Playing in a World

As I return to blogging, I should pay more attention to what other people are writing. At one time, RPG blogs were the home of both great creativity and serious thinking about roleplaying games. Perhaps they still are. So, I thought I'd start regularly reading those on my 'blogroll' who are still active after all this time. This post is therefore little more than a link:

"Where I depart from those frameworks is in how I classify tabletop roleplaying. I don't view tabletop roleplaying as a game. It is a means for people to pretend to be characters having adventures in other places and times. The "game" elements tabletop roleplaying uses are not the end in themselves, but a crucial aid; they make the experience more engaging than Let's Pretend, and more accessible and entertaining for the average person to enjoy within the time they have for a hobby."

I think that this, from Rob Conley of Bat in the Attic - worth reading in general - captures something of how I *want* to approach roleplaying games and their unique capacities (yes, unique - the freedom and creativity possible in a roleplaying game cannot be replicated via computer games or boardgames). I want players to *experience* another world, and indeed I - as GM or referee - want to explore it with them. 

Pulp Title Trope?

From where does the graduated red-orange-yellow "pulp adventure" text trope originate? Is it as recent as Indiana Jones? Recent being relatively speaking - Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been released more than 40 years ago but it was itself an homage to the pulps and serials of 40 odd years earlier. Or is there an 'original' that the title presentation of Indiana Jones itself was aping? 

Extruded Fantasy Fiction

I expect others have pointed out that Dungeons & Dragons has gone from explicitly drawing on external references - from history, legend, and classic fantasy fiction - to self-reference, with decades of setting material to draw upon, including novels. Whether this is a good thing depends on whether you want your RPG to be a game for playing *fantasy adventures*, or whether you want it to be a method of playing *Dungeons & Dragons*. Of course, even the earliest, loosest editions had assumptions baked into the system, but these assumptions have accumulated to the point that "Dungeons & Dragons" is a thing of its own. Of course, as THE THING, as the incredible mass that bends the very space-time of roleplaying, there are many other 'things' that exist in close orbit.

But all that is neither here nor there, because what I wanted to talk about are a few of the novels that are published to support roleplaying games.  

For a long time the only Dungeons & Dragons novel that I had read was the Dragonlance book Test of the Twins. I would have read this in my relatively early teens, and I remember thinking that it wasn't too bad. While I'm sure my tastes have grown more discerning, I don't need all my fantasy to be - or aspire to be - *literature*, though I do increasingly ask myself why I am reading that novel when all those classics sit unread on my shelf (or on my wishlists), but I'll still choose some fun 'genre' fiction; not all reading is for self-improvement. So yes, sometimes I do simply want to read something that more or less conforms to the staples of fantasy as codified in the games that I have played.

A few years ago I did try The Legend of Huma, another Dragonlance novel, as was recommended to me on some forum or another. I didn't take to it and left it unfinished, but I didn't think it actually bad. But several months ago I spotted on a charity book stand a book the content of which I had wondered about - imagined even - for over thirty years; RA Salvatore's The Crystal Shard.

Of course I dropped a quid in the collection and picked up it. What a find! The book advertised endlessly in Dragon Magazine, and in the American comics that I bought. The book that introduced Drizzt Do'Urden to fantasy fiction, creating a cool, not-evil Dark Elf archetype that would find its way back from Salvatore's novels to being referenced in Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks. Where once you were invited to understand character classes in terms of, say, Beowulf, the new touchstones recommended to readers are the likes of Drizzt.   

I had high hopes, expecting extruded fantasy fiction of the superior kind. Surely so, given the lasting influence of-

No!

No, I am afraid that The Crystal Shard is not a good book, not a good book at all. I have got lots of by now long forgotten fantasy novels from the 1980s and 1990s that are not particularly original, that could easily be "Dungeons & Dragons" fiction with a few edits, and The Crystal Shard is bad even by those standards. It is juvenile, and by that I don't mean written for kids - as no doubt it was, despite the very rapey evil wizard - but in its construction; if you showed me an extract and told me is was by a bright GCSE pupil I would believe you.

But I haven't learned my lesson, as here is what I found on the charity book stand last week. 

By all accounts it is a bad novel even according to the judgement of those who read Dungeons & Dragons novels. I'll probably not get round to reading it - I am currently reading The Complete Lyonesse, close to finishing Suldrun's Garden - so if anyone wants Master Wolf, or The Crystal Shard, let me know.    

It seems an obvious point to make; that the best novels to read (to *consume*? ugh!) to steep your imagination in fantastical images, situations, characters, locations, plots, etc. to help you run a Dungeons & Dragons game are more often than *not* Dungeons & Dragons novels. Now, the same is true of Warhammer, even though Warhammer (Fantasy and 40k) has employed experienced authors and has published some books that can stand apart from their association with the games (and 'IP', again ugh!), but as time has gone on and Warhammer has, like Dungeons & Dragons, come to draw more on its own extruded fiction than its original influences, from Moorcock to Herbert to 2000AD. For the worse, I'd say.

I'll get around to highlighting some of my favourite Warhammer fantasy novels that are not Warhammer fantasy novels soon.