The Strange Alchemy of D&D's Genre Emulation

In some ways, "old school D&D" has a laser-like focus on producing a certain type and mood of play. It doesn't feel like this when you read the rulebooks. But it does when you read its main literary inspiration at length. 

In the comments to my last post, Ivan provided a link to an essay Gary Gygax wrote about Jack Vance in the early 2000s. In it, Gary cites some of the ways in which Vance's writing directly influenced the content of D&D. Two of these examples are trite and obvious - the magic and the Thief class. The third is more telling:

Aside from ideas and specific things, the very manner in which Jack Vance portrays a fantasy environment, the interaction of characters with that environment, and with each other, is so captivating that wherever I could manage it, I attempted to include the “feel” he brings to his fantasy tales in the AD&D game. My feeble ability likely managed to convey but little of this, but in all I do believe that a not a little of what fans consider to be the “soul” of the game stems from that attempt.

Gary was "old school" in more ways than one, so he wasn't scared to talk about the "soul" of D&D rather than some bland technical term. I like that sort of language too. He was also obviously attempting to be humble here, so he didn't come out and say that, in play, his attempt to imbue the "soul" of his game with the "feel" of Vance's fiction is often highly successful. 

It is, though. I have recently finished reading The Dirdir, the third in Vance's "Planet of Adventure" series, and I was struck again and again by not only how obvious were the inspirations in it for the "feel" of D&D, but also how this manages to follow-through into what you might call the "lived experience" of D&D players. Not to put too fine a point on it, but basically every D&D campaign I have been involved in has felt like a Jack Vance story without any of us consciously attempting to make it that way. It's as if, by some strange alchemy, Gygax's intentions manage to find effect without ever being stated and without, in many cases, the players even knowing who Jack Vance was.

At times the inspirations are unbelievably direct. In the central portion of the book, the main characters basically act out a D&D campaign, exploring not a megadungeon but an area of wilderness, and searching for "sequins" in the form of "nodes" rather than gold, in a setup which provides the paradigm format for "OSR" games to this day. Here they are arriving in Maust, the settlement on the edge of the "dungeon", which attracts adventurers from all over the world of Tschai:

By noon Maust appeared in the distance: a jumble of tall narrow buildings with high gables and crooked roof-lines, built of dark timber and age-blackened tile...Running boys came out to meet the motor-wagon. They shouted slogans and held up signs and banners: "Sequin-takers attention! Kobo Hux will sell one of his excellent sequin-detectors." "Formulate your plans at the Inn of Purple Lights." "Weapons, puff-pads, maps, digging implements from Sag the Mercantilist are eminently useful." "Do not grope at random; the Seer Garzu divines the location of large purple nodes." "Flee the Dirdir with all possible agility; use supple boots provided by Awalko." "Your last thoughts will be pleasant if, before death, you first consume the euphoric tablets formulated by Laus the Thaumaturge." "Enjoy a jolly respite, before entering the Zone, at the Platform of Merriment."

After arrival, they stop at an inn and haggle with the innkeeper ("For three modest chambers you demand three hundred sequins? Have you no sense of proportion? The charges are outrageous!") and then go to a library to research "the Zone" which they will be exploring for gold:

The side wall displayed a great map of the Zone; shelves held pamphlets, portfolios, compilations. The consultant, a small sad-eyed man, sat to the side and responded to questions in a confidential whisper. The three passed the afternoon studying the physiography of the Zone, the tracks of successful and unsuccessful ventures, the statistical distribution of Dirdir kills. Of those who entered the Zone, something under two-thirds returned, with an average gain of sequins to the value of six-hundred. "The figures here are somewhat misleading," Anacho stated. "They include the fringe-runners who never venture more than half a mile into the Zone. The takers who work the hills and the far slopes account for most of the deaths and most of the wealth."

When the actual exploration gets underway, it even feels a bit like the combat in some D&D campaigns when the PCs have levelled up a bit and are starting to "grind":

There were four slaughters that day, four on the next, five on the third day, by which time the process had become an efficient routine. During mornings and evenings the bodies were buried, and the gear repaired. The business seemed as passionless as fishing...

Mostly the inspirations, though, are subtler and more in the way of mood (or "feel" as Gygax put it). Does this not sound like a prototype for every conversation that has ever taken place between D&D PCs and a prospective "business associate"?

Woudiver seemed in no hurry to have them go. He settled into a chair with an unctuous grunt. "Another dear friend deals in gems. He will efficiently convert your treasure into sequins, if the treasure is gems, as I presume? No? Rare metal, then? No? Aha! Precious essences? 

"It might be any or none," said Reith. "I think it best, at this stage, to remain indefinite." 

Woudiver twisted his face into a mask of whimsical vexation. "It is precisely this indefiniteness which gives me pause! If I knew better what I might expect - " 

"Whoever helps me," said Reith, "or whoever accompanies me, can expect wealth." 

Woudiver pursed his lips. "So now I must join this piratical expedition in order to share the booty?" 

"I'll pay a reasonable percentage before we leave. If you come with us - " Reith rolled his eyes toward the ceiling at the thought - "or when we return, you'll get more." 

"How much more, precisely?" 

"I don't like to say. You'd suspect me of irresponsibility. But you wouldn't be disappointed." 

From the corner Artilo gave a skeptical croak, which Woudiver ignored. He spoke in a voice of great dignity. "As a practical man I can't operate on speculation. I would require a retaining fee of ten thousand sequins."

Does this not sound like a description of every "city of thieves" in every D&D campaign in which one appears?

"A warning: the city seethes with intrigue. Folk come to Sivishe for a single purpose: to win advantage. The city is a turmoil of illicit activity, robbery, extortion, vice, gambling, gluttony, extravagant display, swindling. These are endemic, and the victim has small hope of recourse. The Dirdir are unconcerned; the antics and maneuvers of the sub-men are nothing to them. The Administrator is interested only in maintaining order. So: caution! Trust no-one, answer no questions! Identify yourselves as steppe-men seeking employment; profess stupidity. By such means we minimize risk."

And at times even the conversations between the main characters sound like the sarcastic bickerings of players sat round a table (if a little effusive in their vocabulary):

"He is a notable gourmand and voluptuary, with tastes at once so refined, so gross and so inordinate as to cost him vast sums. This information was given freely, in a tone of envious admiration. Woudiver's illicit capabilities were merely implied." 

"Woudiver would appear to be an unsavory colleague," said Reith. 

Anacho snorted in derision. "You demand that I find someone proficient at conniving, chicanery, theft; when I produce this man, you look down your nose at him!"

And this is even more true when they are squabbling about treasure, as here:

"Look there." [Anacho] pointed. Not twenty feet distant the ground had broken, revealing the wrinkled dome of a large mature node. "Scarlets at least. Maybe purples."

Reith made a gesture of sad resignation. "We can hardly carry the fortune we already have. It is sufficient."

"You underestimate the rapacity and greed of Savishe," grumbled Anacho. "To do what you propose will require two fortunes, or more." He dug up the node. "A purple. We can't leave it behind."

"Very well," said Reith. "I'll carry it."

Or here, where they even start fighting about encumbrance:

"One more kill," said Traz. "Here now comes a group, rich from their hunting." 

"But why? We have all the sequins we can carry!" 

"We can discard our sards and some emeralds, and carry only reds and purples."

But the Vancian "feel" also finds its way in to the structure of the game's ephemera. Nobody involved in writing Monster Manual entries has ever said anywhere (to my knowledge) that they were riffing on Vance. But take a look at this passage from The Dirdir and tell me it doesn't sound like it could have come from the pages of a bestiary, or Dragon magazine (were it not for the sprinkle of sardonic humour, of course, and the fact that D&D bestiary entries are never this imaginative):

"Remember," Anacho warned, "the Khors are a sensitive people. Do not speak to them; pay them no heed except from necessity, in which case you must use the fewest possible words. They consider garrulity a crime against nature. Do not stand upwind of a Khor, nor if possible downwind; such acts are symbolic of antagonism. Never acknowledge the presence of a woman; do not look toward their children - they will suspect you of laying a curse; and above all ignore their sacred grove. Their weapon is the iron dart which they throw with astonishing accuracy; they are a dangerous people." 

"I hope I remember everything," said Reith. 

Playing D&D, in other words, mirrors the experience of reading Vance's fiction very closely indeed, and it happens without this ever being the stated "point" of the designers or generally the intention of the players. It happens through "feel". That is Gary Gygax's possibly unique achievement. Lots of designers explicitly attempt to emulate a genre or piece of fiction through an RPG system and fail. Gygax did it implicitly and suceeded. Perhaps there is a lesson in that.

Did any Appendix N authors know about D&D?

Many of the authors who wrote books listed in the famous 'Appendix N' were dead by the time D&D came out. But some weren't. Off the top of my head, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and Roger Zelazny would have been alive, and I presume a systematic check would show lots of others. It is reasonable to assume some of them, maybe all of them, knew about D&D - that some indeed would have played it, even.

Did Jack Vance know that D&D magic was "Vancian"? Did Michael Moorcock know about the "multiverse" and the alignment system? Did Zelazny know that Shadowjack was an inspiration for the Thief class?

If so, we face the curious possibility that some of these writers may, later in their careers, have been writing in awareness of and even in some sense in response to their supposed influence on D&D. I'm curious to know if anybody has any thoughts about that or has read anything about it.

(I will return to "heavier" blogging tomorrow.)

Why Didn't You Tell Me?

There was apparently a recentish kickstarter for a licensed Planet of Adventure/Tschai RPG. Not a sourcebook like the old GURPS one, but a standalone game. It is "powered by the Apocalypse" and Dungeon World (sigh) and in French, but still, an English translation also appears to have been done or is in the process of being done.

Did anybody back it? Does anybody have it? Having just about finished off the last volume of the series, I can say Tschai one of the very, very few settings not made up by myself which I would actually consider running a game in,* and I'm very curious about what the results of this project are like. (This is not a hint at fishing for a copy - I will buy it myself if I can find out how to online, and if it's confirmed to be any good.)

(*The others would probably be Mythago Wood, the Viriconium of The Pastel City, and possibly Lyonesse.)

Childish Imaginings and the Tyranny of Art

I hadn't thought about this in years, but a comment on a recent post reminded me that when I first read The Lord of the Rings I imagined orcs as having crocodile heads. It is hard to believe there was a time when I had not seen a Warhammer, Fighting Fantasy, or D&D orc. But obviously there was, and in my childish imaginings that was what they looked like.

This would have been in around 1990, I think, when I was still in primary school - about 9 years old. I had read The Hobbit some years before that, and had heard of The Lord of the Rings but had a vague sense it might be "scary". But, while I am not sure I knew there was such a thing as a "fantasy genre", I knew that I was drawn to that kind of book and I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later I'd move on to reading the Rings trilogy. I remember the immediate trigger vividly: a friend of mine had taken The Fellowship of the Ring out from the library and was showing it to me in school. I don't think either of us yet understood there was a concept of a trilogy, and we probably thought the Rings books were like the Narnia ones; there was notionally an order, but you could read them as stand-alone pieces. So that night I went and got out The Two Towers and started from there.

(Starting The Lord of the Rings half-way through is an interesting experience: beginning in media res, there's a lot to figure out, but the narrative isn't harmed at all, and to this day I still think of the main characters of the trilogy as really being Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Gandalf and Merry and Pippin. Frodo and Sam's journey still somehow feels like a sideshow, because I was already caught up in the other branch of the plot - Helm's Deep and all that - before I even knew who Frodo was.)

Illustrations and art can be wonderful things but they can also, perversely, be very restrictive of the imagination. When I read a book I tend, like most people I suppose, to built a picture of what is going on in my mind's eye, but it's very hard to do this when an artist's vision has been imposed on you. The crocodile-head orcs were vivid to me once, but now I've seen a thousand pictures of orcs or various kinds, it's hard for me to think of them that way. Not impossible, but it requires mental effort. This problem is made infinitely worse when you've seen a film or televised version of a book: who now can read The Fellowship of the Ring and not picture Gandalf as Ian McKellan, Aragorn as Viggo Mortensen, and Legolas as a petrified piece of cardboard masquerading as an actor? I must have had a picture in my mind of all of these characters as a child, when I hadn't seen an artistic representation of any of them, but they're largely lost to me now.

The tyranny of art is a benevolent and beautiful dictatorship, but it is a dictatorship all the same. The images it conjures in your mind are not your own - they are a piece of the artist's imagination, etched into your brain. Much is gained from this, but some things, like the crocodile-head orcs or the non-McKellan Gandalf, are lost. This is why, sometimes, I wonder whether when it comes to art in RPG books, less is really more.

Occidental Fantasy Gaming (OFG): The Case of the Early 90s SNES

From the period between, say, about 1992 and 1996, I played a lot of SNES games. I didn't actually have a SNES (my parents didn't allow me to have one; my misery-porn memoir about my childhood spent living in a basement subsisting on buckets of fish-heads will include a chapter on this), but it seemed like all my other close friends did, and our social lives tended to revolve around either that or Games Workshop games (or cricket and football for those of us not completely steeped in nerdiness). Most of the time it was Mariokart or Street Fighter II. But every so often it would be something else - something which I now realise was of a genre all of its own: Occidental Fantasy.

Occidental fantasy is a particular type of pastiche of Western medieval high fantasy tropes, made in (usually) Japan. Here, for instance is the bizarrely-titled Knights of the Round [sic], which features up to three players controlling King Arthur, Sir Lancelot and Sir Percival as they, well, basically fight their way through a particularly cheesy 1980s jidaigeki (complete with suspiciously Japanese-looking swordsmanship) with incongruously European furniture.

On a similar theme, but showing that occidental fantasy can be based on Tolkien-esque rather than folkoric tropes, there is King of Dragons, which is more or less exactly the same game as Knights of the Round, but with magic and goblins and the like:

But exhibit A in the OFG dossier is, without doubt, the Squaresoft oeuvre, and chief among these is the original Secret of Mana.

Words can't express quite how nostalgic it makes me feel to watch the first few minutes of that YouTube video, but setting that to one side, notice its key characteristics. The Japanese aesthetic touches (the birds which look like cranes; the fetishization of swords) layered on a pseudo-European foundation; the preternaturally lush green grass and bucolic charm of a British Isles rendered hyper-real by an Asian imagination; that peculiarly East Asian merging of the high- and low-tech; those Tuscany-via-the-Cotswolds cottages. This is the occidental fantasy palette at its most vivid and enticing.

The Final Fantasy series also fill a significant section in the OFG dossier. Feel free to offer your own suggestions; here I have barely even scratched the surface of the iceberg.

Anti-Cruel Discrimination and the Bestiary of Flukes

"Summon all our people to meet me here as speedily as they can. Call out the giants and the werewolves and the spirits of those trees who are on our side. Call the Ghouls, and the Boggles, the Ogres and the Minotaurs. Call the Cruels, the Hags, the Spectres, and the people of the Toadstools. We will fight..." 

-The White Witch, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Chapter 13) 

Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins. In fact here were all those who were on the witch's side and whom the Wolf had summoned at her command... 

-The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Chapter 14)

If D&D had been less influenced by Tolkien and more by CS Lewis, its bestiary would have looked very different. No goblins or orcs, but plenty of boggles. Evil sprites. Incubuses, ettins, werewolves and efreets as major villains rather than rare encounters. Orknies (meaning nuckelavees?) and wooses (woses?). "Cruels" and "horrors" (whatever they are) running amok - not to mention the people of the Toadstools.

The familiar and iconic entries in the D&D bestiary - orcs, goblins, kobolds, bugbears, ogres and the rest - are really there by fluke. Yes, some were made up by D&D designers. Most weren't, though. They were simply pilfered from other sources. They could just as easily have been overlooked for others in that process. Gary Gygax might have decided not to have orcs, but redcaps, say, and our modern game would be something rather different as a result. (Can you get a half-redcap?)

Want a different tone to your campaign setting and you could do a lot worse than starting off with a copy of the Monstrous Manual and just crossing out and replacing all the iconic monsters and going from there. Redcaps instead of orcs, bogles instead of goblins and nockers instead of dwarves and suddenly it's a different game. Try it with the book or folkloric tradition of your choice and see what you get.

Elves as Tourists

I have spent the last week on holiday in rural Britain. What this tends to mean these days, whichever county you are in (be it Devon, Dorset, Derbyshire or Dumfries) is a kind of bourgeois paradise of delightful rented cottages in picturesque chocolate-box villages full of antique shops, grand old country pubs (all of which seem to be called the White Horse, the White Hart, the Turk's Head or the Fox and Hounds), smart cafe-bars, boutiquey art galleries and impeccably preserved medieval churches and castles. I was going to say that the only difference you get between Scotland and England in this respect is that in the former there's also whisky distilleries - but you also get them in England now as well.

I love exploring my country, which manages to pack astonishing variety and regional flavour into a pretty tiny and absurdly densely-populated space. But I am always struck, when I do so, by the feeling that there is something deeply weird and possibly morally corrupting (in some sense I can't quite identify) about a billion posh people suddenly descending on picturesque pastoral locations every weekend and school holiday and transforming them into their own idealised versions of country living. And that's not to mention all those who choose to retire to such locations, or use them as second homes, or even live in them but spend all their time commuting to the nearest city. Bourgeois people running the show in urban Britain, you sort of expect, but there's something galling about them doing it in the countryside too.

Speaking to relatives (a branch of my family live in one of the most famously picturesque areas of the country), the thing that annoys them is not so much that all this enforced poshness pushes up the cost of living and particularly the cost of housing - though that does, of course, annoy them. It's that it makes them feel like outsiders in their own homeland - their own community activities and their own tastes being drowned in a sea of middle-class frivolity. Where once they had pride in their jobs, their social circles and their roots, they are now forced to dance attendance on the capricious tastes of their society's elites in order to scrape what living they can in the service industry. Nobody ever asked them if they wanted that. It just sort of happened.

Thinking about all this got me imagining a world in which elves visit human societies as tourists. Much as a modern wealthy person visits rural areas in his own country or goes on a grand tour of South East Asia or Latin America, elves - richer, more powerful, more educated - might also choose to savour the texture of life on a lower rung among the humans, so to speak. And if they did it often enough, entire human settlements - maybe entire human regions - would develop to cater to these visitors. Their economies would come to revolve around pleasing the whims of their eccentric and capricious overlords. Their local delicacies would be tweaked to suit the elven taste buds. Their young men and women would learn to exaggerate whatever characteristics the elves found attractive. They would begin producing pastiches of elven goods to make their visitors feel at home. They would all have to learn elven. They would even end up giving up their "charming and rustic" homes for periods of time so that elves could get to experience life at a different pace. They would become essentially parasitic and utterly reliant upon the elven tourist gold piece. Maybe, in time, they would lose any sense of connection with their own cultural practices, performing them rather as quanit, superficial museum pieces for the entertainment of their visitors.

The question then becomes: how does one make such a campaign setting dynamic? The possibility that first pops into my head is what happens when suddenly one day, the tourists stop coming? Now these people, who have spent generations catering only to the pleasures of the elves, find themselves horribly exposed to reality - and without anybody to protect them.

1001 Dungeon Entrances

Look at an interesting or spooky entranceway and I start to imagine it as the entrance to a dungeon. This is a never-ending source of inspiration. Here are some examples:

Post some of your own, here or on your own blog if you have one. 

[Review] The Dragon Never Sleeps, Glenn Cook

I am going to experiment with putting some book reviews on the blog - SF and fantasy ones mostly, with some others I think may be of interest. (There will be some crossover with my hastily-jotted reviews on Goodreads for the tiny number of people who are connected to me there.)

First up is Glenn Cook's The Dragon Never Sleeps, which somebody commented here on the blog to recommend (though I forget on which post):

To enjoy this book (which, in the end, I definitely did), you have to enter a zen-like state of acceptance that you will not understand the absurdly convoluted plot, or even what the characters are talking about half the time. Instead, you just need to get a sense, a feeling, of what's going on: conspiracy after conspiracy, twist after twist, betrayal after betrayal, battle after battle. 

You have to do this for four reasons. First, Cook's sub-Hemingway/sub-Ellroy hardboiled prose is here so unrelenting, so monotonous, that it simply ends up beating you into submission. You can't stop to savour it. All you can do is read it, as fast as you can, and hope to get through each page so you can take a breath before the next one. The text just won't let you do anything else. When you're being hit in the face with a prose frying pan, you don't stop to examine it carefully.

Second, the characters, with a very few exceptions, are all so similar in the way they think, talk, and behave that they become almost interchangeable. With nothing to distinguish one character from another except for their names, keeping track of their machinations becomes a kind of Rubik's Cube puzzle in narrative form. You just have to keep spinning and fiddling with it and in the end take it on faith that there is actually a way to solve it. (Perhaps there's some kid in China somewhere who can read five copies of The Dragon Never Sleeps simultaneously in 13 seconds while juggling, or something).

Third, I'm not sure that it is actually possible to perform that leap of faith. By the end, in particular, it had become so hard to follow who is who and what all the different clones of the characters are doing that I did start to wonder if even Glen Cook knew quite what was going on as he was writing. Is he a plotter of impenetrable genius, or just a little old man behind a curtain with a microphone and smoke machine?

Fourth, the pace of the thing is so breakneck, its tour through its fictional universe so whistle-stop, that the reader never really gets a sense of the context in which the events which come at him pell-mell are taking place. There are fascinating hints of an interesting setting (vast depopulation which nobody is noticing; a constructed interstellar travel system which nobody understands; the capacity for spaceships to become sentient; potential immortality), but they really are only just hints - nobody likes an infodump, but here there really isn't enough of the background revealed to even properly picture things in your mind as you're reading. "Less is more" works with fine dining, fine spirits, and fine SF worldbuilding - but all of them only to a point.

Rumour has it that this book was supposed to be a much longer series, but a falling-out with the publishers led to Cook simply writing up all his notes for that series in novel form in breakneck speed. I can believe it, because that's exactly how the book reads: like somebody trying to provide a comprehensive account of everything that happens in a plot so complicated it makes A Song of Ice and Fire read like a Hardy Boys mystery, all compressed into 400 pages. (I kind of wish GRRM would take this approach in his remaining books...). For all that said, the fact that it remains a riveting read is quite some feat on Cook's part - there can't be many writers who could condense a trilogy into an extended synopsis with dialogue and have it be readable, let alone thrilling, but he manages that in spades.

3 1/2 becs des corbins.

Stone Balancing and the Upwards Dungeon

I confess that I do a little bit of rock balancing from time to time. Not for any particularly hippyish reason, other than that it's nice to be outside somewhere peaceful in the natural world; more because it's a fun challenge, not all that different conceptually from a sudoku puzzle or jigsaw - how do I get this rock to balance on top of this one?

(It's also a lot easier than it looks - you'd be surprised how much the friction of the surface of two rocks combined with gravity will allow freakishly unbalanced looking combinations to, well, balance.)

The other day I was stacking some stones at the beach and it occurred to me that it would be a fun idea for a dungeon: perhaps a wizard's tower; perhaps an ancient monument built by an extinct race of giants. Each stone a boulder of epic size, riddle with tunnels and caverns, and each of them having a distinct physical character (as well as a distinct variety of inhabitants: its own types of rock golem; its own types of pech; its own types of earth elemental; its own types of dwarf; its own types of gem dragon, and so on). And, possibly, able to fall over... or be dismantled.

I am a fan of the idea of upwards dungeons. (As is probably evidence by my many posts about the giant tree dungeon, not to mention the Mountain to the Moon.) The descent into hell is fine, but the attempt to climb to heaven seems more human somehow: obviously it has a figuratively optimistic appeal, but it also feels more real - you can see an upwards dungeon, and so George Mallory's reasoning for climbing Everest becomes the perfect justification: why did you want to climb the wizard's tower full of rock golems and gem dragons? Because it's there.