Who Killed the Megaverse?

The popularity of Dungeons & Dragons has helped establish a baseline genre of fantasy that makes the game easily accessible to those familiar with its tropes. But in D&D's early days, the idea of mixing sci-fi and fantasy was built into the game.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

D&D's Inspiration
Co-creator of D&D, Gary Gygax, was fond of pointing out that the inspiration for D&D was more inspired by R.E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian series than J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but that does a disservice to the list of authors he identified in Appendix N of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide:

The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game.

de Camp's Lest Darkness Fallis an alternate history science fiction novel. Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser meet "a German man named Karl Treuherz of Hagenbeck who is looking for his spaceship, which he uses to cross the boundaries between different worlds in his hunt for animals for a zoo" in The Swords of Lankhmar. Vance's works are set in The Dying Earth, where "magic has loose links to the science of old, and advanced mathematics is treated like arcane lore." A. Merritt's Creep, Shadow! is a pulpy adventure featuring:

...a witch that murders people with her animated dolls. It’s got sketchy scientists, femme fatales, world travelling adventurer types, and even a hard boiled Depression-era Texan.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote more modern weird horror while R.E. Howard's Conan took place in a fantasy setting -- and yet the two borrowed themes from each other's works to blend into the Cthulhu Mythos we know today. Add all this up, and D&D was anything but "regular" fantasy. So how did we get here?
You've Got Martians in My D&D!
James Maliszewski explains at Black Gate:

However, I think it worth noting that, in his foreword of November 1, 1973, when Gary Gygax is explaining just what D&D is, he makes no mention of Tolkien. Instead, he references “Burroughs’ Martian adventures,” “Howard’s Conan saga,” “the de Camp & Pratt fantasies,” and “Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.” Most of the borrowings from Middle-earth occur in Volume 2 of the game, Monsters & Treasure, which only makes sense as many of Tolkien’s creatures are easily dropped into almost any fantasy setting. Of course, Gygax does something similar with Burroughs; D&D‘s wilderness encounter tables include tharks, Martians of every hue, apts, banths, thoats, white apes, and more. I think this makes it readily apparent that, far from being the pre-eminent inspiration of the game, Middle-earth is one of many and not necessarily the greatest one.

The other co-creator of D&D, Dave Arneson, demonstrated his proclivity for mixing sci-fi with fantasy in the Original D&D set, Supplement II, Blackmoor:

While this background provides no real details about the Blackmoor setting itself, it does explain that the high priest of the Temple of the Frog, an individual known as Stephen the Rock, is “an intelligent humanoid from another world/dimension.” Furthermore, Stephen possesses several mysterious devices, such as an anti-gravity unit and an interstellar communicator. I found this information intriguing. I was of course already familiar with Gary Gygax’s Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, as well as the “Mutants & Magic” section of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, which provide guidelines for mixing science fiction and fantasy. But Supplement II was published in 1975, before any of this, which suggested to me that perhaps Arneson was perhaps the originator of this kind of “mixed genre” gaming.

There was the tantalizing possibility of D&D crossing genres, as evidenced by the Gamma World and Boot Hill crossover rules in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. And of course, there was the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, itself inspired by Jim Ward's Gamma World.

But it was not to be. Gygax frequently defended D&D's inclusion of Tolkien-esque creatures as a necessary sop to the popularity of the genre, but as Maliszewski points out, D&D eventually became its own genre, helping strongly demarcate fantasy vs. science fiction:

Prior to the success of Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy was a very broad genre, encompassing everything from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to A Princess of Mars to Howard’s Conan stories and more. The earliest players and designers of fantasy roleplaying games understood and accepted this, but, as these games gained popularity and moved beyond their original audience, they became much more self-referential and self-contained – a genre unto themselves – rather than drawing on the anarchic literature that inspired them.

The onus would be on other RPGs to deliver on the promise of a truly cross-genre universe with Palladium's Rifts being the foremost example. D&D would follow suit with its Planescape and Spelljammer settings that attempted to encompass all the other D&D universes, but even those settings generally stuck to fantasy as a baseline.

New mixed-genre stories have since spun out of that baseline assumption, regularly mixing technology with fantasy in a way that was fresh to fans of the Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon. Thanks to the Internet, cross-pollination between genres is a natural outgrowth of so many ideas mixing together, and that's reflected in our own D&D campaigns where aliens or robots might make a surprise appearance. With the announcement by Goodman Games of the return of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, it looks like the megaverse still has some life in it yet.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

In many cases I don't think all guns are more powerful than melee weapons, one swing of a Greatsword is probably going to out damage one .22 caliber round.

Wound ballistics shows that a 9 mm handgun round has about as much energy as a fastball or a heavy book dropped from head height, both of which are things that humans survive (not without pain). Obviously a rifle is a lot nastier, but the killing power of guns is primarily due to the penetration and destruction of vital tissue. A 22LR is a very weak round.

What's so nasty about at gun is that it is a compact and easy to wield ranged weapon. It wasn't clear that early guns were deadlier than early bows or crossbows and indeed they probably weren't, but compared to bows they required way less training and were probably easier to manufacture and sustain logistically than crossbows once people figured out how to make decent-ish black powder. The early guns were very much in the styles of the crossbows of the age.

One thing I do think a lot of folks ignore is that military applications in the Early Modern era had guns being essentially a platoon or company sized weapon, at least on the battlefield, as indeed were bows and crossbows, whereas most RPGs are really skirmish/small unit type games. There was a lot of melee combat even into World War I when soldiers were in close quarters, such as in raiding parties.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I admit it, I killed the megaverse!
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

Are you the Real Slim Shady, too?

 

[Koloth]

IMO, Tolkien gets too much source credit for critters in D&D. Elves, Trolls, Dwarves, Pixes, etc all existed prior to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Of course, Hobbits are pretty much his creation which explains the recasting of Hobbits in D&D into Halflings after lawyers got involved. I think some of the linkage came because of the animated Hobbit and incomplete LOTR movies that came out around the time D&D was getting started. People saw the movies and assumed they were the prime source for many D&D critters. Of course, for a weird take on a mix of tech and fantasy, hard to top the movie Wizards.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

On the one hand, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

On the other hand, psionics (aka science magic) causes nerd rage.

Conclusion: a space wizard did it.

 

[Henry]

I imagine the (threatened?) lawsuit didn't help.

One of my favorite panels from the “What’s New?” Comic strip from Dragon Magazine #84:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W9kmTRhH...8cVlSA3DvE0oACLcB/s1600/not+a+ring+really.JPG

 

[Henry]

Are you the Real Slim Shady, too?

My name is...

WHAT?

My name is..

WHO?

 

[Hussar]

IMO, Tolkien gets too much source credit for critters in D&D. Elves, Trolls, Dwarves, Pixes, etc all existed prior to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Of course, Hobbits are pretty much his creation which explains the recasting of Hobbits in D&D into Halflings after lawyers got involved. I think some of the linkage came because of the animated Hobbit and incomplete LOTR movies that came out around the time D&D was getting started. People saw the movies and assumed they were the prime source for many D&D critters. Of course, for a weird take on a mix of tech and fantasy, hard to top the movie Wizards.

Sigh. Why is invoking Tolkien on RPG sites the equivalent of Godwinning a thread? Cue the multipage flogging of the dead horse as folks try to "prove" how much Tolkien chocolate is in their D&D peanut butter.

--------

I have to admit, I'd LOVE to see the return of the weird to D&D. Never minding Barrier Peaks, there's at least one other crashed spaceship in Greyhawk. That was one thing I did rather really like about Eberron. It wasn't afraid to go down the weird path and eject the faux 15th century Europe trappings of previous D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

I most hear about this divide as a reason why a GM is not allowing psionics in their game. To them, psionics is one step too far, unless you dress it up as a more mystical thing.

Strange - I ditched psionics but I've got all sorts of sci-fi elements in my medieval fantasy D&D game (most of which haven't been met by the players/PCs yet, but some key ones have).

But PC psionics I just couldn't make work right, not as written nor after several ground-up redesigns, and so I finally dropped them completely as PC abilities. Some iconic monsters e.g. demons, mind flayers, aboleths and so forth still have psionics but - and hint! if any of my players ever read this - note that none of those are native to the prime material...

 

[Von Ether]

Strange - I ditched psionics but I've got all sorts of sci-fi elements in my medieval fantasy D&D game (most of which haven't been met by the players/PCs yet, but some key ones have).

If a sci-fi element falls in the woods and a player doesn't hear it, does it exist. Or does that make it a Schrodinger's element? That might have been a thing to some of the past games I played in. If a GM had sci-fi elements in a game and we never bumped into them, they pretty much didn't exist but for the GM.

That's why if I have something like that in the games I run, I put them front and center because I want the players to engage in them. Not that either way is right or wrong (other GMs may be saving the sci-fi as a plot twist in the game.)

Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press came up with good "secret" sci-fi with their Chaositech book. A good chuck was straight up bio-tech, but since it was supplied by Chaos, now it was magical. Basically, technology with a price.

I suspect that many GMs who didn't want psionics in their game (for good mechanical reasons) used the "no sci-fi" excuse instead of just saying "no."

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I always found Gygax's downplaying of the Tolkien influence to be rather disingenuous. Tolkien was obviously a huge influence, from elves-dwarves-halfings-orcs to "You meet in a tavern" to rangers to Smaug to...well, it goes on and on. IIRC, Gygax spoke of Tolkien somewhat like a petulant teen rebelling against a parent that they want to distance themselves from but unconsciously emulate.

I actually take Gygax at his word on this, insofar as he was talking about his own personal influences and inspiration. Instead, my feeling is that many of the clearly Tolkien-Influenced parts were "fan service" and not things that inspired Gygax himself. He cites Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, Pratt and de Camp's The Incomplete Enchanter, Conan, Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Michael Moorcock's Elric, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth, among other sources. Having read all of these, their influence is very clear.

I do not deny there are parallels. Hobbits/halflings I'll 100% grant and there are a number of other parallels, of course: Ents/treants, dwarves to a large but not total degree, and some other monsters. The 1E ranger is also a pretty clear port.

However, there's a A LOT of points of departure and signs of other influences, many of which are exactly the things he cited in what became Appendix N (originally a Dragon article?). Elves in D&D aren't really like Tolkien elves, though, and clearly draw on other sources. There's no "Thieves' Guild" in Tolkien, but there sure is one in Lankhmar. Dwarves have a strong resemblance to Hugi in Three Hearts and Three Lions and the D&D troll is a direct lift, bearing no resemblance to Tolkien trolls at all. The kind of crazy dungeoneering that existed in early D&D isn't really the sort of thing that fits in Lord of the Rings, but it appears in some of the sources, most notably in some of Leiber's stories and in a few Conan stories, though The Hobbit is a better fit. The kinds of episodic tales that made up various adventures were also not what is featured in the kind of epic fantasy that Tolkien epitomizes. However, they are a key aspect of the other sources. There's a lot of other things: Magic functions differently, there are clerics, the tone is way different for the most part especially for classic D&D, and so on.

All that said, it is undoubtedly the case that D&D took off in no small part because of Tolkien's popularity, but as I said, that's why I consider the Tolkeinisms to be more of the order of "fan service" than a direct inspiration.