Saturday 14 January 2012

Project Gutenberg Appendix N

Another world I'd one day like to set a game in is something I'd call "Project Gutenberg Appendix N". As the name suggests, this is a game whose basic influences/inspirations come entirely from books whose copyright has expired in the USA, and which are thus available for free from Project Gutenberg.

Some ideas, many of which I'm sure you have read (and if not, why not?):

  • Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter stories. They may be very silly, they may have a main character who is practically of Superman-level ability, they may be of the most throwaway quality (you'll forget 95% of the plot the instant you finish reading), but they are full of brio, imagination and atmosphere.
  • The Suprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by Rudolf Raspe. A collection of the tall tales and far-fetched stories of a bragging Flashman-esque minor German nobleman who died in 1797. Amongst many other things he keeps bees for a Sultan in Turkey, throws a hatchet that flies all the way to the moon, shoots down a hot air balloon, turns a wolf inside-out, and slips from one side of the world to the other by falling into a volcano.
  • The Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods by Baron Dunsany. Twin works of sheer fantastical genius by a man cited by Lovecraft, Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges AND Clark Ashton Smith as a strong influence. Was there ever a writer with as strong a D&D-inspiring credibility as that?
  • Really anything published by Richard Hakluyt, as an important reminder of how big the world really is, and how renaissance or pseudo-renaissance societies were so very different and yet oddly similar to our own. His Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, composed almost entirely of eyewitness accounts, is hard to read but full of inspiration.
  • Kubla Khan, from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Selected Poems, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Do you get more D&D than "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea"?
  • George MacDonald's Phantastes. I always preferred this to The Princess and the Goblin, which is really a book for kids. Phantastes is something else altogether. The scene in which the main character encounters his own shadow has stuck with me forever.
  • Frankenstein, natch.
  • Voltaire's Candide, which sort of reminds me of a D&D campaign committed to paper: a constant stream of improbable events, brushes with death, horrible occurrences, and bizarre absurdities. It maybe says something about D&D that it often feels like a satirical comedy from the 18th century. But that something is good. 
I'm not sure what kind of witches' brew of a campaign setting this would create. A group of European noblemen from the 17th or 18th centuries exploring Mars? Except Mars is full of strange creatures and petty Gods?

21 comments:

  1. I would suggest James Branch Cabell who is sort of the missing link between Voltaire and Vance,

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  2. WtD is completely right. Cabell is pure genius.

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  3. Project Gutenberg is a great source of classic books. There is also Wikisource, a sister-site to Wikipedia, which has most of the works of both HP Lovecraft and RE Howard in the public domain as well as others.

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  4. With the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen sauntering through.

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  5. I never heard of Cabell before. I'll have to check him out.

    I actually have a "complete works of HP Lovecraft" .mobi file that somebody compiled from Wikisource. I'll see if I can find the link to that.

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  6. Dunsay in 1912's The Book of Wonder

    "The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again."

    All the nonsense of D&D justified in one paragraph.

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  7. Another one to definitely check out is E. R. Eddison, starting with Worm Ouroboros.

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  8. I've never read that either, though I've often thought about it. Gollancz has a "Fantasy Masterworks" series, of which The Worm Ouroborus is one.

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  9. Oh, and Coopdevil, yeah - I love that paragraph.

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  10. Don't forget the swashbuckling trifecta of Dumas, Sabatini, and Baroness Orczy (creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel).

    For slightly more psychedelic adventures, you can get the complete Oz series. Baum also did a great collection of American fairy tales that is great fodder.

    And, of course, the tales of Wells and Verne are marvelous. Some day, I want to do a Victorian-era X-Files campaign based on their stories.

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  11. You might want to look at Marcus Rowland's Forgotten Futures RPG, which is based on 19C scientific romances and fantasies (Kipling, Conan Doyle, George Griffith, E Nesbit, etc.). Each disk includes not only the rules but the original source texts. It's free!

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  12. Also, re Baron Munchausen, it would be hard to surpass James Wallis's revolutionary RPG "The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen," the highly admired forerunner of today's indie RPGs.

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  13. Allen Varney: Thanks for the advice, will check out both. The Baron Munchausen game looks right up my alley, I have to say.

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  14. I'm Dr. Obscure, and I approve of this Project. Also, I'll jump on the Cabell bandwagon.

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  15. Thank you for organizing this. Already transferring some of them to my kindle.

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  16. I have been quite disappointed in the past with the quality of many of the Gutenberg files. Personally, I have had better luck with files from ManyBooks.net (which often use the Gutenberg files as source, but clean them up a bit).

    I find their interface also much easier to use. Examples:

    - Edgar Rice Burroughs
    - Robert E. Howard
    - H. P. Lovecraft
    - Bram Stoker
    - Eric Rücker Eddison

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  17. Allen, this Forgotten Futures thing is incredible. One core rule set and...what...eleven giant "sourcebooks", most of them containing one original slant on Victorian adventure setting based on a certain series of works, the works being open source and also THEREFORE INCLUDED with the book. Look at the research! So much information about both the real and fictional versions of the place and period. I've never seen anything quite like this.

    Everybody, try to read the setting blurb here and NOT run a game based on airship-using British soldiers fighting vampires and werewolves. It seems so...reasonable...! SO. COOL.

    http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff9/hussars.htm

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  18. I forgot to mention that each 'sourcebook' tends to contain a pile of new rules and several new adventures as well. The author is a one-man OSR-type movement.

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  19. There's also Project Gutenberg Australia, which seems to have a number of books not on the standard Project Gutenberg (presumably due to the nature of copyright law in Australia).

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  20. Australia is a "Life+70" copyright nation, so works like R.E. Howard's are public domain in Australia, but not in the U.S.

    I'd add some H. Rider Haggard to the list, even though it's not strictly fantasy. It's fantastical adventure fiction, though, and I find it fun to read.

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  21. Let me add Gulliver of Mars. Kind of predecessor of the Barsoom novels, but the protagonist is not a perfect hero.

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