Listening to the audiobook of The Hobbit got me thinking about this couple of posts I did about giving Middle-earth the Robert E. Howard touch. I won't repost them in their entirety, as I did that last year, but you can read the first here and the second here.
3 comments:
Love it. I think I was distracted last year! Looking at those elves again in a 1930s pseudoscience context they seem fairly sinister . . . the decline comes as a relief but the threat of their desperate renascence might be good game material.
And in this context, maybe genetically superior "drow" become really interesting. They're great at everything, start out at a fairly high level. Unlike vanilla elves every single one is pretty tough. You don't see their weaklings.
Yeah, I somehow missed this prior conversation, too.
"Pulp Tolkien" is more-or-less how I run my setting (albeit, without ME geography). I think the main shades one needs to add to the palette are A) more (human) people, and B) more corruption. And by corruption I'm talking about "human failings" not some over-arching "evil force" that tempts otherwise good folks to do bad.
The pulp genre really embraces the idea that humans are kind of scummy folks: full of greed, ambition, lasciviousness, vengefulness, etc. A lot of (in setting) reasons could be attributed to these traits: a lack of benevolent gods, the need to make dark pacts with demons for sorcerous powers, the squalor and meanness of pre-modern life, etc.
Tolkien's world is very much a fairy tale world of goodness and light that has had evil creep into it. It is a rare individual in Tolkien's setting that is "inherently bad" (i.e. not seduced by outside forces). There are a couple/three individuals in the Silmarillion but the worst most characters of the LotR can be accused of is fearfulness or gullibility (being "easily led astray"). The ONE person on the edge of going over (on her own) is Eowyn, but because her desire to break out is based on a desire for heroism, her willfulness is hardly the same as the flawed characters in your average S&S yarn.
SO...remove the singular diabolic force of Melkor/Morgoth/Sauron from the game, add more humans, and give them more free will (and more tendency) to F up and screw with their fellow beings and it's quite easy to fall into the pulpy genre. As you point out there's already plenty of fallen civilizations (Numenor), decadent elder races (Elves), and beast men (orcs).
Interessting. And, yeah! Why not?! Listening to some Bal-Sagoth songs to get the perfect feeling for this.
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