Wild, Fantastic Hazard Had Been Their Lot

"They were immediately and absolutely recognizable as adventurers...They were hardy and dangerous, lawless, stripped of allegiance or morality, living off their wits, stealing, and killing, hiring themselves out to whoever and whatever came. They were inspired by dubious virtues."

- China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

When I was in the early stages of planning my new game (began in GURPS and now reincarnated in Warriors & Warlocks),  part of what occupied my imagination was a reconsideration of what an "adventurer" was.  The concept is such a staple of roleplaying, that I had for sometime just accepted it at its face and hadn't much thought about what it meant.

Well surely Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are adventurers in the rpg sense, as is Conan (for much of his life), and Imaro (at least the short-story version--he gets a little more "epic" in the novels).  Nifft the Lean fits the bill.  Owen of Marrdale and his companion, Khitai of David Mason's The Sorcerer's Skull would probably be welcome at guild meetings, too. 

But there are an awful lot of fantasy literature protagonists, though, that may have elements of the RPG style adventurer, but also, quite reasonably, embody some literary archetype.  We've got hidden monarchs, brave little tailors, cursed wanders, battle-haunted veterans, and wrathful avengers.  Elric, Kane, Salmanson's Tomoe Gozen, Taran Pig-keeper, and Arthur, King of the Britons, are all wonderful creations, but not archetypal adventurers--if one uses the term strictly in the D&D since.

Nothing wrong with that.  In fact, a little bit more backstory in a gaming character never really hurts, provided it serves as a springboard for good adventures or adventure elements.  Convoluted backstory with no game use is really just indulging the desire to write fiction in the guise of gaming (which may not be a bad thing either, but it's beside the point).  But none of those literary archetypes really encompasses the professional adventurer that one sees emerge from game manuals or sessions. 

Yes I know, I keep saying that but not really defining what I mean.  Well, let me direct your attention to exhibits A and B at the opening of this post.  First we find Dave Trampier's cover to the AD&D Player's Handbook which encapsulates perfectly the concept I'm driving at.  James Maliszewski at Grognardia dissects it just shy of perfection here, so I won't try to compete, only amplify by quoting his cogent observation about the enthusiastic fane-robbers: "These aren't necessarily heroes. They may be heroes, at least some of them, but they don't seem to be motivated solely by altruism."   To which I might respond, rhetorically: "solely?"

Exhibit B is the quote from China Mieville's wonderful, first Bas-Lag novel, Perdido Street Station.  This is not a book about adventurers per se--any many ways, it's an anti-adventurer book--but such individuals exist on the fringes of the society.  Perhaps good aligned D&D characters might take offense at the description (though their behavior might suggest otherwise), but for neutrals and evils its a critical hit.

When I think of adventurers in this context, and not as characters in a typical fantasy novel, I begin to see a whole new group of literary touchstones.  Are the scalphunters-turned-bandits of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian that far off?  At least for a mostly evil-aligned party?  On the more virtuous side, how about Chabon's titular Gentlemen of the Road?  Moving from tumultuous history to dark future, I'd offer Case, and Molly, the protagonists of Gibson's Neuromancer.

We don't have to stick to literature.  I see a lot of inspiration in film, too.  Why don't we give our adventurers a Ennio Morricone score?  Tuco, Blondie, and Angel Eyes in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly may not be robbing crypts, but their hearts are in the right (or wrong) place.  Fist Full of Dollars (or its original Yojimbo) could almost be a D&D adventure if either director had bothered to include one short dungeoncrawl.  Probably the same could be said of The Wild Bunch.  I'd love to see a player do a medieval fantasy take on Holden's Bishop Pike.  Or even better: Borgnine's Dutch Angstrom as a dwarf.

Enough Westerns?  How about something from the Tarantino catalog?  Reservoir Dogs sort of ends like a number of my high school D&D games.  Pulp Fiction even has a scary dungeon.  From Dusk til Dawn has a whole adventuring party raiding a vampiric temple--only its cleric can't turn undead.  "Hardy, dangerous, and lawless" would certainly describe the Brothers Gecko.

You get the idea.  The traditional fantasy inspirations and their knockoffs will always have their place, but there are other sources to go to find models for the sort of folks that would brave dark labyrinths, kill things, and take their stuff.

Let's make the most creative use of those "dubious virtues," shall we?

Post-Game Report: A Weird Shadow Over Raedelsport

Last night we met for the fourth session of our D&D inspired Warriors & Warlocks game.  Despite, the desire to get "back to the dungeon" so to speak, these first few sessions have been mostly city adventures.  I've found the conversion suggestions from Greywulf very helpful in porting things over from 3e to the M&M system, as I've been using as the backbone of the campaign Paizo's Pathfinder: Second Darkness adventure path.   Despite some wariness about "adventure paths" in general (dating back to Dragonlance), there were some of elements of that storyline that I found really interesting and worth using in a modified way in my own campaign world. 

This setting is the latest iteration of the world I've used for most of my fantasy gaming since late middle school.  Currently, it centers around an Australia-sized island continent called Arn.  Arn is now the frontier for the nations of the large, Eurasian-like landmass to its east, but in previous ages it was center of various now-fallen civilizations--including the enigmatic "Dungeon Builders" who left Arn riddled with their labyrinthine, subterranean ruins, so attractive to adventurers.  Arn is the site of several city-states founded by the Old Thystaran Empire, amongst hostile, barbarian tribes, and nonhuman enclaves.  The greatest of these is Terminus, named so because it was founded on the site of the farthest boundary marker of Thystarus at a landing on the River Fflish. 

But Terminus isn't where the player's currently find themselves.  Instead, they're on Arn's northwest coast, in the narrow streets of the mist-choked, pirate haven of Raedelsport.  As supplied by The Second Darkness, the city is currently beset by strange happenings related to an omnious, inky-black cloud which hangs, unmoving, overhead.  After various interactions with the criminal underworld of Raedelsport, its finally time to move beyond the city and find out the secret of the eldritch cloud.

So that's the set-up.  Here's the cast of player characters:

• Zarac: A veteran sellsword from the eastern Arn, troubled by an acquisitve nature and a current surfeit of funds after the untimely death of his last employer.
• Gannon: A monk and thief from an abbey in the Eiglophian Mountains (yes, a lot of pulp fiction name borrowings here) to the north.  He's a servant of a obscure minor goddess, Mother Scythe, the Lady of Reaping, whose exoteric teachings focus on self-reliance and stoicism, but whose inner mysteries promote fleecing the less wary.  He's been sent on a mission for his goddess.
• Renin: A wanderer from distant Staark (think Prussia under the Teutonic Knights, mixed with a pinch of ancient Sparta, and a smidge of various millenialist heretical sects in the Middle Ages), with rare powers of the mind (psionics, to use the D&D-ism), drawn to Raedelsport by mysterious dreams.  

Like all good characters, they get me thinking about hooks in their backstories.  For instance, I hadn't really given much thought to the inclusion of psionics until Eric proposed his character.  Now I'm thinking about where the other psionicists might be hiding, and that leads me to think about Beneath the Planet of the Apes...But I digress.

Play of first module has seen the basic outline and set peices remain largely intact (in a Yojimbo to Fist Full of Dollars sort of way), with changes to NPC presentation and motivation, and some player driven digressions along the way.  I hear some later chapters get more railroady, so I'm fully prepared to jettison some of them entirely in favor of crafting our own version of the overarching "plot."

Anyway, so far, so good.

Whither D&D?

Previously, I took a look at the inspirations Gary Gygax gave for D&D. Looking at the game as constituted we see things not found in the Vance/Leiber/REH/ DeCamp/Lovecraft works, or in any of the Appendix N sources--at least not in the same permutations or proportions. Many of these elements, and later elements that evolved from them, have gone on to form the "implied setting" (as the kids call it these days) of D&D, and indeed so many of its fantasy rpg offspring.

It could be argued that some of these elements are merely artifacts of D&D being--you know, a game--rather than literal characteristics of the world it emulates. After all, who would take Monopoly's rules and structure as an accurate reflection of Atlantic City or the real estate market? How much does the game D&D really tell us about the world(s) of D&D?

A fair question. I think it becomes a more debatable point depending on how finely you want to comb the rules (rules that have changed through various editions, admittedly). I may want to comb them very fine in the future, but for now I'll enumerate the broad characteristics that have real, "in game world" influence:

1. A moral axis ("alignment"): In the earliest editions of the game this is Law vs. Chaos which comes from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts, Three Lions but then gets de-Christianized and becomes a Sword & Sorcery staple through Moorcock's eternal champion cycle. Later AD&D adds a perpendicular "Good vs. Evil" axis (generating, then, nine alignments by combining the two). This allowed for mechanics to drive the Song of Roland-by-way-of-Anderson virtuous paladin class, and the cleric.

The cleric resembles the orders militant of the Crusades, but they have a big role with the undead--which betrays their true origins--the class reportedly being inspired by Van Helsing in the Hammer Dracula films. This implicitly Christian (even more so than the paladin) character seems at odds with mostly pagan, polytheistic S&S. But it fits comfortably on a moral axis.

2. Common nonhumans: Elves, dwarves, halflings, and half-orcs--in other words, every species appearing in Tolkien--get ported over with only the slightest tweaking, for a clash with the human-centric world of the pulp fantasy. This also goes for monstrous adversaries which are way more common than in most pulp fiction.

3. Emphasis on group rather than individual action: Adventurers travel in packs, likely because of the social nature of games, but also because of the high lethality of the adventuring life to folks not gifted the "plot immunity" of fictional protagonists.

4. Emphasis on equipment and "tech": Like in the real world, adventurers need the right tool for the job. Fictional protagonists get writers to write them around needing extra stuff, but adventurers need 50 ft. of rope and 10 ft. poles. And also...

5. Magic items: In a world where magic items are regularly found and manufactured, they would become indispensable accouterments. In fiction, items are rare or whisked away by the capriciousness of plot, but not so in more "naturalistic" game settings.

The first two points seem to be related to a clash of influences. "Pulp fantasy" was the primary source, but not the only one, so there was bound to be some dissonance. (Need there be dissonance, though? How would Lord of the Rings work if it had been writen by Robert E. Howard? A question for another time, perhaps... )

The other points can be summarized thusly: adventurers seem more like somewhat reckless professionals than typical heroic protagonists. Ironically, though their power-levels and abilities are often great, their approach to things is decidedly more prosaic and "business-like." They rifle through the clothing of fallen foes, pry gold fixtures off walls, and check every room thoroughly for secret doors. Its like the difference between a real group of bank robbers and Ocean's 11.

Now perhaps nothing in the rules expressly states it must be this way--but it seems to be an emergent property arising inexorably from detailed equipment lists, trap-filed dungeons, gold equating to experience, and (often) high mortality.

There are other differences as well. The rigidness of class-defined abilities, the interaction of alignment in play, and strong classification of various sorts of fantastic beings into a kind of taxonomy. But these may be areas where we move into artifacts of simulation rather than real world details. Still, the existence of know alignment spells, or the ability of rangers to use crystal balls can surely raise "in game world" questions which would be best dealt with with an "in game world" answers, it seems to me.

It's interesting to me that with all the D&D fiction written, while most (perhaps all) of it shows the traces of these "D&D-isms," none of it I've ever read (admittedly, a small sample, but hopefully representative) actually tries to rationalize or explain these phenomena in the context of the story.

I think that's a missed opportunity.

Is It The Future Yet?

Soooo....I'm guessing 2010 still isn't going to be the year of astrobabes with jetpacks?

Huh.

Do you think I might at least get Hawk the Slayer on Region 1 Blu-ray?

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

Whence D&D?

As I mentioned, my current M&M:W&W (how's that for an abbreviation!) is a an attempt to create a "D&D world" outside of the D&D ruleset. It's largely a continuation of my last GURPS game which utilized the then-brand-new Dungeon Fantasy line.

In getting ready for that game, I did what one should always do when trying to emulate another work. I took a look at said work's inspirations. This led me to revisit Gygax's Appendix N from the Dungeon Master's Guide. I focused particularly on what he called "the most immediate influences on AD&D."

The list is heavy on pulp authors. I've read that the pulp revival of the late sixties-seventies was due to a publishing hunger for fantasy in the wake of the sixties popularity of Tolkien. Given Gygax's age, he almost certainly had an earlier exposure to these authors than that. He may have began reading the Gnome Press editions of Conan from the fifties. Maybe he discovered Frtiz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in the 1957 collection, The Two Sought Adventure, or perhaps he read some of the stories from the pages of the pulps themselves. The De Camp/Pratt "Incomplete Enchanter" stories extant at the time had first appear in the pulps in the forties, but had begun appearing in collections or novel expansions that were likely still around soon thereafter. Vance's The Dying Earth had first been published in 1950. Wherever he encountered them, Gary Gygax was widely read in the fantasy genre as it existed at that time.

Let's just look at the biggest influences and see what they have in common: Leiber and Howard are "sword and sorcery" with protagonists out for personal, material gain--certainly not out to save the world. De Camp and Pratt, Vance, and Leiber, often have a humorous, ironic tone (perhaps owing a debt to James Branch Cabell who unfortunately doesn't make the list). De Camp and Pratt's Incomplete Enchanter series has a mechanistic, rational approach to the irrational (magic). Merritt gives us "lost worlds" with characters encountering exotic, hidden locales (like a lot of gaming modules). Lovecraft has outre monsters, and subterranean weirdness (as does Leiber in at least a couple of stories). Vance's and Leiber's tales are often picaresque.

So here's what, it seems to me, made it into D&D:

1. Interest more in material gain (treasure) and personal advancement (becoming a person of quality/leader of men--but perhaps not succeeding). This is in contrast to the more "epic hero" goals found in Tolkien and most modern series fantasy.

2. Gritty, lower powered heroes, rather than empowered demigods/epic heroes.

3. Weird/fantastic locales (often ruins of another age or subterranean realms) where dangers may be encountered and treasures gained.

4. (from Vance and some De Camp/Pratt) well defined "rules" of how magic works making it rather mechanistic, and putting magic into the hands of "heroes" not just depraved antagonist "sorcerers" or enigmatic wizardly advisers.


A good starting point for a game of fantasy adventure. Sources to conjure with.

But Gary and crew didn't stop there. Over the evolution of this phenomena called D&D, the game became a thing unto itself with its own tropes and characteristics not found in the source material--or at least differently emphasized. Without these innovations, D&D wouldn't be D&D, as it's commonly conceived.

Next time, I'll try to identify what I think these might be.

The Argument and Introduction

Ok. Here we are. Welcome.

So what I’m trying to do here (at least for now) is look at tabletop role-playing, genre fantasy, and all the other geekery and pop culture marginalia that might conceivably intersect or inform those things.

In my personal pre-history (which is to say the mid-seventies to the dawning of the eighties), there was already in my brain a nascent cauldron of fantasy abubble: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz conjured by the voice of a babysitter, King Arthur for boys illuminated by NC Wyeth, four-color barbarians on spinner-racks, Myth and legend sifted by Bullfinch and Harryhausen, singing hobbits and rotoscoped orcs, power swords split in twain on not one, but two, alien worlds; an elf, a dwarf, a giant--and a slayer named Hawk, the doom that came to Vermithrax Pejorative, fantasylands with oracular pigs and messianic lions.

Somewhere in there, I read a couple of TSR Endless Quest “choose your own adventure” style books. My interest is these led an older cousin to introduce me to AD&D. Though I don’t remember completely, I suspect my first character borrowed a bit from the elven protagonist of Rose Estes’ Mountain of Mirrors. Pretty soon, I introduced a couple of my friends to role-playing and was dungeonmastering with a Moldvay basic set purchased serendipitously by our gifted program teacher.

1983 dawned and the castle gates were thrown wide with the Dungeons and Dragons toyline (and their poor relations the Dragonriders of the Styx), the D&D cartoon, and the short-lived Wizards and Warriors TV show. Maybe it was that Christmas (or at latest, the one after) that I got Monster Manual II, the new Elmore cover Player’s Handbook, and the old Sutherland cover Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Contrary to common parental fears of the era, gaming didn’t turn into a destructive obsession--quite the contrary. D&D led me to, or at least strengthened my interest in, interests beyond gaming I might not have got otherwise. Lists of inspirational readings in game manuals and Gygaxian asides led me to Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, and Burroughs. Searching for works by those authors led me over the years that followed to more obscure—but no less rewarding—finds: Karl Edward Wagner, Manly Wade Wellman, CL Moore, and Leigh Brackett.

Ok, so those are all pulp writers. Maybe they're not the best representatives of the educational merits of gaming—though reading at all is probably meritorious, these days. In addition to fictional inspirations, though, creating my owns towns, cities, cultures, and ultimately worlds led to an interest in history, culture, comparitive religion, and linguistics. It's no hyperbole to give gaming the credit for a large portion of the nonfiction books in my collection that usually impresses visitors, and keeps me buying new bookshelves.

Those interests stayed even as gaming faded. By high school I was playing GURPS and Mayfair's DC Heroes irregularly. AD&D was already a thing of the past. Throughout my college years, I gamed only a hand full of times (FASA Star Trek, with some Trek-loving, gaming naive friends). The year between college and medical school, saw me playing revisiting 2nd edition AD&D briefly before gaming disappeared from my life entirely throughout medical school.

Nine years, five moves, 5 years of residency, and 2 jobs later, reading Old School related blogs stirred up nostalgia led me to get a group who had gamed briefly in residency back together. While I have a lot of sympathy with the Old School Movement, I can't say that I'm a strict adherent (always assuming that there was a consensus on what that might be). Our current game is Mutants & Masterminds: Warriors & Warlocks. We're playing a sort of "rationalized D&D style world" (more on that to come).

On this page I hope to share things from our game, and ideas I've had I didn't use. I'll review books and just about anything else that I've found inspirational, and maybe others will to. One thing that's always seemed decidedly "old school" and Gygaxian to me is a highly promiscuous approach to inspirations.

So, we'll see where it goes. Hopefully, some place good.