Dimension in Role Playing
Apr. 8th, 2007 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaPromoting a comment I made to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bruceb's observation here:
The comments there are well worth reading. Here's mine:
The works which are most influential on D&D--to wit, Lord of the Rings, Conan, Fafhrd and the Mouser, Elric, and the Dying Earth--have basically no dimension-hopping, at least in the sense of travel among really developed worlds. There are jaunts down into the underworld or nebulous semi-worlds like the lair of Gog and Magog (the setting of the Elric/Corum/Eternal Champion crossover that isn't "The Vanishing Tower"), but no journeys to worlds that are more than a few small encounters, generally. The "there and back again" tales of a human from our world going to a fantastic world and having amazing adventures weren't the stories that really fed the fantasy RPG in its earliest days.
Too, the earliest attempts to formalize the type of multi-genre crossovers in D&D always felt more like advertisements for TSR's even worse other games, and left me personally with no interest in pursuing them.
On the other hand, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was one of the most popular early modules, and the entire Giants-Drow-Lolth series is basically a long series of journeys to very strange other worlds, first those of the giants, then the underground kingdoms, then Lolth's home plane. Gygax burned out entire new thesauruses trying to evoke the otherworldly feel of the Vault of the Drow.
bruceb's observation here: In tabletop gaming, I realized the other day, we've lost one of the fairly major recurring elements in many of our inspirations: multiple dimensions.
Communication with and travel to and through realms that are (to the characters) exotic and often operating under their own laws unlike those familiar to the characters, these are very common things, from early outings by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Abe Merritt onward. They're crucial to Moorcock's Corum stories, to McCaffrey's Pern, to Donaldson's Covenant series, to grab a few from what I was reading about the time I discovered rolegaming. Feist's Riftwar stories have, well, rifts and wars, along with some gaming inspirations. And the tradition's remained alive and well up to the modern day in computer gaming, with multiple dimensions fundamental to the World of Warcraft setting.
The comments there are well worth reading. Here's mine:
The works which are most influential on D&D--to wit, Lord of the Rings, Conan, Fafhrd and the Mouser, Elric, and the Dying Earth--have basically no dimension-hopping, at least in the sense of travel among really developed worlds. There are jaunts down into the underworld or nebulous semi-worlds like the lair of Gog and Magog (the setting of the Elric/Corum/Eternal Champion crossover that isn't "The Vanishing Tower"), but no journeys to worlds that are more than a few small encounters, generally. The "there and back again" tales of a human from our world going to a fantastic world and having amazing adventures weren't the stories that really fed the fantasy RPG in its earliest days.
Too, the earliest attempts to formalize the type of multi-genre crossovers in D&D always felt more like advertisements for TSR's even worse other games, and left me personally with no interest in pursuing them.
On the other hand, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was one of the most popular early modules, and the entire Giants-Drow-Lolth series is basically a long series of journeys to very strange other worlds, first those of the giants, then the underground kingdoms, then Lolth's home plane. Gygax burned out entire new thesauruses trying to evoke the otherworldly feel of the Vault of the Drow.
