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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shadowdweller00" data-source="post: 7266575" data-attributes="member: 6778479">I don't give Tolkien credit for material he didn't write.  If Steeldragons is correct then that would be the brothers Hildebrandt.  The fact that such illustrations were made in response to Tolkien's work is irrelevant.  Tolkien didn't popularize the illustrations over and beyond his writing - the illustrators and publishers did.  Conan Doyle equally doesn't get credit for the infamous deerstalker because that's not actually his work.  Dracula can be about vampires...but still be the creation of Bram Stoker.  I could go into George Herbert Mead's sociological theories here, but that's how fiction/literature works.  Authors (artists/creators) influence each other, even across genres and completely different media.  The body of work they build up influences their own future works and those of others.  The public understanding of what the ideas in those works mean...evolves as new works are created or forgotten.Just to clarify though, I was merely pointing out cosmetics there.  Overall, I think the concept of orcs as a whole in D&D is pretty solidly Tolkienesque.Everyone hates being called attercop <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=":)" />  (Yes, I'm aware the reference is wrong).This one brings up another issue I've sort of been trying to get across.  What happens a game designer brings up a concept found elsewhere, but includes one or two items from one particular work of fiction and maybe one or two others from a second?  Easter eggs, as it were.  What happens when you have a giant, speaking spider that hates being called Attercop (Tolkien)...but also has deadlights (Stephen King's It)?  You can't really pretend that such a chimera singularly came from either Tolkien OR Stephen king.  It came from both.  The reality is that many of the D&D game ideas are patchworks drawn from multiple works of fiction, all too frequently I think by deliberate intent.  Why make a class that only models Aragorn, for example...when you could also model Robin Hood, Orion, Tarzan, Fafhrd, etc?  Of course then we need to differentiate whether we're arguing about ideas influenced by Tolkien or ideas taken from Tolkien.  Are you sure which we're doing here?  (And if so, who is doing it in which posts...)It seems idiotic to me to presume that a concept like giant spiders, that appears in multiple media and mythological forms MUST have come from Tolkien, even if the game variant shares one or two traits possessed by Tolkien-spiders.  (All giant spiders have sleep-inducing poison maybe) (Note: they didn't).  The similarity may merely be an attempt at inclusion; or the trait may be an inside reference / easter egg.Perhaps.  Zeus's eagle is fairly obscure, but we do know that Gygax (or whomever) took a fair bit of other things from Greek myth: Minotaurs, chimeras, sphinx (at least the riddle part).  Intelligent, anthropomorphized, or talking animals aren't even slightly unique in myth and fiction.  Several different types of animals in the 1st edition MM were uncharacteristically intelligent (particularly giant versions).  Standard dolphins were more intelligent than the average human!Except that they were in this case, with some slight variation  (see influenced vs taken from).  The name is pretty much straight Anglicized "old norse".  They are god-like or spirit-like being in norse myth in the shape of wolves, that exhibit intelligence.  The bit about being ridden by savage humanoids is from Tolkien, and the o in worg is no doubt an attempt to avoid lawsuits from the Tolkien estate.  Gygax furthermore took a number of other things from Norse myth such as certain deities, particular magical hammers, folding boats...</blockquote>

Verification