The Whole of Fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons

Jupiter and Europa by Marit Berg

Last night I was reading a pdf copy of Europa when I ran across an article by Gary Gygax, How to Set Up Your Dungeons & Dragons Campaign - and Be Stuck Refereeing it Seven Days per Week Until the Wee Hours of the Morning! This was actually the second part of a series he had been writing, which I have yet to fully explore as I haven't found any other copies of Europa other than this one, and I noticed something that I had suspected for some time but not actually seen in print before. Gary wrote, ". . . Now fantasy / swords & sorcery games need not have any fixed basis for the assumptions made by its referee (my own doesn't) except those which embrace the whole of fantasy . . . Settings based upon the limits (if one can speak of fantasy limits) can be very interesting in themselves providing the scope of the setting will allow the players relative free-reign to their imaginations. Typical settings are: Teutonic / Norse Mythology; Medieval European Folklore (including King Arthur, Holger the Dane, and so on); The Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; Indian Mythology; and Lost Continents such as Atlantis or Mu. Regardless of the setting you can have it all taking place on an 'alternative earth' or a parallel world . . ." (Gygax, 18).

The part that got my attention was that first line, that ". . . fantasy / swords & sorcery games need not have any fixed basis for the assumptions made by its referee . . . except those which embrace the whole of fantasy . . ." (Gygax, 18). Embrace the whole of fantasy.

Too often when I read and discuss role-playing games - especially when concerning Dungeons & Dragons - I find that there are all of these established boundaries that delineate what I'm allowed to do with my games. The world must be set in a quasi-Medieval time period. Guns, if they exist at all, should be rare. The world should feel big and the players a small part of it. Oh, and the literary inspiration for your games should come from Tolkien, Martin, or Gygax's Appendix N. 

Fantasy, especially the way that the term was understood before we decided to subdivide everything to death, was so much larger than the truncated spectrum that comes from limiting our imaginations to any guiding light. Take for example my own favorite source of inspiration: pulp fantasy. 

I know that for some of my readers they might be reminded of James Maliszewski's exploration of pulp fantasy and his definition of the term or as he put it ". . . In general, 'pulp fantasy' roughly equates to what we nowadays call 'sword and sorcery.' However, the term is more expansive than that, because it also includes authors and stories that do not, strictly speaking, fall under sword and sorcery, such as Burroughs and other 'sword and planet' authors, as well as 'weird tales' of the Lovecraftian variety. I chose the term because, by and large, most of the authors whom Gygax cites as influences in the famous Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide were published in the pulp magazines of the 20s through 50s . . ." (Maliszewski).

Unfortunately James' definition of pulp fantasy ignores a large part of what made up the pulp fantasy of the era. As a result, if we were to hold to his definition than we wouldn't consider pulp standards like Doc Savage, Buck Rogers, Tarzan of the Apes, The Shadow, Green Lama, or Zorro as something that we should look to for inspiration in our Dungeons & Dragons games. Our heroes would be craven things who acted out of a slavish devotion to selfishness rather than because they were doing the right thing. We wouldn't have alien battles, tanks, high speed car chases, mystical hokum, or super heroics. Instead we would be bound to endlessly repeating pale imitations of Howard's adventures and Tolkien's quests.

Listen, It's all too common for people to coalesce around an idea and codify it as conventional wisdom. Today in our hobby we have as our conventional wisdom the standard refrain that our Dungeons & Dragons styled games are all supposed to be pseudo-Medieval affairs hinged on the literary roots of Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and the Lord of the Rings; and James held to this line of thought in his discussion of pulp fantasy. As a community we have internalized this conventional wisdom and now it is taken for granted that if we are playing Dungeons & Dragons then it must be this way and any deviation is anathema.

Yet it doesn't have to be that way. 

Yes, we can explore a setting bound by certain limits as Gary noted in Europa, but we can also go further and take the game in different directions without it being something other than Dungeons & Dragons. We can hop a ride on the back of a floating cart with hairy aliens and six legged horses to take back our lives like Prince Valentine did in Robert Silverberg's  Lord Valentine's Castle. Or we can race across the globe in a desperate race to get back home after we crash landed on some god forsaken planet like Adam Reith did in Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure novels. We could even fight evil like Buck Rogers in Philip Francis Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 A.D. But we don't; because too often we let ourselves be convinced that if we're playing Dungeons & Dragons it has to be the same way that everyone else has always played it. We have to be Aragon dragging some fat, little halflings half way across the world to save it on an epic quest; or we have to Conan sneaking his way through the palace. 

I have spent the better part of the last decade having fun exploring worlds like that but they're not enough any more. I want my games to be more. I want aliens. I want laser guns and high speed rocket chases across the universe. I want to fight evil. I want to out smart the villain and save the day. I want to go to sleep and wake up a thousand years later only to jump right into a gun fight as I rush to the aide of some poor sap beset by vicious gangs. 

There is so much out there for a Dungeons & Dragons game to be that isn't just a rehashing of Howard and Tolkien. I want all of it. I want the whole of fantasy.

Works Cited

Gygax, Gary. "How to Set Up Your Dungeons & Dragons Campaign - and Be Stuck Refereeing it Seven Days per Week Until the Wee Hours of the Morning!" Europa. April 1975. pg 18. pdf

Maliszewski, James. "What is Pulp Fantasy?" GROGNARDIA, http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-is-pulp-fantasy.html. Accessed February 21, 2017.

How Should We Be Describing Areas in Role-Playing Games

Last night I was reading reddit when ran across a novice Game Master (GM) asking for help in describing their game world. This particular GM had been running an adventure with lots of boxed text descriptions of each room which they had faithfully read as their players had explored. With experience, however, this GM had begun wondering if this was right or if they should be a bit more imaginative with the descriptions. The answers to this question left me feeling rather unfulfilled so I thought that I would explore the question more fully here.

When I first began running Dungeons and Dragons twelve years ago I ran games that came exclusively from my own imagination. I didn't pick up an official adventure from TSR or Wizards of the Coast for two years; and by that point I had already established my own style of describing the worlds my players were exploring which was heavily influenced by the pulp authors that I frequently read. As a result the boxed text felt heavy and unwieldy so I wouldn't run a published adventure because I arrogantly felt like running one would be akin to putting the training wheels back on my bike. 

The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth cover, by Erol Otus, 1981

It wasn't until I really started getting into the Greyhawk setting that my view on published adventures changed. I can remember reading The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth and it suddenly occurred to me that by ignoring the published adventures, and their ubiquitous boxed texts, that I was missing out on all of this really exciting stuff that other Dungeons and Dragons players had experienced. So I began to attempt running published modules. 

The first module that I attempted to run as it was written was David Cook's Dwellers of the Forbidden City. It was a challenging adventure for my players but as a GM I found it just as challenging to keep it interesting for them when it came time to read the boxed text. The problem was solidly my fault as instead of using the text as a starting point from which I would build the description I stubbornly stuck to reading it as it was written. 

Dwellers of the Forbidden City cover by Erol Otus, 1981

That was a mistake. 

One of my strengths as a GM has always been my ability to describe the locations that my players explore with a brevity that leaned heavy on mood and the big details. Without question my style is influenced by the Robert E. Howard novels I read and loved. A good example would be this passage from Son of the White Wolf:

". . . THE SUN WAS not long risen over the saw-edged mountains to the east, but already the heat was glazing the cloudless sky to the hue of white-hot steel. Along the dim road that split the immensity of the desert a single shape moved. The shape grew out of the heat-hazes of the south and resolved itself into a man on a camel . . ." (Howard)

In that short extract everything about the location is told in three sentences and as a GM, and storyteller, I'm always looking to emulate his style. I love the quickness of it and how a mood for the reader is so easily established. 

After my failure with Dwellers of the Forbidden City I decided to take a different approach with all future published modules I would run and try to bring a bit of Howard's style into the descriptions. Now I could do it on the fly but often it meant that I would end up missing things. The tone might get slightly off because I hadn't read far enough to know the location wasn't all that important or that the current non-player character (NPC) would be a pivotal character in the adventure. So I found myself doing a lot of prep work in order to make the published adventures work in a way that satisfied me. 

I would begin by making a copy of the adventure that I could write notes in without feeling guilty. I would then read the entire adventure before I began making notes I would need. I had to know what was happening; who the villains, throwaway characters, and heroes were. Then I would go back through a second time and make my notes. I would jot down a few quick thoughts on how I wanted this NPC to sound or the mood that this location needed to give the players. I highlighted things that I wanted them to discover and that I wanted to find quickly (like the villains' characteristics, weapons, and spells). And the night before I would read out loud the parts I thought we would touch in the session to my wife (when she wasn't playing), attempting to use all of my notes, to see what was working and failing.

All of that prep work I do has often paid off in ways that have taken my running of the adventures from cumbersome affairs into things that my players still talk about today - but it also made me incredibly hesitant to run the larger adventures. As you can imagine, published adventures end up being a lot more work for me and when I look at an adventure that's 250 pages long or more I have a hard time justifying spending that much time on it when my only reward may be my players looking at the start and saying, "Well, this is fucked. We're going the other direction away from the dragon and towards the bar." But Greyhawk has a way of rewarding my efforts. I consistently find myself enjoying the villains that I discover in these modules more than I did previously when I only knew their names and had read through their wiki descriptions. The locations I prepare for never go to waste as I can always find the time to let my players discover a crashed space ship or a hidden shrine to some foul demon princes looking to destroy the multiverse. 

In Greyhawk, there's always a hungry dragon.

Works Cited

Howard, Robert E. "Son of the White Wolf." Project Gutenberg Australia, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601081.txt. Accessed December 1, 2016.

The Book Shelf: Son of the White Wolf by Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard was one of the truly great American authors of the last century. He created the Sword and Sorcery genre of fiction and wrote some of the greatest fight scenes to ever appear in literature. He was prolific writing a vast array of poetry, short prose, and works of fiction of all sizes.

Robert E. Howard created characters that you might know, such as Conan, Solomon Kane, and El Borak. What, you've never heard of El Borak? 

Well until I picked up the Son of the White Wolf I hadn't either.

Son of the White Wolf is a collection of three short stories featuring my new favorite character, El Borak. El Borak is an adventurer hailing from the American Southwest who has spent his time roving about the Near and Far East earning a reputation as the most dangerous man in the world. In a lot of ways El Borak is Robert E. Howard's fictional version of T. E. Lawrence. His relationship with the Arabs and with the world at large often pulls directly from Lawrence's life and legend, but the character's outlook is all Howard's. 

I'd love to tell you all about the ins and outs of this book but it is just too good to spoil for anyone in any way. Do yourself a favor and pick up this fast and infinitely enjoyable read from the master of adventure fiction.

Overall Rating: 9 out of 10