPC's.

You seem to be saying that the syntheses of incompatible ideas that happened in the 70s - adding druids and bards to a supposedly medieval game (like Malory, 1000 years out of time), the Oriental monk in the Occident, monsters from sci-fi such as the displacer beast and the roper - aren't wahoo, whereas very similar syntheses of ideas occurring today are.

Ropers, displacer beasts, druids, bards, and monks are all mainstream core D&D tradition for 30 years. They seem to fit in a quasi-medieval fantasy setting.

Spellcasting weirdos in the woods, singing wandering adventurers, adventurous monks (Friar Tuck or shao lin), and weird magical monsters that are clearly monstrous and weird are not bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, nor out of line with a fantasy medieval milleau.

There's another element for the definition of wahoo, if we need more: bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.