Not too long ago, I made the case for Planetary Romance, and particularly its Sword & Planet (sub-)sub-genre, as good fodder for role-playing games, particularly games focused on exploration of the sort come to old school hex and point crawls. I've recently re-read the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs Venus series, Pirates of Venus (1932) and read for the first time its sequel, Lost on Venus (1935). These provide could examples of the Sword & Planet virtues I mentioned.
The Venus series follows the adventures of Carson Napier, young engineer and daredevil, who's launched out in a missile for Mars, but due to faulty calculations, winds up on Venus. Unlike most epic fantasy or even Sword & Sorcery heroes, but like most of his Sword & Planet brethren, these adventures largely come down to him being lost a lot and stumbling onto monsters and weird civilizations.
In Pirates of Venus, he falls in (literally) with the Vepajan loyalists in exile, in a city built high in titanic trees. After learning the language, he gets a job as a tarel gatherer in training, which turns out to be a dangerous line of work, as tarel is the silk of a giant spider. After getting lost in his first outing, he and a friend end up on the ground, where they encounter more hostile wildlife before being taken as slaves by birdmen working for the Vepajan's enemies, the Thorist revolutionaries.
Taken on board a Thorist vessel, he foments a conspiracy among the other slaves and leads a mutiny to take control of the ship. They briefly turn pirate (or privateer without letters of marquee since they act in Vepaja's interests), until the Vepajan princess Carson is in love with is abducted by Thorists into the wilderness and Carson gets tossed overboard in a storm.
Lost on Venus picks shortly after that, when both Duare (the love interest) and Carson have been captured and taken to a Thorist colonial settlement. There, Carson is placed in a death trap with 7 deadly doors. He escapes though and manages to rescue Duare through a series of the sort of coincidences that Burroughs is famous for. They run into and get lost in the Venusian forest where they have to avoid dangerous animals and cannibals and figure out a way to get food, which involves making a spear and bow and arrows.
Eventually, there's a capture by a mad scientist-type with an army of undead (and another escape), then Carson winds up in an advanced, scientific "utopia," which is really a totalitarian state with an obsession with genetic purity. And then they escape...
If this all sounds rather episodic, well it is--in exactly the way roleplaying games are episodic. The deficits (at least in this regard) these originally serialized stories have as literature are virtues for the table. Finding food and shelter is a concern, too, in a way it might be in a hexcrawl, though the plot armor provided Burroughs' characters ensure none of them starve.
Burroughs' protagonists, and Sword & Planet protagonists in general, are often more reactive than players are or at least often like to be. Things happen to them, or they are forced into a certain course of action. I feel like some of this is broadly acceptable, though there should usually be ways to avoid an encounter by cautious players, and there should always be multiple of ways out of any predicament.
1 comment:
The Carson stories are along way from my favorite ERB work, but you've got a good point about how sword & planet style plotting meshes with tabletop roleplaying. You need to be a little careful to steer clear of the kind of railroading (something the author doesn't need to worry about since his characters can't object to it) but the "something weird over every hill" style of teh setting lends itself well to hexcrawling.
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