Fantasy Females

I just started re-reading Jennifer Roberson’s Cheysuli books, a series I started years ago but stopped collecting due to a lack of funds (a frequent occurrence in my high school and college years). They’re pretty darn good…I had originally thought they’d make a decent B/X campaign setting (and still think that), but now I’m enjoying them just for themselves. Back in high school (my non-D&D years) I attempted to emulate the setting with SSI’s DragonQuest RPG (DQ has a lot of “ups” on D&D for a Cheysuli setting, including shapechanger characters, more accessible magic-use, and knife wielders that don’t totally suck), but in the end no one really wanted to play DQ, not even me.

[side note: If anyone would like to see the equivalent of a literary justification of “all weapons do D6 damage,” check out the Cheysuli books…these guys are like Apache knife-fighters extraordinaire!]

Anyhoo, I was thinking to myself this morning: what the hell is it with all the chick fantasy authors?

That is to say: why do I seem to be drawn to the fantasy writings of women authors? And how has that colored my ideas of fantasy and story and the application of both to my gaming?

Because (after all), the baseline foundation of the DM craft is emulating the stuff that you enjoy or read or watch in the various media available to us: books, comics, film, TV. You can say “well, I base MY D&D campaign on actual history” but I would say you are STILL getting that version of “history” from something: books, comics, film, TV (or possibly university lecture hall).

I think it’s nigh impossible to create something out of a vacuum…and SINCE I’m drawing on my own “memory banks” of fantasy to run my campaigns, and SINCE I’m reading so much fantasy written by female authors, HOW is that influencing me?

Because I do think there are differences in story-telling technique and priorities between genders. That may just be me (I was never an English major, as you may be able to tell from my blog-writing style, so I don’t know if there’s any study/analysis of this kind of thing)…but I certainly tend to gravitate to the woman story authors. Allow me to list some of my authorial inspirations (in no particular order):

Jennifer Roberson (despite only having read 2-3 of her books, she turned me into a knife fan many years ago…also prefer her version of “high fantasy” to others).

Elizabeth Boyer (duh…Vikings. I’ve blogged about this many times; she had major influences on the B/X Companion).

Marion Zimmer Bradley (the Big MZB…one of the All Time Greats. Her books are wonderful and pretty much un-translatable to a visual medium making them real “book books”).

Margaret Weiss (I know she only co-authored Dragon Lance, but her name does get first billing, and not out of alphabetical order…the DL books renewed D&D for me in middle school).

Wendy Pini (artist and writer of ElfQuest comics…probably the most engaging and gripping fantasy graphics of all time).

[Colleen Doran, artist and author of the weird sci-fi comic A Distant Soil has also had some small, if strong influence]

Anne McCaffery (mixing SciFi and fantasy is a good thing!).

J.K. Rowling (not an influence in my formative years, and certainly fairly cheesy compared to my usual literary fare, but I admit I have read all seven Hairy Bottom novels…probably the most books I’ve read from a single author in the last ten years).

[regarding my formative years, I will say that before I started reading fantasy, I read quite a few (10 or more) of the old Nancy Drew books at my school library. Although “Carolyn Keene” is a pseudonym, the authors of most of these books were women, with Mildred Benson and her daughter Harriet Adams being the ones primarily credited]

Susan Cooper (this one WAS during my formative years…read the entire Dark is Rising series. Wouldn’t mind revisiting that one, one of these days).

Robin McKinley (another one from my youth; author of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword. The plots of these books impacted much of my early D&D gaming).


Now this isn’t to say that I haven’t read and enjoyed the works and writings of male authors over the years…however, most of these guys (like woman author Anne Rice) are folks that I’ve read once and not returned to…or authors I’ve grown beyond. For example, I read quite a bit of Piers Anthony back in my youth, but I can’t stand his stuff anymore, and none of it has impacted my gaming (I don’t do puns of the Xanth variety, and his Apprentice Adept series is the kind of simplistic fantasy/scifi that makes me wretch)…despite the sex and violence of his books, they seem squarely aimed at the age 12-15 demographic.

Sometimes, it seems like male fantasy authors only fall into two camps: the humorous/whimsical and the ugly. Humorous/whimsical would include Robert Aspirin’s books (which, like Anthony, can get tired after awhile), while “ugly” is the term I use to describe, say, Stephen King’s Gunslinger series. The latter is a series I read compulsively/raptly as it was published, but as with all of King’s books, it doesn’t shirk from the coarse, the gross, the gritty side of life, instead delighting in showing off just how bad things can be. Reading his books isn’t always “fun.”

However, there ARE male authors that fall into the “inspiring, impactful fantasy” category for me: Howard, Moorcock, Lovecraft, Tolkien, George Lucas, Lloyd Alexander, and C.S. Lewis (especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I have read half a dozen times at least). Interesting that of these authors, Howard, Lovecraft, and Tolkien had very strong female influences on them from a young age (Tolkien’s father died when he was 3 years old and he was raised by his mother)…but then, who’s to say that the female authors I cited didn’t have strong masculine influences?

The point is: it is the female fantasy authors that have had the larger impact on my concepts of fantasy (and directly translated to my fantasy gaming). ESPECIALLY with regard to gaming, only the Big 3 (Howard, Moorcock, and Tolkien) have had as much impact; the first two with regard to tone, the third with regard to mythology (and I would cite the Silmarillion and Children of Hurin as the main influence, not LotR). “Character,” “setting,” and “plot” (for what that last is worth; call it “scenario”), as well as “theme” (if any) comes from my female authors with the occasional random dude (Beagle’s Last Unicorn, Ellison’s Run for the Stars, Steakley’s Armor, and Boyett’s Ariel) sometimes throwing up an especially noteworthy piece of fiction.

[this, of course, is only in reference to my fantasy fiction influences; history and folklore also has a major impact/influence on my gaming and “fantasy life”]

Well, anyway, I thought it was interesting. I'll think about the subject a bit more and see if there are specific things about woman-penned fantasy that I really admire or if the whole discussion is ridiculous...more (hopefully) later...

: )

Every Holy Symbol is Holy to SOMEone

When I was a kid, I loved AD&D, pure and simple.

Really, to deny it would be totally absurd; it was, hands down, my all-time-favorite game, role-playing or otherwise. I would rather play AD&D than pretty much anything else.

Note: I am specifically talking about ADVANCED Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition..not B/X not BECMI, not OD&D, not 2E. And when I say “as a kid,” I mean up until age 13 or 14, although usually when I use the term I mean “under the age of 25.” As in “kids these days wouldn’t know good [insert whatever] from a smack upside the head.”

ANYWAY…when I was a YOUNG kid, AD&D was the Be All and End All of fun things to do. I know that most of my readers have felt this way about SOME edition of D&D in the past, so we’ll just move on to the next part of the post.

One of the Big Main reasons I loved AD&D so much was how DARK and BADASS it was (you can see why 2nd edition and BECMI was fairly antithetical to this love). After all, here was a game in which you could play capital-E EVIL characters. How cool was that?

I mean, right there in the Players Handbook we find the ASSASSIN character class. Wow. Forget the fact that the assassin, AS IS, is a totally awesome archetype. Heck, forget the fact that the assassin is exactly the same as a thief except better (with the addition of poison, disguise, and auto-kill abilities). Forget all that…here is a character with a required “Evil” alignment.

None of this Palladium pussy-footing around, ‘oh, this cool class is recommended as an NPC villain ONLY' bullshit that I hated SO MUCH (back before I was all about mass discarding of intrinsic rule systems).

DM says: Okay, what’s your character?

PLAYER: I’m a half-orc assassin! I’m Chaotic Evil!

DM: Um, you realize that your companions are good, right?

PLAYER: Are you saying I can’t be an assassin? It’s a core class! Gary says it’s cool!

DM: (*sigh*) Yes, you’re right.


Actually, this exchange is more likely to occur with today’s AD&D/OSRIC players than back in MY day. If someone wanted to be an assassin (and evil) more power to him! You don’t have to keep any more of an eye on him than on the party thief, after all. Actually, it’s the PALADIN that seems the “odd-man out” in your normal Old School dungeon crawl…for a guy who says he doesn’t care about treasure, he sure ends up doing a lot of killing and looting of monsters!

I’ve noted before but I’ll mention again, in my old campaigns NONE of the players would have been caught DEAD playing a goody-goody Paladin. Zero. The first time I ever met a guy who played paladins (and that’s ALL he played…hi, Alex!) was in 1997, and while he was only a year younger than me (born 1974), I believe he had been introduced to D&D through the 2nd edition, possibly Mentzer’s BECMI. You know…one of those editions where TSR assumed you wanted to play some sort of “hero.”

As if there was anything heroic about putting humanoid tribes to the sword in pursuit of gold.

ANYWAY, as I said, I used to like AD&D better than anything else, and part of this was the “Evil” option that was included with the game…Chaotic EVIL, Lawful EVIL, UNHolyWord, UNHoly Symbol, UNHoly Water, Detect Evil and Detect GOOD, etc.

Now...well, I tend to think all this is absolute over-kill. And unnecessary. And redundant padding.

After all, isn’t “evil” in the eye of the beholder? Certainly B/X would say that with Detect Evil being more of a “detect danger.” And holy symbols? Well what’s holy to one guy is unholy to another. If I’m a Chaotic cleric that worships satan, my sacred symbol is still “holy” to me…it’s only “unholy” to you goody-good Lawful types out there. And I’m sure my cleric would find your blessed Crucifix to be decidedly “UN-Holy.”

Holy and Unholy are simple matters of semantics and perspectives. Same with an assassin. If my character murders someone, I AM an assassin (that is the definition of “assassination” after all). If I get paid to do so, I’m a paid assassin. If you want to play an assassin with thief abilities, roll up a thief character and kill people for money. Hell…in B/X you can be any alignment you want and still do this (you know that bald Hit Man character from the video game that’s working for the Church? Or “good guy” assassin James Bond? Call ‘em both “Lawful” in alignment).

Now, there are no “half-orcs” (or half-humans at all) in B/X play, which is actually how I prefer things…in my opinion, other humanoids are non-human species, completely alien to humans and should NOT be able to interbreed. ‘Cause if you have some sort of Xanthian Ecosystem (c.f. Piers Anthony) then why no half-dwarves or half-gnomes or (*shudder*) half-trolls? I mean that would just be consistent, right?

All right…don’t want to get too far off topic. The point of the post (as much as I ever have one) is the same as my usual rant: you really don’t need the complication of AD&D to run a cool-ass fantasy game. I think the original LBB rules gave most everyone what was needed to adjudicate a game within a virtual, imaginary fantasy world. B/X simply cleaned-up and straightened out those Little Brown Books. AD&D codified and systematized one man (Gary’s) particular vision on how to run that fantasy world…but I’m not sure I agree anymore that his vision is the best. I like my own vision, thank you very much.

I’ve grown up…and in doing so I’ve grown beyond “Advanced” Dungeons & Dragons.

Light, If Inspirational, Reading

Welp, the wife got home Saturday and my work on my B/X Companion tanked for the rest o the weekend, as I figured it would. Ah, well. She's heading out again for a few days come Tuesday and I should be able to get back to it (assuming I don't spend all my time watching 80's fantasy flicks). The bad news is my wife will be gone a few days and the beagles and I miss her terribly when she's gone.

Anyway, I DID get a chance to do some light re-reading, and it was nothing if not inspirational, causing me to update and several items in my Companion (I did do some work). The book: Hassan but the esteemed (or at least commercially successful) author Piers Anthony.

As a kid and teen, Mr. Anthony's novels captivated me as much as any role-playing game...I found his work to be just wht I needed even into my late teens. I read most of his Xanth novels with relish (despite my loathing of puns), his Apprentice Adept series, and the first three or four novels of his Incarnations of Immortality (always thought I'd finish those someday...). But as an adult, I've found myself somewhat cooled to his works...actually "frozen" might be a better term. For the most part, I just can't stand his stuff anymore.

The exception is Hassan. Re-reading it again...either the 3rd or 4th time I've done so...I was surprised at how enjoyable it is. Maybe because I love Arabian Nights-type entertainment (his novel is based entirely on one of the original Arabian Nights tales, Hassan and the Bird-Maiden), perhaps because it's a somewhat more mature piece of work (despite being one of his first published novels), perhaps because the story just resonates with fortunate slackers like myself. Whatever...I dig it.

And, like my recent foray into Dragonslayer, it has provided me with inspiration for my game. As I wrote earlier, I'm trying not to fall into the trap of simply making my set echo earlier works (Mentzer's BECMI, Gygax's AD&D). I've said it before and I'll say it again: I feel B/X is the true inheritor of OD&D, and as such has much more "wide open" potential than just doing "basic" knock-offs of AD&D systems and "goodies." Not that I don't do SOME knock-offs (some spells, critters, and magic items are too cool or achetypal to leave out). But when one has the opportunity to do something cool versus "same-old-same-old," well, hey, let's err on the side of something cool.

All right, more later (as always). ("real") Work's been pretty busy today, and promises to look the same tomorrow, but there will be more coming this week, I swear O My Brothers!

All glory to Allah! (or whomever you like to worship)

: )

Blue Starred Mages and Goat F***ers

Anyone recognize this book?

I love Marion Zimmer Bradley (or MZB as she is affectionately known).  For all the skeletons and scandals in her closet, how can you not love a little old lady that channels antediluvian history, writes like a crack-addled wiccan, and helped found the SCA?  I mean that with all sincerity...I find her stuff great.  And she did A LOT to promote other authors (especially of the small scale, fantasy writing type).  You want to talk "old school?" Check out her Darkover novels for some real crosses of sci-fi and psionics with Sword and Sorcery pulp.

Of course, for my money I prefer Lythande...but we'll get to her/him in a second.

I do hang out with kids these days (of the under 17 crowd), and I see the kind of fiction kids are reading. I haven't read those Eregon books (written by a kid in Eastern WA) or the Twilight series (set in Port Angeles, WA land of my father's folk).  But I have read the entire Harry Potter saga and I say...this is the most popular fantasy series out there?  Wow.

Back when I was a kid I read a lot.  Steven King  and John Saul for horror and suspense; Piers Anthony, Robert Aspirin, and MZB for a lot of the rest.  I've grown out of the horror (though I did read the entire Dark Tower saga by King), and Anthony and Aspirin I've long since left behind (you start reading Moorcock and Anderson and you wonder why you ever bothered...you start reading the REAL Howard and Lovecraft stuff and Moorcock and Anderson start paling in comparison).

But Bradley was and still is great. The Mists of Avalon (which I didn't read until my 20s) is a great book, as is The Fall of Atlantis.  The Darkover series shares a lot with McCaffery's Pern, though just as gritty (if not moreso).  Hell, I even read Warrior Woman, though it is pretty weak, especially compared to Marvel's Red Sonja comics.

But Lythande was pretty badass.  Bradley created this character for a short story in Robert Aspirin's Thieves World anthologies, though the character only appeared once or twice.  Bradley wrote several short stories for the character outside of Thieves World, and all (to my knowledge) are compiled in the character-titled book.

Lythande is a warrior-mage, one of the Order of the Blue Star.  All the mages of the Blue Star have a blue star tattooed on their foreheads, and have access to great magical power...with one condition.  Each mage possesses a single secret, individual to that particular mage, that if ever revealed and spoken aloud by another, causes the mage to lose all of his power.  It's an extreme taboo that once broken, no amount of atonement will repair.

Lythande's secret is that she's a woman...the only female member of the Order.  And because it's her secret, she is forced to hide her sex for fear of being stripped of all power and left vulnerable to her enemies.

Quite fun really. The mages of the Blue Star are not a cooperative lot...in fact, they actively seek to discover other members' secrets so that they can slay them with impunity.  As one might surmise, many of the stories involve Lythande having to complete some adventure where her secret is in danger of exposure.  Rest assured, she always comes through thanks to sword, spell, and wit.

And sometimes luck...my favorite story is one in which she is in direct confrontation with another member of her Order.  While involved in an actual physical duel (note her two swords in the illustration), the opponent's are bantering back and forth and she hurls the epithet "goat f---er" at her foe...and his momentary hesitation and loss of composure clues her in that she has inadvertently discovered his occult secret.  Lythande stops and deliberately states "you have sex with goats," whereupon he loses all his powers. She then runs him through in cold blood.

Priceless.

Anyway, not a bad thing to mix into any particular home-brewed D&D campaign.  I have an upcoming post where I discuss allowing mages to wield any weapons (just like a fighter) with no expense of "game balance." Lythande is yet another example of the warrior-mage (like Elric or Gandalf).