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. 

[King] Arthur as an 'Old School' PC

I borrowed Bernard Cornwell's Enemy of God, the second book in his Arthur series, from the library* yesterday. I'm only a few pages in, but there is a description of Arthur that should be applicable to any PC in the sorts of games that I prefer to run:

"He was good at fighting, and he even enjoyed battle for the unleashed thrills it gave his usually so careful soul, but he never sought war if peace was available because he mistrusted the uncertainties of battle. The vagaries of victory and defeat were too unpredictable, and Arthur hated to see good order and careful diplomacy abandoned to the chances of battle." (p. 12, Penguin paperback)

Once the dice are clattering on the table, the lives of the PCs are at the mercy of random chance. The odds of victory might be good, but the spectre of mortal failure is always there, and some victories come at a cost you would be unwilling to pay. So long as the PCs are talking (and scheming) their fate rests in the quality of their play, their decisions. It is thinking such as this that goes some way to explain no only why I tend to struggle to run games that have rules for 'social combat', but also why I prefer games in which PC success in combat is not so intimately related to rules mastery.  

*Aren't libraries brilliant? I know that 'austerity' will have great human cost as services are cut, but the cost to British cultural life will also be lamentable. Cardiff Council, for example, has to make cuts worth £50M. This might close a concert hall with one of the best acoustics in Britain, and it will almost certainly will restrict the services, opening hours, and staffing of libraries. If not close some entirely.

   

Appendix N[ow]

This Christmas I decided to try to read more, notwithstanding my addiction to Assassins' Creed: Black Flag's mix of rum, sodomy and the lash. I think that I've gone proper Grog, as I was actually thinking of making an argument that books have far better acting, cinematography, and special effects than films - while mediocre fantasy and science fiction films often leave me unsatisfied, my imagination can make even a bad book passable.

So what have a I read so far?

Conan the Conqueror, Robert E Howard

So I've been reading a lot of Conan. It is always good for gaming fodder. In this, the only Conan novel (and even then it is only a couple of hundred pages long or so), we have hints at a dungeon adventure to retrieve a magical artifact, Conan exploring a temple of evil, Conan infiltrating a castle, an encounter with a mysterious woodland witch... Oh, and pirates! I've said in the past that Mentzer Expert is one of my all time favourite RPG books. It has rules for ships and sailing (and the included adventure demands that your PCs get themselves shipshape!), something that all fantasy RPGs should have.  

The Winter King, Bernard Cornwell

This was my favourite book of this bunch. BY FAR. I must confess that I have never read any Bernard Cornwell. I might have watched a few episodes of Sharpe, and that is about it. My mum has been trying to push Cornwell's Saxon books on my for a while now. So, once I have finished his 'Arthur' books I will almost certainly be moving on to those. I also can't wait for the RQ6 Mythic Britain book now, which is heavily inspired by this series.

In short: A vivid picture of dark ages Britain, with a (magical?), mysterious, and dangerous behind the scenes schemer - Merlin - bloody, frightening combat and, and... I really want to know what happens next!

The Black Company, Glenn Cook

I found this hard going at first, but gradually 'got' the writing style, and the setting. It took me some time to understood that the world was both gritty and relatively high in magic. I only read the first book in the series - this is the only book for which Google Image Search couldn't bring back exactly the cover of the book that I had read - but I'll be picking up more of the Black Company series.

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

Reading this, I had the opposite experience as I did when reading The Black Company. I started off loving this book, and ended up bored. Over 600-odd pages, I would expect more. I'd at least expect the book to cover the whole of Kvothe's childhood and education, even if we didn't get to his legendary deeds. At one point I thought to myself, 'this is what Harry Potter should have been', and by the end I thought that, just like Harry Potter, it was too little stretched out over too many words. I probably will pick up more books by Patrick Rothfuss - he is a very good writer - but hopefully we'll have a slightly higher adventure to page ratio next time.

The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge, Harry Harrison

I bought this book along with a whole bunch of other 'Traveller' inspirational reading ages ago. The other books included Larry Niven's Ringworld and a handful of Dumarest novels by E.C. Tubb. And I preferred those. I think that the humour was lost on me - nearly half a century on from the time in which this book was written. As for the adventure, while it provided some inspiration for Traveller-esque capers, all too often Slippery Jim diGriz succeeds by virtue of heavy-handed author's perogative. Earl Dumarest, by comparison, feels much more 'vulnerable', even though they are both extra-humanly capable characters.

I did enjoy the 2000AD strips back in the day. Perhaps my next encounter with the Stainless Steel Rat will be in the form of James Coburn chanelled through Carlos Ezquerra. 

Conan the Destroyer

Look, it’s really not that bad. Okay, okay, it IS a bad film. It’s no worse than many other early 80s fantasy movies, but that’s about a faint as praise gets. What Conan the Destroyer is, is a good D&D movie, a far better D&D movie than Conan the Barbarian.

Not sure about the armour classes here... maybe Conan is wearing Frazetta Oil.

In Conan the Destroyer we have a party of four PCs – two fighters, a thief, and a magic-user – on a quest, accompanied by two NPCs – a zero-level princess and another fighter. They travel across the wilderness, have a one or two encounters, and raid two ‘dungeons’. One is the home of an evil sorcerer with a set piece ‘trap room’ full of magic mirrors, the second is a lost temple from which they must recover an ancient artefact. The adventure culminates in a battle against a Lovecraftian minor ‘dreaming god’ in the throne room of a palace. If this was one of the X-series of modules it would totally ROCK! Honestly, it would be up there with Night’s Dark Terror. You just need to throw in a few more encounters in the ‘dungeons’, and to add a few more minor adventuresome locations in the wilderness and you have a fine mini-campaign with an old school feel.

Reading fantasy fiction and watching fantasy movies I am often inspired by even the worst. However, I always have to remind myself that a good game of D&D (or any other FRPG) shouldn’t try to be a recreation of a good film, or a good book. The worlds invented for films and books are not good worlds for gaming. They are there to tell one, and that story is one that is determined, written, fixed. Unless you are playing a game in which you know that the PCs are the Fellowship of the Ring, Titan is a far better gaming world than Middle Earth. If you know before you begin that the PCs are the Fellowship, then you know the story that you need to tell, and the dice you need to fudge to help them reach Mount Doom. If the aims and adventures of the PCs are to be determined through play, you need a world quite unrealistically full of adventure, a world that is probably quite unsuited to being the setting for any ‘serious’ fantasy fiction.

Last Argument of Kings

'I've been trying to get through this damn book again.' Ardee slapped at a heavy volume lying open, face down, on a chair.

'The Fall of the Master Maker,' muttered Glotka. 'That rubbish? All magic and valour, no? I couldn't get through the first one.'

'I sympathise. I'm onto the third and it doesn't get any easier. Too many damn wizards. I get them mixed up with one another. It's all battles and endless bloody journeys, here to there and back again. If I so much as glimpse another map I swear I'll kill myself.'

From Last Argument of Kings, Book 3 of The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. 670 pages long, plus two other books of similar length.

Good, nasty, cynical fun. Very 'Warhammery'. Recommended.