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Inspiration and Emulation, Tolkien and Gygax

Inspiration and Emulation, Tolkien and Gygax

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Ballantine The Return of the King-smallTo say that I have an abiding interest in the relationship between tabletop roleplaying games and the literary inspirations of their creators is something of an understatement.

Notice, though, that I said “inspirations” rather than another word that frequently gets bandied about when discussing the relationship between literature and RPGs – emulation. I can’t recall precisely when I first heard the term “emulation” used in the context of roleplaying games, but I’d be surprised if it were before the late 1980s. That’s about a decade after I entered the hobby, so my memory is admittedly fuzzy and I could well be mistaken. On the other hand, I heard the term “inspiration” a great deal, most notably in (you knew this was coming!) Gary Gygax’s 1979 Appendix N and the “Inspirational Source Material” found in the 1981 Tom Moldvay-edited edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Back in those days, game creators often talked about the books whose characters, plots, and ideas had fired their imaginations to such a degree that they decided to create a RPG that drew on them; they still do.

“Emulation” is something different. It’s one thing, I believe, to create a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by, say, Robert E. Howard’s stories of Conan the Cimmerian, but an entirely different thing to create a roleplaying game intended to emulate the adventures of Conan. Emulation implies a degree of fidelity to its literary sources (at least thematically), as well as some means – whether rules or advice – to ensure that experience of playing the game imitates that source material. An example of what I’m talking about that comes immediately to mind is Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG. While its rules do not explicitly talk about emulation, they do include game mechanics for the loss of sanity that results from encounters with blasphemous tomes and eldritch horrors. The creator of a game that’s merely inspired by some literary source is under no such obligations. After all, inspiration can take many forms, many of which do not include aping one’s sources of inspiration.

I mention all of this as a prologue to a large, more contentious discussion, namely the place of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons.

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John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The House With a Clock in its Walls-smallI know John Bellairs mostly as the author of a host of YA fantasy mysteries — rather dark fantasy mysteries, actually, with a twinge of horror. The first one I purchased was The House With a Clock in its Walls, back when my kids were very young, but I imagined they’d thank me as they grew older and started devouring the fantasy library I’d diligently built for them.

Never happened. Instead, they did the exact same thing I did at their age: found their own books and steadfastly ignored the stuff their boring parents kept recommending.

They read Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, and Suzanne Collins’s Gregor books, John A. Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice, and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. I ended up with stacks of unread John Bellairs titles like The Eyes of the Killer Robot and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. At least they looked good on the shelves.

John Bellairs also wrote at least one adult fantasy, The Face in the Frost. And that was apparently enough to win him a space in Gary Gygax’s Appendix N in the back of the Dungeon Masters Guide, which is why we’re talking about him today.

Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan are examining one Appendix N writer per week at Tor.com, in their Advanced Readings in D&D series. They’ve done 15 installments so far, and for number 16 Tim turns to John Bellairs.

But first, he briefly returns to subject #15, Lin Carter, to say a few words about his exceptional treatise on adult fantasy, Imaginary Worlds.

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The Cleric and the Crucifix

The Cleric and the Crucifix

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vanhelsing

“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones — something of the tingling of glass when struck — which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.

So does Dr. John Seward describe the encounter between Abraham Van Helsing and newly-risen Lucy Westenra in Chapter 16 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m not knowledgeable enough in literary vampire lore to be able to say with any certainty that the 1897 novel is the first time we see a bloodsucker recoil from a crucifix, but, even if it’s not, I have little doubt that it was probably the most widely-read and influential example of it. Not only has the novel itself sold untold copies in the English-speaking world alone, but motion picture adaptations, starting with F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized 1922 film, Nosferatu, have added much to the popular conception of “the undead” (to borrow Stoker’s own coinage) – and how to combat them.

In the world of gaming, it’s well-known that the medieval miniatures rules, Chainmail, written by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, was the immediate predecessor to Dungeons & Dragons, especially its “Fantasy Supplement,” which introduces the option of including magic and monsters so as to “refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers.” Even a cursory examination of Chainmail reveals that there’s nary a mention of religion in its pages, including in the Fantasy Supplement. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, since the priest isn’t a distinct literary archetype in the pulp fantasy literature that inspired Gygax (as revealed in innumerable posts about his Appendix N bibliography on this site and elsewhere). Consequently, Chainmail includes only “heroes” and “wizards” as individual units.

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New Treasures: Cold and Dark

New Treasures: Cold and Dark

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Cold and Dark-smallI couldn’t go to Gencon in August. I had to work. Someone had to — the rent on our spacious rooftop headquarters here in downtown Chicago doesn’t pay itself.

Certain members of our staff did attend that august gathering, however. I’m not going to point any fingers, but I will point you, without comment, to Howard Andrew Jones’s GenCon Writer’s Symposium 2013 and Andrew Zimmerman Jones’s three-part (three-part! That’s how much fun you can have at Gencon) Post-Convention Recap. That’s right. While some us were putting in long hours, trying to finish that scathing expose on the use of polluted air in model zeppelins, everyone on staff named Jones got to go Indianapolis to party. But I’m not bitter.

I’m lying. I’m totally bitter. What’s a guy got to do to keep up with the Joneses around here? It’s not just all the fun they had; it’s the fantastic loot they brought back. Like Cold and Dark, a new RPG of gritty science fiction horror from Chronicle City — publishers of Dungeonslayers, Achtung! Cthulhu, and the upcoming Punktown — which draws inspiration from Pitch Black, Dead Space, and other classics of dark SF. Here’s the back-cover copy:

Centuries from now mankind lives on in the Sirius galaxy, an enormously vast and dense system of stars. It’s a greedy industrial society run by corporations and the Governmental Industrial Complex. The onslaught of strip-mining has stirred something terrible best left buried and forgotten.

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Dungeonslayers 4.0 & The Demolished Ones

Dungeonslayers 4.0 & The Demolished Ones

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dungeonslayersI’ve fallen for two game products I never expected to like. One is a slim paperback rule system for a fantasy role-playing game – and you might think we have enough of those, but this is pretty excellent. The other initially puzzled me because it seemed on first blush like it was a Victorian murder mystery… except that I discovered it more resembled The Prisoner.

The products have very little in common, except that they come from the same publisher and that I highly recommend them both.

All that you need to play Dungeonslayers – apart from dice, paper, pencil, and imagination – can be found in a slim 160 page paperback. I suppose a lot of role-playing games can make a similar claim, and it’s one I’ve heard often enough that upon first look I really didn’t see what the big deal was. But Dungeonslayers really is a different animal.

It’s beautifully presented and succinctly explained. There’s no bloat here, and there’s nothing confusing. It’s minimalist without being simplistic, and incredibly succinct. You can get the game up and running with a minimum of fuss.

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Appendix T

Appendix T

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aljUnless one considers charts, tables, and mathematical formulas to be “illustrations,” the original edition of GDW’s science fiction roleplaying game Traveller (1977) contains only one piece of genuine artwork: namely, the portrait to the right. That portrait, by an uncredited artist, depicts Alexander Lascelles Jamison, the example character whose career is detailed in the first volume of the classic SF RPG. Like all Traveller characters, before he starts seeking his fortune among the stars, Jamison has already had a career, in this case in the merchant service, where he mustered out with his own ship and the rank of captain.

Looking at that portrait, I found myself remembering a quote from “Margin of Profit,” a story by the late Poul Anderson, first published in the September 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That story, too, depicts an interstellar merchant captain:

He was a huge man, two meters in height and broad enough to match. A triple chin and swag belly did not make him appear soft. Rings glittered on hairy fingers and bracelets on tawny wrists, under snuff-soiled lace. Small black eyes, set close to a great hook nose under a sloping forehead, peered with laser intensity.

Anderson’s merchant is, of course, Nicholas Van Rijn, president of the Solar Spice & Liquors Company, and one of the more famous characters from the period between the end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction and the rise of the New Wave.

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A Return of Pacesetter RPG Style Horror

A Return of Pacesetter RPG Style Horror

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You are about to enter the world of CHILL, where unknown things sneak, and crawl, and creep, and slither in the darkness of a moonless night. This is the world of horror, the world of the vampire, ghost, and ghoul, the world of things not known, and best not dreamt of. CHILL is a role-playing game of adventure into the Unknown and your first adventure is about to begin — CHILL Introductory Folder

In 1984, a group of former TSR Employees that included Mark Acres, Troy Denning, and Stephen Sullivan formed Pacesetter Ltd. Games and ambitiously published four role playing games: Chill, Timemaster, Star Ace, and Sandman. The rights to these games now belong to a diverse list of small publishers. Phil Reed owns the rights to Star Ace, Goblinoid Games own the rights to Timemaster and Sandman (as well as the Pacesetter brand), and Mayfair Games owns the rights to Chill.

Chill wasn’t the first horror role playing game, nor is it considered the best by the majority of gamers.  However, it has long held a place as a “cult” favorite in the role playing game world. While it is a cult favorite, that cult status has not enabled it to garner a reprint in recent years. In 2009, Otherworld Creations attempted to do a Fundable campaign (a Kickstarter before Kickstarter was cool) and failed to raise the necessary money to do a new edition.

Chill was different from other horror role playing games that often sought to capture the dark nihilistic material horror of H.P. Lovecraft or turned monster-hunting into an action movie. Chill tried to capture the tone of Hammer and AIP productions. Because of this four-color focus, and I believe also because its creators were former TSR employees, Rick Swan reviewed the game quite negatively in Dragon magazine and in his Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games. Swan wrote that the game was:

A horror game for the easily frightened… While most of Chill‘s vampires, werewolves, and other B-movie refugees wouldn’t scare a ten-year-old, they’re appropriate to the modest ambitions of the game… Chill is too shallow for extended campaigns, and lacks the depth to please anyone but the most undemanding players. For beginners only.

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Appendix N: Carrying on the Flame

Appendix N: Carrying on the Flame

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Runequest Sixth Edition-smallAs recently posted here at Black Gate by James Maliszewski in his article “The Other Appendix N,” the very first Appendix N bibliography of inspirational reading ever printed in a roleplaying game was actually in the 1978 edition of Chaosium’s RuneQuest; a year before Gygax released his own homage in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Whilst it merely followed the time honored convention of academic publications, few remember nowadays that it was RuneQuest which started an institution in roleplaying that still continues to this day.

Surprisingly, the differences between the two bibliographies are quite stark. RuneQuest’s list, rather scholarly, incorporated a lot of ancient history texts, books of military warfare, and Nordic sagas; whereas AD&D’s was more devoted to fantastical fiction, especially the less well-known authors of the genre. Central to both bibliographies, however, are some familiar names: Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, and JRR Tolkien. Other than that, there was little overlap between the two.

Whilst these recommended reading lists reveal each game’s designers’ interests and objectives, it also highlighted that every writer is heavily influenced by the literature they read, and by implication, those stories available to them at the time.

For Gary Gygax, a man turned forty by the time he wrote the Dungeon Masters Guide, the early works of fantasy authors such as Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, Fox Gardner, Andre Norton, Jack Vance, and Roger Zelazny were readily available in bookshops, hot off the press. Indeed, almost all of the books on his inspirational reading list would have been as easy to pick up as purchasing a copy of A Game of Thrones is today.

Although the combined authors of RuneQuest were less than a decade younger, their drier bibliography somehow never matched the mystique of Gygax’s subsequent list, despite the fact that the game itself gripped my imagination with a far tighter hold. This fascination was more due to the Classical style of its illustrations combined with Greg Stafford’s wondrously magical world of Glorantha, with its roots firmly grounded in diverse mythologies – alas, unlisted in the first Appendix N.

When Lawrence Whitaker and I set about refining and re-launching RuneQuest as a quality roleplaying game, we too were influenced by our own youthful reading.

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Remembering Dave

Remembering Dave

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davearneson
David L. Arneson (1947-2009)

Had he not died of cancer in 2009, today would have been the 66th birthday of David L. “Dave” Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and one of the most under-appreciated creators of the past century.That may sound like an exaggeration, but I mean it most sincerely. Through the medium of tabletop roleplaying games, a concept that owes as much to his imagination and ingenuity as anyone’s, Arneson has profoundly affected millions of lives, including my own. If you’ve ever played in any kind of game that featured a “dungeon” or had a character with “hit points” or who earned “experience points,” you can thank Dave Arneson, who pioneered all these game mechanics in his Blackmoor campaign in Minneapolis during the early 1970s. It was Arneson who made the conceptual leap from fighting battles on a sand table with miniature metal figures to playing individual characters who explored monster-filled labyrinths in search of “more and bigger loot,” as Volume 3 of the 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons memorably puts it.

Sadly, Arneson is far from a household name. When Gary Gygax, D&D‘s other co-creator, died in 2008, it was big news. Newspapers, magazines, and websites across the world, including such prestigious ones as The New York Times, The Economist, and the BBC (to cite but a few) all included high-profile obituaries of the man whom they called “the Father of Roleplaying Games.” More than that, these obituaries often served as springboards for wide-ranging reflections about RPGs and their place in shaping contemporary popular culture. The video game industry in particular hailed Gygax as its intellectual forefather, citing the seminal role Dungeons & Dragons played in shaping it – and rightly so, I should add. There’s no question that Gary Gygax played an incalculably huge role in the popularization of the roleplaying game, a new form of entertainment whose ideas took the world by storm.

Arneson’s death, just a little over a year later, didn’t receive quite the same kind of coverage. There were still obituaries in The New York Times and on the BBC, of course, but they were shorter, more muted affairs, perhaps in part because Gygax’s death was still fresh in people’s minds and there didn’t seem to be much more to say about Arneson that hadn’t already been said about Gygax.

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Adventure in a Place of Unholy Shadows: A Review of Crypts and Things

Adventure in a Place of Unholy Shadows: A Review of Crypts and Things

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Screen Shot 2013-09-25 at 10.39.17 Back in the 70s, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), I spent a long time wanting a ruleset that would let me recreate the sort of sword and sorcery that I was reading back then.

I wanted to play a game that caught the atmosphere of Robert E Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. I wanted to adventure in a place of unholy shadows, where magic was scary and thrilling and men with swords sought lost treasures in glittering towers where old gods and dark secrets waited.

Clearly, D&D was not quite what I was looking for. The white box contained an unholy mishmash of Tolkien, bits of medieval history, and a weird variation of Vancian magic from the Dying Earth which, while awesomely powerful, was not very scary or, well, magical. Magic items were as common as if they came in cereal boxes. And what was with it with those cleric guys and the undead?

The setting of D&D did not look like any fantasy world I had read about, but it was clearly influenced by a number of them. There were thieves that might have been Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. There was a barbarian character class in an issue of White Dwarf that might, if you squinted, have resembled something like Conan.

But D&D did not quite hit the mark. There were also elves and halflings and dwarves and all manner of other things that did not exist in the S&S universes of my particular dreams. There were echoes of Howard and Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith, but they were smudged over with bits of Tolkien and a kind of high fantasy.

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