Who are Howard and Leiber?
- Thread starter MerricB
- Start date
rogueattorney
Adventurer
I've always thought that those playing O(A)D&D without a pretty good grounding in the "Suggested Reading List" were akin to those attempting to play a Start Trek rpg without ever having seen an episode. You saw the problems that arose in all the "but this isn't how it was in LotR" letters to Dragon that began from the beginnings of the game.
This changed in the late 1e years, essentialy beginning with Dragonlance and has continued right on to the present day. What happened is as someone earlier said, D&D became its own genre. From about 1977 to the mid-80's, the Shannara books and Star Wars really changed the popular view of what fantasy was about. First, they hard-wired "the story" into the genre, ("The story" = young boy who's really someone important is taken from his home by whacky old dude who's really a wizard and they and their stock group of companions conquer the evil overlord) making the genre far more conventional. Second, fantasy became a lot more mainstream. Book publishers realized simply printing Tolkien rehashes would sell. Hollywood started making fantasy movies (Conan, Ladyhawke, Beastmaster, etc., etc.) Third, partially as a result of the first and second, and partially on its own merits, Dungeons & Dragons became very popular. This lead to innumerable books being based on D&D, D&D putting out it's own books, and then D&D products based on these books. The whole genre became very self-referential. The D&D of today is based upon the D&D of the past as much as anything else.
Is that a good or bad thing? I'm really not sure. I suppose it depends on what you want. As for a suggested readings list, I don't know that the D&D of today could put out a suggested reading list that fairly portrayed the world without using D&D books. (I think this is partially true because in our more lititious society of today, an author or his estate might object... "If your game is supposed to portray my works, I'd appreciate a few royalty checks...")
R.A.
This changed in the late 1e years, essentialy beginning with Dragonlance and has continued right on to the present day. What happened is as someone earlier said, D&D became its own genre. From about 1977 to the mid-80's, the Shannara books and Star Wars really changed the popular view of what fantasy was about. First, they hard-wired "the story" into the genre, ("The story" = young boy who's really someone important is taken from his home by whacky old dude who's really a wizard and they and their stock group of companions conquer the evil overlord) making the genre far more conventional. Second, fantasy became a lot more mainstream. Book publishers realized simply printing Tolkien rehashes would sell. Hollywood started making fantasy movies (Conan, Ladyhawke, Beastmaster, etc., etc.) Third, partially as a result of the first and second, and partially on its own merits, Dungeons & Dragons became very popular. This lead to innumerable books being based on D&D, D&D putting out it's own books, and then D&D products based on these books. The whole genre became very self-referential. The D&D of today is based upon the D&D of the past as much as anything else.
Is that a good or bad thing? I'm really not sure. I suppose it depends on what you want. As for a suggested readings list, I don't know that the D&D of today could put out a suggested reading list that fairly portrayed the world without using D&D books. (I think this is partially true because in our more lititious society of today, an author or his estate might object... "If your game is supposed to portray my works, I'd appreciate a few royalty checks...")
R.A.
Odhanan
Adventurer
I am one of the ultimate fans of fantasies of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and I think above all, J.R.R. Tolkien, even if I think Middle-earth is probably the most inappropriate setting from these authors to be used as a RPG. It is clear to me that the original assumptions of Merric hold some truth.
D&D cannot afford to assume people read these authors.
That does not mean, however, that they can't be discovered or made accessible through D&D and RPGs in general. I think that's one of the great things games can do for fantasy literature: open the door to worlds of imagination in writing, in fantasm, whatever. This is one of the great functions of literature too: to think outside the box, to show "out there" what is imagined "in here". Tabletop RPGs are vibrant tools to help in sharing imagination (not only in terms of advertisement, but because of their nature also - sharing an imagined setting around the table and make stories out of this "now" that could not be).
There are good authors in today's fantasy literature. Pratchett and Martin come to my mind. But there is SO much chaff also. My usual Chapters store has three shelves of fantasy books. It's sometimes hard to know what's good or not. And when I see readers satisfied by easy plots, stereotype characters and "simplified" writing, I get a bit worried. When I see the standards in the fantasy literature publishing industry, I get angry: basically, you have, as an author, to "think low to sell high". Dumbing yourself down to make yourself understandable of poor, illeterate and unintelligent readers. This makes me want to throw up (sorry for the language).
D&D cannot afford to assume people read these authors.
That does not mean, however, that they can't be discovered or made accessible through D&D and RPGs in general. I think that's one of the great things games can do for fantasy literature: open the door to worlds of imagination in writing, in fantasm, whatever. This is one of the great functions of literature too: to think outside the box, to show "out there" what is imagined "in here". Tabletop RPGs are vibrant tools to help in sharing imagination (not only in terms of advertisement, but because of their nature also - sharing an imagined setting around the table and make stories out of this "now" that could not be).
There are good authors in today's fantasy literature. Pratchett and Martin come to my mind. But there is SO much chaff also. My usual Chapters store has three shelves of fantasy books. It's sometimes hard to know what's good or not. And when I see readers satisfied by easy plots, stereotype characters and "simplified" writing, I get a bit worried. When I see the standards in the fantasy literature publishing industry, I get angry: basically, you have, as an author, to "think low to sell high". Dumbing yourself down to make yourself understandable of poor, illeterate and unintelligent readers. This makes me want to throw up (sorry for the language).
Last edited:
If you are interested in some of the old stuff, see www.blackmask.com
Odhanan
Adventurer
I don't know how to take your statement, diaglo. I've seen "rouge" for rogue numerous times as well. But that's not because we see people misspelling words that we have to give up on them. I read Tolkien when I was twelve. I read Moorcock around the same age. Both authors made me interested in words and learning, or at least intensified that thirst. I don't want to write novels for people and think "hey, anyway they don't know what I'm talking about so I could make it easier by just not talking about it." That's a loser's point of view, isn't it?
There's in my mind a huge difference between accessibility and condescendence. Accessibility can make a particular literary work better. It elevates the reader instead of weakening the works.
Last edited:
The Shaman
First Post
Well...in that case, it's "chaff," not "chaft."Odhanan said:No, no offense at all, since English is not my natural language!
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
This thread is good for thinking.
I do agree that D&D does have it's own feel. In designing a table-top game based on a video game (check the sig!), I've had to drop a lot of the D&D feel and embrace a more "video game-ish" feel to get the kind of game I wanted. D&D wasn't video game enough. It was too grounded in realism, in minis, in the minutiae of equipment and the simplicity of the dungeon crawl. It was too complex to be like a video game.
That complexity is born of its source material. Were it not for the near-starvation that occured in the LotR trilogy, would we bother accounting rations for the first few levels? Would our druids oppose much of human civilization if there wasn't an ecology kick in the last half of the 20th century?
Any product reflects its own times. Any old-school C&C game is just as much a product of pop psychology as the most abstracted FFZ game. It's becuase products are created for the audience, and the audience changes.
I do agree that D&D does have it's own feel. In designing a table-top game based on a video game (check the sig!), I've had to drop a lot of the D&D feel and embrace a more "video game-ish" feel to get the kind of game I wanted. D&D wasn't video game enough. It was too grounded in realism, in minis, in the minutiae of equipment and the simplicity of the dungeon crawl. It was too complex to be like a video game.
That complexity is born of its source material. Were it not for the near-starvation that occured in the LotR trilogy, would we bother accounting rations for the first few levels? Would our druids oppose much of human civilization if there wasn't an ecology kick in the last half of the 20th century?
Any product reflects its own times. Any old-school C&C game is just as much a product of pop psychology as the most abstracted FFZ game. It's becuase products are created for the audience, and the audience changes.
Similar Threads
