# Where's the American Fantasy RPG?



## Tyler Do'Urden (Aug 25, 2020)

Interesting how Baum is rarely read any more, despite his influence on American pop culture via The Wizard of Oz. My spouse - not an American - was recently asking me about that movie, and I told her it was one we all watched as a child and in many ways it is the American equivalent to "Journey to the West" - Americans will recognize Dorothy, The Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man as readily as Chinese will recognize Tripitaka, The Monkey King, Pigsy and Sandy.

From a roleplayer's perspective, however, the dominance of Tolkien and "European" style fantasy probably comes from the strength and believability of it's worldbuilding. While worldbuilding is undoubtably present in Baum and other early American fantasists (such as my favorite "forgotten" American fantasist, James Branch Cabell), it is weaker, and tends to be much more whimsical and inconsistent - and I find that too much whimsy and inconsistency can be detrimental to suspension of disbelief. Narnia, after all, doesn't get nearly the respect that Middle Earth does in our quarters. 

Interesting question, overall, and there's plenty of contradiction here.


----------



## GlassJaw (Aug 25, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> From a roleplayer's perspective, however, the dominance of Tolkien and "European" style fantasy probably comes from the strength and believability of it's worldbuilding. While worldbuilding is undoubtably present in Baum and other early American fantasists (such as my favorite "forgotten" American fantasist, James Branch Cabell), it is weaker, and tends to be much more whimsical and inconsistent - and I find that too much whimsy and inconsistency can be detrimental to suspension of disbelief. Narnia, after all, doesn't get nearly the respect that Middle Earth does in our quarters.




Totally agree, although I found Vance much more difficult to read than CS Lewis/Narnia.

Narnia is more "traditional" as far as fairy tales go. Dying Earth is bonkers. It's kitchen sink world-building and Vance's writing is very flowery. Dying Earth has more of a Spelljammer/Planescape vibe than the implied setting of D&D.


----------



## Von Ether (Aug 25, 2020)

My theory is that Oz also suffers from "local garage band"-itus. LoTR has all that cool European stuff like castles and dragons. YMMV.

Funny enough, the European answer to Ren Faire is putting up Wild West towns. I heard of one where the buildings' walls were bales of hay. 

The final celebration for the weekend is a controlled burning down of the town.


----------



## Undrave (Aug 25, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> Interesting how Baum is rarely read any more, despite his influence on American pop culture via The Wizard of Oz. My spouse - not an American - was recently asking me about that movie, and I told her it was one we all watched as a child and in many ways it is the American equivalent to "Journey to the West" - Americans will recognize Dorothy, The Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man as readily as Chinese will recognize Tripitaka, The Monkey King, Pigsy and Sandy.




That's a damn good point! 



Tyler Do'Urden said:


> From a roleplayer's perspective, however, the dominance of Tolkien and "European" style fantasy probably comes from the strength and believability of it's worldbuilding. While worldbuilding is undoubtably present in Baum and other early American fantasists (such as my favorite "forgotten" American fantasist, James Branch Cabell), it is weaker, and tends to be *much more whimsical and inconsistent* - and I find that too much whimsy and inconsistency can be detrimental to suspension of disbelief. Narnia, after all, doesn't get nearly the respect that Middle Earth does in our quarters.



Or the world of Harry Potter... 



Von Ether said:


> My theory is that Oz also suffers from "local garage band"-itus. LoTR has all that cool European stuff like castles and dragons. YMMV.
> 
> Funny enough, the European answer to Ren Faire is putting up Wild West towns. I heard of one where the buildings' walls were bales of hay.




Which reminds me that I think it's a shame there's not much interesting fiction based on the early day of Canadian colonization :/


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 25, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> Interesting how Baum is rarely read any more, despite his influence on American pop culture via The Wizard of Oz. My spouse - not an American - was recently asking me about that movie, and I told her it was one we all watched as a child and in many ways it is the American equivalent to "Journey to the West" - Americans will recognize Dorothy, The Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man as readily as Chinese will recognize Tripitaka, The Monkey King, Pigsy and Sandy.
> 
> From a roleplayer's perspective, however, the dominance of Tolkien and "European" style fantasy probably comes from the strength and believability of it's worldbuilding. While worldbuilding is undoubtably present in Baum and other early American fantasists (such as my favorite "forgotten" American fantasist, James Branch Cabell), it is weaker, and tends to be much more whimsical and inconsistent - and I find that too much whimsy and inconsistency can be detrimental to suspension of disbelief. Narnia, after all, doesn't get nearly the respect that Middle Earth does in our quarters.
> 
> Interesting question, overall, and there's plenty of contradiction here.




I love the Oz books, but they're also a product of their time - there's more than a little racism and other antiquated ideas in these books.

I love your connection between the party in _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ with the party in _The Journey to the West_. I had never considered that connection, and I somewhat doubt Baum had knowledge of the Chinese epic, but the flow of gathering party members who are at first sources of conflict is undeniable. One of the big debates in fairy tale, folklore, mythology, and religious studies is whether mirroring stories from opposite sides of the world draw from a deep archetypal element of human psychology that is universal to our species and bubble up to the surface as independent subcreations, or whether these stories can theoretically be traced back to a common origin with the first humans emerging out of Africa (or any  other specific point in human history, that then spread by cultural diffusion). 

An example of the latter theory would be of the Chaoskampf myth (Sumerian/Akkadian Marduk vs Tiamat, Greek Zeus vs Typhaon & Echidna, Thor vs Jörmungandr, Mittani-Aryan Verethragna vs Azhi Dahāka*, *RigVedic Indra vs Vitra, etc) entering India with the Indo-Aryans, syncretising with local Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto-Burman traditions to become a core tale within Hinduism, then through Buddhist diffusion made its way all the way to Japan and became a part of the Izumo Cycle of the oldest Japanese mythological text, the _Kojiki_, with Susanooh triumphing over the Yamata-no-Orochi dragon and establishing Izumo's early prominence in Japanese mythology. This theory is pushed by those who argue that Shinto traditions do not exist independently of Buddhism due to lack of records earlier than its arrival (Buddhism arrived around 538 CE; the earliest surviving Japanese text, the _Kojiki, _dates to 620 CE).

The former theory would say that Susanooh's triumph over the Orochi dragon was an independent local Japanese Shinto creation that persisted in the cultural consciousness beyond the arrival of Buddhism, and that any similarities are due to similar archetypal themes shared by and told in stories from some or all of humanity. 

What does this mean to the modern day? I'd argue everyone should go out there and read Neil Gaiman's _American Gods_.

We're still myth making, we're still recording history and transforming historical figures into fantastical and superheroic ones. We build monuments and temples to presidents and war leaders and kings and conquerors, and in the process drive a sense of worship toward them. I'm not immune to this; a few years ago I personally made a something akin to a prayer to the statue of Abraham Lincoln in what I can only refer to a a temple complex in the US capital of Washington D.C. for guidance, wisdom, strength, and perseverance in these troubled times. I regret doing so; I believe he was a great man, but I fear we can get taken up by the mightiness of these monuments and begin to deify them. There's certainly a debate in the US right now over whether certain monuments, if not all monuments, should be torn down. 

At the same time, we have New Gods, as Jack Kirby put it, in the form of superheroes, fantasy heroes, and mythic recreations of past pantheons pulled into the modern era. James Bond, Star Wars, the MCU, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, among other major pulp franchises, have transformed the world of fantasy fiction and roleplaying games. 

I'd argue that while Baum is a very important stage of American fantasy literature, we should not ignore the new developments of American Superhero fiction and American YA Fiction in their influences upon the modern fantasy stage. Video Games, too, have made a major influence here, and while Japan remains a huge source of RPG tropes, Zelda, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy, built upon the American Dungeons & Dragons and two American video game attempts at translating it to the computer - Wizardry and Ultima. And now we have Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls and it's expansive mythology, and Dark Souls, and Warcraft (itself influenced by Warhammer Fantasy), and the wheel keeps clocking. 

American culture is rooted in Fantasy. Gygax and Arneson's D&D is as much a story based on Western film tropes as it is on medieval fantasy. Most D&D fantasy continental maps are either populated coastal region giving way to fuzzy-detailed wilderness to the interior, or a map of a single mass continent. While the former draws on Middle-earth (east coast) and Narnia (west coast), American-influenced fantasy often tells stories beginning from East or West coast and works its way toward the interior of the North American continent. And the single massive continent is like cutting out the USA from North America and making it its own continent (not that hard to imagine for many Midwesterners who live south of the Great Lakes, a series of inland seas that almost feel like a north coast to the country, nor for many Gulf Coast Americans who live north of a sea of their own). Similarly, the Great Lakes of the USA and Canada border are just as much an inspiration for fantasy inland seas like the Realms' Sea of Stars and Moonsea as the series of Mediterranean, Black, Persian, Aral, and Red Seas are. 

I'd argue that while Tolkien's works still stand as foundation stones for which all Fantasy much build upon (whether by incorporating his tropes or purposely subverting or averting them), he doesn't stand alone.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 25, 2020)

1) That picture up top is crazy nightmare fuel.

2) American mythology doesn't need to follow Oz, any more than British fantasy has to follow Narnia.

3) There are almost certainly dozens, maybe hundreds of ENWorld posters with just as copious notes as Tolkein had on Middle Earth, but are lacking 1) a background in linguistics and ancient literature, 2) Christopher Tolkien digging all of this stuff up and publishing it and 3) professional publicists. (Sorry, but anyone who randomly lobs Tom Bombadil into his saga and then seems to forget about him shouldn't be held up as the final word in worldbuilding.)

4) If I were making an Americana fantasy setting or game, I'd start with Atlas Games' Northern Crown, which was a fantasy world version of Colonial America and probably advance it forward a few decades. There's lots of folkloric and tall tale critters to mine in American history, some obvious mythic narratives to create campaigns around, some _counter _narratives reflecting more contemporary views of things like Manifest Destiny and the like, and, of course, plenty of interesting history like the real-life golden age of pirate (Blackbeard = killed off the coast of North Carolina), the Salem Witch Trials, various wars both forgotten and remembered, and so on.

There's so much good material, IMO, that once someone comes along with a serious head of steam and professional level of quality, it's going to seem like an inevitable success in retrospect.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 25, 2020)

Doesn't "American Fantasy" sorta dominate the Urban Fantasy market?

You say American Fantasy and I automatically think of "shooting a necromancer" or "driving to a vampire lair"

So that's where I'd see the American RPG with more urban flair or small town drama. But I could see more talking animals.


----------



## Twiggly the Gnome (Aug 25, 2020)

I see a lot of Oz in Eberron. A central seat of government with a vacant throne, four core kingdoms plus a desolate wasteland, all surrounded by more unusual lands. And the new character options: sapient automatons, talking beastfolk, and people who aren't what they seem and can switch genders.


----------



## ninjayeti (Aug 25, 2020)

Dungeons and Dragons *IS *an American Fantasy RPG.

Don't believe me?  Read a few of the names from Appendix N:  Howard Carter,  Fritz Lieber, Edgar Rice Burrughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny, Andre Norton, L. Sprague De Camp, Poul Anderson, and many others.  The list is chock full of American Fantasy writers, and Gygax said that many of them were more influential  on the game than Tolkien was.  (Baum is not on the Appendix N list at all.)

While I have not read the linked book it seems to me that the author defines "American Fantasy" to pretty much just mean Baum.  Defining "American Fantasy" to exclude some of these greats is like defining "British Rock" to mean Coldplay but not the Beatles or Rolling Stones then asking why British Rock had no influence on American music.


----------



## theworstdm (Aug 25, 2020)

The Strange is the best example that I can think of for a game that gives players that contrast between a fantasy world and a reality world like The Wizard of Oz does. There's also games like Colonial Gothic that ramp up the idea that there used to be much more supernatural elements to America in our past.


----------



## innerdude (Aug 25, 2020)

While mildly interesting on an academic level, my gut reaction to the question, "Why isn't there more uniquely 'American' fantasy?" is "Who cares?"

Furthermore, I largely reject the notion that "Oz" is somehow a paragon of "American" fantasy.

The United States has always been the breeding ground for traditions brought from elsewhere. Too, why wouldn't the myriad forms of Native American spiritualism spread across the continent count as "American" fantasy? While I can't speak to specifics, it's my impression that such traditions look nothing like "Oz", but are certainly tied to the roots of the U.S. at least geographically.

And what about Southern Gothic horror? It's a mystical genre with a rich tradition of its own.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on Oz. A good friend of mine has the _Battle for Oz_ Savage Worlds setting, and it's a lot of fun. I just don't understand the notion that Oz specifically needs to be upheld as a specific American fantasy "tradition." 

If it's a setting worth being played, people will play it.


----------



## LordEntrails (Aug 25, 2020)

I was really looking forward to a good definition of American Fantasy. But I don't see it here. Unless it is being defined as the the land of Oz...? Certainly Baum is not the only defining source for such a definition?


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 25, 2020)

ninjayeti said:


> Defining "American Fantasy" to exclude some of these greats is like defining "British Rock" to mean Coldplay but not the Beatles or Rolling Stones then asking why British Rock had no influence on American music.



Coldplay is influential, whether we're comfortable with that fact or not.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 25, 2020)

For my part, I think if I had to define American Fantasy, it all goes back to the frontier and the wild west. It's about individuality and freedom and a strange land where people of all different cultures come together. Whether that's John Carter and Barsoom, Conan and Hyboria, Dorothy and Oz, that is American Fantasy.

I would point out the TV series, Once Upon A Time, as a recent example of American Fantasy. It's a melting pot of tropes, genres, and characters. Heck, it even featured the Wicked Witch and Oz. 

Frank Baum's influence is still around, perhaps more by osmosis than direct influence, but it's still here. Just looking at it as a portal fantasy, it's this long lineage that goes way back, arguably to the stories of people being abducted into the lands of the Fae, to Alice in Wonderland, to Oz, to A Princess of Mars, to Harold Shea, to Narnia, to The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, to Every Heart a Doorway.



LordEntrails said:


> I was really looking forward to a good definition of American Fantasy. But I don't see it here. Unless it is being defined as the the land of Oz...? Certainly Baum is not the only defining source for such a definition?




In a discussion of American Fantasy, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Americana RPG. Tolkien meets Stand By Me, it addresses those same anxieties about youth and authority that have been around for ages, whether we're talking Rebel Without a Cause, just about any John Hughes movie, Huckleberry Finn, and countless others.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Aug 25, 2020)

innerdude said:


> While mildly interesting on an academic level, my gut reaction to the question, "Why isn't there more uniquely 'American' fantasy?" is "Who cares?"
> 
> Furthermore, I largely reject the notion that "Oz" is somehow a paragon of "American" fantasy.
> 
> ...




I'd agree with pretty much all of this.

I do think Michael correctly identifies Gamma World as a peculiarly American take on fantasy (it's somewhat coded as SF, but it's solidly fantasy) which has been successful, and which links to a lot of Oz-ish ideas, but I agree with you that American fantasy isn't really defined by Oz any more than British fantasy is defined by Narnia (which is surely is not).

Some other peculiarly American fantasy/horror RPGs stick out to me:

1) World of Darkness - This could never have been written in Europe or anywhere else. The ideas, the concerns, the focus, the initial settings and so on, it's deeply American. Sure, there is a lot of Old World influence, and a lot of references to stuff outside North America, but Vampire, Werewolf, Mage? No way anything like these (particularly Werewolf) could have emerged elsewhere. Obviously you could have a vampire-centric RPG from Europe, but the concerns, focus, style would be different.

2) Shadowrun - It's very popular in Europe, and again has a worldwide setting, but this is also uniquely American. This is part of why it so badly lost its way when it got sold to the Germans. I know it is very popular there, but there's something different about how they perceive the whole setting and a lot of what was done was deeply misguided.

3) RIFTS - Again with the worldwide setting, but I think this is an RPG which has more than a little of an Oz-ian feel, and again, it's a setting which could really only out of the US.



Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> Coldplay is influential, whether we're comfortable with that fact or not.




Who have they influenced? Genuine question though I am asking in part so I can avoid them.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 25, 2020)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Who have they influenced? Genuine question though I am asking in part so I can avoid them.



The Chainsmokers, for one, whom you should definitely should be avoiding.


----------



## GMMichael (Aug 25, 2020)

talien said:


> There is technology too, always at the cusp of becoming ubiquitous, with objects taking on a life of their own. Baum was uneasy about the impact of technology on society: concerned about the impact of "flying machines", worried about what would happen to premature children in "incubators", and wary of slick-talking characters using gimmicks and puppetry (the titular Wizard of Oz). Judging by the abuse Baum heaps on an animated phonograph, he wasn't a fan of recorded music either.



America has its own magic items, too.  I heard something about ruby/crystal spectacles placed on North America by Jesus himself.

Gotta say, though: Baum's concerns weren't very far off the mark.



Minigiant said:


> Doesn't "American Fantasy" sorta dominate the Urban Fantasy market?



I'm thinking Steampunk and Cthulhu are American Fantasy.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> For my part, I think if I had to define American Fantasy, it all goes back to the frontier and the wild west. It's about individuality and freedom and a strange land where people of all different cultures come together. Whether that's John Carter and Barsoom, Conan and Hyboria, Dorothy and Oz, that is American Fantasy.
> SNIP
> 
> 
> In a discussion of American Fantasy, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Americana RPG. Tolkien meets Stand By Me, it addresses those same anxieties about youth and authority that have been around for ages, whether we're talking Rebel Without a Cause, just about any John Hughes movie, Huckleberry Finn, and countless others.




I don't disagree though this was   by the 1990's.  

If you are talking about Now I'd argue that most of what you have mentioned is basically no longer part of the American  canon. I haven't seen the Wizard of Oz on TV in years and odds are a lot of even adult gamers have never seen nor will they care about or understand a good chunk of the stories you mentioned. They have been too busy with One Punch Man or the like to have paid much attention to these.

This suggests to me that we will go back to a more regional culture  or cultures and a huge range of influences from all ovber with each political and ethnic subdivision finding its own kind of stories that matter to them.

There could be an  distinctly old  American fantasy tradition modernized (like  Red Dead Redemption say)  along side a   lot of influences from Anime and Manga and non European immigrants  each forming different styles. This is going to make huge shifts in the broader culture and how  these fuse is going to be interesting.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 25, 2020)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Some other peculiarly American fantasy/horror RPGs stick out to me:
> 
> 1) World of Darkness - This could never have been written in Europe or anywhere else. The ideas, the concerns, the focus, the initial settings and so on, it's deeply American. Sure, there is a lot of Old World influence, and a lot of references to stuff outside North America, but Vampire, Werewolf, Mage? No way anything like these (particularly Werewolf) could have emerged elsewhere. Obviously you could have a vampire-centric RPG from Europe, but the concerns, focus, style would be different.
> 
> ...




These were the games that first came to mind. American RPGs tend to be multiculural in internal design much like how the nation came to be. It tilts to warring faction with a metaplot above it and subplots below it all with idea puled from all over.

This tend to move American Fantasy to American Gothic, Horror, Punk, or Urban fantasy. 

You could make a Oz-like RPG but to make it feel really American,  you'd have to add urban and/or suburban theme and drama as the Americas was very different from Europe in the Classical through Renaissance Era and the nation itself missed them.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> Doesn't "American Fantasy" sorta dominate the Urban Fantasy market?
> 
> You say American Fantasy and I automatically think of "shooting a necromancer" or "driving to a vampire lair"
> 
> So that's where I'd see the American RPG with more urban flair or small town drama. But I could see more talking animals.




What surprises me is, despite the prevalence of Urban Fantasy in tv and cinema, the RPG community seems resistant to Urban Fantasy, and prefers medieval-esque fantasy. Modern settings seem to struggle.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 25, 2020)




----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> For my part, I think if I had to define American Fantasy, it all goes back to the frontier and the wild west. It's about individuality and freedom and a strange land where people of all different cultures come together. Whether that's John Carter and Barsoom, Conan and Hyboria, Dorothy and Oz, that is American Fantasy.



So, Babylon5 is American Fantasy?

Colliding cultures in a New World. That seems like a prominent characteristic of "American" Fantasy.

Also, your note about questioning authority, seems prominent (at least since the Vietnam War? or before then too?),


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> What surprises me is, despite the prevalence of Urban Fantasy in tv and cinema, the RPG community seems resistant to Urban Fantasy, and prefers medieval-esque fantasy. Modern settings seem to struggle.




A lot of Urban Fantasy is actually paranormal romance which is less appealing to gamers. Its great for TV as it lowers costs .

Also most of the shows don't have a lot of broad based appeal.

I used to run  Angel and Buffy near constantly, they were super popular settings  but Buffy hasn't been on TY in nearly twenty years. I can't even name what modern fantasy is popular now and I don't think anyone in my group has read any of the books I've have.

Also a lot of gaming plots and ideas don't fit the modern world very well. Its not a great place for adventure with all the surveillance and the Internet and such. This is why the many directors among them the Coen Brothers avoid very modern settings, Once cellphones much less smart phones are ubiquitous , adventure gets harder without a lot of GM fiat. 

That said it has its appeal. Monster of the Week went over well with the group.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> What surprises me is, despite the prevalence of Urban Fantasy in tv and cinema, the RPG community seems resistant to Urban Fantasy, and prefers medieval-esque fantasy. Modern settings seem to struggle.




It's harder to do adventures in Urban Fantasy. 
The modern world isn't friendly to adventuring and it's harder to do.
Urban Fantasy leans to mystery, horror, and politics.

WoD and Shadowrun get around this by making the "early game" focused about missions forced on you by need, ownership, duty, loyalty, or obligation.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> I used to run  Angel and Buffy near constantly, they were super popular settings  but Buffy hasn't been on TY in nearly twenty years. *I can't even name what modern fantasy is popular now* and I don't think anyone in my group has read any of the books I've have.




CNN, Fox News


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> So, Babylon5 is American Fantasy?
> 
> Colliding cultures in a New World. That seems like a prominent characteristic of "American" Fantasy.




B5 is very American though its usually considered SF.

The reason that American Fantasy is hard to describe is that the culture is in transition on a number of levels. Once that settles, we may have a new distinctly American fantasy or we may not as the Internet makes culture come and go faster.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> B5 is very American though its usually considered SF.
> 
> The reason that American Fantasy is hard to describe is that the culture is in transition on a number of levels. Once that settles, we may have a new distinctly American fantasy or we may not as the Internet makes culture come and go faster.




To paraphrase Orson Scott Card: If it has trees, it's fantasy; if it has rivets, it's science fiction.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> I used to run Angel and Buffy near constantly, they were super popular settings but Buffy hasn't been on TY in nearly twenty years. I can't even name what modern fantasy is popular now and I don't think anyone in my group has read any of the books I've have.




Well in the last 10 years on TV i think these were popular:

Lucifier
True Blood 
Grimm
Sleepy Hallow
Good Omens
American Gods  

Only watched some of them. But these are what I could remember. Notice a lot of them is just one or two people doing a monster of the week.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

WayOfTheFourElements said:


> To paraphrase Orson Scott Card: If it has trees, it's fantasy; if it has rivets, it's science fiction.



Thats a great quote.


----------



## Tyler Do'Urden (Aug 25, 2020)

Urban Fantasy is a popular RPG genre - I'd say the World of Darkness games are much more urban Fantasy than Horror (in the way they're actually played and run by most), and they were the #2 games in popularity back when I first started RPing in the 90s.

Why none have managed to capture market share and imagination share in the same way since, despite it having become such a popular TV and novel genre, is a mystery to me, though. But I'd say RPGs actually beat them to the punch!


----------



## Deset Gled (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> What surprises me is, despite the prevalence of Urban Fantasy in tv and cinema, the RPG community seems resistant to Urban Fantasy, and prefers medieval-esque fantasy. Modern settings seem to struggle.




In a single word: swords.

By and large, people want sword fights in their fantasy RPGs.  Urban and modern and techno stuff are all dominated by ranged combat.  In any Urban Fantasy RPG with even the slightest bit of simulation and tactical wargame left in it, ranged combat will quicly become the default.  You need something to force melee back in mix.  Star Wars did it with religion.  Buffy did it with stakes and blood.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 25, 2020)

Deset Gled said:


> In a single word: swords.
> 
> By and large, people want sword fights in their fantasy.  Urban and modern and techno stuff are all dominated by ranged combat.  In any Urban Fantasy RPG with even the slightest bit of simulation and tactical wargame left in it, ranged combat will quicly become the default.  You need something to force melee back in mix.  Star Wars did it with religion.  Buffy did it with stakes and blood.




Now that you mention it, my interest in history wanes with the invention of gunpowder.


----------



## Tyler Do'Urden (Aug 25, 2020)

Deset Gled said:


> In a single word: swords.
> 
> By and large, people want sword fights in their fantasy.  Urban and modern and techno stuff are all dominated by ranged combat.  In any Urban Fantasy RPG with even the slightest bit of simulation and tactical wargame left in it, ranged combat will quicly become the default.  You need something to force melee back in mix.  Star Wars did it with religion.  Buffy did it with stakes and blood.




It's pretty easy to figure out a way to make modern-day vampires, werewolves and mages immune to gunfire.  (Heck, you can even bring back melee without magic - Dune manages well enough with just technology - personal kinetic shielding)


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> A lot of Urban Fantasy is actually paranormal romance which is less appealing to gamers. Its great for TV as it lowers costs .
> 
> Also most of the shows don't have a lot of broad based appeal.
> 
> ...






Regarding Modern setting. Hackers that disable or disguise surveillance cameras and smartphones, seems like a reasonable workaround, to allow characters to adventure away from scrutiny by authorities. Even an emp device could take out all digital equipment, albeit would definitely get official emergency response.

Also, if combats are nonlethal, the party can usually stay under the radar.

I guess, the issue is anonymity. Either a Modern setting needs a way to protect anonymity, or else embrace the lack of it, and make publicity a feature of the setting.



Angel and Buffy seems an excellent example of Urban Fantasy.

I can see how monster-of-the-week, like the show Supernatural, works well. Surveillance is less of an issue, when one goes to the monster, and those affected appreciate the help.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> It's pretty easy to figure out a way to make modern-day vampires, werewolves and mages immune to gunfire.  (Heck, you can even bring back melee without magic - Dune manages well enough with just technology - personal kinetic shielding)



Vampires are already dead. Wearwolf are berserker-like, shaking off nonmagical weapons. Mages have force shields. Regeneration is also a method.


----------



## Deset Gled (Aug 25, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> It's pretty easy to figure out a way to make modern-day vampires, werewolves and mages immune to gunfire.  (Heck, you can even bring back melee without magic - Dune manages well enough with just technology - personal kinetic shielding)




Sure, it's always possible to use a hack to force swords back in.  But we'll always know its a hack.  Also, hacks work better in a narrative than in a game.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Deset Gled said:


> In a single word: swords.
> 
> By and large, people want sword fights in their fantasy RPGs.  Urban and modern and techno stuff are all dominated by ranged combat.  In any Urban Fantasy RPG with even the slightest bit of simulation and tactical wargame left in it, ranged combat will quicly become the default.  You need something to force melee back in mix.  Star Wars did it with religion.  Buffy did it with stakes and blood.



In built-up areas, close combat, forces combatants within 30 feet of each other.

Also, gunfire will attract attention in urban environments.

If there is legal incentive to avoid lethal combat, melee becomes more normative.



That said, your point that Melee is key, for more dramatic upclose and personal combat, is probably a major people because of its visceral thrill.


----------



## GlassJaw (Aug 25, 2020)

Haven't seen Jim Butcher/The Dresden Files mentioned. To me it's a perfect example of modern urban fantasy.

Love his stuff. I need to read more!


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> Well in the last 10 years on TV i think these were popular:
> 
> Lucifier
> True Blood
> ...




I love the genre but I only watched Grimm more than once  . My group (30-55 in age) hasn't seen any of these. I wonder of that is common enough to impact the genre.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

GlassJaw said:


> Haven't seen Jim Butcher/The Dresden Files mentioned. To me it's a perfect example of modern urban fantasy.
> 
> Love his stuff. I need to read more!




Has its own RPG using a Fate variation. Good stuff.

Come to think of it we tried the setting once I think , it didn't click for some reason.


----------



## ART! (Aug 25, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> From a roleplayer's perspective, however, the dominance of Tolkien and "European" style fantasy probably comes from the strength and believability of it's worldbuilding. While worldbuilding is undoubtably present in Baum and other early American fantasists (such as my favorite "forgotten" American fantasist, James Branch Cabell), it is weaker, and tends to be much more whimsical and inconsistent - and I find that too much whimsy and inconsistency can be detrimental to suspension of disbelief. Narnia, after all, doesn't get nearly the respect that Middle Earth does in our quarters.
> 
> Interesting question, overall, and there's plenty of contradiction here.




Yeah, i think you could find plenty of gamers who aren't put off by a setting's whimsy and inconsistency. Some people have a very willing suspension of disbelief, and some people less so. The strength and believability of a setting's worldbuilding attracts a _subset_ of people interested in fanatasy. They are interested in well-documented, readily-comprehensible settings, and the more lore to master, the better. Some people are turned off by that, and/or by the lore-master gatekeepers who inevitably crop up.



theworstdm said:


> There's also games like Colonial Gothic that ramp up the idea that there used to be much more supernatural elements to America in our past.




I clicked on this thread with the intent to mention Colonial Gothic, so "ditto".



Haldrik said:


> So, Babylon5 is American Fantasy?
> 
> Colliding cultures in a New World. That seems like a prominent characteristic of "American" Fantasy.




Deep Space Nine as well. They're frontier towns in a (semi?) colonial "melting pot" environment.

There's a very American West quality to the vast "unexplored" territories on fantasy maps, full of strange folk and beasts.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> In built-up areas, close combat, forces combatants within 30 feet of each other.
> 
> Also, gunfire will attract attention in urban environments.
> 
> ...




Melee combat is often messier and more violent than gun fights. Worse it goes on longer than say  say two supressed 9mm rounds vs a cultist . And  note suppressors are well within the skills of a typical PC.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 25, 2020)

Deset Gled said:


> In a single word: swords.
> 
> By and large, people want sword fights in their fantasy RPGs.  Urban and modern and techno stuff are all dominated by ranged combat.  In any Urban Fantasy RPG with even the slightest bit of simulation and tactical wargame left in it, ranged combat will quicly become the default.  You need something to force melee back in mix.  Star Wars did it with religion.  Buffy did it with stakes and blood.




I played a one-shot of Dresden Files RPG.

*Shootouts*. Just shootouts. Even our wizard.



Ace said:


> I love the genre but I only watched Grimm more than once  . My group (30-55 in age) hasn't seen any of these. I wonder of that is common enough to impact the genre.




Well some of them have many seasons. And that's just the one of the top of my head since 2010.

Then you have all the vampire and werewolf movies. Most of the popular ones are modern and/or urban.


----------



## Undrave (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> Also a lot of gaming plots and ideas don't fit the modern world very well. Its not a great place for adventure with all the surveillance and the Internet and such. This is why the many directors among them the Coen Brothers avoid very modern settings, Once cellphones much less smart phones are ubiquitous , adventure gets harder without a lot of GM fiat.




That was frustrating the one time I played Shadowrun... you couldn't do ANYTHING cool without "Wait, they'll detect that!" at every turn. It got tiring... you spent a quadrillion hour in character creation painstakingly buying cool naughty word for you character to do, only to spend 90% of the game avoiding using them to begin with or having the guy who can modify memory just doing half the mission on his own...

I went through so many tables... 



Deset Gled said:


> In a single word: swords.
> 
> By and large, people want sword fights in their fantasy RPGs.  Urban and modern and techno stuff are all dominated by ranged combat.  In any Urban Fantasy RPG with even the slightest bit of simulation and tactical wargame left in it, ranged combat will quicly become the default.  You need something to force melee back in mix.  Star Wars did it with religion.  Buffy did it with stakes and blood.




Or with monsters immune to bullets like Kuuga...


----------



## LordEntrails (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Also, your note about questioning authority, seems prominent (at least since the Vietnam War? or before then too?),



Before then. I think it's central to American history and culture. At least since the 1800's. Look at Westerns from the 50's and 60's. The Lone Ranger and all those other black and white westerns. Even many of the tales of the American Revolutionary and Civil War are rooted in anti-authority. Though I would leave that to a true historian to validate that since I know my perception is highly colored by media and myths prominent from post-Vietnam era.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> That was frustrating the one time I played Shadowrun... you couldn't do ANYTHING cool without "Wait, they'll detect that!" at every turn. It got tiring... you spent a quadrillion hour in character creation painstakingly buying cool naughty word for you character to do, only to spend 90% of the game avoiding using them to begin with or having the guy who can modify memory just doing half the mission on his own...
> 
> I went through so many tables...
> 
> ...




Detection is an issue. Its why SF setting have to put a tight lid down on surveillance tech.A example  It wouldn't be that hard to develop tracking implants and mandate them . They might cost pennies and be essential unavoidable as you can't work or buy anything without one.. That's maybe twenty years off tech BTW not far future.

Modernity isn't that dystopian but cell phones are a menace to PC privacy as are cameras, license plate readers and countless other bits of tech that are everywhere.

Non US setting would probably have more melee combat though a melee fight vs the baddies would attract a lot of attention in the UK.

Also unless its the focus of the setting you can only use bulletproof monsters once in a while otherwise its gets silly. I overused ghosts with bad results and while my players told me it wasn't fun and I fixed it, it certainly was learning experience,

Also super monsters could wipe entire towns or police stations  from the map and settings need to take this into accounting in some manner, either restricting power level, rarity, monster cabals or PC are the ones stopping it ala  Angel

This is why we see less modern fantasy,  while the setting is easy and obvious, its too hard to make work and not escapist enough.

More on topic, problem is its harder to use past settings too. Lack of cultural familiarity and even if you do a Deadlands and  edit out hot button issues, its too much work to learn new tropes and very unfamiliar territory.

Oz for example is more foreign than Fantasy Feudal Japan to many people.

Thus we stick to comfortable tropes


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 25, 2020)

Absolutely! American Fantasy has that same thread that winds through American sci-fi like Star Trek, and yes, Babylon 5.

I'd say that the whole bucking authority thing goes back to the people that came to America seeking a better life when it was still just the colonies, then to the Revolutionary War. Certainly, though, Vietnam affected the country's fiction as well. How could it not?



Haldrik said:


> So, Babylon5 is American Fantasy?
> 
> Colliding cultures in a New World. That seems like a prominent characteristic of "American" Fantasy.
> 
> Also, your note about questioning authority, seems prominent (at least since the Vietnam War? or before then too?),




I dunno, there have been a ton of movies calling on most of the properties I mentioned in the last 15 years:

2005: Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
2008: Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)
2010: Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
2010: Alice in Wonderland
2011: Conan the Barbarian
2012: John Carter
2013: Oz, the Great and Powerful
2016: Alice Through the Looking Glass 

Even more recently in videogames, there's 2018's Conan Exiles, and this year's, err, Conan Chop Chop. Modiphius just released Conan and John Carter tabletop RPGs. Are these franchises as popular as they used to be, maybe not? They still made millions. They are hardly dusty relics that no one pays attention to (other than older folks like myself).

But, I will agree that things are a lot more diverse, with people able to access genre media of all sorts from across the world.



Ace said:


> I don't disagree though this was   by the 1990's.
> 
> If you are talking about Now I'd argue that most of what you have mentioned is basically no longer part of the American  canon. I haven't seen the Wizard of Oz on TV in years and odds are a lot of even adult gamers have never seen nor will they care about or understand a good chunk of the stories you mentioned. They have been too busy with One Punch Man or the like to have paid much attention to these.
> 
> This suggests to me that we will go back to a more regional culture  or cultures and a huge range of influences from all ovber with each political and ethnic subdivision finding its own kind of stories that matter to them.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> *Modernity isn't that dystopian* but cell phones are a menace to PC privacy as are cameras, license plate readers and countless other bits of tech that are everywhere.




Did you skip 2020? Please teach me your secrets.


----------



## Cadence (Aug 25, 2020)

Are Superheroes a big arena for American Fantasy since the late 1930s (with blips now and then)?   So, Villains and Vigilantes, Champions, DC Heroes, Marvel Heroes, and Mutants and Masterminds?


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

WayOfTheFourElements said:


> Did you skip 2020? Please teach me your secrets.




2020 is not all of modernity grasshopper.


----------



## Cadence (Aug 25, 2020)

Besides superheroes, did the Wild West and Dectective/Crime Noir/Police fiction take up a bunch of the space that fantasy might have gotten in American popular culture?  It feels like they dominated the air waves with the radio programs, and then jumped over to TV?    Why did Boot Hill and Gangbusters never catch on?


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Here is a sample of popular speculative-fantasy-scifi shows during the 2010s decade.

Shows I am familiar with:

Sense8
Killjoys
Legion
Humans
DC Legends of Tomorrow
Shadowhunters
The Magicians
Doctor Who (favorite Smith)
Travelers
Doom Patrol
Orphan Black
Flash
The Tomorrow People
Altered Carbon
Teen Wolf
Limitless
Now Apocalypse
Supernatural
Future Man
Being Human
Arrow
Incorporated
Titans
Kyle XY
The Adventures of Merlin
Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency
Cloak and Dagger
Runaways
Misfits
The Boys
Beyond
Los Spookys
Batwoman
Midnight Texas
Agents of Shield
The Expanse
Twilight Zone
Krypton
Black Lightning
Star Trek: Discovery
The Orville
Alphas
Heroes / Heroes Reborn
Watchmen
Stranger Things
True Blood
Constantine
The Expanse
Warehouse 13 (magic item of the week)
The Umbrella Academy
What We Do in the Shadows
Siren
The Order
Wu Assassins
Into the Badlands
Timeless
Continuum
Charmed
Cleverman
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Smallville (havent watched but know of, plan to watch)
Supergirl
Daredevil
Luke Cage
Iron Fist
Jessica Jones
Lucky Man
The Gifted
Witcher
His Dark Materials
Carnival Row
Stargate Universe
Agent Carter
Inhumans
The Rook
Black Mirror
Eureka
Gotham
Star-Crossed
Once Upon a Time
Tell Me a Story
Mandalorian
Scorpion

And others ...



2020s are starting well

Brave New World
Tales from the Loop
October Faction
Upload
Star Trek: Picard
Westworld (favorite series 2)
Avenue 5
Dracula 2020

And others ...


----------



## Retreater (Aug 25, 2020)

I think that a good deal of the fantasy that inspired the creation of D&D is rooted in lost empires, bygone ages, and history of medieval feudal societies. While the western hemisphere had those things, they are not our stories to tell (for most of us, I'm assuming).


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Cadence said:


> Besides superheroes, did the Wild West and Dectective/Crime Noir/Police fiction take up a bunch of the space that fantasy might have gotten in American popular culture?  It feels like they dominated the air waves with the radio programs, and then jumped over to TV?    Why did Boot Hill and Gangbusters never catch on?




Too much learning curve especially for teenage boys who made up huge chunks of the gamers at the time.

When I was  young lad back in the day  I was the only person who knew anything about the prohibition era or who had ever seen a Western even though I lived in that region and I didn't know enough to run a game at all as the flavor, language of the time, customs, dress styles and such were too hard to communicate.  So we passed,.

This never changed and though I've seen a Western game or two run (Wild West RPG for a session and a short GURPS game) it never caught on with the players the way D&D does.,

Buy in is a critical part of gaming and most gamers know "D&D" "generic fantasy" and :"whatever current" pretty well . They may have a preference or two but odds they've never bothered with  the Appendix N of you favorite game. I've read the entire Appendix N for Blue Rose and all but The Broken Sword for D&D (I did finally get a copy so soon) but I kow few gamers who read a lot or have read that much.

There was a time in which World of Darkness was huge but that is gone. That Goth touchstones are npo longer common and the chance of finding a gamer whose read say Chelsea Yarborough or Anne Rice is slight.

.SNIP unintended bash of my hobby 

 Virtually no  one read history for fun in my circles (decades of gaming here)  even when they had time  and so the chance of  a group being fully bought in to anything is slight.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Here is a sample of popular speculative-fantasy-scifi shows during the 2010s decade.
> 
> Shows I am familiar with:
> 
> ...




Great list here.

Problem is other than the Witcher and Mandalorian (which I don't watch)  no  one in our gaming group has any of these in common. This makes gaming buy in too expensive.Ultimately its basically comes back to D&D because we all know that.


----------



## Cadence (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> Too much learning curve especially for teenage boys who made up huge chunks of the gamers at the time.




I felt odd asking about them because I've become a big fan of old-Time radio shows over the past decade or so - so lots of westerns and detective/crime-noir, and got my 10yo to watch Brisco County Jr. when I rewatched it last... but I've never really thought of getting a game in either genre going. I've done sci-fi and supers ones over the decades and don't particularly like them because the powers/computers feel like they make it too easy to short circuit a lot of plots. But late 1800s to mid-1900s don't have that problem. And I can see trying to nail a time period in the early to mid 1900s being hard, but old west doesn't feel much worse to me than the middle ages.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Cadence said:


> I felt odd asking about them because I've become a big fan of old-Time radio shows over the past decade or so - so lots of westerns and detective/crime-noir, and got my 10yo to watch Brisco County Jr. when I rewatched it last... but I've never really thought of getting a game in either genre going. I've done sci-fi and supers ones over the decades and don't particularly like them because the powers/computers feel like they make it too easy to short circuit a lot of plots. But late 1800s to mid-1900s don't have that problem. And I can see trying to nail a time period in the early to mid 1900s being hard, but old west doesn't feel much worse to me than the middle ages.




Good point . 


 Its telling though the game is very popular I don't know any tabletop  gamers who play Red Dead Redemption but we all play Skyrim.

Its not difficult but it also isn't that interesting to most either. Why bother with sixguns and horses and dying of being gutshot when you have swords,  cleric and such. Most gamers IMO like low to mid level D&D, easy to understand, tons to do and not as challenging as th ehigh level stuff which many DM's refuse to touch.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> Great list here.
> 
> Problem is other than the Witcher and Mandalorian (which I don't watch)  no  one in our gaming group has any of these in common. This makes gaming buy in too expensive.Ultimately its basically comes back to D&D because we all know that.



Witcher is fun, and for a D&D fan is a mustwatch.

Mandalorian might be high concept art. He wears a mask, according to sacred custom. The entire series (almost) never sees his face and facial expressions. So the acting is strictly voice and body language, and the body language is minimalist. I enjoyed the show alot. I love telekinesis, so baby Yoda is always a joy.


----------



## Undrave (Aug 25, 2020)

Ace said:


> Great list here.
> 
> Problem is other than the Witcher and Mandalorian (which I don't watch) no one in our gaming group has any of these in common. This makes gaming buy in too expensive.Ultimately its basically comes back to D&D because we all know that.




Surprised no one's managed to make a Pokémon RPG a thing then  

...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?


----------



## ART! (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?




Yeah, i can't figure that one out, either. No publisher/game has figured out how to cash in on the super-hero movie and tv craze of the past 20 years or so. Weird.

Part of the attraction of medieval-ish fantasy is that it's so removed from our own historical time and technology, yet near enough that actual physical structures and written records still exist for reference. It's a nice, malleable middle-ground of real and unreal.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> Surprised no one's managed to make a Pokémon RPG a thing then
> 
> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?




I've run  Pokethulhu at least . It did not go over well.

As for Supers games. Many GM's are timorous when it comes to game balance and have trouble managing Batman adventures  much less far more powerful supers. I have played and run in such games   with some success but its challenging.

Also too many players end up rationally pragmatic which fails the buy in or ends of The Boys. Not enjoyable.

IMO most DM's/GM's can't and won't run high level/high powered play because PC power makes it extremely challenging and not much fun. The 3.5 D&D exemplar, Scry Buff Teleport -- there were ways to deal with this monster combo but the stress they put on world building were considerable.

Mostly D&D stops around 8th level these days which is that different than Name Level back in the 1e era. Its as far as most people can handle  as far as the DM finds fun

And yes most games have high level /high power options, people like making high levels, they just don't enjoy playing them or running them. Again IMO.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> Surprised no one's managed to make a Pokémon RPG a thing then



I have tried to watch the Pokeman cartoon several times. ... I just dont get it.




Undrave said:


> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?



Probably the superhero genre is the most popular modern fantasy setting.


----------



## Eyes of Nine (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> What surprises me is, despite the prevalence of Urban Fantasy in tv and cinema, the RPG community seems resistant to Urban Fantasy, and prefers medieval-esque fantasy. Modern settings seem to struggle.




Umm, the huge popularity of Vampire the Masquerade and all it's subsequent spinoffs and editions seems to speak differently.


Haldrik said:


> Here is a sample of popular speculative-fantasy-scifi shows during the 2010s decade.
> 
> Shows I am familiar with:
> 
> ...



Dude wth. Did you just come up with that list off the top of your head? Wow.


----------



## Undrave (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I have tried to watch the Pokeman cartoon several times. ... I just dont get it.




No biggie. It's just the most profitable franchise of all times, it's just an oddity it's never been leveraged properly into an RPG, even as a non-liscenced clone. Like, BESM has a Monster Tamer class but it's not really enough to hold a full game.

I guess it doesn't help that the core gameplay is single player, and the side games that would make it work aren't as popular? (I could Pokémon Masters being a great basis for a table top RPG, since everybody has ONE partner active at once and you go about doing fights 3 on 3) It's part of why I don'T think a Pokémon MMO would work based on the core game principle. 

I've seen fan games online but they spend WAY too much time adapting the video game's convoluted math and trying to adhere strictly to it... and then they try to shoehorn the six ability scores of D&D or something or include stuff like trainer on trainers combat rules... it's a mess of a world to adapt really.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> No biggie. It's just the most profitable franchise of all times, it's just an oddity it's never been leveraged properly into an RPG, even as a non-liscenced clone. Like, BESM has a Monster Tamer class but it's not really enough to hold a full game.
> 
> I guess it doesn't help that the core gameplay is single player, and the side games that would make it work aren't as popular? (I could Pokémon Masters being a great basis for a table top RPG, since everybody has ONE partner active at once and you go about doing fights 3 on 3) It's part of why I don'T think a Pokémon MMO would work based on the core game principle.
> 
> I've seen fan games online but they spend WAY too much time adapting the video game's convoluted math and trying to adhere strictly to it... and then they try to shoehorn the six ability scores of D&D or something or include stuff like trainer on trainers combat rules... it's a mess of a world to adapt really.




 There was a Pokethulhu satire version by S.John Ross . Its still free on Drivethru.


----------



## Eyes of Nine (Aug 25, 2020)

When I think American Fantasy, I think of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (check his story the Great Carbuncle), Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

Eyes of Nine said:


> When I think American Fantasy, I think of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (check his story the Great Carbuncle), Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe.



I guess those are all American Romantic Era, around the same time Europe is documenting folklore and fairytales.


----------



## Retreater (Aug 25, 2020)

ART! said:


> Yeah, i can't figure that one out, either. No publisher/game has figured out how to cash in on the super-hero movie and tv craze of the past 20 years or so. Weird.



Really the best there is are generic role-playing systems that can be tweaked to support supers play: GURPS, Savage Worlds, FATE. 
I think it's largely because the power level is cranked beyond Eleven. It's hard for a GM to present a challenge, and if you do, the math behind doing it will drive you crazy.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 25, 2020)

I feel the 5e design space for tiers 13-16 and 17-20 can focus on superhero genre compatibility.

Also, a "simple mage" with only three or so magic powers, feels like a superhero.


----------



## Ace (Aug 25, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I feel the 5e design space for tiers 13-16 and 17-20 can focus on superhero genre compatibility.
> 
> Also, a "simple mage" with only three or so magic powers, feels like a superhero.




Tulok the Barbarian on YouTube does 20 Level 5e builds of a of supers using only WOTC and UA material and the standard array. His only concession is occasional use of custom backgrounds which are PHB legal anyway  Its a cool channel 

There is also a 3rd part supplement called Marvelous Archetypes on Drivethru which is pretty much what it sounds like.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?



lack of advancement.
Difficulty in creating a game system with all the power and balancing time.

Designing a RPG that replicate all he popular heroes for the players to replicate is *HARD. *And if you succeed it's like GURPS or super complex.

Magic doesnt have to balance power sets to each other.


----------



## Eyes of Nine (Aug 25, 2020)

Undrave said:


> Surprised no one's managed to make a Pokémon RPG a thing then
> 
> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?




Zero to hero's not usually part of the superhero flow. Or rather, it's non-super powered to super powered - it's a binary. There's no sense of progression typically.


----------



## TiwazTyrsfist (Aug 26, 2020)

The biggest reason in my mind is that the 1939 Film softened, shortened, and in general watered down the Story of the Wizard of Oz.
It made it more acceptable and accessible for a larger audience.

And since almost EVERYONE is exposed to OZ first via that movie, all the other adaptations of other books in the series that are more true to the original works, and the original works themselves, seem very odd, off-tone, and even disturbing.

It's like picking up a cup of what you think is Cola, taking a big swig, and discovering it's Sarsaparilla.

It's also why SO MANY people hate the Jonny Depp "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and claim it's "Not true to the original" when in fact it is MUCH MORE true to the original BOOK than the Gene Wilder "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".  First exposure was Gene Wilder so that's what people see as the "True" work.

It seems like a circular problem, in that not enough people are exposed to the original material to generate the interest necessary to create or support derived material, and not enough modern derived material exists to draw people past the *Judy Garland *movie to the Original works.

Editted: because I got Julie Andrews and Judy Garland mixed up.  Thank you Eyes of Nine.


----------



## TiwazTyrsfist (Aug 26, 2020)

Undrave said:


> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?




I dunno, Mutant's & Masterminds keeps reviving, and I liked it pretty well.

TC: Aberrant did $125K on kickstarter which isn't HUGE but it's no small potatoes.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 26, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> 1) That picture up top is crazy nightmare fuel.
> 
> 2) American mythology doesn't need to follow Oz, any more than British fantasy has to follow Narnia.
> 
> ...




FYI, Tolkien didn't forget about Tom. All the adaptors of the saga seem to think he's extraneous and miss the extremely important thematic point of him, that detour episode, the trees and barrow-wights, and the power of the Ring.

That said, I agree with the rest of your point here, including everything else in 3). Much of Tolkien's world details would never have seen the light of day if not for his son's dedication to publishing the various drafts. But also much of it wouldn't if Tolkien had been using Microsoft Word and saving over his drafts without track changes turned on. 

Tolkien was special, and a monolith of the genre, but he's not all encompassing. And even he stood on the shoulders of MacDonald and others who came before him. Each generation of creators can build upon the last and reach new heights, if we strive for them.


----------



## TrueAlphaGamer (Aug 26, 2020)

Perhaps it is the familiarity with the general setting that stifles the ability of escapism. American students are, for the most part, inundated with lecture regarding the history of the country. I believe there was more time dedicated to the history of the American continent in all my years of schooling than to any other historical subject. Likewise, in many parts of the States, you constantly see the history around you - you are grounded to it, able to touch it; thus, it becomes mundane. Indeed, you are also not far from it, chronologically speaking, as there has been much less time for such history and legend to 'ferment' when compared to the civilizations of Europe and Asia. By the time of adolescence and adulthood, there is little to romanticize about a setting inexorably linked to the notes you took (or might not have taken) during the last decade or so of your education.

Compare that to the history and legend of ancient and medieval Eurasia, as well as the literature it engendered, which a young 'nerd' has learned little about in school, yet are naturally fascinated by (if not as a result of the content, then as a result of the relative 'mystery' and 'foreignness' of the subject matter). IDK about most people, but I would much rather explore the woods of Wallachia than the hills of Appalachia, similarly to how I would prefer to recreate the Three Kingdoms conflict than the American Civil War.

Another idea, similar to the point made about swords, is that there is just a lot less _big stuff_. America has no great pyramids which may hold labyrinths of unknown secrets (the Bass Pro Shop one doesn't count). America's 'spellcasters' live in wooden huts, not huge stone towers guarded by mystical woods. We have no great castles in which the king lives (unless you count state government buildings, but those are perhaps more suited to the post-apocalypse than to fantasy). We simply don't have the big places and set-pieces in which to put the stuff required for fantasy to function, unlike Eurasia, which has all of those things and more. Of course, nothing is stopping us from putting those set-pieces into the relevant work, but that, in turn, distances it from the identity of America as it is and has been.


----------



## Gradine (Aug 26, 2020)

Not sure what counts as "American Fantasy RPG" if stuff like _Dresden Files, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun_, or _The Deadlands _don't make the cut.

I mean, I suppose there's Ehdrigohr, if we want to get _really _nitpicky about what qualifies as _American _fantasy.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Undrave said:


> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?



It's a really tough balance to get right.

There are a _lot_ of superpowers out there and you have to make it feel satisfying to be Hawkeye standing next to Doctor Strange.

So either you abstract the crap out of things, which is the way lots of modern games have tried it, which doesn't feel great to people who want being the Human Torch to feel a lot different than, say, Starfire, or you make it hyper-granular, like Champions did, which means that fast-paced superheroics can take _hours_ to adjudicate.

The design studio that cracks this one will likely make a ton of money. But it's worth noting that even in the videogaming space, where a lot of the stuff that slows down Champions is automated, there's been relatively few big hits (Insomniac's Spider-Man being the big obvious mega-hit).


----------



## Retreater (Aug 26, 2020)

I was working on a D&D campaign very much based on American fantasy, heavily influenced on growing up near "cave country" in the Karstlands. Alas, 3.5 ended, then my ex-wife deleted all my notes before I could convert to Pathfinder, so it's been a back burner project for a decade. 
I might get back to it after my current project for 5e wraps up.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Marandahir said:


> FYI, Tolkien didn't forget about Tom. All the adaptors of the saga seem to think he's extraneous and miss the extremely important thematic point of him, that detour episode, the trees and barrow-wights, and the power of the Ring.



I think there's a difference between Tom and that whole set of sidequests in the Hobbit as an _artistic_ pursuit and how it fits together as a world.

All of the jokes about "why didn't Gandalf just call the eagles" are nothing compared to "why didn't anyone just ask Tom if he could help save the world?"



> Tolkien was special, and a monolith of the genre, but he's not all encompassing. And even he stood on the shoulders of MacDonald and others who came before him. Each generation of creators can build upon the last and reach new heights, if we strive for them.



The Venn diagram of people who love Lord of the Rings but claim they hate Beowulf makes me super-sad.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Oh, and I have been remiss for not mentioning this before now: If you want to try Appalachian fantasy, Dungeon Crawl Classics has recently reprinted a collected Chained Coffin book, which features the Shudder Mountains, a fantasy setting inspired by the Silver John stories of Manly Wade Wellman. Both the stories and setting are worth a look.


----------



## GrahamWills (Aug 26, 2020)

Gradine said:


> Not sure what counts as "American Fantasy RPG" if stuff like _Dresden Files, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun_, or _The Deadlands _don't make the cut




I have to agree here -- if I think of American Fantasy, it's not OZ I think off (and I haven't really seen any strong support for that position; even the OP simply cites his own post as support for this) it's Harry Dresden, Sandman, and, in general, Urban Fantasy that jumps to mind. Deadlands =- a great citation -- is another example; the classical American genre of The Western being used as for fantasy roleplaying.

Oz doesn't even read as very American to me. Apart from Dorothy it seems much more European fairytale than Americana.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Sandman is British. Even if we want to make Gaiman's later works American (which I think is an arguable at best position), he was a Brit through and through at that point, writing from a very British point of view.


----------



## Retreater (Aug 26, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> Oh, and I have been remiss for not mentioning this before now: If you want to try Appalachian fantasy, Dungeon Crawl Classics has recently reprinted a collected Chained Coffin book, which features the Shudder Mountains, a fantasy setting inspired by the Silver John stories of Manly Wade Wellman. Both the stories and setting are worth a look.



Appalachian fantasy, you say? Music to my Kentucky ears. (Not bluegrass, thankfully.)
Edit: Drats, it looks like another of those $50 collectors editions they like these days. And on top of it, published for a weird system I can't play.


----------



## Doug McCrae (Aug 26, 2020)

Conan's progress from barbarian outsider to king of Aquilonia seems distinctively American to me. It's like a Horatio Alger story but with more social climbing.

It's also an immigrant story as he was born in Cimmeria.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Retreater said:


> Appalachian fantasy, you say? Music to my Kentucky ears. (Not bluegrass, thankfully.)
> Edit: Drats, it looks like another of those $50 collectors editions they like these days. And on top of it, published for a weird system I can't play.



You need to run, not walk, to the nearest library or ebook source to get your hands on some Wellman.

And Dungeon Crawl Classics is forked off of early D&D but stays very simple. It's pretty straightforward to use with D&D.


----------



## MarkB (Aug 26, 2020)

I think part of the problem with superheroes for RPGs is the combination of high power levels with hyper-specialisation. Essentially, if a particular challenge falls within the ballpark of your power set, you'll be able to apply game-breaking levels of power to it, but if it doesn't, you'll be utterly outclassed.

It prevents the GM from creating a natural, varied scenario. The only way to ensure everyone gets to participate is to provide a constant mix of challenges tailored to their individual specialities, and telegraph them sufficiently that none of the players goes after the 'wrong' hook and winds up facing someone else's nemesis.


----------



## Tonguez (Aug 26, 2020)

Eyes of Nine said:


> Zero to hero's not usually part of the superhero flow. Or rather, it's non-super powered to super powered - it's a binary. There's no sense of progression typically.




I dunno, you’ve got the entire Xaviers School and shows like The Flash, Smallville, The Greatest American Hero, Arrow (via flashback) which cover a whole lot of ‘learning to understand their powers” and gaining new powers as they ’level up’.
Even where learning powers is skipped over theres often an implied training montage. Maybe not zero to hero, more Chuck 1.0 to Chuck 1.5


----------



## Retreater (Aug 26, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> You need to run, not walk, to the nearest library or ebook source to get your hands on some Wellman.
> 
> And Dungeon Crawl Classics is forked off of early D&D but stays very simple. It's pretty straightforward to use with D&D.



Luckily, as a librarian, I am in a library at this very moment. 

So DCC would be basically compatible with other OSR systems, like Old School Essentials? All I know about it is that it has a bunch of tables, uses dice no one has, and has a crazy magic system that isn't like any other edition's magic.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

If you're using OSE, 99 percent of the spells will be in there, or a very close facsimile. Basically, in DCC, every spell is wild magic and has a custom table. Get past that and either handwave or add a luck mechanic to things (honestly, you can just skip it) and OSE will be fine.

The only other things to know are that DCC has almost no repeated monsters, since it's going for a weird fantasy vibe, and that there are 5E-style warlock patron figures that give spellcasters their power in DCC (and eventually ruin their lives). The one in Chained Coffin -- an Old Scratch analogue -- is important, but he can just be a powerful NPC as far as you're concerned.

EDIT: Oh, and the Zocchi dice are a weird affectation. You can totally ignore them by using the nearest alternative or just by rolling a higher die and ignoring stuff outside the prescribed range.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

MarkB said:


> It prevents the GM from creating a natural, varied scenario. The only way to ensure everyone gets to participate is to provide a constant mix of challenges tailored to their individual specialities, and telegraph them sufficiently that none of the players goes after the 'wrong' hook and winds up facing someone else's nemesis.



True. I used to run V&V for years, and either adventures need to be completely bespoke (a Batman adventure is not a Flash adventure, nor vice-versa) or incredibly generic.


----------



## Zardnaar (Aug 26, 2020)

Sentient cheeseburgers, soda monsters and a cure diabetes spell?


----------



## Hussar (Aug 26, 2020)

I have to agree with the general sentiment here about why American fantasy isn't really present in D&D.  D&D is based on medieval fantasy.  There isn't a Medieval period in American history.  It doesn't exist.  So, stories about knights, and castles, and whatnot don't fit at all in an American setting.

I can't even really imagine what an "American" inspired D&D would look like.


----------



## Retreater (Aug 26, 2020)

Zardnaar said:


> Sentient cheeseburgers, soda monsters and a cure diabetes spell?



Bold of you to think America would stand for the curing of any medical malady.


----------



## Zardnaar (Aug 26, 2020)

Retreater said:


> Bold of you to think America would stand for the curing of any medical malady.




You have to pay for it


----------



## Retreater (Aug 26, 2020)

Hussar said:


> I can't even really imagine what an "American" inspired D&D would look like.



I think the American D&D has existed for nearly a year. How soon we forget the Feast of Legends!








						Wendy's Just Made a Dungeons & Dragons-Style Game Where You Fight McDonald's
					

For Freshtovia!




					www.thrillist.com


----------



## Von Ether (Aug 26, 2020)

Comparing Oz to LoTR at the time seems a bit off because Oz was written a half a century earlier and before WWI, which seemed to permanently change the Western psyche. 

And Tolkien had previous practice with the Hobbit which was still a generation (and world war) after Oz. But at last Hobbit is more apples to apples being a children's book. 

Comparing the fantasy legacy of Peter Pan to Oz would make a better comparison, even down to the original intent (stories told to entertain children then written down to entertain even more of them.) 

But on that note, you can say that's why LotR has endured, it was written with the grander vision of creating a mythology to tell stories in vs telling a stories that create a haphazard mythology as a by-product. 

Though that sort of by-product mythology (just in the movies alone) never stopped Star Trek and Star Wars from becoming cultural touchstones. 

As for truly American fantasy, I'd go with Silver John, the Headless Horseman. Oz and also urban fables (The hook, the Lady in White, etc.) The early seasons of Supernatural and American Gods are good inspirations.


----------



## The Mirrorball Man (Aug 26, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> The design studio that cracks this one will likely make a ton of money.



In my opinion, Mayfair Games' DC Heroes RPG is the perfect super heroes role playing game and it didn't make a ton of money.


----------



## Dausuul (Aug 26, 2020)

D&D is set squarely within the swords-and-sorcery tradition, and that tradition is quite thoroughly American, going back to its founder Robert E. Howard. The idea that there is one singular "American fantasy" genre, and that L. Frank Baum (?!?) is the exemplar and defining author of that singular genre, is absurd.


----------



## Eyes of Nine (Aug 26, 2020)

TiwazTyrsfist said:


> the Julie Andrews movie to the Original works.




Ahem... Judy Garland, if we're talking Oz. Andrews was 4 years old in 1939, and didn't appear in any motion pictures (television technically) until 1949.

The rest of your post is true - most people consider whatever their first exposure to anyting as the "true" version of that thing. There are no doubt some poor benighted souls whose first exposure to Star Wars was episode 1!


----------



## Eyes of Nine (Aug 26, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> I dunno, you’ve got the entire Xaviers School and shows like The Flash, Smallville, The Greatest American Hero, Arrow (via flashback) which cover a whole lot of ‘learning to understand their powers” and gaining new powers as they ’level up’.
> Even where learning powers is skipped over theres often an implied training montage. Maybe not zero to hero, more Chuck 1.0 to Chuck 1.5



We're totally thread busting (what else is new here on ENW?), but...

So I think you're conflating 2 concepts. There's the power level of the characters - street level (Punisher, Batman), country level (Captain America, X-Men, Wonder Woman), and cosmic level (Thor, Superman). 

And then there's the idea of the actual fiction of the source inspiration material (I like the phrase touchstones) - in comic books the training up is a single issue; or a flashback. Daredevil learning all his marital arts from Stick? A flashback. It is not the point of the narrative arc. Xavier's School? We rarely actually see the characters advancing in grades. What we see is scenes set in a school; and sometimes there's a training session in the Danger Room. But the characters aren't advancing "levels" in the fiction of the source material.

Take instead someone like Luke Skywalker. Or Harry Potter. Or yes, even Peregrine Took - who starts as a villager and ends up Thain of the Shire (note, he inherits the title - but still...). All those narrative arcs in various realms of fantasy are zero to hero narratives. 

(There's a whole other possible thread where we could discuss "Chosen One" narratives vs "Everyman Hero" storylines - and why very few TT RPGs actually feature "Chosen One" type characters. Monster Hearts being an exception that proves the rule).


----------



## Stacie GmrGrl (Aug 26, 2020)

Twiggly the Gnome said:


> I see a lot of Oz in Eberron. A central seat of government with a vacant throne, four core kingdoms plus a desolate wasteland, all surrounded by more unusual lands. And the new character options: sapient automatons, talking beastfolk, and people who aren't what they seem and can switch genders.




That's a good comparison. I never saw that correlation in Eberron.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 26, 2020)

MarkB said:


> I think part of the problem with superheroes for RPGs is the combination of high power levels with hyper-specialisation. Essentially, if a particular challenge falls within the ballpark of your power set, you'll be able to apply game-breaking levels of power to it, but if it doesn't, you'll be utterly outclassed.
> 
> It prevents the GM from creating a natural, varied scenario. The only way to ensure everyone gets to participate is to provide a constant mix of challenges tailored to their individual specialities, and telegraph them sufficiently that none of the players goes after the 'wrong' hook and winds up facing someone else's nemesis.



Good point. It almost makes sense for each player to play two superhero characters, each with its own power set, so as to deal with more challenges.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 26, 2020)

Response to original post, haven read entire thread.

I don't think the Oz books well known in the UK - I saw them in a bookshop _once_, about 30 years ago! Although the movie is well known and "Wicked", both novel and musical are too. Not really seen as part of the fantasy genre. There are Oz references in Terry Pratchett though.

However, Westerns are a big influence on D&D, and it might be better to consider the Western the "archetypical American fantasy" rather than the Oz books. (Also see: The Mandalorian).


----------



## Zardnaar (Aug 26, 2020)

Star Wars or maybe an American author like Terry Brooks.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 26, 2020)

Fantasy literature and games have always been intensely American. Wild West themes are palpable in many adventures and writers such as Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs have had a huge impact on the genre. Even Burroughs' Tarzan novels are a lot more American than in any sense "African." Or check out Henry Kuttner's Elak of Atlantis stories - it's like you're reading a D&D adventure. The Wild West even seems to have influenced Tolkien: The scene describing the ranger Strider sitting in the Prancing Pony could just as well be used to describe a trapper or mountain man in the dark shadows of a saloon. Actual medieval society generally has had little influence on modern fantasy. Moreover, castles don't make any sense in high-magic worlds, where the castles' defenses can be easily circumvented. People didn't live in a castle because they liked it there but because it provided them with protection.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 26, 2020)

Zardnaar said:


> Star Wars or maybe an American author like Terry Brooks.



Star Wars is basically a fantasy sci-fi Western - even more so in the Mandalorian, of course.


----------



## Aldarc (Aug 26, 2020)

GlassJaw said:


> Haven't seen Jim Butcher/The Dresden Files mentioned. To me it's a perfect example of modern urban fantasy.
> 
> Love his stuff. I need to read more!





Ace said:


> Has its own RPG using a Fate variation. Good stuff.
> 
> Come to think of it we tried the setting once I think , it didn't click for some reason.



I actually used Dresden Accelerated to run an urban fantasy game about a paranormal investigative society set in Vienna during the early 1840s before the 1848 revolutions. (Seriously check out a map of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire during this time and all the modern day nationalities included.) I even used an old map I found. My players (all Germans or Austrians living in Vienna) has a load of fun navigating the old city.


----------



## Hussar (Aug 26, 2020)

Like anything else, I suppose, it helps to define our terms.  What is meant by "American Fantasy"?  Simply written by Americans?  Well, that's pretty solidly part of D&D.  Or, is something else meant?


----------



## Aldarc (Aug 26, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Like anything else, I suppose, it helps to define our terms.  *What is meant by "American Fantasy"?* Simply written by Americans?  Well, that's pretty solidly part of D&D.  Or, is something else meant?



Socio-economic mobility. So it’s pretty easy to see how D&D’s old “XP through plundering the wealth from others” system factors into that fantasy.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Aug 26, 2020)

talien said:


> *American Fantasy Defined*
> 
> As described in *The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, *the tenets of American Fantasy include a contrast between real world struggles and a fantasy land (Kansas vs. Oz), the Garden of the World set in the midst of *the Great American Desert *(Oz), and* pastoral qualities* that encompass the *heartland *like *corn fields*, crows, wildcats, and field mice. Baum's Oz is different in character but similar in texture to *American agrarianism*.
> 
> ...



[Note: Some emphasis mine]

American Fantasy as described in "The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature" would appear to me to be significantly more dead than the Western as a genre - and that's why you don't see it much in modern RPGs. I can think of a lot of good modern fantasy novels by Americans but I'm struggling to think of anything significant in the last half-century that qualifies as American Fantasy ("The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature" was written in 1980 so the death of the genre might not have been so obvious).

If I'm looking for modern specifically American fantasy settings I don't look for what self-aggrandizingly calls itself "The heartland" (and in response gets given the only slightly less inaccurate nickname of "Flyover country"). I look at where the majority of Americans actually live and work, and it turns out htat Americans are not actually children of the corn. Instead the majority of Americans live in cities, and that is where fantasy coming out of America is in general set - and roughly two thirds of Americans live in 100 miles of one of America's borders. Urban Fantasy is the American fantasy genre, and in the 90s the World of Darkness was about as popular as D&D.

And Urban Fantasy has the contrast between real world struggles and fantasy land, technology frequently being dangerous and normally ubiqutious. But instead of "pastoral qualities" and "American agrarianism" it has complexities, different cultures, diversity, struggles with immigration - and is more equitable, more companionable, and because it is magic, more wonderful. It's just written for Americans about something based on America as experienced by far more Americans than ever got to experience the largely propagandist America of Little House on the Prarie. 

So where's the American Fantasy RPG? They exist - but they are every bit as niche as the so-called American Fantasy genre is in 2020.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 26, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Like anything else, I suppose, it helps to define our terms.  What is meant by "American Fantasy"?  Simply written by Americans?  Well, that's pretty solidly part of D&D.  Or, is something else meant?




I think American (the country) Fantasy isn't fantasy written by Americans but for Americans using American ideas, mythology, and tropes.

This is why Urban Fantasy is bigger in the US than Europe or Asia. The US is a young nation and shyed away from the history of the Natives for so long. It missed the boat on Medieval knights and Classical empires. And by the time it fully united, it was the Modern Era. So it's fantasy would be based around the thoughts and fears of the cities, the ruggedness and familiarity of the small towns, or the sense of exploration of going out on your own.

For example,* factions* are big in American Fantasy. Because the US is a melting pot of different cultures, there is always a sort of faction system in most American societies.  American facial has racial groups, "racial" groups, gangs, cartels, unions, alliances, cliques and the like.

Look at Vampire. It's vampire families teaming up to make an organization. Then some other the families rebel and make their own organization. Then OH NO the first organization didn't learn their lesson and the youth ones ditch AGAIN. Then OH NO one of the major clans goes neutral and a clan almost  completely switch sides. THEN you have the magic vampires who do their own thing with all the groups. THEN their is the vampire church in Africa unsure where to go. And that's before you add in the many human groups and the werewolves and the other stuff in WOD.

You have factions in European style Fantasy but it's different. It's less about the factions and more about the heads of them as Europe has a history or kings and emperors. The US rebelled against a king so it runs power and methods in different ways.


----------



## ART! (Aug 26, 2020)

Undrave said:


> Surprised no one's managed to make a Pokémon RPG a thing then
> 
> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?




I don't think anyone has figured out how to emulate modern super-hero movies and tv shows _specifically_, and in an era of Critical Role et al this hypothetical game might also need a big YouTube, Twitch, etc. presence.



Retreater said:


> It's hard for a GM to present a challenge, and if you do, the math behind doing it will drive you crazy.




...except in games where math isn't much of an issue. I've played in many super-hero games using narrative-based systems, and it worked really, really well.



Minigiant said:


> lack of advancement.
> Difficulty in creating a game system with all the power and balancing time.
> 
> Designing a RPG that replicate all he popular heroes for the players to replicate is *HARD. *And if you succeed it's like GURPS or super complex.




I get where you're coming from, but narrative games put less emphasis on traditional ideas of advancement.

A drama build of Cortex Prime (modeled after the Smallville version of Cortex Plus) emulates superhero tv series, eliminates concerns of power differentials completely, and works beautifully.

None of these are like GURPS or super-complex.



Eyes of Nine said:


> Zero to hero's not usually part of the superhero flow. Or rather, it's non-super powered to super powered - it's a binary. There's no sense of progression typically.




There are plenty of games that emulate the kind of dramatic progress that super-hero comics, shows, and movies focus on.

It's an interesting cultural phenomenon that more mechanical, XP-progress, leveling-up games like D&D are more popular than the alternatives.



MarkB said:


> I think part of the problem with superheroes for RPGs is the combination of high power levels with hyper-specialisation. Essentially, if a particular challenge falls within the ballpark of your power set, you'll be able to apply game-breaking levels of power to it, but if it doesn't, you'll be utterly outclassed.
> 
> It prevents the GM from creating a natural, varied scenario. The only way to ensure everyone gets to participate is to provide a constant mix of challenges tailored to their individual specialities, and telegraph them sufficiently that none of the players goes after the 'wrong' hook and winds up facing someone else's nemesis.




Games that emphasize a character's dramatic import (over mechanical stuff about super-hero physics, power levels, etc) skip this problem completely. Their drama can be just as natural and varied as anything else - perhaps more so since their focus is on the drama itself. Everyone's participation is equal because they have equal dramatic import, an effect created by rules that focus on things like convictions, connections to other characters and organizations, etc.



Tonguez said:


> I dunno, you’ve got the entire Xaviers School and shows like The Flash, Smallville, The Greatest American Hero, Arrow (via flashback) which cover a whole lot of ‘learning to understand their powers” and gaining new powers as they ’level up’.
> Even where learning powers is skipped over theres often an implied training montage. Maybe not zero to hero, more Chuck 1.0 to Chuck 1.5




Right, and the focus of those shows - like the comics they're based on - is more soap opera than dungeon crawl, so a rules system wouldn't need to focus on the same things we expect from a game that emphasizes leveling-up and the like.



Hussar said:


> I have to agree with the general sentiment here about why American fantasy isn't really present in D&D.  D&D is based on medieval fantasy.  There isn't a Medieval period in American history.  It doesn't exist.  So, stories about knights, and castles, and whatnot don't fit at all in an American setting.
> 
> I can't even really imagine what an "American" inspired D&D would look like.




The geographic spaces typical of D&D maps are heavily influenced by the American notions of westward expansion and "untamed" wilderness in the heads of D&D's creators.

For me, and American-inspired D&D would look like Colonial Gothic and Northern Crown, i.e. a magic-injected alternate colonial-era America setting.


----------



## Lord_Blacksteel (Aug 26, 2020)

Superheroes are the American myth, right up there alongside the Western, and I'm kind of amazed by the seeming lack of awareness in this article and thread. There are more Superhero RPGs available now than ever before. M&M is probably the biggest and has been in its 3rd edition for at least ten years now and has had a steady stream of releases for years. 



ART! said:


> Yeah, i can't figure that one out, either. No publisher/game has figured out how to cash in on the super-hero movie and tv craze of the past 20 years or so. Weird.





M&M. They had a DC Heroes branded version that was 4 books. 
Champions is still around in 6th edition "complete" form. 
Icons. 
BASH. 
various Savage Worlds super-books including Necessary Evil which is still an awesome concept and campaign. 
The late lamented Marvel Heroic Roleplaying from Margaret Weis Productions circa 2012 which was an incredibly different and interesting take on a superhero RPG. 
AMP Year One etc. 
Aberrant is coming back in a new edition 
Aeon Trinity already is back in a new edition
There are ten just off the top of my head. If you go to DTRPG and poke around there are far more. None of them are on a 5E D&D level but then Supers has always been a steady presence in RPG's, though never a dominant one. 



Retreater said:


> Really the best there is are generic role-playing systems that can be tweaked to support supers play: GURPS, Savage Worlds, FATE.
> I think it's largely because the power level is cranked beyond Eleven. It's hard for a GM to present a challenge, and if you do, the math behind doing it will drive you crazy.




I would not agree that they are the best but they are certainly workable and that balanced power level thing is kind of M&Ms signature feature, alongside being a d20 based system.



Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> There are a _lot_ of superpowers out there and you have to make it feel satisfying to be Hawkeye standing next to Doctor Strange.
> 
> So either you abstract the crap out of things, which is the way lots of modern games have tried it, which doesn't feel great to people who want being the Human Torch to feel a lot different than, say, Starfire, or you make it hyper-granular, like Champions did, which means that fast-paced superheroics can take _hours_ to adjudicate.
> 
> The design studio that cracks this one will likely make a ton of money. But it's worth noting that even in the videogaming space, where a lot of the stuff that slows down Champions is automated, there's been relatively few big hits (Insomniac's Spider-Man being the big obvious mega-hit).




Again, this is what M&M was based around and even Champions (original pen and paper Champions) handled this fairly well. It's really not that hard. Marvel Heroic took an entirely different approach and it worked well too.  

The biggest challenge is that to really get attention a Supers RPG has to be licensed and those DC and Marvel licenses are expensive. Costly to the point it seems to prevent any real financial viability for an ongoing, open-ended RPG line. So what's reasonable to produce are non-licensed or smaller-licensed RPGs. Hellboy and Sentinels of the Multiverse are both getting the RPG treatment right now so it's still an active area of the RPG scene.


----------



## Cadence (Aug 26, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> It's an interesting cultural phenomenon that more mechanical, XP-progress, leveling-up games like D&D are more popular than the alternatives.




People like to get cookies. Do chat/discussion boards that allow the collection of upvoting (and maybe give ranks) do better than those that don't, for example? Do phone games like Pokemon or Ingress with leveling lose a bunch of players when the leveling slows down or when they max it out?

Another thing I wonder about is the seeming more "recent" need to up the stakes.   In Gunsmoke or Magnum PI or Detective novels or a lot of pre-1980s super hero comics or the original Star Trek there wasn't a consistent need to always up the power level of the opponents and threaten the entire world -- the story seemed to matter more.   Now it seems like in the comic books there needs to be a new more-powerful-world-threatening thing every year, and in Star Trek you have the Borg, and Dominion and who knows what else, and the stakes need to get higher each time in Dresden books.  That doesn't seem to be as consistent in D&D though - where a lot of games seem to run to about level 10 and restart, so I'm not sure how much of a factor that is.


----------



## Undrave (Aug 26, 2020)

ART! said:


> There are plenty of games that emulate the kind of dramatic progress that super-hero comics, shows, and movies focus on.
> 
> It's an interesting cultural phenomenon that more mechanical, XP-progress, leveling-up games like D&D are more popular than the alternatives.




Narrative focused game never do as well. I think people just like to get a sense that they are getting better... 

Maybe, ironically, Japan has the better model for that kind of game: My Hero Academia! The school structure there could work... 



Lord_Blacksteel said:


> There are ten just off the top of my head. If you go to DTRPG and poke around there are far more. None of them are on a 5E D&D level but then Supers has always been a steady presence in RPG's, though never a dominant one.




It doesn't feel like any of Superhero RPG ever got to the level of Vampire the Masquerade, for exemple, to the point of dominating its genre. 

I think the problem with M&M is the abundance of powers and possible build system. Point buy systems are more arcane looking to neophyte than the simple class-based system of D&D. I know M&M and others have sample builds and stuff, but I feel like it's not quite the same? Would it be possible to create a class-based superhero game? A bit like the ol' City of Heroes MMO? If anybody remembers Mutant X, that show had 'classes' of mutant (Telepathic, Elemental, Feral and Molecular).

Maybe the solution would be to try and focus your game on a specific power level? Don't try to cover Batman AND Green Lantern, just cover one or the other, ya know? I feel like a 'Street level' game would be a good place to start? Basically as if you segmented DnD into tiers of power that would flow into one another (one book has level 1-10, another 11-20 and a final one 21-30, for exemple) so you COULD eventually do Justice League if you wanted. 

Just random thoughts.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 26, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> I think there's a difference between Tom and that whole set of sidequests in the Hobbit as an _artistic_ pursuit and how it fits together as a world.
> 
> All of the jokes about "why didn't Gandalf just call the eagles" are nothing compared to "why didn't anyone just ask Tom if he could help save the world?"




They discussed it at the Council of Elrond. Someone even asked why they couldn't just give it to Tom to look after. Tom would forget about it, and then with the Ring still extant, Sauron would conquer the world, and even Tom's country would fall, even if it was the last area to do so. 

That's about as equal a solution as trying to throw it into the Sea. They HAVE to destroy the Ring because there's no way to beat Sauron at force of arms. Aragorn's last stand at the Morannon is a play for time, to give Frodo and Sam more time to get to the cracks of Orodruin. There was no way to win that battle unless Sauron himself was defeated. 

The eagles are messengers of Manwë (albeit mortal ones) and are bound to specific missions similarly to the Maiar Istari. They can't directly intervene like that, and Tolkien himself said they had to be used sparingly lest this question be asked by everyone. He actually was frustrated with his usage of them in The Hobbit (which itself was a reference to Thorondor bearing Húrin to Gondolin, or Gwaihir and Landroval themselves rescuing Beren & Lúthien) later on during LotR, because it meant he was caught with this eucatastrophic tool. It let him get the "happy" ending for Frodo & Sam (of which he was altogether not sure was going to be able to happen - at one point in development, Sam was going to grab the ring and jump into the fire to end it all!). But the Eagles are not beholden to any mortals, they have no fëar (and thus cannot be considered among the "Free Peoples" of Middle-earth like the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Ents, and Hobbits) and only help Mithrandir and Aiwendil due to great respect and mutual support for each others' needs and missions. Gwaihir even tells Mithrandir at Isengard that he cannot carry him far - he was sent to bear tidings, not burdens. He only takes him as far as Edoras, where Gandalf tames the Mearas, Shadowfax, to carry him the rest of the way. But even Shadowfax returns to the Mark after getting Gandalf to Rivendell in Fellowship.

Mortal animals, no matter how long-lived like the Great Eagles, simply are not like free peoples. You might be able to convince them to help you, they might be able to talk like the Eagles, but they are driven by instinct and evolution, not by free will. These Eagles were taught the languages of the Valar and Elves and Men by Manwë and in exchange tasked with watching Morgoth and later Sauron's forces from the skies. But any ride they grant to mortals is a momentous event - they are not simply a force Gandalf can summon at will by grabbing any random moth and calling for their aid like in the movies.



> The Venn diagram of people who love Lord of the Rings but claim they hate Beowulf makes me super-sad.




I hear you there.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 26, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> I dunno, you’ve got the entire Xaviers School and shows like The Flash, Smallville, The Greatest American Hero, Arrow (via flashback) which cover a whole lot of ‘learning to understand their powers” and gaining new powers as they ’level up’.
> Even where learning powers is skipped over theres often an implied training montage. Maybe not zero to hero, more Chuck 1.0 to Chuck 1.5






Eyes of Nine said:


> We're totally thread busting (what else is new here on ENW?), but...
> 
> So I think you're conflating 2 concepts. There's the power level of the characters - street level (Punisher, Batman), country level (Captain America, X-Men, Wonder Woman), and cosmic level (Thor, Superman).
> 
> ...




I agree with Tonguez and disagree with Eyes of Nine.

It may not be evident in the often-resetting comic book storylines, but if you look at their famous film adaptations, the characters go through character arcs and growth not just in character, but also in power and abilities.

Tony Stark is always learning from his mistakes and failures and errors, and each suit is better and more powerful than the last, using newer and more advanced technology and featuring more innovative ideas sometimes weaker but more useful like his "football" suit i.e. Mark V - it was for situations where he didn't have time to get into the Mark III or Mark IV during Iron Man 2. By Infinity War and Endgame, he's got nano-particle suits with energy shields. This is a far cry from the Mark I suit he built in a cave. FROM A BOX OF SCRAPS!

Captain America's martial abilities, fighting style, and equipment advance from film to film. Some of this is technological upgrades from SHIELD or Stark, but his martial abilities are from his own growth.

Daredevil's flashbacks to learning from Stick are one thing, but they're really about how he got to be a Level 1 Hero character. He also goes through martial ability, equipment, and power level growth over the course of 3 seasons and a miniseries.

Trish Walker (Hellcat) says specifically to Jessica in Season 3 that she's spent the last year honing her martial skills, after the end of a montage of events she was involved in the last year. These are characters who are constantly training and getting better.

Even the Hulk goes a long way from his narrow (and scarily violent) victory over Abomination to being the Champion of the Conquest of Champions on an alien world, able to go toe-to-toe with Norse Gods and demons of the apocalypse. Each film he shows up in, it's not a static character. Both Banner the scientist and Hulk the monster grow over the movie series.

Perhaps the greatest example of character level up in Marvel is Agent Daisy Johnson aka Skye aka Quake, from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. She goes from being a Rising Tide cyberhacker to a shadow of Agent Coulson to a Level 1 Agent of Shield in Communications (like Coulson), to training with weapons and martial arts under Melinda May (the only agent with more blackbelts than Black Widow) to be a field agent, to going through Terrigenesis and turning into an Inhuman with earthquake powers that she can't control that start taking down everything around her, to turning those powers inward to protect her friends and family and destroy her own bones in the process, to training with power surpressing gauntlets that can help with the bone injuries, to healing from the injuries and learning how to make music and move mountains from an Inhuman teacher, to training to combine her powers with her field agent abilities to take on field missions, to figuring out how to use them to perform sonic resonance to hold open a portal, to unleashing her power and nearly destroying the entire base, to learning how to jump really good with her powers, to going toe-to-toe with freakin' Ghost Rider, to have to learn it all over again in a digital Matrix world, to fight for her life against terribly powerful Kree alien warriors, to becoming powerful enough that she could crack the entire world apart with her powers, to learning how to control said powers and survive the finale of the series (jumped over and brushed over some important spoilers I wouldn't want to give away). That's at LEAST a level 1-15 arc equivalent. And her story's not over.


----------



## Cadence (Aug 26, 2020)

Marandahir said:


> I agree with Tonguez and disagree with Eyes of Nine.
> 
> It may not be evident in the often-resetting comic book storylines, but if you look at their famous film adaptations, the characters go through character arcs and growth not just in character, but also in power and abilities.




How many game sessions would you consider a movie or episodes worth of screen time?

And some of the characters certainly develop a lot. How much did Coulson and May develop?

Are their at least three big reasons for needing resets in comic books?   One is that character's appeal is in their development (like younger mutants or spider-man) and that at some point they've gone past that stage (they're the adults now and are getting married instead of doing teen angst).  Is this like in D&D where campaigns stop some time between level 10 and 20 instead of continuing on (where an E6 type thing, or one with slower advancement like I remember in VtM could keep going).   A second could be that  they're looking for a big sales boost and to draw people in that have drifted over time whenever a story hits a lull?  (The continual sets of new number 1s in comics, but no particular major change.  The long time campaign has kind of stalled, so lets reboot it).  A third could because one of the authors decided to have a formerly stable character develop to a dead end storytelling stage (after x00 issues of gradual armor improvements that don't really change the stories, Tony goes nanites,  or after x00 issues of doing his thing Thor becomes powerful enough to put back together the moon)?


----------



## Doug McCrae (Aug 26, 2020)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> Superheroes are the American myth, right up there alongside the Western



I agree and I'd add that the first American superhero, Superman, is even more distinctively American because he is an immigrant, both to the US and to Earth. For most of the character's history (though not in Action Comics #1) his immigrant status has been particularly important because it's the source of his powers.

Compare with Dorothy Gale and John Carter (one of the major inspirations for Superman) who are both immigrants, to Oz and Mars, but emigrants from the US. Wonder Woman is an immigrant to the US from Paradise Island, but it's not the source of her powers - she would still be superhuman on Paradise Island.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 26, 2020)

Cadence said:


> How many game sessions would you consider a movie or episodes worth of screen time?
> 
> And some of the characters certainly develop a lot. How much did Coulson and May develop?
> 
> Are their at least three big reasons for needing resets in comic books?   One is that character's appeal is in their development (like younger mutants or spider-man) and that at some point they've gone past that stage (they're the adults now and are getting married instead of doing teen angst).  Is this like in D&D where campaigns stop some time between level 10 and 20 instead of continuing on (where an E6 type thing, or one with slower advancement like I remember in VtM could keep going).   A second could be that  they're looking for a big sales boost and to draw people in that have drifted over time whenever a story hits a lull?  (The continual sets of new number 1s in comics, but no particular major change.  The long time campaign has kind of stalled, so lets reboot it).  A third could because one of the authors decided to have a formerly stable character develop to a dead end storytelling stage (after x00 issues of gradual armor improvements that don't really change the stories, Tony goes nanites,  or after x00 issues of doing his thing Thor becomes powerful enough to put back together the moon)?




Oh, I agree with those. Character resets (let alone entire franchise or shared universe resets) are in part influenced by the fact that these comics have been running for longer than almost anyone alive today. Sure, sometimes these resets happen in rapid succession due to changing demographics or a failed storyline that led to massive reader backlash (like _Secret Empire_'s Hydra-Cap) but they're usually a result of trying to keep these characters relevant to changing times, demographics, and generations.

I agree that it's not all that different from a party that's played the same characters for years and decided, rather than start over with new characters in a new campaign, to start over with new iterations of their characters. I know that I've run my main PC in about a dozen different campaigns over the years, often with some carry over parties but a different total make up and different worlds and settings, and campaign stories that started from Level 1, so it didn't make sense to "import" the character as-is from his past adventures, but instead reboot him.



Doug McCrae said:


> I agree and I'd add that the first American superhero, Superman, is even more distinctively American because he an immigrant, both to the US and to Earth. For most of the character's history (though not in Action Comics #1) his immigrant status has been particularly important because it's the source of his powers.
> 
> Compare with Dorothy Gale and John Carter (one of the major inspirations for Superman) who are both immigrants, to Oz and Mars, but emigrants from the US. Wonder Woman is an immigrant to the US from Paradise Island, but it's not the source of her powers - she would still be superhuman on Paradise Island.



Created by two 1st-generation Jewish-American comic book writers/artists, Jerry Sieger and Joe Shuster from NYC & the Tri-State area. Notably, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko were all also 1st-generation Jewish-American comic book writers/artists from NYC and the Tri-State area. (Note also that Bob Kane was a descendant of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants, though not 1st-generation, and Bill Finger was an Eastern European Jewish immigration 1st generation American as well, and those two created Batman). 

The turn of the 20th century Eastern-European Jewish immigration to NYC and its suburbs had a profound influence on the dawn of comic books as the All-American myth.


----------



## LuisCarlos17f (Aug 26, 2020)

I dare to say American fantasy tells more about coexistence and conflicts between different communities, altough using fictional races are a softer way.


----------



## ART! (Aug 26, 2020)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> There are more Superhero RPGs available now than ever before. M&M is probably the biggest and has been in its 3rd edition for at least ten years now and has had a steady stream of releases for years.
> 
> M&M. They had a DC Heroes branded version that was 4 books.
> Champions is still around in 6th edition "complete" form.
> ...




Oh, I'm aware of (and have played) all of those, I was just trying to say what you say here - that no single system has become the go-to for people hungry to create their own supers game, inspired by their favorite supers tv series, movie, or movie series - not in the way that D&D has for fantasy. Heck, not even two of them have done that for supers, like D&D and Pathfinder have for fantasy.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 26, 2020)

Cadence said:


> How many game sessions would you consider a movie or episodes worth of screen time?
> 
> And some of the characters certainly develop a lot. How much did Coulson and May develop?



Regarding game sessions - that really depends on how much people normally get done in a session. I try to an "episode" worth of content, or an "act" of a movie. But that can really be tricky. Some nights we only get a few major scenes done in 4 hours. 5th edition certainly has sped up gameplay, though. Our sessions moved much more slowly back in 4e.


Regarding Coulson and May, I'd argue they both developed a lot over the series as well. My partner tells me that she feels that Coulson is fundamentally different from the person he was in Iron Man and through Phase 1 by the time of Season 5 (to her disgruntlement). I'd say one way we can examine his development is from Captain Marvel to the S4 flashbacks he has with May to then all the events of Phase 1 and then the show. 

I mean, this is the every-man MiB agent who dies, is resurrected due to his value as the heart binding the Avengers together, get to put together his own team/family of agents, grows into the shoes of Fury, gets his hand cut off and replaces it with a robot one that can generate an energy shield projection that looks a bit like Cap's shield but with the Shield logo, is set back to a normal agent role because he can't be the face of the organization as he's supposed to be dead, reclaims the leadership, becomes Ghost Rider for a bit, learns how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world and makes his way back to our world in time to die again and come to peace with it but not before facing his own demons, only to come back to life multiple times (first as a possessed recreation from Hell, then as a freakin' robot and a man in a TV and another robot) with super strength.

May starts the series with more blackbelts than Natasha Romanoff ("she's a friend"), but further grows through the series, too. By the end of the series, she's gone from being a closed off cold wall of an agent who has sealed her anger and feelings as a coping mechanism to beng an empath and teacher at Coulson Academy. Along the way she's had to overcome her demons, see her ex-husband come back into her life only to transform into her worst nightmare and defeat him - at great cost - and even learn how to fly spaceships through a post-apocalyptic asteroid field (she's an expert airplane/quinjet pilot but flying in space is a different matter altogether).


----------



## Ace (Aug 26, 2020)

ART! said:


> Oh, I'm aware of (and have played) all of those, I was just trying to say what you say here - that no single system has become the go-to for people hungry to create their own supers game, inspired by their favorite supers tv series, movie, or movie series - not in the way that D&D has for fantasy. Heck, not even two of them have done that for supers, like D&D and Pathfinder have for fantasy.




I think this s because super hero RPG's don't feel like comics very much. Even when you can lock your player's down and get them into the mechanics and the genre assumptions  like say no  Iron Age Azrael types in a Silver Age game, game play isn't very super.

And while say Mayfair Games DC/MEGS and TSR Marvel/FASERIP were able to capture the numbers right out if the handbooks of the time, they can't make them play well on the table. FASERIP which is tied to the old Marvel Handbooks in numbers was closer and even included genre reinforcement, it still never felt quite right and wouldn't hold up to player ingenuity. We still played a lot of it anyway since we all were into the comics (it was along time ago in Galaxy, well nevermind) but it wasn't well super enough


----------



## Cadence (Aug 26, 2020)

Marandahir said:


> Regarding Coulson and May, I'd argue they both developed a lot over the series as well.




Is the development of the teenager to adult, who is building on/learning to control their powers in major ways, fundamentally different than the trajectory of an adult who is developing and experiencing the changes of life and gradually adding on new skills here and there?   It feels like the later can go on a lot longer without a reboot than the former.   Does D&D's level system well serve the second kind?


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 26, 2020)

Cadence said:


> Is the development of the teenager to adult, who is building on/learning to control their powers in major ways, fundamentally different than the trajectory of an adult who is developing and experiencing the changes of life and gradually adding on new skills here and there?   It feels like the later can go on a lot longer without a reboot than the former.   Does D&D's level system well serve the second kind?




I think D&D's level system can serve both well, but remember that experience and levels are arbitrary and not tied to the passing of time or specific types of accomplishments (an executioner is not a level 20 Assassin Rogue because they kill a bunch of people for their job, gaining XP for each kill - it's not awarded that way).

I think we could easily chart out popular heroes and their changes and developments, whether friendly neighbourhood teenage heroes or adult MiB field agents, onto D&D style character development. But until Agents of SHIELD, I'd argue that Coulson was an NPC. Maybe in Avengers he was a DM PC like Fury and possibly Hill, but if I was running Avengers as a D&D campaign he'd definitely be controlled by the DM, with the party being specifically Tony, Steve, Natasha, Bruce, & Thor (+Clint as the new player joining the group near the end of the adventure and the DM quickly providing a solution to turn one of the antagonists into a PC character). Coulson is an NPC designed to make the party work with each other rather than fall apart (they've all got Coulson in their backgrounds' bonds section due to past solo adventures the DM ran for each of them prior to this big table game). 

Then the DM's brother and sister-in-law decide they want to play their own campaign, and they take on Coulson and grant him a bad-ass colleague in May. Jed and Mo recruit their friend Jeff Ball to DM their game since Joss is too busy making the sequel campaign to Avengers.


----------



## Mark Sabalauskas (Aug 26, 2020)

Reading this thread I suspect the real American "fantasy" is people assuming that what games happen to be played has to do with consumer preferences as revealed by the great and powerful invisible hand of the market. 

As opposed to DnD being dominant because of network effects, and Pathfinder being successful because they were able to fork it.

For rest of the absurdly tiny "industry", isn't it really the arbitrary interests of talented games designers that often determines what stands out? _Night Witches _didn't raise $50K because there was a pent up demand for an RPG about Soviet Airwoman during World War II, it's because people rightly assumed Jason Morningstar would make a cool game,  Just as earlier gamers found  that Stafford  made an interesting game out of Arthurian legends, because he was skilled and passionate about it.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 26, 2020)

Great call! Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John tales are woefully out-of-print. Fortunately my library had a dusty copy of The Old Gods Waken in storage. Definitely a solid example of American Fantasy. The Chained Coffin is a great descendant that manages to meld its Appalachian folk influences into a traditional fantasy setting.



Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> Oh, and I have been remiss for not mentioning this before now: If you want to try Appalachian fantasy, Dungeon Crawl Classics has recently reprinted a collected Chained Coffin book, which features the Shudder Mountains, a fantasy setting inspired by the Silver John stories of Manly Wade Wellman. Both the stories and setting are worth a look.


----------



## Retreater (Aug 26, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Great call! Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John tales are woefully out-of-print. Fortunately my library had a dusty copy of The Old Gods Waken in storage. Definitely a solid example of American Fantasy. The Chained Coffin is a great descendant that manages to meld its Appalachian folk influences into a traditional fantasy setting.



Yeah, our library doesn't have them, and being out of print, won't buy them as a rule. Interlibrary Loan is an option, I suppose. Otherwise, I'll have to resort to other means to try to find them online.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 26, 2020)

I used to work in ILL, many years ago! 

You can get copies from eBay, but they're not cheap.



Retreater said:


> Yeah, our library doesn't have them, and being out of print, won't buy them as a rule. Interlibrary Loan is an option, I suppose. Otherwise, I'll have to resort to other means to try to find them online.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Retreater said:


> Yeah, our library doesn't have them, and being out of print, won't buy them as a rule. Interlibrary Loan is an option, I suppose. Otherwise, I'll have to resort to other means to try to find them online.



Audible has them and I think Amazon still has them in Kindle form.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> However, Westerns are a big influence on D&D, and it might be better to consider the Western the "archetypical American fantasy" rather than the Oz books. (Also see: The Mandalorian).



The Wild West and its attendant characters are certainly the mythic stories Americans tell themselves about America.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> Again, this is what M&M was based around and even Champions (original pen and paper Champions) handled this fairly well. It's really not that hard. Marvel Heroic took an entirely different approach and it worked well too.
> 
> The biggest challenge is that to really get attention a Supers RPG has to be licensed and those DC and Marvel licenses are expensive. Costly to the point it seems to prevent any real financial viability for an ongoing, open-ended RPG line. So what's reasonable to produce are non-licensed or smaller-licensed RPGs. Hellboy and Sentinels of the Multiverse are both getting the RPG treatment right now so it's still an active area of the RPG scene.



M&M did have the DC license.

There's obviously a number of people that the level of fiddliness in M&M and Champions works well for -- no one is disputing that. But that's still a number of players several orders of magnitude smaller than either the D&D or comic book audience, to say nothing of the comic book movie audience.

Until a superhero game is as popular as even a middle tier World of Darkness game (Promethean or Geist, for example), I don't think we can say a superhero RPG has really been a big success.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Marandahir said:


> They discussed it at the Council of Elrond. Someone even asked why they couldn't just give it to Tom to look after. Tom would forget about it, and then with the Ring still extant, Sauron would conquer the world, and even Tom's country would fall, even if it was the last area to do so.



I don't remember this, but I'm not dumb enough to disbelieve someone with a Middle Earth elvish ENWorld handle. 



> The eagles are messengers of Manwë (albeit mortal ones) and are bound to specific missions similarly to the Maiar Istari. They can't directly intervene like that, and Tolkien himself said they had to be used sparingly lest this question be asked by everyone. He actually was frustrated with his usage of them in The Hobbit (which itself was a reference to Thorondor bearing Húrin to Gondolin, or Gwaihir and Landroval themselves rescuing Beren & Lúthien) later on during LotR, because it meant he was caught with this eucatastrophic tool. It let him get the "happy" ending for Frodo & Sam (of which he was altogether not sure was going to be able to happen - at one point in development, Sam was going to grab the ring and jump into the fire to end it all!). But the Eagles are not beholden to any mortals, they have no fëar (and thus cannot be considered among the "Free Peoples" of Middle-earth like the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Ents, and Hobbits) and only help Mithrandir and Aiwendil due to great respect and mutual support for each others' needs and missions. Gwaihir even tells Mithrandir at Isengard that he cannot carry him far - he was sent to bear tidings, not burdens. He only takes him as far as Edoras, where Gandalf tames the Mearas, Shadowfax, to carry him the rest of the way. But even Shadowfax returns to the Mark after getting Gandalf to Rivendell in Fellowship.
> 
> Mortal animals, no matter how long-lived like the Great Eagles, simply are not like free peoples. You might be able to convince them to help you, they might be able to talk like the Eagles, but they are driven by instinct and evolution, not by free will. These Eagles were taught the languages of the Valar and Elves and Men by Manwë and in exchange tasked with watching Morgoth and later Sauron's forces from the skies. But any ride they grant to mortals is a momentous event - they are not simply a force Gandalf can summon at will by grabbing any random moth and calling for their aid like in the movies.



One of Tolkien's failings, along with everyone singing constantly on their _secret mission _and the massive lack of female characters (literally no female characters appear on screen in the Rankin-Bass Hobbit cartoon, which is amazing to see once you realize it's happening, even in Laketown or Mirkwood) is that this sort of stuff _needs to be in the text_. The appendices and apocrypha are really interesting and fun -- I loved reading about what the Black Riders were up to in Unfinished Tales as a kid -- but if it's not in the core text, it's not really a defense.

And since he already went back and edited the Hobbit once as he was aligning it with LotR, that would have been an ideal time to remove the eagles there. As it is, I think it's completely fair for people to point out that they're basically the Uber of Middle Earth.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 26, 2020)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> Superheroes are the American myth, right up there alongside the Western, and I'm kind of amazed by the seeming lack of awareness in this article and thread.



But, again, there aren't really a ton of Western RPGs. Boot Hill was early, but that was probably its biggest claim to fame. Deadlands is almost certainly the most successful such RPG and was third-tier at best.

That said, I think Westerns per se are a lot less popular than they were even a decade or two ago, despite the long cultural shadow they cast.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 27, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> That said, I think Westerns per se are a lot less popular than they were even a decade or two ago, despite the long cultural shadow they cast.




In year 2000, a 10 year old might have a 70 year old grandparent who was born in year 1930. That grandparent might have a grandparent who was born in year 1870.

So close-knit American family hears family stories about the West, and can feel a personal connection to it, and relate to its sensibilities.

Moreover, the 10-year-olds grandparent can have experienced the surge of the Western genre before and after the 1950s.

But as generations move forward, it becomes more difficult to preserve earlier identities for future generations.

Meanwhile, the most immediate Wild West that we are dealing with today, is the global internet.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 27, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> I don't remember this, but I'm not dumb enough to disbelieve someone with a Middle Earth elvish ENWorld handle.




It's not, but I find it hilarious that people think it is (you're not alone). Any actual scholar of Qenya, Sindarin, Ñoldoli, Mithrin, Doriathrin, Telerin, etc would probably be offended if I claimed it was any sort of proper Sindarin formation. It comes from a child me creating a name that sounded vaguely similar, decades ago. Thanks. 



> One of Tolkien's failings, along with everyone singing constantly on their _secret mission _and the massive lack of female characters (literally no female characters appear on screen in the Rankin-Bass Hobbit cartoon, which is amazing to see once you realize it's happening, even in Laketown or Mirkwood) is that this sort of stuff _needs to be in the text_. The appendices and apocrypha are really interesting and fun -- I loved reading about what the Black Riders were up to in Unfinished Tales as a kid -- but if it's not in the core text, it's not really a defense.
> 
> And since he already went back and edited the Hobbit once as he was aligning it with LotR, that would have been an ideal time to remove the eagles there. As it is, I think it's completely fair for people to point out that they're basically the Uber of Middle Earth.




I disagree about singing (it's not so constant, when the Hobbits are singing in Book I, they're usually admonished by fate for doing so and/or were in a safe place, and when anyone else is singing throughout the series, it's in a very reasonable place). Song is used in the bardic sense - to encourage, inspire, grant fortitude and the ability to keep on going.

About lack of female characters, I agree with you wholeheartedly for Hobbit & LotR, though they're abundantly present in his Silmarillion Great Stories. Probably because Tolkien was writing based on his experiences in WWI, marching over the Alps and hunkered and bunkered down in the trenches.

I love the Rankin-Bass cartoons fyi, as cheesy as they are, for the gorgeous proto-Ghibli artwork. But this is a big reason why Tauriel was added to the Hobbit trilogy, to the nerdrage of millions, as well as why Arwen's role was expanded to the LotR trilogy, to the nerdhots of millions. You can't win always.

I agree he should have resolved a lot in his books. He was tinkering with them to the end of his life. Silmarillion, Hobbit, and LotR form a cohesive super-text, but Silmarillion is a frankenstein's monster since Tolkien never settled on major questions like do Orcs have souls and free will, and if so, does that make his heroes racist? So he never finished it, and Chris asked a popular writer to help fill in the gaps and few were the wiser until Christopher did the History of Middle-earth.

In any case, Tolkien himself would say the works have numerous flaws and inconsistencies that he wished to reconcile, if he was still alive. Few authors are satisfied with their works, even when they get them to the published state. George Lucas was the same with Star Wars…

Speaking of American Fantasy giants.


----------



## Tonguez (Aug 27, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> But, again, there aren't really a ton of Western RPGs. Boot Hill was early, but that was probably its biggest claim to fame. Deadlands is almost certainly the most successful such RPG and was third-tier at best.
> 
> That said, I think Westerns per se are a lot less popular than they were even a decade or two ago, despite the long cultural shadow they cast.




You can blame the Space Opera for that, Star Wars and Star Trek are both Westerns in their structure but entirely different genre.




Haldrik said:


> In year 2000, a 10 year old might have a 70 year old grandparent who was born in year 1930. That grandparent might have a grandparent who was born in year 1870.
> 
> So close-knit American family hears family stories about the West, and can feel a personal connection to it, and relate to its sensibilities.
> 
> ...




Kind of, my grandfather was born in 1926 and his grandfather was in the Madras Fusiliers during the Indian Rebellion 1857. All he remembered of his grandfather was a big imposing figure and that when they buried him, he was caried in a big black hearse coach pulled by two black horses with feather plumes.

Equally another great grandfather who was around 100 when he died 1979 was born in the house of his great grand uncle - who was also over 100 and who as a child had met Capt James Cook.

I dont feel much of a personal connection to British India,the British Admiralty or British Imperialism in general


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 27, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> You can blame the Space Opera for that, Star Wars and Star Trek are both Westerns in their structure but entirely different genre.



As is the cop who plays by his own rules, which Justified made explicit.

Like I said, this is the story Americans love to tell themselves.

Speaking of which, something I've said for years: Lonesome Dove works in _any genre_. McMurtry happened to write arguably the greatest Western of all time, but it takes almost no effort to turn it into a fantasy epic, a war remembrance, a science fiction story, a superhero tale, samurais, whatever. It's got amazing bones and plays off of not just Western archetypes, but Joseph Campbell stuff. Any DM who's ever stumped for a campaign idea: rip off Lonesome Dove and the last hurrah of great heroes of the past, bringing along the new generation with them through a world they increasingly don't know.


----------



## jedijon (Aug 27, 2020)

We’re reading Baum now? Somehow I doubt it. Quoth the raven—nevermore.

At least Edith Nesbit got there first.

Always interesting to take a walk down memory lane. I’ll tell you two tomes that really haven’t aged well: ‘The Adventures of Huck Finn’ and ‘The Kamasutra’.

Must we really lament that there’s not more of this stuff?


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 27, 2020)

I should probably point out that it's not just franchises with "Star" in their name that are Westerns.

The Conan and John Carter stories are also heavily influenced by Westerns.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 27, 2020)

Neonchameleon said:


> American Fantasy as described in "The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature" would appear to me to be significantly more dead than the Western as a genre




So "American Fantasy" is basically "weird stuff happening out in the cornfields"? It seems to me that it should more correctly be called "American Horror" of the Stephen King variety.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 27, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> In year 2000, a 10 year old might have a 70 year old grandparent who was born in year 1930. That grandparent might have a grandparent who was born in year 1870.
> 
> So close-knit American family hears family stories about the West, and can feel a personal connection to it, and relate to its sensibilities.
> 
> ...



In my case it was because my Dad owned tons of Western novels as well as books by Edgard Rice Burroughs, so I basically grew up with this stuff too.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 27, 2020)

Fantasy


Ravenbrook said:


> So "American Fantasy" is basically "weird stuff happening out in the cornfields"? It seems to me that it should more correctly be called "American Horror" of the Stephen King variety.



Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, and Weird/Strange/Paranormal Fiction have heavy overlaps. 

As they do with other "Pulp" fiction or "Genre" fiction, but even more so together.

Heck, this is literally how Marvel Comics became the juggernaut it is today: by taking the tropes of the genre stories in pulp fiction magazines and penny dreadful novels and porting them into their "Tales of Suspense" (Iron Man, Captain America), "Tales to Astonish" (Ant-Man, later also the Hulk) "Strange Tales" (Doctor Strange, Nick Fury), and "Amazing Fantasy" (Spider-Man). 


You can't tease apart the genres completely. These were the stories the geeks and nerds of the day 180s-1950s were interested in (many of whom have already been mentioned here, like Conan, John Carter, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers), and after the fall of the Pulp Magazines, comic books, fantasy & sci-fi novels, and the eventually the rise of massively popular genre films like Star Wars would carry on the mantle. Remember that Lucas himself wanted to make a film to pay homage not only to John Wayne and Akira Kurosawa, but also to the 1930s serialized films of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. 

And today, the serialized film has cemented itself back into the American moviegoing mindset, with massive movie franchises churning out multiple intereconnected films a year, and streaming services delivering hour long episodes in batches (or in the case of Netflix, in binge-bundles) with no commercial interruptions. The pulp serial film has now come into your own home.


----------



## jasper (Aug 27, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Great call! Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John tales are woefully out-of-print. Fortunately my library had a dusty copy of The Old Gods Waken in storage. Definitely a solid example of American Fantasy. The Chained Coffin is a great descendant that manages to meld its Appalachian folk influences into a traditional fantasy setting.



I haven't read Silver John but I had to put John the Balladeer into my File 13 column. The written speech patterns got on my nerves.


----------



## jmartkdr2 (Aug 27, 2020)

Something that I feel hasn't been pointed out enough: a good fictional setting for a book and good fictional setting for a roleplaying game are not the same thing. I don't want to dive too deep into it this morning, but you need a particular kind of setting to make someone want to play in that setting. It needs a lot of detail and a lot of mystery and a lot of diversity to create the characters and adventures that make games fun. Oz is not that - it's too vague to serve as a foundation. A lot of other fictional settings are too closed - the world of a Wheel of Time doesn't leave enough unexplored to make for good gaming. The best examples I can think of for a setting where people really want to dive in further:

Middle-Earth
Hogwarts
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away,
and Space: the final frontier.

Star Wars is extremely American, containing all the tropes people are talking about when they try to define American Fantasy: immigrants, factions, Westerns, races, social mobility, personal faith, lone heroes, etc. I'd vote for Star Wars as the platonic ideal American Fantasy. Including space. Space is a big part of the American imagination, after all. 

Hogwarts would have a major rpg if anyone could get the licence, and Middle-Earth not only has dedicated games but is the mother of the biggest rpg of them all. Star Wars is not far behind, though, with three major rpgs based on the setting, all of which are/were pretty big deals in their time.

Star Trek is tougher because keeping everyone involved and engaged in ship combat is a tough nut to crack, but many attempts have been made.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 27, 2020)

jmartkdr2 said:


> you need a particular kind of setting to make someone want to play in that setting. It needs a lot of detail and a lot of mystery and a lot of diversity to create the characters and adventures that make games fun. Oz is not that - it's too vague to serve as a foundation.



The maps the Oz obsessives have made definitely argue otherwise. (I actually had this map in high school, which I guess makes me one of them.)


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 27, 2020)

jmartkdr2 said:


> Hogwarts would have a major rpg if anyone could get the licence



I think JKR's star is rapidly falling among Harry Potter fans. And there's actually a slew of Hogwarts-like RPGs out or coming out now, including Kids on Brooms, which came out earlier this month and which has been written up several times on EN World.



> Middle-Earth not only has dedicated games but is the mother of the biggest rpg of them all



For the record, Gygax strongly disagreed, including here at EN World, as I recall. I was skeptical about that until I started reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (don't bother with the last few books, for the record) and it was genuinely shocking how much they _are_ D&D, decades beforehand, to the point that Leiber, if he had wanted to be a jerk about it, could have likely had a good case against TSR.


----------



## Undrave (Aug 27, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> I think JKR's star is rapidly falling among Harry Potter fans. And there's actually a slew of Hogwarts-like RPGs out or coming out now, including Kids on Brooms, which came out earlier this month and which has been written up several times on EN World.




That and, personally, I never found the world building in Harry Potter to be particularly impressive. Most of it is whimsy for the sake of whimsy (and puns) and its magic system is too soft to properly codify into a game. It's all non-sense pseudo-latin and one off spells... and really impractical stuff like using friggin' fireplace that are in used to teleport instead of purpose built ones or wasting magic when a regular photograph would do the job... or moving stairs?! Kids just smacking each other with stick while flying twenty feet above the ground...


----------



## Dausuul (Aug 27, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> For the record, Gygax strongly disagreed, including here at EN World, as I recall. I was skeptical about that until I started reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (don't bother with the last few books, for the record) and it was genuinely shocking how much they _are_ D&D, decades beforehand, to the point that Leiber, if he had wanted to be a jerk about it, could have likely had a good case against TSR.



Very true. However, TSR eagerly capitalized on the Tolkien craze by adding Middle-Earth elements (dwarves, elves, orcs, etc.), and that opened the door for Tolkien themes to enter D&D and quickly gain tremendous influence.

You can see it in the alignment system. The original alignments were simply Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic; very much in keeping with the swords-and-sorcery tradition, especially Michael Moorcock. While Chaos was more likely to be associated with "bad stuff," it wasn't a hard and fast rule. But when Tolkienesque high fantasy came in, that demanded a clash of clearly defined Good and Evil, and so we got the nine-point system we have now.

Of the three "big settings" for AD&D, Dragonlance was firmly in the Tolkien camp and defined by Good versus Evil, while Greyhawk was just as firmly in the Howard/Leiber camp and defined by Law versus Chaos. (Forgotten Realms, of course, crammed everything in and to hell with consistency or theme. The fact that FR came out on top in the end is a cautionary tale for purists.)

As for L. Frank Baum, there's no reason why he should ever have had any great influence on D&D, and he didn't. He's one writer in one strand of the rich and broad tradition of American fantasy; D&D belongs to a different strand and draws on different writers.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 27, 2020)

The law/chaos/neutrality axis was a good system when D&D was something a few hobbyists in Wisconsin was playing. The public was never going to get it, given that arguments about alignment have been around since the 1970s (which you can see in the letters columns of Dragon), when more people had actually read Moorcock. Even then, though, it wasn't something most folks, even many fantasy fans, really understood.

I don't think inclusion of good vs. evil is about Tolkein so much as it as recognition that it's one of the primary conflict axes in Western pop culture.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 27, 2020)

Marandahir said:


> ...the 1930s serialized films of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.



I recently watched some of the original Flash Gordon flicks (1936). They're hilarious, especially the ridiculous costumes and spaceships. I'm sure that people 80 years from now will also laugh about today's sci-fi.


----------



## Tonguez (Aug 27, 2020)

jmartkdr2 said:


> Middle-Earth
> Hogwarts
> A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away,
> and Space: the final frontier.



|

Not really, once you get pass the movie, Oz has some awesome world building with the Land of Ev, the Nome Kings Domain and villains like said Nome King and Princess Langwidere. Its got a more steampunk vibe than traditonal fantasy but I for one would love to adventure there.

Hogwarts on the other hand isnt that interesting in terms of worldbuilding. The premise of Students at a Wizards Academy is cool, which is why there are so many Anime versions of the premise to chose from


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 27, 2020)

Ravenbrook said:


> I recently watched some of the original Flash Gordon flicks (1936). They're hilarious, especially the ridiculous costumes and spaceships. I'm sure that people 80 years from now will also laugh about today's sci-fi.



I mean… I still laugh at 80s sci-fi & fantasy stop motion animation creatures (like the Rancor in Star Wars Episode VI).

And now looking back at Fellowship of the Ring, I laugh at obvious and dated CGI (such as the Fellowship running across the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm) or when the Hobbits & Dwarves look entirely different in wide-shots because they thought they could "make it work" with the dwarf double actors wearing face masks. The effect works unless you notice that the Hobbits are a lot "rounder" so to speak in wide shots than they are in closeups.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 27, 2020)

Those are just the moments when the hobbits' girdles popped open.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 27, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> Those are just the moments when the hobbits' girdles popped open.



I meant rounder in the face (mostly from the layers of prosthetics if anything!), but I guess body type is slightly different too. Hah. 

In general, Peter Jackson's Hobbits were too lean.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 27, 2020)

When I think of American Fantasy, there's one recent tale that I come back to: Over the Garden Wall. A dark, but whimsical, world of dangerous backwoods, paddle boats on winding rivers, and small communities of strangers, both mundane and mystical.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 27, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> When I think of American Fantasy, there's one recent tale that I come back to: Over the Garden Wall. A dark, but whimsical, world of dangerous backwoods, paddle boats on winding rivers, and small communities of strangers, both mundane and mystical.



Very in synch with the tone of the Oz novels, incidentally.

AND WE COME FULL CIRCLE!


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 28, 2020)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> Superheroes are the American myth, right up there alongside the Western, and I'm kind of amazed by the seeming lack of awareness in this article and thread. There are more Superhero RPGs available now than ever before. M&M is probably the biggest and has been in its 3rd edition for at least ten years now and has had a steady stream of releases for years.
> 
> M&M. They had a DC Heroes branded version that was 4 books.
> Champions is still around in 6th edition "complete" form.
> ...




Fate also has a few official supers settings: Venture City: a 'superpunk' setting in the usual Marvel/DC mold, On the Wall, a teen school drama with elements of X-Men mutants, and Spirit of the Century/Atomic Robo for your pulp adventurers fix.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 28, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> Hogwarts on the other hand isnt that interesting in terms of worldbuilding.



Potterverse is ok. Each reallife culture has their own kind of wizard cultures. Harry Potter happens to be in the British one.

It is almost "American" in the sense of colliding cultures in a New World.

But I suspect it is more like British boarding schools around the world.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 28, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> Very in synch with the tone of the Oz novels, incidentally.
> 
> AND WE COME FULL CIRCLE!




So, mystical/alternate 1880s-1920s Southeast/mid-West with a tech level sitting right around candlestick phones and Model Ts...? I'd play it.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 28, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> Fate also has a few official supers settings: Venture City: a 'superpunk' setting in the usual Marvel/DC mold, On the Wall, a teen school drama with elements of X-Men mutants, and Spirit of the Century/Atomic Robo for your pulp adventurers fix.



I would love to see an excellent translation of X-Men and New Mutants into 5e.


----------



## Doug McCrae (Aug 28, 2020)

The tall tale is distinctively American partly because of the importance placed on work. Paul Bunyan is a lumberjack, the greatest lumberjack of all time. Captain Stormalong is a sailor. John Henry dies on the job, outworking a machine.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 28, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> So, mystical/alternate 1880s-1920s Southeast/mid-West with a tech level sitting right around candlestick phones and Model Ts...?  I'd play it.



Sounds like Eberron. If necessary, use Eberron mechanics, and use reallife flavor for the setting and its map.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 28, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Sounds like Eberron. If necessary, use Eberron mechanics, and use reallife flavor for the setting and its map.




Edit: 'So, mystical/alternate 1860s-1910s Southeast/mid-West with a tech level sitting right before/at cartridge firearms, candlestick phones, and Model Ts...? I'd play it.'

1880s-1920s is more Victorian/WWI. I was thinking (cherry-picked) Antebellum South to just BEFORE the World War. A solid fifty years of steady change and milder turmoil before the 20th Century REALLY kicks in and runs everyone through a blender.

(I have to learn to edit my posts faster.)


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 28, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> Edit: 'So, mystical/alternate 1860s-1910s Southeast/mid-West with a tech level sitting right before/at cartridge firearms, candlestick phones, and Model Ts...? I'd play it.'
> 
> 1880s-1920s is more Victorian/WWI. I was thinking (cherry-picked) Antebellum South to just BEFORE the World War. A solid fifty years of steady change and milder turmoil before the 20th Century REALLY kicks in and runs everyone through a blender.




The lightbulb patent is circa 1880. Seems like a good landmark for before-and-after technological themes.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 28, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> The lightbulb patent is circa 1880. Seems like a good landmark for before-and-after technological themes.




Yeah, a good sign of the changing times when the world slowly starts banishing the night, long term.


----------



## SehanineMoonbow (Aug 28, 2020)

Marandahir said:


> I love the Oz books, but they're also a product of their time - there's more than a little racism and other antiquated ideas in these books.
> 
> I love your connection between the party in _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ with the party in _The Journey to the West_. I had never considered that connection, and I somewhat doubt Baum had knowledge of the Chinese epic, but the flow of gathering party members who are at first sources of conflict is undeniable. One of the big debates in fairy tale, folklore, mythology, and religious studies is whether mirroring stories from opposite sides of the world draw from a deep archetypal element of human psychology that is universal to our species and bubble up to the surface as independent subcreations, or whether these stories can theoretically be traced back to a common origin with the first humans emerging out of Africa (or any  other specific point in human history, that then spread by cultural diffusion).
> 
> ...





Neonchameleon said:


> [Note: Some emphasis mine]
> 
> American Fantasy as described in "The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature" would appear to me to be significantly more dead than the Western as a genre - and that's why you don't see it much in modern RPGs. I can think of a lot of good modern fantasy novels by Americans but I'm struggling to think of anything significant in the last half-century that qualifies as American Fantasy ("The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature" was written in 1980 so the death of the genre might not have been so obvious).
> 
> ...





I love Japanese mythology. I'm no expert on it, but I've studied it some, along with religion in Japan in general. When the _Kojiki _was written, they drew on a lot of folklore from the land (the term "Shinto" wouldn't be used until much later), to come up with a cohesive creation narrative for the country. 

Anyway, on topic, as others have mentioned, I think, while Americans may romanticized things like the Wild West, "medieval" style castles and elements from Western mythos have a large influence on American fantasy. We unfortunately don't get as much Native American influence, so much of "American fantasy" like D&D draws most of its inspiration from the "medieval" world of Europe. 

Of course you have urban fantasies, with magical worlds under our nose, like in Chicago or something (while in Europe, even Harry Potter took place alongside "the real world"). 

The world of Oz has certainly found its place in American pop culture. You have retellings of it (look at _Wicked_), and phrases like, "There's no place like home" are deep in the American conscience (even if the depiction of "home" in this case is rural Kansas). There is a sort of nostalgia for bygone days of rural America (romanticized by images of fireflies, corn and wheat fields, etc), but those depictions also come with a lot of historical baggage. 

Fantasy itself is a very popular genre in America, but it's often fantasy that draws from European influences.


----------



## Tonguez (Aug 28, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> When I think of American Fantasy, there's one recent tale that I come back to: Over the Garden Wall. A dark, but whimsical, world of dangerous backwoods, paddle boats on winding rivers, and small communities of strangers, both mundane and mystical.




The trailer didnt give me a particularly American feel, however your description got me thinking of the movie Big Fish, which I suppose takes us back to Southern Gothic. Interesting the how the presence of the travelling circus seems to be an important trope to the American fantasy genre


Im also suprised (though I may have missed it) that no one has mentioned Orson Scott Cards Alvin Maker series..


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 28, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> The trailer didnt give me a particularly American feel, however your description got me thinking of the movie Big Fish, which I suppose takes us back to Southern Gothic. Interesting the how the presence of the travelling circus seems to be an important trope to the American fantasy genre




Hold on... Ah. The first episode is officially on YT. Might give you a better read of the series.


----------



## MGibster (Aug 28, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> This is why Urban Fantasy is bigger in the US than Europe or Asia. The US is a young nation and shyed away from the history of the Natives for so long. It missed the boat on Medieval knights and Classical empires. And by the time it fully united, it was the Modern Era. So it's fantasy would be based around the thoughts and fears of the cities, the ruggedness and familiarity of the small towns, or the sense of exploration of going out on your own.




The United States did not spring forth fully grown from the forehead of Europe as some sort of historical tabula rasa.  European history and literature is a core part of our education with Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_, _Beowulf, _and Greek mythology commonly being taught in grades 6-12.  We didn't miss the boat on medieval knights or classical empires any more than a modern French or British person did.  Though we don't have all those cool castles right here in our backyard.  

And there are European nations that weren't fully united until the modern era.  Great Britain wasn't fully unified until 1707, Italy in 1861, and Germany in 1871.  And the horrors of cities?  Didn't Charles Dickens cover some of that in his books?  



> For example,* factions* are big in American Fantasy. Because the US is a melting pot of different cultures, there is always a sort of faction system in most American societies.  American facial has racial groups, "racial" groups, gangs, cartels, unions, alliances, cliques and the like.




Historically speaking there have been plenty of factions based on religion, politics, and economic goals in Europe.  There are whole books just written about the barber-surgeons, physicians, and apothecaries of London, all of whom were in competition with one another for centuries.  Factions are big in every human society I can think of.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 28, 2020)

SehanineMoonbow said:


> Fantasy itself is a very popular genre in America, but it's often fantasy that draws from European influences.




That's mostly because the Americas didn't have a traditional Classical nor MedievalAge. Not a traditional Iron age. A lot of fantasy tropes that exist in Europe, Asia, and Africa never existed in the Americas. And the information of the timea is so scattered or lost. 

So the early American fantasy can pull from is the 1600s. Well into the days of Gunpowder. Therefore a lot of American Fantasy pulls from the later era.
1600 Pirates
1860s-1890s Wild West
1920 Prohibition
1930 Dustbowl
1980-2000 Urban 
2050+ Cyberpunk


----------



## Hussar (Aug 28, 2020)

MGibster said:


> The United States did not spring forth fully grown from the forehead of Europe as some sort of historical tabula rasa.  European history and literature is a core part of our education with Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_, _Beowulf, _and Greek mythology commonly being taught in grades 6-12.  We didn't miss the boat on medieval knights or classical empires any more than a modern French or British person did.  Though we don't have all those cool castles right here in our backyard.
> 
> And there are European nations that weren't fully united until the modern era.  Great Britain wasn't fully unified until 1707, Italy in 1861, and Germany in 1871.  And the horrors of cities?  Didn't Charles Dickens cover some of that in his books?
> 
> ...




What American public schools did you go to?  Canterbury Tales taught in junior or high school?  Beowulf?  You had one hell of an English department if that's true.  I'm pretty sure that none of those works appear in the overwhelming majority of American public school reading lists.  You're lucky, anymore, if Tolkien appears on any of those reading lists.  

But, at the end of the day, it's hard to draw on American fantasy because of the technological level.  18th and 19th century technology means no more castles, widespread gunpowder use, widespread professional armies, and a world that is far more full than the previous few hundred years.  By the time of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy would be familiar with technology that is, by and large, completely out of place in what we consider to be traditional fantasy.  

In other words, the reason we don't really see American fantasy of this style influencing D&D very much is the time period is all wrong.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 28, 2020)

MGibster said:


> The United States did not spring forth fully grown from the forehead of Europe as some sort of historical tabula rasa. European history and literature is a core part of our education with Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_, _Beowulf, _and Greek mythology commonly being taught in grades 6-12. We didn't miss the boat on medieval knights or classical empires any more than a modern French or British person did. Though we don't have all those cool castles right here in our backyard.




Yes, but America the land doesn't havethat history. There's no American knights leaving an American castle to fight American dragons.

So yes, America leans to European history and fantasy. However that history and fantasy isn't American. The time period is all wrong.



MGibster said:


> And there are European nations that weren't fully united until the modern era. Great Britain wasn't fully unified until 1707, Italy in 1861, and Germany in 1871. And the horrors of cities? Didn't Charles Dickens cover some of that in his books?




However Europeans nations have more history to pull from. The relative youth of the United States means that the Modern Era is fonder to Americans than it would bee to Europeans, Asians, and Africans.



MGibster said:


> Historically speaking there have been plenty of factions based on religion, politics, and economic goals in Europe. There are whole books just written about the barber-surgeons, physicians, and apothecaries of London, all of whom were in competition with one another for centuries. Factions are big in every human society I can think of.




Didn't say Europe doesn't have factions. I said factions in an RPG likely mean more to American gamers as US history and media constantly bombards up with gangsters, criminal organizations, racial gangs, competing law enforcement, high school cliques, secret societies, class warfare, corporate warfare, and political drama.

My friend joked that why Americans like "Game of Thrones. You can root for your favorite gang."


----------



## Tonguez (Aug 28, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> That's mostly because the Americas didn't have a traditional Classical nor MedievalAge. Not a traditional Iron age. A lot of fantasy tropes that exist in Europe, Asia, and Africa never existed in the Americas. And the information of the timea is so scattered or lost.
> 
> So the early American fantasy can pull from is the 1600s. Well into the days of Gunpowder. Therefore a lot of American Fantasy pulls from the later era.
> 1600 Pirates
> ...




Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court And Conan would suggest otherwise


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 28, 2020)

Hussar said:


> What American public schools did you go to?  Canterbury Tales taught in junior or high school?  Beowulf?  You had one hell of an English department if that's true.  I'm pretty sure that none of those works appear in the overwhelming majority of American public school reading lists.  You're lucky, anymore, if Tolkien appears on any of those reading lists.
> 
> But, at the end of the day, it's hard to draw on American fantasy because of the technological level.  18th and 19th century technology means no more castles, widespread gunpowder use, widespread professional armies, and a world that is far more full than the previous few hundred years.  By the time of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy would be familiar with technology that is, by and large, completely out of place in what we consider to be traditional fantasy.
> 
> In other words, the reason we don't really see American fantasy of this style influencing D&D very much is the time period is all wrong.




I didn't have Beowulf, but I did have Canterbury Tales in AP English at my public high school.


American Fantasy could lean more heavily into the myths and tropes of the stories told by the actual American peoples who have been here for thousands of years and DID have an Iron Age of sorts - in the Canada, Beothuk among other native peoples acquired iron some from Leif Eriksson's Vinlanders, and then centuries later iron and other European tech filtered in through trade to interior first nations, long before direct contact with Europeans existed for those nations. 

That said, doing so as a white person without a connection to these cultures is just as perilous as engaging in fantasy based on East Asian fantasy - very easy to dive into racist romantic and/or barbaric caricatures. Still, these are the people whose stories are embedded in the land we live on, whose names echo in many of our towns and place names, even if our ancestors long ago killed or drove them away and our governments are still treating the survivors as second class citizens. If we listen respectfully and follow their lead, we can engage in good faith. 

I recommend anyone who can - when the pandemic is over - to visit such places of learning as the Pequot Museum in Connecticut, where the stories are remembered and told by the surviving Pequots themselves.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 28, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> That's mostly because the Americas didn't have a traditional Classical nor MedievalAge. Not a traditional Iron age. A lot of fantasy tropes that exist in Europe, Asia, and Africa never existed in the Americas. And the information of the timea is so scattered or lost.
> 
> So the early American fantasy can pull from is the 1600s. Well into the days of Gunpowder. Therefore a lot of American Fantasy pulls from the later era.
> 1600 Pirates
> ...



Maybe add an era of onvention and gagetry, relating to lightbulb, airplane, and backyard inventors, and garages.

Also cold war, nuclear post apocalyptic,  space alien eras.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 28, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> Orson Scott Cards Alvin Maker series..



Orson Scott Card JK Rowlinged himself years before JK Rowling did, so I don't think he's top of mind much any more.


----------



## Wishbone (Aug 28, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> Orson Scott Card JK Rowlinged himself years before JK Rowling did, so I don't think he's top of mind much any more.




To be fair I don't think any of the people I know who ever liked Orson Scott Card before his views became known liked him for Alvin Maker—it was all for the Ender and Bean books.


----------



## MGibster (Aug 28, 2020)

Hussar said:


> What American public schools did you go to?  Canterbury Tales taught in junior or high school?  Beowulf?  You had one hell of an English department if that's true.  I'm pretty sure that none of those works appear in the overwhelming majority of American public school reading lists.  You're lucky, anymore, if Tolkien appears on any of those reading lists.




I went to middle school and high school in Plano, Texas.  In fact, all seniors in Plano were required to recite the first part of the prologue from the Canterbury Tales to their English teacher.  It's been 26 years and I still have most of it memorized.  (However, I cannot spell it from memory.)  And maybe not everyone went to a wealthy school district like I was lucky to, but I can't help but think people like Gygax, Arneson, and others were exposed to Arthurian.  Mark Twain was influenced by Arthurian tales and one of the oldest brands of flour in the country is King Arthur.  It's a part of our culture too.  

Whan that Aprille with his shour*e*s soot*e*,
The droghte of March hath perc*e*d to the root*e*,
And bath*e*d every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendr*e*d is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swet*e* breeth
Inspir*e*d hath in every holt and heeth
The tendr*e* cropp*e*s, and the yong*e* sonn*e*
Hath in the Ram his half*e* cours y-ronn*e*,
And smal*e* fowel*e*s maken melody*e*,
That slepen al the nyght with open y*e*,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corag*e*s,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimag*e*s,
And palmeres for to seken straung*e* strond*e*s,
To fern*e* halw*e*s, kowthe in sondry lond*e*s;
And specially, from every shir*e*s end*e*
Of Eng*e*lond, to Caunterbury they wend*e*,
The hooly blisful martir for to sek*e*,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seek*e*.




> But, at the end of the day, it's hard to draw on American fantasy because of the technological level.  18th and 19th century technology means no more castles, widespread gunpowder use, widespread professional armies, and a world that is far more full than the previous few hundred years.




I tend to agree with you here.  I can suspend my disbelief for dragons, fireballs, and all manner of intelligent humanoid species living on the same continent, but I can't wrap my head around shooting someone and only doing 1d8.


----------



## MGibster (Aug 28, 2020)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> For the record, Gygax strongly disagreed, including here at EN World, as I recall. I was skeptical about that until I started reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (don't bother with the last few books, for the record) and it was genuinely shocking how much they _are_ D&D, decades beforehand, to the point that Leiber, if he had wanted to be a jerk about it, could have likely had a good case against TSR.




I was reading a Conan story last year and I could swear that during his exploration of an ancient abandoned holy city he behaved exactly like an AD&D character.  The way he checked for secret spaces in walls and altars was very reminiscent of dungeon crawling adventures.


----------



## Tonguez (Aug 28, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> Didn't say Europe doesn't have factions. I said factions in an RPG likely mean more to American gamers as US history and media constantly bombards up with gangsters, criminal organizations, racial gangs, competing law enforcement, high school cliques, secret societies, class warfare, corporate warfare, and political drama.
> 
> My friend joked that why Americans like "Game of Thrones. You can root for your favorite gang."




Europe definitely has a huge number of factions, knightly Orders, Merchant guilds, church sects, heresies, Hunting clubs, Fencing Schools, Public Schools, street gangs, isolated villages, pagan cults, outlaw lairs, banks and Company.

The difference I think though is that Europe has a much deeper ‘Institutional tradition’ which works to constrain the work of factionalism within it - the monolithic Church and the Imperial Courts are the two (or so) most obvious institutions which defined the social boundaries of Europe.

The European crusades can be viewed as factional, the 3 Musketeers was about factionalism, and of course the Protestant Reformation was creation of a new faction. In Europe pretty much every nation is a faction and then you get the rise of Mercantilism - the Company v the Crown too.

I think the difference with the Americas is that those Institutions had to all be established new and they had to stake out their new territorial borders. Things like the Church and Crown had a huge advantage of course, but even rebel groups like the Puritans, Amish and Irish were able to find a place - hence the whole ‘American Liberty‘ narrative.
Of course, the Crown lost ground after the American Rebellion and private institutions and Company, filled the gap staking their claim in American society creating the whole - Pioneer Individualism narrative too


----------



## Azzy (Aug 28, 2020)

Ace said:


> 2020 is not all of modernity grasshopper.




But it sure is the most _modern_ modernity there is.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 28, 2020)

Tonguez said:


> Europe definitely has a huge number of factions, knightly Orders, Merchant guilds, church sects, heresies, Hunting clubs, Fencing Schools, Public Schools, street gangs, isolated villages, pagan cults, outlaw lairs, banks and Company.
> 
> The difference I think though is that Europe has a much deeper ‘Institutional tradition’ which works to constrain the work of factionalism within it - the monolithic Church and the Imperial Courts are the two (or so) most obvious institutions which defined the social boundaries of Europe.
> 
> ...




I think that might it. American factions tend to carve out their own area of control, have closer "power levels" to other factions, and are more likely to come together democratically. Since the US never had a Crown or Church to stamp down on factions, American factions tend to have more independence. Even when there are more power factions,there are multiple ones and struggle with each other.

You see this in WoD and the MTG settings. Ravnica feels very American in its fantasy.


----------



## Azzy (Aug 28, 2020)

Undrave said:


> ...But why aren't superhero games more popular then?




Maybe because rules that allow the flexibility to recreate the wide range of superpowers tend to be a bit onerous (from general mechanics to decision paralysis in character creation) for the new player. Champions is probably the best example of this.


----------



## Azzy (Aug 28, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I have tried to watch the Pokeman cartoon several times. ... I just dont get it.




It would be easier for you to understand if you were a pre-adolescent child. A lot of children's entertainment is like that.


----------



## Cadence (Aug 28, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I have tried to watch the Pokeman cartoon several times. ... I just dont get it.




The first thing is notice that there are apparently _no non-Poke animals_ in the world.
Then google up Beyblade and Bakugan and try to stand watching a few episodes of them. (WTF!?!?!)
And then  go back to Pokemon and ponder the mysteries of how all the police and nurse characters are like clones, why the world full of dangerous wild Pokemon has kids running free starting at 10, and attempt to decide whether or not Bewear is as awesomely powerful as it seems.


----------



## Aldarc (Aug 28, 2020)

Hussar said:


> What American public schools did you go to?  Canterbury Tales taught in junior or high school?  Beowulf?  You had one hell of an English department if that's true.  I'm pretty sure that none of those works appear in the overwhelming majority of American public school reading lists.  You're lucky, anymore, if Tolkien appears on any of those reading lists.



Seems fairly normal. We read Beowulf (translated). Had to memorize the general prologue of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and read the rest in modern English. We also covered important sections of Paradise Lost. I grew up in a small, rural Southern Appalachian town. The largest town in the county is about 17-18K people.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 28, 2020)

Aldarc said:


> Seems fairly normal. We read Beowulf (translated). Had to memorize the general prologue of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and read the rest in modern English. We also covered important sections of Paradise Lost. I grew up in a small, rural Southern town. The largest town in the county is about 17-18K people.




Also sounds similar to my education (Portland, Oregon). We had to read a lot of Shakespeare starting from 8th grade. A little Milton and Chaucer. Some Plato. Lots of Homer. Some Greek drama.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 28, 2020)

MGibster said:


> I went to middle school and high school in Plano, Texas.  In fact, all seniors in Plano were required to recite the first part of the prologue from the Canterbury Tales to their English teacher.  It's been 26 years and I still have most of it memorized.  (However, I cannot spell it from memory.)  And maybe not everyone went to a wealthy school district like I was lucky to, but I can't help but think people like Gygax, Arneson, and others were exposed to Arthurian.  Mark Twain was influenced by Arthurian tales and one of the oldest brands of flour in the country is King Arthur.  It's a part of our culture too.
> 
> Whan that Aprille with his shour*e*s soot*e*,
> The droghte of March hath perc*e*d to the root*e*,
> ...



I get the impression American schools - at least the expensive ones - take the teaching of English Literature far more seriously than English schools. These days in England you wouldn't meet Chaucer until degree level, and it's getting increasingly difficult to keep anything written prior to the 20th century, or any poetry at all, in the curriculum.


----------



## Aldarc (Aug 28, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> I get the impression American schools - *at least the expensive ones* - take the teaching of English Literature far more seriously than English schools. These days in England you wouldn't meet Chaucer until degree level, and it's getting increasingly difficult to keep anything written prior to the 20th century, or any poetry at all, in the curriculum.



I went to a run-down American public high school. But my English education was not necessarily standard for everyone at the school. It was the equivalent of college-preparation and advanced placement classes.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 28, 2020)

In other words, schooling is simply inconsistent.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 28, 2020)

WayOfTheFourElements said:


> In other words, schooling is simply inconsistent.



It it was just that it wouldn't be so bad. But in England the teaching of Literature has been consistently trivialised over the last couple of decades, lumped with music, cooking and pre-20th century History as a trivial luxury that young people don't need any more.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 28, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> It it was just that it wouldn't be so bad. But in England the teaching of Literature has been consistently trivialised over the last couple of decades, lumped with music, cooking and pre-20th century History as a trivial luxury that young people don't need any more.




That's very sad.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 28, 2020)

Aldarc said:


> Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court And Conan would suggest otherwise



Yeah, the influence of Mark Twain on the American psyche shouldn't be underestimated. I'm sure that if you took a close look you could also find it in fantasy texts.


----------



## Aldarc (Aug 28, 2020)

That wasn’t me, Ravenbrook.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 28, 2020)

Oops, a hitch in the quote bit.


----------



## Aldarc (Aug 28, 2020)

Happens.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 28, 2020)

Ravenbrook said:


> Yeah, the influence of Mark Twain on the American psyche shouldn't be underestimated. I'm sure that if you took a close look you could also find it in fantasy texts.



Well, he was in Star Trek...


----------



## Doug McCrae (Aug 28, 2020)

Ravenbrook said:


> Yeah, the influence of Mark Twain on the American psyche shouldn't be underestimated. I'm sure that if you took a close look you could also find it in fantasy texts.



I think A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was an influence on L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and the Harold Shea series he wrote with Fletcher Pratt.

According to Clute and Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) Twain's novel "provided the most important precedent for modern timeslip stories".

Mendlesohn and James's A Short History of Fantasy (2009) says of Three Hearts and Three Lions "[Poul] Anderson uses this novel as a way of offering twentieth-century comment upon a medieval fantasy world much in the tradition of Twain's _A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court_".


----------



## jasper (Aug 28, 2020)

Shoot here in Alabama in 70s and early 80s Bewulf and Canterbury was covered. I think in JR high it was like two weeks using translations.  In High School The evil English teach made us memorize it and recited back to her individually. Any non old farts in South want to update us?


----------



## Cadence (Aug 28, 2020)

jasper said:


> Shoot here in Alabama in 70s and early 80s Bewulf and Canterbury was covered. I think in JR high it was like two weeks using translations.  In High School The evil English teach made us memorize it and recited back to her individually. Any non old farts in South want to update us?




A few years younger and in northern Illinois. In the mid 80s it was covered up there. I want to say we had a year of British literature and a year of American literature in high school (Sophomore and Junior years?).

It feels like US high schools were very in to the literary canon to the exclusion of a lot of other voices until recently. The senior HS course I had through a local college had a lot of variety (from the classics to modern with some in translation) and it feels like it's been trickling down.

Also, RE: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was in 1978 -








						A Connecticut Rabbit In King Arthur's Court
					

A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court (Also Known as Bugs Bunny in King Arthur's Court) is a 1978 Looney Tunes special directed by Chuck Jones. All voice characterizations were done by Mel Blanc. The title is a reference to the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark...




					looneytunes.fandom.com


----------



## wingsandsword (Aug 28, 2020)

GlassJaw said:


> Totally agree, although I found Vance much more difficult to read than CS Lewis/Narnia.
> 
> Narnia is more "traditional" as far as fairy tales go. Dying Earth is bonkers. It's kitchen sink world-building and Vance's writing is very flowery. Dying Earth has more of a Spelljammer/Planescape vibe than the implied setting of D&D.



I always thought it was clear that Vance was used as the seed material for magic in D&D not because it was an especially popular or influential book series, but because the magic in it was well suited to being converted to a tabletop RPG.

A system where wizards could only cast a fixed, well defined number of spells each day, that they have to choose in advance, and those spells do specific, clearly defined things.  It's certainly friendly towards turning into an RPG mechanic, more friendly than magic from Tolkien or Lewis, or various works of folklore.


----------



## wingsandsword (Aug 28, 2020)

jasper said:


> Shoot here in Alabama in 70s and early 80s Bewulf and Canterbury was covered. I think in JR high it was like two weeks using translations.  In High School The evil English teach made us memorize it and recited back to her individually. Any non old farts in South want to update us?



I can tell you that in the mid 90's in rural Kentucky, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were standard works for Senior-year High School English class.  

We had to read them in the original dialects instead of translated (albeit with generous translation notes provided for many words and terms), with part of the point being to be shown how much the English language has changed over the centuries and how something being 600 to 1000 years old means something is only barely understandable to a modern audience.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 28, 2020)

wingsandsword said:


> I can tell you that in the mid 90's in rural Kentucky, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were standard works for Senior-year High School English class.
> 
> We had to read them in the original dialects instead of translated (albeit with generous translation notes provided for many words and terms), with part of the point being to be shown how much the English language has changed over the centuries and how something being 600 to 1000 years old means something is only barely understandable to a modern audience.



That supports the impression I get from TV, movies and online teaching resources I have plagiarised researched. Whenever I see a US English Lit class on TV and I think "that's _way _more advanced than anything we do in the UK" (I can't speak for Scotland though).

How old is "senior year"? Back when I was at school in the 80s I did _The Pardoner's Tale_, but even that little bit of Chaucer has gone now.


----------



## Minigiant (Aug 28, 2020)

Well they didn't teach Beowulf nor Canterbury on the eastern side of Brooklyn.
I got the Illiad and Odyssey though.
I guess they thought "Bro, the dude stole my girl. Gather the crew and we''ll @#%$ him and his crew up" relates to New York youth.

I will neither confirm nor deny that I've fought in a large melee over SOs.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 28, 2020)

Minigiant said:


> Well they didn't teach Beowulf nor Canterbury on the eastern side of Brooklyn.
> I got the Illiad and Odyssey though.
> *I guess they thought "Bro, the dude stole my girl. Gather the crew and we''ll @#%$ him and his crew up" relates to New Yorke youth.*
> 
> I will neither confirm nor deny that I've fought in a large melee over SOs.




Sounds like Thanksgiving with my brother.


----------



## MGibster (Aug 28, 2020)

WayOfTheFourElements said:


> How old is "senior year"? Back when I was at school in the 80s I did _The Pardoner's Tale_, but even that little bit of Chaucer has gone now.




Senior high school students in the United State are typically 17-18 years old.  Even though we covered some of Chaucer when I was a senior in high school, we sure as hell didn't cover the Miller's Tale until I was at university.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Aug 28, 2020)

Just to add: I was Class of 2015 at Oak Ridge High in Tennessee and I distinctly remember them covering Beowulf at some point. The Oddysee, Gatzby, Things Fall Apart, and Alas, Babylon were also on the list over the years.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 28, 2020)

As others have been saying, US schools want students to have a sense of where the English language came from and how it develops. This likewise connects us to British history and culture and origins as a British colony.

Also US schools want students to have a second language but what that language is tends to depend on what each school offers and individual choice. For my contrarian self, I picked Latin.


----------



## WayOfTheFourElements (Aug 29, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> As others have been saying, US schools want students to have a sense of where the English language came from and how it develops. This likewise connects us to British history and culture and origins as a British colony.
> 
> Also US schools want students to have a second language but what that language is tends to depend on what each school offers and individual choice. For my contrarian self, I picked Latin.




The best way to learn a second language is by joining Peace Corps or the military. My second languages studies in school were a bit of a joke.


----------



## Bedrockgames (Aug 29, 2020)

Does Conan count as American fantasy ?


----------



## pemerton (Aug 29, 2020)

Bedrockgames said:


> Does Conan count as American fantasy ?



Yes. It's modernist verging on nihilistic.



Minigiant said:


> Since the US never had a Crown or Church to stamp down on factions, American factions tend to have more independence.



This is not plausible in my view. The US has had a strong state for a long time. Parts of Europe have done so (eg England, France) but parts have not. 



Doug McCrae said:


> I think A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was an influence on L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and the Harold Shea series he wrote with Fletcher Pratt.



Whether or not it's an _influence _I would say it's also a _model_ for a lot of FRPGing. Essentially modern sensibilities in mediaeval garb.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 29, 2020)

Religion is another area where D&D, at least, is very American. In the U.S., every protestant denomination (or, if you perfer, "sect") has its own church or churches in a city. It's the same with the temples in D&D, where polytheistic religions have little in common with the paganism of the ancient world. Not even the mystery religions were anything like most fantasy cults. Contrast this with Europe, where religion in most countries has been dominated by just one or two denominations until quite recently.


----------



## Warren Ellis (Aug 29, 2020)

Would an RPG attempting to base itself on "American Fantasy" perhaps be best served by looking at stuff like the Wizard of Oz, various regional tall tales and legends (Paul Bunyan, Picos Bill, Appalachian tales, etc) along with possibly looking at Pre-Columbian legends and tales and folklore as well?

Maybe focusing on also how vast and _strange_ the world may be, civilization having a definite frontier and Points of Light style feeling as well?

To be honest, I don't think superheroes really are any an answer to the question, so it genuinely surprised me people were saying "superheroes" before looking at regional and local legends in the US as inspiration for fantasy.

I mean something like this could fit well in an RPG, for example.

Americana as well could be used to mine for an American flavored RPG.

And before someone says something about D&D, no for all that it has American aspects, no one would, with a straight face, ever consider knights and castles to be that "American."


----------



## MGibster (Aug 29, 2020)

pemerton said:


> This is not plausible in my view. The US has had a strong state for a long time. Parts of Europe have done so (eg England, France) but parts have not.




And for those who don't think we had a lot of factions in America let's just take a look at the prohibition movement.  The Anti-Saloon League was formed in the 1850s, but by the early 20th century it had become one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States and took the lead in the prohibition movement.  The League formed alliances and allies with Democrats, Republicans, the KKK, the NAACP, International Workers of the World, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Baptist, Methodist, as well as other religious organizations.  

And of course you're right that the United States does have a history of going after factions.  The government sent the US army after the KKK in the 1870s and actually broke them, we've had union busting activities by private and public entities, and look up COINTELPRO sometime to learn about the FBI's activities against political groups including those involved in the Civil Rights Movement.  




> Whether or not it's an _influence _I would say it's also a _model_ for a lot of FRPGing. Essentially modern sensibilities in mediaeval garb.




It is.  For a game where the gods are real and people perform miracles, D&D is oddly very secular.


----------



## GreenTengu (Aug 29, 2020)

I think D&D has some _very_ American aspects to it that are being quite overlooked here.

Many D&D worlds are about reclaiming a world that has some history to it, where treasure from previous inhabitants is hidden everywhere, and you are going from the ever-expanding bastions of civilization into the wild. Those who live out in the wild, for the most part, are "evil savages" and your enemies and if you go wandering out there in search of treasures then you are likely to be ambushed and perhaps killed.

You don't have people living in distinct regions with fairly well understood borders nor a powerful government that assigns individuals their roles in society from near birth like you would in a fantasy setting in proper medieval/fuedal Europe or Asia. You start off fully formed with often no ties to wherever you came from with very few rights and substantial freedom to go wherever you want and do whatever you want until you butt heads with any other individual-- just a few coins in your pockets and it is entirely up to you to make your fortune and place in the world.

All these assumptions of a character starting off in D&D are quite quintessentially American regardless of whether many aspects of the world were swiped from an English book series. The way it works is very much frontiersman, treasure hunter, Cowboy & Indians, American Dream....

An RPG that draws more from L. Frank Baum's works is fine-- but it is no more particularly American, it just reflects a different region and era of America once the world began to be neatly divided up and governance and civilization had pushed fantasy and adventure to the margins so you had to either delve into the few remaining regions of "wilderness" or get swept off to another land to find your adventure-- although that is, if anything, far more relatable to the way European and Asian tales work.

Honestly-- if I were to think of another book that is like the Wizard of Oz books where a character gets swept off to an imaginary fantasy land that contrasts his struggles in the real world, the next thing I would think of would not be other great American authors of the late 19th/early 20th century like Mark Twain or Ernest Hemmingway or John Steinbeck or Jack London... no, the next thing I would think of is Alice in Wonderland by U.K author Lewis Carol or the Chronicles of Narnia by U.K. author C.S. Lewis or The Neverending Story by German author Michael Ende.

So... calling this type of "real life person gets swept off into a fantasy world" more fundamentally "American" or contributing it primarily to American authors and contrasting that with the expectations and assumptions a game like D&D makes about characters just doesn't make sense to me.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 29, 2020)

GreenTengu said:


> All these assumptions of a character starting off in D&D are quite quintessentially American regardless of whether many aspects of the world were swiped from an English book series. The way it works is very much frontiersman, treasure hunter, Cowboy & Indians, American Dream....



That's a good catch, IMO.

By comparison, the "Spaghetti Fantasy" D&D setting, Brancalonia, assumes you're bouncing around through warring city states, which makes sense, since it's coming at the game from a distinctly Italian point of view. I have to imagine their world assumptions are very different than the default ones laid out in the first few pages of the 5E DMG, which explicitly talks about the characters being in a successor civilization exploring the ruins of past empires -- a post-revolutionary worldview if ever there was one.


----------



## Hussar (Aug 30, 2020)

Not sure about that last bit about "exploring the ruins of past empires" is specifically post-revolutionary.  I mean, most of the middle ages was exactly that - trying to recapture what was lost after the apocalypse of the fall of the Roman Empire.  I know we tend not to frame it that way, but, the fall of Rome was probably the most shattering event in Western history.  It took centuries to recover and more centuries to surpass.  

That sounds decidedly D&D to me.


----------



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Aug 30, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Not sure about that last bit about "exploring the ruins of past empires" is specifically post-revolutionary.  I mean, most of the middle ages was exactly that - trying to recapture what was lost after the apocalypse of the fall of the Roman Empire.



It probably depends on the person.

I lived in a country that was the modern successor to an ancient civilization and everyone I knew was _very clear_ with the silly foreigner that they were the same people and, in their minds, it was an unbroken chain with the past, ruins notwithstanding.

In comparison, I was thinking it was a colonialist/revolutionary mindset that viewed those past empires as _other_, as is the case in most D&D settings.

But I could well be reaching here.


----------



## Warren Ellis (Aug 30, 2020)

Azurth strikes me as more what the article is looking for:








						Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak - Hydra Cooperative | DriveThruRPG.com
					

Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak - After turning himself into a manticore, the self-style wizard-artiste, Mortzengersturm, moved to the crystalline peak of




					www.drivethrurpg.com
				











						Azurth Adventures Digest Issue 1 - Hydra Cooperative | DriveThruRPG.com
					

Azurth Adventures Digest Issue 1 - Explore the Land of the Azurth with the Azurth Adventures Digest! This full color premier issue focuses on the Boundless




					www.drivethrurpg.com


----------



## Ravenbrook (Aug 30, 2020)

GreenTengu said:


> ...the next thing I would think of is Alice in Wonderland by U.K author Lewis Carol or the Chronicles of Narnia by U.K. author C.S. Lewis or The Neverending Story by German author Michael Ende.



And don't forget the British author Edith Nesbit (1858-1924). Her children's books had a huge influence on the Narnia series. In one of her novels, a bunch of kids are even whisked off to Atlantis. She's one of my favorite authors and I always feel like cracking up when somebody says "Crikey!" Besides children's books, she also wrote horror stories.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Aug 30, 2020)

Ravenbrook said:


> And don't forget the British author Edith Nesbit (1858-1924). Her children's books had a huge influence on the Narnia series. In one of her novels, a bunch of kids are even whisked off to Atlantis. She's one of my favorite authors and I always feel like cracking up when somebody says "Crikey!" Besides children's books, she also wrote horror stories.



Always wanted to get a Psammead into D&D, never found the right place for it.


----------



## Marandahir (Aug 30, 2020)

I'm also a big fan of British Author Lucy M. Boston (1892-1990), who wrote the _Green Knowe _series. Probably my go-to story for inspiration for exploring the grounds of an ancient manor/castle, complete with ideas of having to boat across the flooded moat to the door!


----------



## Ace (Aug 30, 2020)

Ravenbrook said:


> And don't forget the British author Edith Nesbit (1858-1924). Her children's books had a huge influence on the Narnia series. In one of her novels, a bunch of kids are even whisked off to Atlantis. She's one of my favorite authors and I always feel like cracking up when somebody says "Crikey!" Besides children's books, she also wrote horror stories.




The funny thing is crikey was  strong language in that period. Pretty edgy for kids books.


----------



## Haldrik (Aug 30, 2020)

Ace said:


> The funny thing is crikey was  strong language in that period. Pretty edgy for kids books.



Zounds!


----------



## Azzy (Sep 2, 2020)

jasper said:


> Shoot here in Alabama in 70s and early 80s Bewulf and Canterbury was covered. I think in JR high it was like two weeks using translations.  In High School The evil English teach made us memorize it and recited back to her individually. Any non old farts in South want to update us?




In the late 80s in Florida, we read the Iliad and Odyssey and Beowulf (as well as some Shakespeare). For Beowulf, we learned a passage in Old English. In high school we covered a bit of Chaucer, and lots of Shakespeare.


----------



## Hussar (Sep 2, 2020)

Wow, you guys did a hell of a lot more classics than we ever did.  Never even touched any of those until university.


----------



## jmartkdr2 (Sep 2, 2020)

Northeast, 90's - lots of Shakespeare, lots of Dickens, and a focus on American classics: Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hersey, Wiesel, Poe, et al. No reading dead languages beyond Shakespeare, and they were pretty forgiving with that. They seemed to favor 20th-century lit, really, since they could link that to History classes.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Sep 2, 2020)

jmartkdr2 said:


> Northeast, 90's - lots of Shakespeare, lots of Dickens, and a focus on American classics: Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hersey, Wiesel, Poe, et al. No reading dead languages beyond Shakespeare, and they were pretty forgiving with that. They seemed to favor 20th-century lit, really, since they could link that to History classes.



Ohio, early 80s: Pretty much the same, except we didn't do Dickens. We read Nathaniel Hawthorne instead. Btw, we did Charlotte's Web when I was in elementary school  - does that also count as "American Fantasy"?


----------



## Ancalagon (Sep 4, 2020)

your american fantasy is right here!


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 4, 2020)

And it is real, no less (and available on DriveThruRPG). In the free sample I am astonished and impressed by how much detail they put into the setting's history.



Ancalagon said:


> your american fantasy is right here!
> 
> View attachment 125507


----------



## Undrave (Sep 4, 2020)

Ancalagon said:


> your american fantasy is right here!
> 
> View attachment 125507




"WHO DARES ENTER FLAVORTOWN UNINVITED?!" 

Are those... are those TURDUCKENS?!


----------



## Ancalagon (Sep 4, 2020)

Undrave said:


> "WHO DARES ENTER FLAVORTOWN UNINVITED?!"
> 
> Are those... are those TURDUCKENS?!




my god, I think you're right :O


----------



## Burnside (Sep 7, 2020)

Twelve pages and nobody mentioned Call of Cthulu? 

You can't spell America without Cthulu. Seriously, by RPG standards it is quite popular and distinctly American.

Lovecraft's influence on American Fantasy in general is enormous - it's even got the racism baked in.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 7, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Twelve pages and nobody mentioned Call of Cthulu?
> 
> You can't spell America without Cthulu. Seriously, by RPG standards it is quite popular and distinctly American.
> 
> Lovecraft's influence on American Fantasy in general is enormous - it's even got the racism baked in.




Because of the white-supremacist racism of Lovecraft, I hope WotC distances D&D as far away from Lovecraft as possible.

A cultural heritage is vital. But we who inherit a heritage must keep the baby and throw out the bathwater.


----------



## The Mirrorball Man (Sep 7, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Because of the white-supremacist racism of Lovecraft, I hope WotC distances D&D as far away from Lovecraft as possible.



The Cthulhu Mythos has been in the public domain for so long, and has produced so many different stories, that in my opinion it has become almost completely distinct from HP Lovecraft's oeuvre.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 7, 2020)

The Mirrorball Man said:


> The Cthulhu Mythos has been in the public domain for so long, and has produced so many different stories, that in my opinion it has become almost completely distinct from HP Lovecraft's oeuvre.




I dont understand your point.

Mein Kampf has also been in the public domain.

Obvously, WotC also does well to distance itself from Mein Kampf.


----------



## The Mirrorball Man (Sep 7, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I dont understand your point.
> 
> Mein Kampf has also been in the public domain.
> 
> Obvously, WotC also does well to distance itself from Mein Kampf.



Absolute nonsense. Mein Kampf is not a work of fiction, it doesn't have a huge literary tradition built by hundreds of writers through decades. In addition, equating a very racist novelist with the most evil dictator of all time doesn't make much sense.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 7, 2020)

The Mirrorball Man said:


> Absolute nonsense. Mein Kampf is not a work of fiction, it doesn't have a huge literary tradition built by hundreds of writers through decades. In addition, equating a very racist novelist with the most evil dictator of all time doesn't make much sense.




This very racist novelist enthusiastically supported this most evil dictator of all time.



Currently, WotC is busy updating the core D&D texts to make sure that the Drow doesnt come across as unintentionally racist.

And you want WotC to champion the cause − by name − of a very evil reallife white supremacist racist?

Really?


----------



## The Mirrorball Man (Sep 7, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> And you want WotC to champion the cause − by name − of a very evil reallife white supremacist racist?
> 
> Really?



No. I think it would be cool to include the Cthulhu Mythos, though.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 7, 2020)

I feel WotC should keep its own "aberrants" − and disconnect from the reallife white supremacist entirely. And never look back.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 7, 2020)

I have a hard time with Lovecraft's writings these days, to be sure. I much prefer those later authors that are addressing and subverting the racist elements of the mythos, like Tom LaValle, Ruthanna Emrys, and of course, the Lovecraft Country series (I really need to get around to reading the book). Lovecraft got a free pass for far too long, considering he was in no ways unclear about his bigotry. At this point, if a mythos-related work doesn't address the racism of the author and the materials, that's not something I care to support.

Considering Wizards' current efforts on diversity and inclusion, I wouldn't see them adding more Lovecraft to D&D. Nor would I want them to.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 7, 2020)

Even without the diversity and inclusion aspect, I don't really need Lovecraft's cosmic horror to be a big part of my D&D experience.  That's not what I play D&D for.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 7, 2020)

I'm not saying Lovecraft/Cthulu SHOULD be the American Fantasy RPG. I'm saying that it is, currently, arguably the most successful and popular one and it's odd to leave it out of this conversation. And as for keeping Lovecraft out of D&D, it's far too late. It's very much part of D&D's DNA and has been from the beginning. No Lovecraft = no mindflayers, no aboleths, no Great Old One patrons, etc.


----------



## Ace (Sep 7, 2020)

MGibster said:


> Even without the diversity and inclusion aspect, I don't really need Lovecraft's cosmic horror to be a big part of my D&D experience.  That's not what I play D&D for.




Me either. Less Cthulhu, more faerie princesses please

But Lovecraft s American in every way that matters. And yes his racism and xenophobia though not extreme for his time  grate on some modern audiences, a hundred years ago was  a different country and assuming that people in the past would or should share modern values is risible.

Just ignore it  use the good stuff and move on.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 7, 2020)

Ace said:


> And yes his racism and xenophobia though not extreme for his time  grate on some modern audiences, a hundred years ago was  a different country and assuming that people in the past would or should share modern values is risible.




Wasn't Lovecraft pretty extremely excremental even for his time?  (Didn't REH chastise him for it?).


----------



## Dausuul (Sep 7, 2020)

Ace said:


> And yes his racism and xenophobia though not extreme for his time



Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia were notorious _in his time. _And considering his time, that's saying something.


Burnside said:


> I'm not saying Lovecraft/Cthulu SHOULD be the American Fantasy RPG. I'm saying that it is, currently, arguably the most successful and popular one...



No, the most successful and popular one is Dungeons and Dragons. Any definition of "American fantasy" that excludes swords and sorcery is a ridiculous definition.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 7, 2020)

Cadence said:


> Wasn't Lovecraft pretty extremely excremental even for his time?  (Didn't REH chastise him for it?).




Not really.  Lovecraft lived his life in an era where the lynching of African Americans was a fairly common occurrence treated with the approval or indifference of most of the population, the KKK grew to the height of it's power with millions of members (it was strongest in Indiana), white supremacy was pretty much a given even in northern states, and nativism was alive and well as Americans campaigned against immigrants from eastern and southern Europe as well as Mexico and China.  

But of course there were also plenty of Americans who weren't nativist and had no objection to Italian or Slavic immigrants, individuals and organizations stood up to the KKK, there were lawmakers and organizations with white members, even in the South, devoted to ending the lynching of African Americans, and the NAACP had white members and supporters who shared 

Were Lovecraft's beliefs a bit more severe than a lot of Americans?  Yes.  Even white Americans who were sure of their own racial superiority and didn't care for those new immigrants from eastern Europe probably didn't spend as much time thinking about it as Lovecraft did.  But Lovecraft's attitudes weren't so radically different from millions of his contemporaries.


----------



## Ace (Sep 7, 2020)

Cadence said:


> Wasn't Lovecraft pretty extremely excremental even for his time?  (Didn't REH chastise him for it?).




My understanding  is that REH was downright progressive for his era though and a very unusual person.

 Lovecraft wasn't  super popular in his day though maybe a bit strong for some parts of the country  though he was not exactly an Anti Semite (wife was Jewish) His views on homosexuality were perfectly mainstream at the time.

I'll also note that its seemed to be mostly about preservation of his Anglo Saxon culture not exploitation so it was  a sort of "Know Nothing" some assimilated people are OK kind of racism

Now  racism is a complex topic at the best of times and frankly when it comes to private gaming , do what is best for your table.  

Mainstream gaming books and any public games  ought to avoid the appearance of bigotry. As someone used to gaming with diverse groups with a wide range of  , ethnic backgrounds, faiths , genders, sexual preferences  ableness and so on, the last thing any of us want is someone to feel excluded or discriminated against.  

How to do this will very a bit from publisher to publisher and setting to setting though. None of this  should not keep your from enjoying your HP Lovecraft setting (you can always fix parts you don't like) or from borrowing cool stuff.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 7, 2020)

Dausuul said:


> No, the most successful and popular one is Dungeons and Dragons. Any definition of "American fantasy" that excludes swords and sorcery is a ridiculous definition.



Sure...but the basic premise of the article we’re discussing is that D&D isn’t fundamentally an American fantasy RPG. I was taking that as read in this context, even though I disagree with it.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 7, 2020)

In some ways yes, in others no. R.E. Howard has said some racist stuff himself. His opinions did shift a bit over time (probably due to the influence of Novalyne Price, who was quite outspoken and not afraid to go toe-to-toe arguing with him, specifically calling him out on his racism).

He was definitely an unusual person, but as I read more and more of Price's diaries in One Who Walked Alone, the more I feel like he also was suffering from undiagnosed depression or bipolar disorder, as much as one can judge across the gulfs of time.

I'm only halfway through it, but One Who Walked Alone is a must for those interested in the life of R.E. Howard.



Ace said:


> My understanding  is that REH was downright progressive for his era though and a very unusual person.




But back to the subject of Lovecraft, there is no reason we need to include him in a conversation in 2020 on fantasy and D&D. As a horror writer, his influence at this point is many points removed. We do not owe a garbage person a place at the table. Now, were we talking about American horror, it might be a different story, but even then, there's a lot to wrestle with him and his works.


----------



## Ravenbrook (Sep 7, 2020)

Ace said:


> Less Cthulhu, more faerie princesses please



Oooh, I always wanted to do a campaign inspired by French Baroque fairy tales in which matronly fairies ride in enchanted carriages pulled by thousands of big and brilliant butterflies and beautiful shepherds and shepherdesses stand around doing nothing all day, except perhaps singing and dancing. But all of this has, of course, absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this thread....


----------



## MGibster (Sep 8, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> But back to the subject of Lovecraft, there is no reason we need to include him in a conversation in 2020 on fantasy and D&D. As a horror writer, his influence at this point is many points removed. We do not owe a garbage person a place at the table. Now, were we talking about American horror, it might be a different story, but even then, there's a lot to wrestle with him and his works.




No reason except the various Lovecraftian monsters which have appeared in D&D since early days of the game.  Heck, they even included Cthulhu himself!  The fact that we're evening having this conversation points to Lovecraft's work still having some relevance.  You're right, we don't owe Lovecraft a place at the table.  But to pretend that he isn't there is just silly.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 8, 2020)

Undrave said:


> "WHO DARES ENTER FLAVORTOWN UNINVITED?!"



I was thinking more, “WHO RUNS FLAVORTOWN?!”


----------



## jasper (Sep 8, 2020)

What about Poe and the beating heart? Is that American fantasy. Or will any horror count? Mummy the one that punches your face not the one with cool loot that was all the rage in the 70s.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

jasper said:


> What about Poe and the beating heart? Is that American fantasy. Or will any horror count? Mummy the one that punches your face not the one with cool loot that was all the rage in the 70s.




Poe is clearly American fantasy, and the Gothic Earth Ravenloft stuff in particular draws on his work a lot.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

(Speaking of problematic, L. Frank Baum wrote articles calling for the wholesale extermination of all Native Americans, which is actually worse than anything Lovecraft wrote.)


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 8, 2020)

In a discussion of American horror, I would totally agree. But for fantasy, I don't see him as being so relevant as to overcome the garbage person part. As for the Cthulhu mythos in D&D, the first printing of Deities & Demigods was out for less than a year or so before the revised version came out with that section removed. The mind flayer is based on a picture of Cthulhu, but not so much the actual writings.



MGibster said:


> No reason except the various Lovecraftian monsters which have appeared in D&D since early days of the game.  Heck, they even included Cthulhu himself!  The fact that we're evening having this conversation points to Lovecraft's work still having some relevance.  You're right, we don't owe Lovecraft a place at the table.  But to pretend that he isn't there is just silly.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

Ace said:


> He was not exactly an Anti Semite (wife was Jewish)



To be fair, the marriage of Greene, a Jewish woman, to Lovecraft lasted only around two years. Even much that time appears to have been spent in a long distance relationship, while she was the primary breadwinner and traveling trying to earn money for them.

The increasingly virulent racism by Lovecraft, including ugly Antisemitic racist comments, appears to have been a factor in their divorce, during an era when divorce was rare.

That said, Lovecraft was especially a white supremacist, in his flavor of racism. The status of Jews as "whites" appears to have been borderline in his eyes.

The effort to distance WotC away from reallife racism, includes removing Lovecraft.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> In a discussion of American horror, I would totally agree. But for fantasy, I don't see him as being so relevant as to overcome the garbage person part. As for the Cthulhu mythos in D&D, the first printing of Deities & Demigods was out for less than a year or so before the revised version came out with that section removed. The mind flayer is based on a picture of Cthulhu, but not so much the actual writings.




The idea of cosmic horror owes a great deal to the mythos and Lovecraft.

Lovecraft-ian horror has always been a part of D&D. Whether it's mind flayers, aberrations in general, the basement of X2, or the 5e Warlock and the Great Old Ones. The Lovecraftian influence is as old as Tharizdun, and concepts from his stories pop up all over (even when they aren't explicit, like Saltmarsh).


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

Japanese anime includes "weird" tentacle tropes, relating to the Japanese concepts of "demons" (hostile nature spirits).

Making "aberrants" the Neutral Evil fiend between LE devils and CE demons, is a flavorful way to pursue the tropes within D&D and without tolerating Lovecraft.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Japanese anime includes "weird" tentacle tropes, relating to the Japanese concept of "demons".
> 
> Making "aberrants" the Neutral Evil fiend between devils and demons, is a flavorful way to pursue the tropes within D&D and without tolerating Lovecraft.




There's a difference between saying that you can and should excise Lovecraft from D&D (very supportable), and saying Lovecraft's work isn't very much present in D&D from its very beginnings up to and including 5E (unsupportable; it obviously and undeniably is there, and pretty pervasively so).


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Japanese anime includes "weird" tentacle tropes, relating to the Japanese concepts of "demons" (hostile nature spirits).
> 
> Making "aberrants" the Neutral Evil fiend between devils and demons, is a flavorful way to pursue the tropes within D&D and without tolerating Lovecraft.




Dostoyevsky and Edith Wharton were terrible anti-Semites.
Ernest Hemingway was a terrible misogynist (and that is barely scratching the surface).
And don't get me started on the homophobia.


....for that matter, I am not too sure you really want to depend on Japanese anime as your source for all that is good and pure.

I can certainly understand why someone today would not celebrate Lovecraft the person. But bad and terrible people have created good things. Numerous other people have worked within the field of cosmic horror and done good things, and a lot has been derived from Lovecraft's works. I don't want your (IMO) completely misguided beliefs forced upon the rest of us.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

Burnside said:


> There's a difference between saying that you can and should excise Lovecraft from D&D (very supportable), and saying Lovecraft's work isn't very much present in D&D from its very beginnings up to and including 5E (unsupportable; it obviously and undeniably is there, and pretty pervasively so).



Currently, WotC is in the process of even removing accidental racist content from D&D 5e.

The status of earlier editions is as a historical archive.

Fortunately, the founders of D&D seem to be decent people, for their era. But even D&D 1e occasionally includes offensive material, such as a random table.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 8, 2020)

Lovecraft may have been the most popular of those writing cosmic horror and of unknown abominations, but he was not the only one. The pulps are filled with them. Prior to him there was Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson. His contemporaries included Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith, just to name a few. Heck, the Far Realm didn't even exist until third edition. Lovecraft's influence is not core to the game in a way that R.E. Howard, Tolkien, Poul Anderson, and Fritz Leiber are.



Snarf Zagyg said:


> The idea of cosmic horror owes a great deal to the mythos and Lovecraft.
> 
> Lovecraft-ian horror has always been a part of D&D. Whether it's mind flayers, aberrations in general, the basement of X2, or the 5e Warlock and the Great Old Ones. The Lovecraftian influence is as old as Tharizdun, and concepts from his stories pop up all over (even when they aren't explicit, like Saltmarsh).


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Lovecraft may have been the most popular of those writing cosmic horror and of unknown abominations, but he was not the only one. The pulps are filled with them. Prior to him there was Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson. His contemporaries included Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith, just to name a few. Heck, the Far Realm didn't even exist until third edition. Lovecraft's influence is not core to the game in a way that R.E. Howard, Tolkien, Poul Anderson, and Fritz Leiber are.




1. Lovecraft, as you know, it Inspiration Reading in Appendix N.
2. Not only was Lovecraft listed, he was one of the six (6!) authors specifically called out as being the most influential by Gygax. Refresher- it was de Camp & Pratt, REH, Leiber, Vance, Merritt, and Lovecraft.
3. He was so influential that he, along with Moorcock & Lieber, was one of the three authors that has a mythos in the original Deities & Demigods.

...so, yeah. I completely, 100% disagree with you. Lovecraft is as core to D&D as REH and Leiber. Lovecraft was an indispensable part of the admixture that is D&D.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Currently, WotC is in the process of even removing accidental racist content from D&D 5e.
> 
> The status of earlier editions is as a historical archive.
> 
> Fortunately, the founders of D&D seem to be decent people, for their era. But even D&D 1e occasionally includes offensive material, such as a random table.




Lovecraft is going to be a heavier lift to remove though - because the bad parts of Lovecraft aren't actually in the game, whereas there are obvious problems  and real-world parallels with having intelligent player races that are written to have inherently evil "natural" tendencies.

You can say, "We need to get rid of the Great Old One warlock patron, not because there is anything conceptually wrong with it, but because it's obviously heavily indebted to Lovecraft, a white supremacist."

I'm not sure where that leads you, though. Tolkien was pretty awful on Jews (see his explanation for how he racially characterized his dwarves - which, not coincidentally, happens to be how they have been traditionally characterized in D&D). So should we remove Tolkien-isms from D&D because he was Anti-Semitic? Not a lot left of D&D after than, tbh.

(Disclosure: I'm Jewish).


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Lovecraft is going to be a heavier lift to remove though - because the bad parts of Lovecraft aren't actually in the game, whereas there are obvious problems  and real-world parallels with having intelligent player races that are written to have inherently evil "natural" tendencies.
> 
> You can say, "We need to get rid of the Great Old One warlock patron, not because there is anything conceptually wrong with it, but because it's obviously heavily indebted to Lovecraft, a white supremacist."
> 
> ...



There is no such thing as "perfect".

There is such thing as degrees of objectionable.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> There is no such thing as "perfect".
> 
> There is such thing as degrees of objectionable.




Fair enough. But now you open up the question of who arbitrates that?


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Lovecraft is going to be a heavier lift to remove though - because the bad parts of Lovecraft aren't actually in the game, whereas there are obvious problems  and real-world parallels with having intelligent player races that are written to have inherently evil "natural" tendencies.
> 
> You can say, "We need to get rid of the Great Old One warlock patron, not because there is anything conceptually wrong with it, but because it's obviously heavily indebted to Lovecraft, a white supremacist."
> 
> I'm not sure where that leads you, though.




Look at the bright side! It could be worse. We could be trying to scrub _Call of Cthulhu _and replace everything within it with, um, anime references?

(Aside- it's bizarre to me that the go-to "clean" reference is anime, because .... man, anime looks at a lot of Hollywood racism and misogyny and says, "Hold my beer.")


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

At a time when keeping a dream journal, I remember once having a vivid nightmare. In this nightmare, it was moreorless simply a tentacled sea anemone, underwater. There was water current dragging things toward it in the water. That was it, just a sea anemone. But the dream was terrifying.

Archetypally, dreams visualize different aspects of a cognitive social identity. Plants are an aspect of humans relating to life and growth and lush vitality. A snake is something like the "reptile brain". A mammal can be gut instincts. Humans are a social level.

This primordial nonhuman − even antihuman − level of the tentacles of the anemone, seem to correlate with insanity − a dissolving and selfdistructive level of human identity.

D&D can work with these kinds of antihuman tropes. Because each one of us owns these kinds of tropes.


----------



## Undrave (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> That said, Lovecraft was especially a white supremacist, in his flavor of racism. The status of Jews as "whites" appears to have been borderline in his eyes.




Even more precisely, he was an ENGLISH supremacist... there was some... questionably back-handed compliment to the French speaking people of Quebec City in his guide book to the city (From Quebec to the Stars)... Like, basically, "They're almost as civilized as English men!"


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 8, 2020)

Lovecraft is in Appendix N. But so is Fletcher Pratt's The Blue Star. Which, as far as I can tell, only models a D&D session wherein everyone is bored and falling asleep (ye gods do I hate that novel; and yet I love the Harold Shea tales). If you look at the accounts of the game from the early days, I do not see Lovecraft's stories reflected therein. If there's some recounting I'm unaware of, that's certainly possible, but those dungeon crawls don't seem to have much in common with Lovecraft's brand of horror and his madness-haunted protagonists.



Snarf Zagyg said:


> 1. Lovecraft, as you know, it Inspiration Reading in Appendix N.
> 2. Not only was Lovecraft listed, he was one of the six (6!) authors specifically called out as being the most influential by Gygax. Refresher- it was de Camp & Pratt, REH, Leiber, Vance, Merritt, and Lovecraft.
> 3. He was so influential that he, along with Moorcock & Lieber, was one of the three authors that has a mythos in the original Deities & Demigods.
> 
> ...so, yeah. I completely, 100% disagree with you. Lovecraft is as core to D&D as REH and Leiber. Lovecraft was an indispensable part of the admixture that is D&D.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Undrave said:


> Even more precisely, he was an ENGLISH supremacist... there was some... questionably back-handed compliment to the French speaking people of Quebec City in his guide book to the city (From Quebec to the Stars)... Like, basically, "They're almost as civilized as English men!"




Yep. He was a serious Anglophile and Everythingelse-phobe.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Lovecraft is in Appendix N. But so is Fletcher Pratt's The Blue Star.




You know that I also wrote that Lovecraft is one of only six authors to be additionally, and specifically, cited as the immediate influences, right?

And Deities & Demigods.

And a ton of monsters. And so much of the early modules.


----------



## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 8, 2020)

It was not my intention to be insulting. If it was taken in such a way, I do apologize. We clearly disagree about Lovecraft's place in the pantheon of D&D's inspirations, but I would not deliberately insult you, @Snarf Zagyg.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> You know that I also wrote that Lovecraft is one of only six authors to be additionally, and specifically, cited as the immediate influences, right?
> 
> And Deities & Demigods.
> 
> And a ton of monsters. And so much of the early modules.



I would be happy if Deities & Demigods stayed a separate splatbook, that players could opt into or opt out of.

I find 5e problematic when the core rules bake gods into the cosmology and classes.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

Regarding "American Fantasy".

I am going to say that Star Wars, is the quintessential American fantasy.

• modern
• technology-loving
• multicultural
• New World (outer space)
• good-guys-versus-bad-guys
• deeply religious but by means of individualistic freedom of religion
• rebellion against authority
• heroic women (Leah)
• cowboyish rogue (Han) and valiant whitehat (Luke)

People generally acknowledge Star Wars is as much fantasy as it is scifi. But I suspect, this fantasy-scifi fusion is American Fantasy.

Perhaps Wizard of Oz feels less central to US fantasy because it feels to some degree anti-technological luddite.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Regarding "American Fantasy".
> 
> I am going to say that Star Wars, is the quintessential American fantasy.
> 
> ...




I agree with this. Star Wars and superheroes.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I would be happy if Deities & Demigods stayed a separate splatbook, that players could opt into or opt out of.
> 
> I find 5e problematic when the core rules bake gods into the cosmology and classes.




But "problematic" covers so much ground. Just think about Lovecraft.

Should we stop excise Arkham Asylum from Batman?
Should we stop watching Evil Dead (and its progeny) because of the Necronomicon?
Am I not allowed to watch the excellent Lovecraft Country on HBO? (That would be particularly weird).

To me, all of this is as silly as saying we need to try and remove all of the Mythos (the cosmic horror) from D&D, or saying that we can't allow people to read The Old Man and the Sea because Hemingway was  misogynistic jerk, or Notes from Underground because Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semite.

But that would be bizarre. Because without Notes, we wouldn't have Invisible Man, and then we would have a much poorer literature, wouldn't we?

I can't agree with any of this. It's perfectly fine to look at a modern work, and say that _because of what is in there, it has issues that need to be addressed_, but I cannot imagine saying, _because this modern work uses a theme or a trope that developed out of another theme or a trope, which is not itself problematic, but the earlier theme came from a person who had views that are now objectionable, we have to revise it to remove references to that theme_ ... well, that way lies madness. ... Kind of appropriate, given the discussion.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 8, 2020)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> But "problematic" covers so much ground. Just think about Lovecraft.
> 
> Should we stop excise Arkham Asylum from Batman?
> Should we stop watching Evil Dead (and its progeny) because of the Necronomicon?
> ...




Yeah, I largely agree. Lovecraft isn't among my favorite authors anyway, but as Jewish person this is a calculus I have to perform all the time with writers I love. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite books. I devoured Agatha Christie novels as a kid. I've made a lot of my living performing Shakespeare. All of these writers are Anti-Semitic, and it's not subtle and it's not absent from their work - it's right there in Brothers K, And Then There Were None (now on its third published title because racism), The Merchant of Venice, and other works. Dickens too, although he did have the grace to apologize and do re-writes on Oliver Twist. 

I'm not prepared to say we have to forgive these artists, but I'm also not prepared to say they are now unreadable or un-performable. or un-playable.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 8, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Yeah, I largely agree. Lovecraft isn't among my favorite authors anyway, but as Jewish person this is a calculus I have to perform all the time with writers I love. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite books. I devoured Agatha Christie novels as a kid. I've made a lot of my living performing Shakespeare. All of these writers are Anti-Semitic, and it's not subtle and it's not absent from their work - it's right there in Brothers K, And Then There Were None (now on its third published title because racism), The Merchant of Venice, and other works. Dickens too, although he did have the grace to apologize and do re-writes on Oliver Twist.
> 
> I'm not prepared to say we have to forgive these artists, but I'm also not prepared to say they are now unreadable or un-performable. or un-playable.




Some of the most amazing work happens not from ignoring or excising the problematic aspects of a work, but from working with it and re-contexualizing it.

Whether it's a re-imagination of the Founding Fathers (Hamilton), or a staging of Merchant of Venice that places the issue of anti-Semitism front and center, or even something as banal as choosing to put Gatsby to hip hop as a riposte to the casual racism of its author.

Good art speaks in a multiplicity of tongues; and it is better to struggle with that art than to pretend it did not exist.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

I am thinking, Wizard of Oz has resonance in some American gay communities. But I am unsure why.

May its the Girl-Meets-World story, that transgenders can relate to?

I am unsure.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 8, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> I am thinking, Wizard of Oz has resonance in some American gay communities. But I am unsure why.




That's a good question.  I thought her status as a gay icon had been established after The Wizard of Oz but apparently it started there.  I could see how a lot of gay men might want to leave the drab oppression of their black & white world to a colorful place like Oz.  A magical place where someone like the Cowardly Lion was accepted and loved for who he was rather than what others expected him to be.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 8, 2020)

MGibster said:


> leave the drab oppression of their black & white world to a colorful place like Oz.  A magical place where someone like the Cowardly Lion was accepted and loved for who he was rather than what others expected him to be.



That sounds closer to true.

I imagine a conservative small town, where the odds of finding romance are fewer in number, could be difficult. So, where others found the "city slickers" to be selling snake oil, the gay communities might find the cities a great escape to explore themselves among a larger community.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 8, 2020)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Some of the most amazing work happens not from ignoring or excising the problematic aspects of a work, but from working with it and re-contexualizing it.




Iirc there are others on here with children that Lovecraft would have called abominations, and I want to say that some of his stories read very differently in that light.

One doesn't need to keep Lovecraft's name or his direct creations in to keep similar ideas to the mythos and far realms and cosmic horror in D&D. If one feels the need to make the name front and center while using the ideas, it seems like the reason should be compelling enough to overcome the previous paragraph.

If your goal is to look at Lovecrafts racism in relation to horror, obviously his name should be there. Arkham Asymlum has a long history in Batman, that feels like a reason to keep him.  I assume he'll still always be sold in the bookstores.  But does Cthulhu need a mention in 5e in particular? Does the list in the back need to be everything that inspired D&D, or can it be things that can be viewed as inspriational to those running it (or could there be two lists).



Snarf Zagyg said:


> or saying that we can't allow people to read The Old Man and the Sea because Hemingway was  misogynistic jerk, or Notes from Underground because Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semite.




It feels like anyone more than 45 years old is probably tainted to some extent with some bigotry (lets look back at how LGBTQ things were looked at in the 70s and 80s, for example...).   If you start to get rid of anyone who wasn't in the 5 or 10% most progressive for their era, there probably aren't many people left...  But do we need to use folks in the worst 10% though?    RA Fisher did a lot of important genetics and statistics -- but was also a prominent Eugenicist who formally pushed it and might have tried to get Nazi experimenters out of trouble.  His name goes with some things in genetics and statistics that he discovered/developed and isn't going to be scrubbed from the textbooks, and he has a big entry in the history of statistics or genetics textbooks.  But do we need to include his picture and quotes from him at the start of the standard non-historical text books though?  Do we need to have awards named for him?


----------



## MGibster (Sep 8, 2020)

Cadence said:


> It feels like anyone more than 45 years old is probably tainted to some extent with some bigotry (lets look back at how LGBTQ things were looked at in the 70s and 80s, for example...).




I'm used to people throwing around words like racist, ableist, and sexist but I think this is the first time I've seen something ageist.  I'm quite sure that many people in the teens and twenties are afflicted by their own biases these days.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 8, 2020)

MGibster said:


> I'm used to people throwing around words like racist, ableist, and sexist but I think this is the first time I've seen something ageist.  I'm quite sure that many people in the teens and twenties are afflicted by their own biases these days.




I wasn't trying to imply anything peculiarly wrong with people in my >45 age group. Sorry! Just that I would be kind of surprised if, in another 20 or 30 years, there was nothing that a lot of today's teens and.twenties (in general) could look back on and wonder how they didn't do better about or hadn't thought more about as a group.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 9, 2020)

My personal take on things like excising Lovecraft is that I can often (but not always) separate the art from the artist.  I can still listen to my Bill Cosby albums, but I’m glad he’s in prison right now, for example.*

So instead of tossing babies with bathwater, I’m personally in favor of keeping the good stuff that not-so-nice people created.





* OTOH, I don’t have any Charlie Manson recordings or copies of Hitler’s paintigs.  Of course, they’re primarily remembered for things OTHER THAN their contributions to humanity’s artistic endeavors.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Sep 9, 2020)

I remembered another example: Kentucky Route Zero. It's the middle of the Great Recession, and Conway, the delivery driver for a troubled antique shop, is lost trying to find a street that doesn't seem to exist. The only way to get there is to take Route Zero, the only road that goes UNDER Kentucky. Things get weird from there.


----------



## ProfessorDetective (Sep 9, 2020)

Addendum: I think I've also found a relevant TV Trope: 









						Fantasy Americana - TV Tropes
					

The wilderness of North America (especially the United States) makes for an effective fantasy setting. Its huge swaths of uninhabited land might contain all manner of strange and terrible creatures, or robbers and bandits, ready to prey on …




					tvtropes.org


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 9, 2020)

I think it's quite easy to separate "Cosmic Horror" from Lovecraft. As I've mentioned before, the idea of aliens that are so much more advanced that they are completely incomprehensible to humans, and who regard humans as less than ants, goes back to The War of the Worlds, and crops up in other science fiction of the 40s, 50s and 60s. H. G. Wells was known for his very progressive political views.

The drawback, of course, is he wasn't American!

But on the plus side, I believe he wrote a couple of books about tabletop wargaming.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 9, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> Addendum: I think I've also found a relevant TV Trope:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



And it even classes D&D under this!


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 9, 2020)

ProfessorDetective said:


> Addendum: I think I've also found a relevant TV Trope:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



This tvtropes trope suggests that the tv show Supernatural is the quintessential American Fantasy. I like this show.

I still feel Star Wars strikes a deeper cord within Americana.

Maybe the US needs to distinguish between Urban US and Rural US, each with their own sensibilities. So there are at least two different populations, each with their own version of American Fantasy.

Note, both Star Wars and Supernatural are "modern", even when Supernatural is more about the "quaint town" variety.



I am even going to say, full-on medievalism is Un-American! Even formative D&D had Barrier Peaks, and time-traveling handgun-weilding Wizards, and D&D today has Eberron. One way or an other, Americans must enfranchise anything medieval into the modern world, in order for it to feel American.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 9, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> I think it's quite easy to separate "Cosmic Horror" from Lovecraft. As I've mentioned before, the idea of aliens that are so much more advanced that they are completely incomprehensible to humans, and who regard humans as less than ants, goes back to The War of the Worlds, and crops up in other science fiction of the 40s, 50s and 60s. H. G. Wells was known for his very progressive political views.




Cosmic horror is more than just having aliens who view humanity as little more than we view ants.  There's a certain nihilism associated with cosmic horror with the idea that not only is humanity insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but that the process of learning about the true nature of the universe will only end in disaster.  These aren't present in _War of the Worlds._ 

And you can't put the genie back in the bottle.  Lovecraft has already influenced many prominent writers including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Alan Moore, filmmakers including John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, and Sam Raimi,  bands like Metallica, obviously many table top role playing, video, and board games, and you can find tidbits of Lovecraft's work scattered about in random media including children's cartoons like _The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy_.  

I suppose you could purge Lovecraft's name from the canon, but you're just sticking your head in the sand at that point.  His influence is quite clear.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 9, 2020)

MGibster said:


> Cosmic horror is more than just having aliens who view humanity as little more than we view ants.  There's a certain nihilism associated with cosmic horror with the idea that not only is humanity insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but that the process of learning about the true nature of the universe will only end in disaster.  These aren't present in _War of the Worlds._
> 
> And you can't put the genie back in the bottle.  Lovecraft has already influenced many prominent writers including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Alan Moore, filmmakers including John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, and Sam Raimi,  bands like Metallica, obviously many table top role playing, video, and board games, and you can find tidbits of Lovecraft's work scattered about in random media including children's cartoons like _The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy_.
> 
> I suppose you could purge Lovecraft's name from the canon, but you're just sticking your head in the sand at that point.  His influence is quite clear.



Who wrote this:
_"I presently saw something stirring within the shadow - greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two luminous discs like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me - and then another"
...
"and an ungovernable terror gripped me. I stood petrified and staring."
...
"A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder..."_


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 9, 2020)

Cadence said:


> Iirc there are others on here with children that Lovecraft would have called abominations, and I want to say that some of his stories read very differently in that light.
> 
> One doesn't need to keep Lovecraft's name or his direct creations in to keep similar ideas to the mythos and far realms and cosmic horror in D&D. If one feels the need to make the name front and center while using the ideas, it seems like the reason should be compelling enough to overcome the previous paragraph.
> 
> If your goal is to look at Lovecrafts racism in relation to horror, obviously his name should be there. Arkham Asymlum has a long history in Batman, that feels like a reason to keep him.  I assume he'll still always be sold in the bookstores.  But does Cthulhu need a mention in 5e in particular? Does the list in the back need to be everything that inspired D&D, or can it be things that can be viewed as inspriational to those running it (or could there be two lists).




Here's the thing which continues to bother me, and I think it is brought to life amazingly well in Lovecraft Country. Funny that!

What do you do when you love something that doesn't love you back? To be both banal and specific, the intertwined themes of characters who are both marginalized by the "geek culture" that they want to be a part of as well as the nation that they are a part of are omnipresent; it is hardly a shock that Tic (Atticus) loves both pulp sci fi (and Lovecraft) and served in the military, both things that his ... father ... Montrose told him not to do.

I think that this is not, and has not been, uncommon. Gay and transgender people have found representations in a predominant culture that, for the most part, has not loved them back- either coded, or sometimes just read in. The existence of any marginalized people, anywhere, often exists in a weird state with regard to the predominant culture; this tension always exists, and can be dealt with movingly and thoughtfully (Lovecraft Country and race) or humorously and crassly (as in Larry David, Wagner, and anti-Semitism). 

But I cringe when I see people move to identify the authors with the text. Was Lovecraft a raging jerk, a racist, an anti-Semite, and more? Sure. Was he the worst? No. He didn't kill someone. He didn't lynch anyone. He had abhorrent thoughts- but so did a lot of people at that time. Burroughs _killed his wife. _We could go down through the line, but once we start to get rid of art based on changing ideas about what the artists should or shouldn't have done ... that is not a world I am comfortable with.

Applying modern standards to people from the past is fool's game, and I refuse to be any part of it.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 9, 2020)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Applying modern standards to people from the past is fool's game, and I refuse to be any part of it.




There seems to be a lot of ground to pick from between applying modern standards and applying no standards.  Both extremes seem more than slightly problematic to me.


----------



## rogueattorney (Sep 9, 2020)

Wow. I think this might be my first post in 10+ years. Long time lurking. But this is a subject that I love.

While Baum is certainly a strain of American fantasy, as others have said, it is nowhere near the only one.

There’s the Irving, Poe, Lovecraft, King strain of east coast horror that often bleeds over into fantasy. It tends to focus on isolated pockets of civilization, clinging to the coasts, with the yawning, dark terror of the frontier full of unknown horrors just outside the window.

And then there’s its mirror image, the Burroughs, Howard, Lucas swords and sorcery that dresses the American West up in thinly disguised fantasy drag (or lite sci-fi, to the extent there’s a difference). It revels in the freedom and chaos of the frontier.

Both of those strains of American fantasy are heavily represented among the foundational fantasy works that influenced D&D.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 9, 2020)

Cadence said:


> There seems to be a lot of ground to pick from between applying modern standards and applying no standards.  Both extremes seem more than slightly problematic to me.




To you, sure. You are welcome, in your personal life, to make those decisions. Everyone has ... something. For me, I could never, ever, re-read Marion Zimmer Bradley. Because my current knowledge of her life, well, I can see it in her work, now, and I can't unsee that. 

But I would not and could not insist that her books not be available. 

In the end, what's problematic isn't the extremes; it's the belief that someone else gets to assert what those extremes are, and then dictate them to other people. It's one thing when you can point to _actual art that is problematic _(and even that I have a problem with), but when people fail to do that, but instead point to the artist?

That's crazy. 

And kind of insulting; sort of like ignoring everything I wrote about the need to struggle with and re-contextualize art in order to make your point.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 9, 2020)

Now I don't know anything about the life of Marion Zimmer Bradley, but when I tried to read one of her books I detected attitudes that made me so uncomfortable that I couldn't finish it.

NB, that was a long time ago, 1980s probably.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 9, 2020)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> To you, sure. You are welcome, in your personal life, to make those decisions. Everyone has ... something. For me, I could never, ever, re-read Marion Zimmer Bradley. Because my current knowledge of her life, well, I can see it in her work, now, and I can't unsee that.
> 
> But I would not and could not insist that her books not be available.
> 
> ...




I didn't mean to imply disagreement with the bulk of your post - if I had disagreed with the rest of it I would still be typing up a point by point disection of the parts I didn't like (it feels rude to not do so if going back and forth with someone).     I wish there was a mostly agree button on here -- of course, in retrospect typing "I agree with a lot of that but..." at the start of my post might have done that.  And, in retrospect, I see where not acknowledging the rest could be insulting.  I'm sorry.

I certainly don't want some "art-watch" and "book-watch" committees to pick what we can read! As you noted before (iirc), I used your examples about Arkham and Lovecraft Country and agreed with them.

I think your point about Bradley is similar to the point others have made in other threads about Lovecraft.  His hatreds do pervade some of his stories.   And so a growing number of people don't read them and would rather not have D&D hold them up as exemplars.  It's not up to us individuals to decide what goes in WotC's books, it's up to WotC.  But it feels fair to me to let them know why someone might not want certain authors put front and center.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 9, 2020)

Regarding the tv show Lovecraft Country, it is on the radar of Jewish communities. It appears that even while taking on a Black American perspective, the creators apparently injected Antisemitic canards into the tv version (such as the name "Epstein" for the name of a character having Antisemitic tropes), even when the original book that the show is based on lacked such Antisemitism.

There is the possibility that Lovecraft continues to serve as a dog whistle for reallife white supremacist groups.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Sep 9, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Regarding the tv show Lovecraft Country, it is on the radar of Jewish communities. It appears that even while taking on a Black American perspective, the creators apparently injected Antisemitic canards into the tv version (such as the name "Epstein" for the name of a character having Antisemitic tropes), even when the original book that the show is based on lacked such Antisemitism.
> 
> There is the possibility that Lovecraft continues to serve as a dog whistle for reallife white supremacist groups.




Or, just possibly, the series (which re-contextualizes that past and the present) used the name to allude to the person who was quite obviously in the news for his own abductions and crimes - Jeffrey Epstein.

The parallelism between the Tuskegee experiments in the past, and the current issues that were recently explored with Epstein, are quite obvious. And make a lot more sense than anti-Semitic tropes being snuck by the main actors in that scene (such as Jurnee Smollett) and the others associated with the show (such as JJ Abrams).

As for your belief that white supremacist groups are gatherin' round to watch Lovecraft Country? It would be risible, if it wasn't laughable.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 9, 2020)

After millions of us were mass-murdered, only a generation ago. It is wiser to be cautious going forward.


----------



## Urriak Uruk (Sep 9, 2020)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Applying modern standards to people from the past is fool's game, and I refuse to be any part of it.




I agree with the rest of your post, but have a slight nitpick here; we absolutely should apply modern standard's to people from the past. That doesn't mean we should purge all of their works, and scrub them from history, or completely wipe out any positive impacts they've had on culture or history, but we should balance the positives against those negatives through a modern lens.

It's like looking at the founding fathers; they made one of the oldest democracies, a net positive for the world and important part of history, and a net gain from the monarchy. They also allowed slavery to continue, and many owned slaves themselves; very few people at the time thought this was worth banning. It is important to recognize that such historical figures were extremely flawed people, while also recognizing the positives they fostered.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 9, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> There is the possibility that Lovecraft continues to serve as a dog whistle for reallife white supremacist groups.




I don't think I've ever run across any white supremacist groups that adopted Lovecraft as one of their own.  Do you have any examples that you've seen?


----------



## MGibster (Sep 10, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Fair enough. But now you open up the question of who arbitrates that?




There is never going to be settled.  The definition of what is objectionable is in a state of constant flux and so to are our efforts to determine how much of what is objectionable is too much.  We're never going to settle on a perfect answer that lasts the ages.  Think of it as a process of constant dialogue.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 10, 2020)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> My personal take on things like excising Lovecraft is that I can often (but not always) separate the art from the artist.  I can still listen to my Bill Cosby albums, but I’m glad he’s in prison right now, for example.*




If we're going to be honest about Lovecraft, we've got to admit that there are some stories where he wears his bigotry on his sleeve.  The Horror at Redhook and Herbert West for examples.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 10, 2020)

MGibster said:


> If we're going to be honest about Lovecraft, we've got to admit that there are some stories where he wears his bigotry on his sleeve.  The Horror at Redhook and Herbert West for examples.



Certainly...as do countless other works considered classics of mainstream literature.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 10, 2020)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Certainly...as do countless other works considered classics of mainstream literature.




You used Bill Cosby as an example of an artist from his art.  Which is totally fair, but Cosby's monstrous behavior was never really reflected in any of his work from what I can see.  In twenty years time a young person unfamiliar with Cosby might come across his work and never have a clue about who he really was.  It's easier to separate the man from the art.  It's not so easy in Lovecraft's case because his bigotry really shines through in some of his stories.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 10, 2020)

MGibster said:


> You used Bill Cosby as an example of an artist from his art.  Which is totally fair, but Cosby's monstrous behavior was never really reflected in any of his work from what I can see.  In twenty years time a young person unfamiliar with Cosby might come across his work and never have a clue about who he really was.  It's easier to separate the man from the art.  It's not so easy in Lovecraft's case because his bigotry really shines through in some of his stories.



No question, Lovecraft’s issues are more obvious in his creations than Cosby’s. 

OTOH, Cosby took more RW actions in service to his demons than did HPL.  (At least, that I know of.)

Which really made his fall so painful, especially for upwardly mobile black families that the Huxtables echoed so well.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 10, 2020)

MGibster said:


> You used Bill Cosby as an example of an artist from his art.  Which is totally fair, but Cosby's monstrous behavior was never really reflected in any of his work from what I can see.  In twenty years time a young person unfamiliar with Cosby might come across his work and never have a clue about who he really was.  It's easier to separate the man from the art.



Wellllll...


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 10, 2020)

MGibster said:


> There is never going to be settled.  The definition of what is objectionable is in a state of constant flux and so to are our efforts to determine how much of what is objectionable is too much.  We're never going to settle on a perfect answer that lasts the ages.  Think of it as a process of constant dialogue.



In certain important ethical situations, I prefer blurry lines that require constant attention, and allow for multiple points of view.

It seems healthy to discuss important ethical areas, to better understand what is at stake.



Regarding the past eras. I dont need my heroes to be perfect. I need them to be heroic.

That said, to actively encourage hate is less forgivable than other disappointments.


----------



## Burnside (Sep 10, 2020)

MGibster said:


> There is never going to be settled.  The definition of what is objectionable is in a state of constant flux and so to are our efforts to determine how much of what is objectionable is too much.  We're never going to settle on a perfect answer that lasts the ages.  Think of it as a process of constant dialogue.



Except that some in this thread seem to be making a ruling: Lovecraft out.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 11, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Except that some in this thread seem to be making a ruling: Lovecraft out.




They certainly are.  But I'm making a ruling as well:  Lovecraft in.  So I can't exactly fault them for making a ruling.


----------



## Committed Hero (Sep 11, 2020)

Doug McCrae said:


> Conan's progress from barbarian outsider to king of Aquilonia seems distinctively American to me. It's like a Horatio Alger story but with more social climbing.
> 
> It's also an immigrant story as he was born in Cimmeria.




Conan gets my vote as the American fantasy rpg. I would also note Howard's views that old (read: European) civilizations were dying (witness how Hyboria is literally Earth with a thin veneer of pseudohistory) and that a frontier kept a nation on its toes. I can't read Oz as anything more than an allegory of 19th century US fiscal policy, personally.



Dausuul said:


> D&D is set squarely within the swords-and-sorcery tradition, and that tradition is quite thoroughly American, going back to its founder Robert E. Howard. The idea that there is one singular "American fantasy" genre, and that L. Frank Baum (?!?) is the exemplar and defining author of that singular genre, is absurd.




Howard is the Creedence Clearwater Revival* of rpg inspiration: he's normally not cited as the founding father for either fantasy or horror, but unquestionably he is the second luminary in both genres (behind Tolkien and Lovecraft**, respectively). His works are the backbone of the pulp tradition, which I'd argue is an American phenomenon.

* this band recorded the most #2 hit singles without ever charting a #1.

** HPL was ahead of his time, but no one deserves writers of color improving his vision more than he.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 11, 2020)

Burnside said:


> Except that some in this thread seem to be making a ruling: Lovecraft out.



Regardless of Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror not specifically American.


----------



## MGibster (Sep 11, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> Regardless of Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror not specifically American.




Is there any horror or fantasy author writing in a genre that is completely unique to their own country?


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 11, 2020)

MGibster said:


> Is there any horror or fantasy author writing in a genre that is completely unique to their own country?



The Western is pretty specific (bar a few Australian examples) and there is horror and fantasy deriving from that.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> The Western is pretty specific (bar a few Australian examples) and there is horror and fantasy deriving from that.



The Western is specific to Americana.

So mainly, Native Americans are who make Americana, American?


----------



## Bedrockgames (Sep 11, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> The Western is specific to Americana.
> 
> So mainly, Native Americans are who make Americana, American?




There are a lot of movies set outside America, and made outside America, that take many of the elements of western movies and apply them to their own genres, their own frontiers, etc. I think there is a strong argument to be made that it doesn't have to specifically be America anymore


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

Bedrockgames said:


> There are a lot of movies set outside America, and made outside America, that take many of the elements of western movies and apply them to their own genres, their own frontiers, etc. I think there is a strong argument to be made that it doesn't have to specifically be America anymore



That is part of my thought.

If the genre ceases to have Native Americans, then it likewise ceases to be unique to America.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 11, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> The Western is specific to Americana.
> 
> So mainly, Native Americans are who make Americana, American?






Haldrik said:


> That is part of my thought.
> 
> If the genre ceases to have Native Americans, then it likewise ceases to be unique to America.




There are westerns without Indigenous Americans (many radio episodes of the Six-shooter or Have Gun Will Travel or Gunsmoke, for example) -- but I'm assuming that's not what you meant?

Among authors of Westerns listed on Wikipedia, Nye Tredgold was Scottish. Jeff Sadler and Frederick Christian were English. William MacLeod Raine was born in England. Leonard Frank Meares was Australian. Karl Friedrich May was German. Hyung Min-Woo is Korean.

The main character of Frontier Gentleman is English. The main one in Kung Fu is Chinese.

Sergio Leone was Italian.

Does the Great Silence count because it was set in the US (in spite of not having many Americans involved).

Do Galaxy Rangers and Firefly count in spite of being in outer space? Is John Ford's 7 women essentially a Western except for being in China?


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

Cadence said:


> There are westerns without Indigenous Americans (many radio episodes of the Six-shooter or Have Gun Will Travel or Gunsmoke, for example) -- but I'm assuming that's not what you meant?
> 
> Among authors of Westerns listed on Wikipedia, Nye Tredgold was Scottish. Jeff Sadler and Frederick Christian were English. William MacLeod Raine was born in England. Leonard Frank Meares was Australian. Karl Friedrich May was German. Hyung Min-Woo is Korean.
> 
> ...




It seems like American is more like a "modal" assemblage, where certain features appear in high frequency and cluster together, but each feature might also appear elsewhere in Nonamerican ethnicities.



There is alot of artistic crossover back-and-forth between America and Britain, apparently because they share many features in common.


----------



## Committed Hero (Sep 11, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> It seems like American is more like a "modal" assemblage, where certain features appear in high frequency and cluster together, but each feature might also appear elsewhere in Nonamerican ethnicities.




The genre presupposes a frontier where civilization ends and lawlessness begins (at least in the eyes of the characters). American Westerns are the first and most easily recognizable, but there are Westerns set in China, for example.


----------



## Cadence (Sep 11, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> It seems like American is more like a "modal" assemblage, where certain features appear in high frequency and cluster together, but each feature might also appear elsewhere in Nonamerican ethnicities.




And if you get to far into it you end up with Seven Samurai -> Magnificent Seven -> Battle Beyond the Stars, (and going more loosely Three Bad Ben -> Hidden Fortress -> Star Wars ?) and having to wonder how simply the right window dressing lets something pass as another genre.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

Committed Hero said:


> The genre presupposes a frontier where civilization ends and lawlessness begins (at least in the eyes of the characters). American Westerns are the first and most easily recognizable, but there are Westerns set in China, for example.



Heh, so cyberpunk is a Western?


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

The quote above describing why Star Wars is American Fantasy, happens to have a "modal assemblage", a list of things that tend to be found in American works.

If a story has all or many of these features it probably feels more American to an American audience?


"
• modern
• technology-loving
• multicultural
• New World (outer space)
• good-guys-versus-bad-guys
• deeply religious but by means of individualistic freedom of religion
• rebellion against authority
• heroic women (Leah)
• cowboyish rogue (Han) and valiant whitehat (Luke)

"


----------



## Cadence (Sep 11, 2020)

Committed Hero said:


> The genre presupposes a frontier where civilization ends and lawlessness begins (at least in the eyes of the characters). American Westerns are the first and most easily recognizable, but there are Westerns set in China, for example.






Haldrik said:


> Heh, so cyberpunk is a Western?




I'm not sure about cyber-punk, but now I want to take another look at B2 from a different persepective...


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

Americans and Brits have much in common.

What dont they have in common?


----------



## MGibster (Sep 11, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Heh, so cyberpunk is a Western?




You laugh, but if you want to find a period when American corporations hired goons to go after competitors and to resolve labor disputes than look to farther than the American west.


----------



## Haldrik (Sep 11, 2020)

MGibster said:


> You laugh, but if you want to find a period when American corporations hired goons to go after competitors and to resolve labor disputes than look to farther than the American west.



Heh.

If it has prairies, it is an American Western.

If it has internet, it is an American Cyberpunk.


----------



## Tyler Do'Urden (Sep 11, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> If it has prairies, it is an American Western.
> 
> If it has internet, it is an American Cyberpunk.




If it has both, it's South Dakota.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 12, 2020)

Tyler Do'Urden said:


> If it has both, it's South Dakota.



Different Indians, though.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 12, 2020)

Been saying for years, someone should do a game based on Kurt R. Giambastan’s Fallen Cloud novels.  Essentially the American West of the 1800s, but with Native Americans riding dinosaurs.*  Of course, you could probably just run that as a Homebrew in Deadlands, but...

Seriously- what‘s more American than Comanche warriors on raptorback?




* actually even suggested a fellow ENWorlder use riding raptors or moas for a Plains Indians type culture in their homebrew.


----------



## Paul Farquhar (Sep 12, 2020)

Haldrik said:


> Americans and Brits have much in common.
> 
> What dont they have in common?



A language.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Sep 12, 2020)

Paul Farquhar said:


> A language.



Barely!


----------



## Burnside (Sep 16, 2020)

FWIW, Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is specifically called out by Chris Perkins in the Afterword at the end of RIME OF THE FROSTMAIDEN as one of the two biggest influences on the adventure (the other being John Carpenter's THE THING).


----------



## Hriston (Sep 16, 2020)

I got my copy today.


----------



## Giauz (Sep 23, 2020)

When I think of American Fantasy I think of Christian Apocalyptic literature ('Left Behind' as well as "non-fiction" like '88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will be in 1988' [the year I was born]).  I think of the Spiritualism Movement and the "study" of ESP.  I think of Area 51 mythology and media.  I think of conspiracy theories with not so hidden dog-whistles and Lost Cause Mythology.  I think of new age religion and holistic medicine.  I think of 'The Secret Garden' and Christian Science.  I think of the Satanic Panic.  I think of the film, 'Gabriel Over the White House'.  I think of the film America of 'Interstellar'.  I think of big foot and 'Ghost Hunters' and the Winchester Estate.  There is no small shortage of historical fodder for dystopian stories across all periods and locales across the USA, either (I cannot recommend enough the non-fiction book, 'The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case', for a look at the fall of Reconstruction).  In other words all kinds of crazy BS.

'The Great American Tabletop Role-Playing Game' must not only include superheroes, pulp who-dunnits with genius detectives, Western mythology, Sci-fi, radiation as magic, etc but also Christianity's many bat**** crazy contributions to fiction and non-fiction, lots of racism, yellow journalism, the fall of Native American peoples, slavery, fascism, the counter-feminist movements that were a great source of conspiracy theories.  Embrace the crazy and religious and freaking psychic powers.  It's all American as freedom fries and Salsbury Steak before them.

Sorry to anyone if this comes off as ranty, but I figured it was worth mentioning that the USA has a lot of mythology that people even actually believed and even stuff that people still believe to this day.


----------



## pemerton (Sep 24, 2020)

@Giauz, quite a bit of what you mention is found in Over the Edge - although notionally set on a hidden Mediterranean island republic, it's written by Americans and inspired by American culture.


----------



## Jack Daniel (Sep 24, 2020)

In their day, Baum's "expanded universe" (Oz and its surrounding fairy-countries) were called "wonder-tales" and "the first American fairy-tales." They existed before the fantasy genre as we know it was a thing, and they didn't really influence it much. Modern fantasy can probably trace more a more direct line of descent from John Carter of Mars than Dorothy Gale of Kansas.

That said, Oz is most definitely one of the foundational, genre-defining pieces of fantastical Americana. You almost can't do distinctly American fantasy without at least referencing it. For my part, I grew up on Oz, so this just natural to me. I read Oz before I read Narnia and years before I ever even looked at Tolkien. (To the point where, in the 4th grade, when I finally did pick up a copy of _The Hobbit, _I was utterly baffled by the beginning of the story and Tolkien's explanation of how Hobbits were different from "the bearded Dwarves." Even as I read through the book and started to get a proper handle on Middle-Earth, it still seemed to me back then that Tolkien's Dwarves and Goblins were just respectively more-good and more-evil takes on Baum's Nomes.)

These days, my campaigns are chock full of deliberate and obvious Oz-references. My _Engines & Empires_ game has stats for kalidahs, flying monkeys, and such right there in the monster section. (I've used kalidahs in place of owlbears for as long as I can remember.) Its campaign setting, _World of Gaia,_ has full rules for playing as magically-animated straw men and tin men (and patchwork girls and wooden pumpkin-heads ), as well as windup clockwork men. But then, it helps that my default mode is "steampunk plus magic," so my games always feel like something of a mash-up among Baum, Lewis, Tolkien, Victorian literature, _The Wild Wild West_, and a healthy helping of the Southern Gothic esthetic.


----------

