Dungeons & Dragons and creativity unburdened by coherence

[womzilla]

dhole has a very nice look back at his own Golden Age of Role-Playing (the Golden Age of RPGs is "the summer of your first campaign"), which was the release of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition in 1989. He mostly discusses the tangle of brilliance and idiocy which marked the early versions of D&D--and by early, remember, 2nd Edition was more than fifteen years after the original grey/white box release:

There was a naive enthusiasm in the earlier version which is lost in the more professional product, and some of those unworkable or unnecessary rules had a stroke of brilliance to them. It's possible that there's a writing related moral in there, somewhere.

This collides in my head with the fact that A. E. van Vogt was, for a couple of key years , the most popular writer in John W. Campbell's Astounding. In an venue which supposedly valorized reason and thoughtful extrapolation, van Vogt wrote stories which are layer upon layer of hallucinatory nonsense supercharged by wild and passionate invention. He is the diametric opposite of the cool, careful writing of Asimov or the coherent worldbuilding of Robert Heinlein's Future History (the two canonical works of Astounding). van Vogt is more in the tradition E. E. "Donutmaker" Smith, but he took Smith's sense of epic scale and freed it of even the thinnest constraints of logic--in fact, often being deliberately anti-logical. And even now--nearly fifty years after Damon Knight's epic demolition of van Vogt in "Cosmic Jerrybuilder"--van Vogt's place of honor in the field has survived in a way that most of his contemporaries' reputations have not. (Note that there have been two authorized van Vogt sequelae in the last couple of years. No one is doing that for Edmund Hamilton or Sprague de Camp or Elron Hoover, three other very popular contemporary writers.)

van Vogt and D&D are permanently linked in my mind by Gygax's appropriation of van Vogt's "Coeurl the Destroyer" in the form of the Displacer Beast in the Greyhawk supplement (1975). Lore Sjoberg said, "the idea of a six-legged panther with squid tentacles that looks like it's somewhere other than it really is [probably] originated ... as the result of blunt trauma". That sums up both early D&D and van Vogt so well.

For years, I've felt that anyone really wanting to understand science fiction needs to understand how van Vogt works. And I think that those two words from dhole's essay above--"naive enthusiasm"--are the key that unlocks the mystery.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

That last is a point Alexei Panshin has made--and one reason I cannot entirely dismiss him.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Not dismiss Panshin or not dismiss van Vogt? Or both?

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Hahhaaaaa. Rust monsters.

Hahahahaha.

D&D Nostalga

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I remember how exciting is was when Greyhawk finally came out. And the first issue of The Dragon.

B

Rust Monsters

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Damn things destroyed magical armor and weapons. Still do, in some parts.

B

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I meant Panshin. I can't dismiss van Vogt because he is so central to the tradition.

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I'm such a newb. I didn't start playing D&D until there were actual hard-bound books full of crappy artwork and cross-referencing that actually extended to completely different books.

Re: Rust Monsters

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Yes. There was nothing more annoying, as a player. But from another perspective, it's funny how something so absurd-looking could rout otherwise powerful parties, especially in a good old 10' x 10' corridor.

Re: Rust Monsters

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I've never had a mental image of rust monters. Maybe large bearish looking monsters.

B

Re: Rust Monsters

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

The rust monster was inspired by a rubber toy that Gygax got in a bag of plastic dinosaurs.

I believe no picture of the toy exists, but this is pretty close to the first-edition Monster Manual illo:



Heh. I remember when the Monster Manual was new, too.

Re: Rust Monsters

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

That's not even close to what they look like.

B

Re: Rust Monsters

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

That was pretty close to my reaction in 1978, too. And yet it's one of the few monsters where we can say definitively what they look like to their creator, since the miniature preceded the monster.

Re: Rust Monsters

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Oh, they're quadrapedal, armored things with antennae.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I finally read Panshin's Villiers books in 2004. The first one is the best, imao, and the one I had actually gotten through when I first tried to read them, years ago.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I didn't start quite as early as minnehaha B did, but I started early--with the "Blue Box" Basic Dungeons and Dragons (http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/setpages/basic.html) set in 1977. I started reading The Dragon with issue 11. The Blue Box was full of references to "Advanced" D&D, which didn't even exist at that point, and I think was planned as something very different from what actually got published under that title.