Worlds of Design: In the Shadow of Tolkien

How much does Tolkien’s body of work influence you fantasy role-playing games?

When were you first interested in Tolkien's works compared to when you played FRPGs

  • I was interested in Tolkien's works well before I got into FRPGs

    Votes: 89 46.6%
  • My interest in Tolkien's works and FRPGs happened about the same time

    Votes: 69 36.1%
  • I became interested Tolkien's works well after I got into FRPGs

    Votes: 28 14.7%
  • I've never been a fan or influenced by Tolkien's works

    Votes: 5 2.6%

The answer is likely predicated on if you came to Tolkien before you came to FRPGs.

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true." - J. R. R. Tolkien

I read the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) when I was in my late teens, about seven years before original Dungeons & Dragons was released. (The Hobbit came later for me.) This is long before any LOTR movies, of course. Most of you have read LOTR (or watched the Peter Jackson movies) long after the release of D&D, I suspect, but still we can ask which came first for you, LOTR or D&D?

Which Came First (for You)?​

I’d suppose that Tolkien is likely to have a greater influence on your gaming if you came to Tolkien before you came to fantasy role-playing games (FRPGs).

This also might depend on when you started playing FRPGs. When I first played D&D (1975) the assumption was that the GM would mine fantasy novels and stories, and myths and legends, for ideas for his/her campaign. I remember hunting down Stith-Thompson’s Motif Index of Folklore Literature (in Duke Library), surely not something many GMs do today (even though today it’s a free PDF rather than huge paper volumes). There were few adventure modules and even fewer ready-made settings to buy. With this approach, Tolkien would be one author amongst many, maybe foremost but still just one.

Gary Gygax listed in Appendix N of AD&D the novels/novelists that had influenced him, including many long preceding LOTR. I’ve read most of the books listed in the Appendix, but I suspect many younger people have read few of them. Working from the list, Jeffro Johnson in his book Appendix N: the Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, by reviewing these books, has ably demonstrated that there were a lot stronger influences on D&D than Tolkien.

Tolkien’s Expanding Influence​

Even before the Ralph Bakshi LOTR movie (1978) I gauged the likelihood that someone would like D&D according to whether or not they’d read The Lord of the Rings. (Many give up because the book starts slowly.) If they had not read it, prospects were much less rosy. Now, with many movies (Peter Jackson’s, Bakshi’s, and the Rankin Bass follow-up to Bakshi, and others more obscure), and even a LOTR TV series (Rings of Power), I don’t rely on my old view. On the other hand, so many more people are aware of LOTR (and of RPGs) than in the pre-movie past.

More recently, adventure modules and even settings of all kinds can be found online, including many that are free. GMs don’t have to make up adventures or settings, they can use someone else’s creations. Further, many of the old fantasy authors are virtually unknown to recent generations. But with the movies, Tolkien is even more well-known than when there were only books. Do the movies make Tolkien a stronger influence? Or do GMs today just accept whatever adventures/settings they acquire and not change much? For most these days, likely the latter.

Beyond Tolkien​

If you want more discussion of Tolkien’s influence, see my previous articles (Escaping Tolkien and Reassessing Tolkien’s Influence). As I wrote this, I asked myself, what’s the biggest influence likely to be, after Tolkien?

Conan the Barbarian (whether the savage Robert E. Howard version, or the more tempered ones by other authors that followed)? Wheel of Time? Game of Thrones? Dresden Files? David Eddings’ Mallorean and Belgariad? Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn? Harry Potter? Superhero movies? Something from Appendix N days such as Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions?

Your Turn: Do you think the timing on your exposure to Tolkien’s works influenced your FRPG play?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio
red dwarves
Maybe that is the origin of the Scottish dwarf trope? It’s a reference to hair colour, and it’s a colour often associated with Scottish and Irish (and it’s well known that Americans can’t tell those accents apart). I Don’t think there are any red haired dwarves in Tolkien.

But I think there is a general reluctance to acknowledge the influence of Narnia on D&D, on account of being a) children’s and b) religious books. Although Dragonlance seems to get a free pass.
 

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Maybe that is the origin of the Scottish dwarf trope? It’s a reference to hair colour, and it’s a colour often associated with Scottish and Irish (and it’s well known that Americans can’t tell those accents apart). I Don’t think there are any red haired dwarves in Tolkien.

But I think there is a general reluctance to acknowledge the influence of Narnia on D&D, on account of being a) children’s and b) religious books. Although Dragonlance seems to get a free pass.
Even Dragonlance was a less obvious religious allegory than Narnia. Also official licensing by the makers of D&D goes a long way.
 

BBC did pretty much the same for British regional accents at around the same time, and is pretty much responsible for how Americans think the British speak.
Absolutely. The same happened everywhere that TV and radio came, which is to say pretty much everywhere. The nationalist projects of standardizing languages wasn't really completed until the advent of soap operas and TV news.

One thing that's pretty funny is how rapidly the "trusted" standard American accent changed. It wasn't actually that long ago that what was referred to as the Mid-Atlantic Accent (think FDR or Katharine Hepburn) was standard. Focus groups in the 1950s or so suggested that a certain kind of Lower Midwest accent was trusted and pretty soon every newscaster spoke that.

Also funny: Americans seem to trust a certain kind of British accent more, which is why so many narrators speak with a cultivated British accent. Indeed I have my car's GPS set to British accent.

The BBC still has a habit of subtitling Scottish accents.
When I first moved to NYC twenty years ago I felt like I needed subtitltes to understand some of the old timers. Wrapping back to JRRT, I watched an interview with him late in life and he was very difficult to understand, not because his English was bad but because he spoke very fast and it was hard to keep up with his pace and cope with his accent at the same time.
 

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