Worlds of Design: In the Shadow of Tolkien

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

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?

 

[CF07]

I discovered Tolkien before D&D. Therefore I think D&D is nothing like Tolkien, despite the presence of elves and orcs et al.

When I first got into D&D I tried to figure out how to shoehorn Tolkien into it but pretty rapidly figured out that that wasn't actually possible or even worth it.

 

[jasper]

We had plenty of other novels to read and definitely didn't have more time!
Tolkien had become a huge fad during this time period. There were "Frodo for President" signs, if I'm remembering correctly. Gygax preferred Sword & Sorcery but couldn't ignore the Tolkien love at the time.

I didn't find D&D like Tolkien or Sword&Sorcery. It didn't really feel like any book.

I do remember Tolkien was called armchair books. Because you would fall asleep in your armchair reading it.

 

[Arkanum]

… Working from the list, Jeffro Johnson in his book Appendix N: the Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons…

I think your link is pointing to the other Appendix N book. The one by Mr. Johnson is this one.

I remember trying to channel the Tolkien vibe to my characters the first few D&D games. That did not last for long.

 

[Tonguez]

Mrs Riddick, my year 5 teacher read the. Hobbit as the class shared reading text, same year I got the Basic Red Box. I was reading Greek/Roman myth before that.

LotR was boring, but I liked Silmarillion (sp) as it was more mythic

 

[ART!]

I read The Hobbit not long before the Rankin-Bass animated tv version premiered, and not long after that I was introduced to D&D by a friend in junior-high/middle-school. By then I had read LOTR.

To this day playing a human ranger is one of my defaults, because of Aragorn (and Tarzan - I had read a bunch of those books by then, too).

And really, if a system has a class or build that's supposed to be a ranger and it doesn't feel like Aragorn or Tarzan to me, I feel like it's doing something wrong.

Because of Tolkien, I prefer low-to-mid fantasy to high fantasy, and how "magic" feels in Tolkien is one of my preferred approaches to magic.

I don't have orcs in my games, because I feel like that's a Tolkien thing, and there are plenty of easy replacements for the role they usually fill.

 

[Stormonu]

I was about 10, in 1980, when I was introduced to D&D. My first exposure to Tolkien was The Hobbit Rankin Bass version - I can't remember exactly when, but well before I was in 7th grade (I got to be the voice of Smaug for the school play that year ). To this day, I have never completely read the Hobbit, and only barely managed to complete The Fellowship of the Rings. The movies and TV series (as well as discussions with my friends who have read the books) is where I got my knowledge of the stories.

As an aside, when it comes to Conan, my knowledge is primarily from the Marvel comics (#1 to about #83), as well as the Savage Sword of Conan comics - as well as the various movies. I've only this last year sat down and read a handful of the Howard tales.

Oh, and when it comes to Cthulhu and Lovecraft, my knowledge for the longest time only came from Deities and Demigods. The first Lovecraft story I actually read was only a handful of years ago - At the Mountains of Madness, then followed by a few other stories (Call of Cthulhu, Pickman's Model, The Colour out of Space, The Dunwitch Horror, that I can recall).

 

[R_Chance]

I was a voracious reader before I ran into D&D (in 1974). Moorcock, Anderson, Leiber, Vance, and Burroughs were already in my head. I read Tolkien in my Freshman year of high school (1972-1973), and first played D&D in the summer of 1974. I think Tolkien influenced my view of certain monsters (Orc, Ents, etc.) more than the world. I didn't want my fantasy campaign to end dramatically I drew my world for us to use in Chainmail / fantasy appendix campaigns in 1973. Moorcock and Anderson's law vs. chaos (minus the end game in Moorcock of the Eternal Champion destroying the fun stuff) was probably my greatest influence.

 

[overgeeked]

I started in 1984 with B/X before moving on to AD&D.

By that time I had already fallen in love with the cartoon trilogy of Tolkien's works The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Return of the King. (Yes, I know. You don't need to @ me.)

But Tolkien was not really high up on my list of influences other than an odd character name here and there. Far more influential were the glut of 1980s sword & sorcery movies along with all those wonderfully gonzo Saturday morning cartoons.

 

[MGibster]

I read all sorts of fantasy growing up, but I didn't read Lord of the Rings until shorty before the movies were released. I didn't care for them but I've got to acknowledge this is because so many of the tropes he developed made their way into other works which I had read. It's like twelve year old today watching Star Wars for the first time and asking, "What's the big deal?" I'd say my biggest influence on how I play fantasy RPGs is D&D itself and I find that's true for many other players. Even when I'm running a different game, I often have to explain to players we're not playing D&D, so let's not make the same assumptions for this game you would for D&D.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Got into Tolkien first--because my parents had read and loved them, and I watched the '77 Rankin-bass version of The Hobbit at a very very young age, which was extremely formative. (My natural poetic meter is iambic tetrameter, either couplets or the A,A,BB,A thing with internal rhyme on the third line, purely because of the Song of the Dwarves.)

We're not going to see an author that breaks us out of Tolkien's shadow for a good while. Even if we do, it's only going to be in part. His definitions of elves, orcs, and dwarves have been so universally influential, it's genuinely shocking to me that "Tolkien Studies" isn't a class offered at most universities. Fantasy, as a literary genre, would not exist as we recognize it without Tolkien.

As for what will influence D&D? Personally, I think Avatar: the Last Airbender is a more likely target. It's a similarly HUGE HUGE HUGE generation-defining hit that presented old ideas in new ways and new ideas steeped in ancient tradition.