Tone matters. There are all kinds of fantasy books, of course, all kinds of settings. But if you were interested in that sort of thing, I think you could divide them between two tonal ancestors in the form of Tolkien and Lovecraft, or, more specifically The Hobbit and "Call of Cthulhu". Modern fantasy divides along those lines.
The Hobbit is an optimistic book. And I don't just mean it has a happy ending. It has an optimistic disposition. It's important to take it in isolation from The Lord of the Rings, here: The Hobbit in its original form was not a book about saving the world. It is a book about an adventure. It's a book about fun. Breaking out of your shell and getting out there and seeing what's going on in exotic places you've never heard of. There is peril and sadness and death, but that's not going to detract from the underlying philosophy: the world is a good place once you get out of the front door. The Hobbit is composed in a major key.
"Call of Cthulhu" is a pessimistic story. It reveals a universe which is indifferent to us, and which is mainly best hidden; adventure in that world leads at best to insanity, and all it's really going to do for you is lift the veil on the fact that life is meaningless and there are lots of hideous unfathomable menaces out there. The universe is a bad, bad place. It's composed in a minor key.
Most if not all OSR settings draw on the "Call of Cthulhu" well much more than that of The Hobbit. Which is odd, when you think about it, because at the end of the day OSR gaming is all about adventure - hexcrawls and dungeon-delving and all that. Yet it is there, and it gives OSR games, I think, a distinctively arch and ironic character: the PCs may be adventuring, but they are basically either doing it for self-centered reasons (get gold and XP) or because they are half- or fully mad. Nobody sensible or normal would want to go adventuring in your average OSR setting because of all the potentially terrible things that could happen to you - the "adventure" is a test for the wits of the player framed by a general sense of wry humour and interest in what is happening as a disinterested observer.
There is nothing wrong with this at all - my games are like that most of the time - but I think something that we (I'll include myself in this despite not really liking the "OSR" label) do pretty badly is a major-key, The Hobbit approach to world building and adventure: discovering amazing things, going to weird places, doing great things, for the sake of it. Not so much going into the megadungeon to try to gather wealth and see what fucked up situations the PCs get into, but going in search of the Elixir of Youth (or whatever) because it's a great excuse to see the world which the DM (or the random tables, or the boxed set) has created.
On my OSR wishlist would be a vivid technicolour strange and wondrous Sinbad hack but I fear he'd fail his Save vs scurvy.
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness somebody should make that.
DeleteBut the motivations that get the adventure going in The Hobbit is the avarice and glory of the dwarves. It's also insanely dangerous with Golblins, Spiders, Mean Elves, Hungry Trolls, and a freakin Dragon. While a spirit for adventure is what gets Bilbo moving he is actually hired for services as a burglar.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but what Bilbo discovers is that adventure is good.
DeleteGood post. My Carcosa modules are on the end of the spectrum labelled "The Call of Cthulhu", while my Wilderness modules are on the other end of the spectrum labelled "The Hobbit". I don't have anything in the middle. I guess one could say I'm an extremist. ;)
ReplyDeleteSo is Isle of the Unknown more "The Hobbit"?
DeleteNot to get all Hegelian on you, but: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In other words, whenever you have dialectic, there is always a third.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the synthesis is... Dragonlance??
DeleteThe Synthesis is the characters of course!
DeleteThat doesn't seem quite Cthulhu enough to me. Dreamlands is not a bad combination of wonder and horror. Planescape could qualify, although I don't know enough about it to speak intelligently.
DeletePlanescape is a good call.
DeleteHow about the works of Lord Dunsany? In those, the world wondrous and wonderful, but adventures rarely end well. As a bonus, he seems to have influenced both Tolkien and Lovecraft, lending the whole thing a nice symmetry.
DeleteReading this is struck me that influences and tone can be very separate things. I've been running campaign in the Eberron setting for a few years, and while the content is largely drawn from Lovecraft and noir, the games always have a healthy dose of optimism.
ReplyDeleteI think this is partly because the personality of the creator comes through, but also because one of the default assumptions about the setting is that, despite all the horrors and intrigue that are inflicted upon the world, the PCs can make a difference.
While a lot of OSR might be written in the "Call of Cthulhu" tone, in actual play it often turns into "The Hobbit", at least in my experience.
ReplyDeleteFixed World and Moons of Jupiter struck me as "major-key" settings.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the world necessarily needs to be a good place for an optimistic narrative. The world can be a hard place, or even a bad one, so long as the people are mostly good, or good-ish, or would like to be good (even the people in opposition to you). Good actions take by the players should have an effect on people, even if they ultimately do not change the world.
Thanks - Fixed World definitely has that feel I think.
DeleteI think, the mixture of both sides would be perfect for a nice OSR-tone. I love HPL's Dreamlands and I think putting some Lovecraftian horror into the fairytale like "Hobbit" could be very nice. Putting some Nightgaunts into the Mirkwood could be interesting or replacing the Goblins from the Misty Mountains by Ghouls. I think, this could work very nice.
ReplyDeleteMy OSR dream would be a mixture of a lot settings like the Dreamlands, C.A.S. Xothique, Hyperborea and Atlantis, R.E.H. Hyboria, Sinbad, J.Vance Dying Earth, Tekumel, etc.
Dreamlike and savage sci-fantasy weirdness.
I like the setting in Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea; I think it meets a lot of those criteria.
DeleteThat's true, but I miss a little bit the "freshness" within the setting of AS&SoH. It's like take parts from different myth, settings and games together in one pot, but I would love to see a more individual setting with more new features. "Yoon-Suin" is a great example for such kind of a setting, because it has an asian-tone, but it is total different to everything else I read in this genre. So I think, it is possible to create something similar with out copy and paste.
DeleteHave you read Clark Ashton Smith's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"? For me, that's the quintessential OSR story. Two thieves go looking for treasure in an abandoned city. They meet a Lovecraftian monster. Half a thief comes out to tell us what happened.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I can't get the Lord of the Rings out of my head, but it seems to me that the reason adventure is not insanely dangerous in the Hobbit is providence, as personified by Gandalf. When you get yourself into trouble you can't get out of, Gandalf comes and saves you. If he doesn't, like when Bilbo gets lost under the Misty Mountains, you'll survive because of some lucky break combined with reserves of bravery you didn't know you had.
ReplyDeleteTrue. There is a huge amount of luck in The Hobbit and LOTR, which isn't really luck but divine providence I think (although Tolkien never quite comes out and says that). Incorporating divine providence into a setting - especially a polytheistic one - would be really interesting.
DeletePlanescape, Spelljammer, Al-Qadim.
ReplyDeleteThe first ones come with many light-hearted sightseeing adventures. The latter one is largely underrated as a setting - hobbit-like fantasy, Arabian nights feeling, and a positive (or naive) undertone, i.e. good tends to prevail. Al-Qadim avoids the Dragonlance cheesyness, and it works really great during play as an actual campaign setting.