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?

 

[Mercurius]

Personally, I love Tolkien, and LotR is probably the greatest fantasy influence on me bar none. But I think that it's difficult to overstate Tolkien's impact, even to those who don't like him. The entire genre was shaped by his works.

That fairly famous quote by Terry Pratchett is still valid:

I agree with you and Pratchett, with a few significant caveats. One, see my Babe Ruth analogy above. No single baseball player changed the game as much as he did, but it was 100 years ago and is mostly felt today through how the game shifted due to his influence, not the "looming presence of Babe Ruth," who is now a mythical figure.

Secondly, there's a difference between mediums - specifically literature vs. RPGs (but we could also include film/tv, video games, etc). Tolkien's influence is stronger in literature than it is in RPGs, imo. And certainly, in fantasy lit, the publication of LotR marks arguably the most important before/after moment - everything after was, at the very least, published in the context of "post-Tolkien fantasy." But this is a bit different in RPGs.

And third, we have to consider generations. I do think his influence has waned--or become more diluted--over the years. The OP is presumably 75+ years old ("late teens...seven years before original D&D [1974]") and grew up in a context well before the internet and "geek media" became prominent. Fantasy was very fringe, and only congealing as a genre in his youth (some say that the Ballantine Adult Fantasy classics, republished in 1969-74) are what crystallized fantasy as a genre distinct from literature, children's lit, adventure stories, and SF). And of course the LotR was only published in 1954-55, and the fantasy field far more sparse in the OP's youth. Furthermore, what "fantasy" means today is quite different than what it meant when D&D came out in 1974.

So while "Mt Tolkien" looms large in a historical sense, especially in fantasy literature, there are various factors that diminish his overt influence, and most of it comes through secondary and tertiary influence and/or the way the genre as a whole prospered after. Or to put it another way, far fewer kids right now know or care about Tolkien than they did even 20 years ago, let alone 40+ years ago. They are influenced through lineage, but most of it is implicit.

 

[Mercurius]

Back to the OP, and to address it more directly, as someone more in the 1970s, my interest emerged around the same time. I was interested in fantasy stories and mythology before discovering D&D, which was like a dream come true (you mean I get to play out the stories?!), but I don't know if I read LotR or played D&D first. Probably the former, but not sure.

But today, I see Tolkien as my "literary grandfather," and Ursula K Le Guin as my "literary grandmother" - in terms of my own fantasy writing. I have numerous other influences, but those two hold a special reverence to me - not just because of what they wrote, but also what they wrote about what they wrote (e.g. Tolkien's Letters and "On Fairy-stories," Le Guin's essays, but especially those in Language of the Night and various interviews and lectures). But there are so many other influences across different media.

 

[occam]

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

It couldn't. Put simplistically, the Tolkien elements in D&D didn't make it feel like swords-and-sorcery, and the pulp elements made it feel very different from Middle-earth. Nothing crammed all that stuff (plus other elements of world mythology and folklore) into one place before like D&D did, which is a big part of D&D's idiosyncracy.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A group of mercenaries set out to steal the treasure from under the nose of a monster.

I put it to you that The Hobbit is swords and sorcery.

 

[occam]

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).

My first character for each new edition was a half-elf ranger named Eldarion (Aragorn's son) for the same reason: 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e; I broke the trend with 5e.

Which gives away part of my story: I love Middle-earth. I also love Moorcock, Donaldson, Leiber, Zelazny, etc.; I was getting into all of those around the same time. But for Tolkien, I began with the Silmarillion (what I think of as the Bulfinch's Mythology of Middle-earth) in 7th grade, then started playing Moldvay Basic the summer after 8th grade.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In a world where reading is less prevalent for visual and interactive media, it's also worth considering that video games may also be taking the place of "books" in terms of influential fantasy works.

Good point. In which case, I kinda suspect cyberpunk to have a pretty big influence, as that's even more popular in video game circles than it is in literary ones. Deus Ex is kind of the granddaddy of great cyberpunk video games (up there with Planescape: Torment as some of the best actual writing in video games), but CP2077 has more recently made a big splash in that field, and there's an argument to be made that Mass Effect 2 has elements of cyberpunk in its otherwise "space opera reconstruction" ethos.

Though video games kinda have some ouroboros action going on, since a huge swathe of CRPG tropes share a common origin: D&D. Whether imitating it or reacting to it, they're still often in D&D's shadow, and thus second-hand in Tolkien's.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A group of mercenaries set out to steal the treasure from under the nose of a monster.

I put it to you that The Hobbit is swords and sorcery.

Honestly? Not the most crazy notion. Bilbo only objects to being called a "thief" because he's a genteel country squire type. Tolkien's tone doesn't match the expected nature of swords-and-sorcery, but the narrative beats are all there. Heck, it's even a Big Deal when they find a small cache of magic weapons that are just like...pretty good at killing orcs, and can glow.