Elliot Wilen ([info]ewilen) wrote,
@ 2007-08-08 07:54:00
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Entry tags:s&s

Swords & Sorcery - the natural home of immersive player empowerment
I honestly believe the title of this post. Way, way back when I first encountered D&D (white box edition), I wanted to try to edit it into a perfect representation of Middle Earth. No campaign developed from that. Instead, as I played and thought about the game, working on a setting, I realized that the basic idea of characters as adventurers trying to improve their lot in the face of a dangerous world was more Old West than Tolkien, and I embraced that. And really, Old West is only a short jump away from S&S.

Now I'm wondering (but only wondering) if efforts to impose story on the basic paradigm necessarily means either

(a) Epic via GM-led plotting
(b) Epic via Anti-immersive player empowerment via metagame
(c) Sturm und drang via focus on character "issues"

Eh, whatever.

The main reason for this post is really to link to two threads from theRPGsite and Dragonsfoot:

Sword & Sorcery in a Nutshell
Swords & Sensibility: the evolution of tone in D&D

I think it will be good read & reread them as inspiration, guidance, and corrective to both romanticized tropes and anti-immersive/disempowering setting and design.

For example, I'm realizing that a key to good setting design is: there are no good guys. In fact, most everyone is a bad guy. If you design a kingdom or empire, the dominant social system, government, and rulership should be neutral at best. Societal norms should offend modern sensibilities (e.g., slavery). If you make up an NPC, always remember Jeff Rients's dictum: Your NPCs suck and they are all going to die.


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Digression time
[info]ewilen
2007-08-08 04:32 pm UTC (link)
The feel of S&S to me is captured very strongly in certain comics--though not the Conan or Elric comics, simply because I never read them.

What are they?
Jack Jaxxon
Wally Wood & EC comics in general
Death Rattle (Kitchen Sink)
Stalker (DC comics, by Levitz/Ditko/Wood)
and lastly, a piece called "Barometer Falling" from an early 70's horror comic anthology. I forget the title, but I've got it around here somewhere.

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Re: Digression time
[info]ewilen
2007-08-08 04:34 pm UTC (link)
Oh, almost forgot: here's a Wally Wood account of Agincourt. Probably not accurate in terms of military history, but both the drawing and the narrative says S&S. Maybe I can explain why later.

http://randompanels.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

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Wally Wood on Agincourt
[info]ewilen
2007-08-09 04:54 am UTC (link)
Okay, the military history geek in me requires that I note how Kurtzman & Wood got a couple of things wrong. The longbow had already contributed to the English victories at Crecy and Poitiers more than a generation before Agincourt; it wasn't a "secret weapon". And there's reason to doubt that arrows contributed directly to very many French casualties, given the use of plate armor in the 15th century. Instead it seems likely that the French suffered from poor maneuverability, disorganization, and overcrowding as they approach the English line, making them vulnerable to the hand-to-hand weapons depicted in the third-to-last row of panels.

But anyway, what's S&S about this? That'll have to wait...

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"Barometer Falling"
[info]ewilen
2007-08-20 12:46 am UTC (link)
appeared in Chilling Adventures in Sorcery #5, Feb. 1974, and was written/pencilled/inked by Gray Morrow. The cover illustration is drawn from that story.



Another contributor to that series was Vicente Alcazar who was also noted for his S&S and horror work.

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[info]r_earley_clark
2007-08-08 10:51 pm UTC (link)
So... does this mean you'll be running a Thieves' World game then? (hint, hint, hint).

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[info]ewilen
2007-08-09 02:25 am UTC (link)
Hm, I wasn't so crazy about Thieves World, yet I have to admit it influenced my thinking. But I DID pick up a copy of the AD&D 1e Lankhmar supplement not long ago!

City-based fantasy is of course not Old West--so Kyle, I was wrong to identify OW with S&S...but that's irrelevent again. A second stab (probably in a series) would be to say that S&S is "pulp fantasy", not in the sense of being produced in pulps, but in sharing a great many themes and elements of other pulp genres. In the case of city-based, it's the fascination with decadence, the underworld and seaminess.

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[info]ewilen
2007-08-09 04:40 am UTC (link)
Oh, wait, I forgot to respond to the (hint, hint).

I'd really love to do something along those lines.

I think what I need to do is get a few people together to talk about general ideas, and then settle on a system.

Are you still planning on doing a Science vs. Pluck game?

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[info]r_earley_clark
2007-08-09 04:16 pm UTC (link)
I'm definitely still going to do the SvP game. In fact, I plan to dragoon Chris B. into helping me co-GM it (I'll be talking to him about it after we finish up a Legends of the Old West Battle Saturday morning at End Game).

As for a system? I'd be alright with using plain jane Basic/Expert D&D circa 1980. My suggestion is start _everyone_ with a character at about 4th level, dump alignment, and go with rotating GMs (with a hard maximum of two sessions per adventure for any GM before we rotate).

You know, basically what we all used to do in 8th grade at lunch time
;-)

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[info]jimboboz
2007-08-08 11:35 pm UTC (link)
If you can say

"And really, Old West is only a short jump away from S&S"

then it's only natural you'll say,

"Swords & Sorcery - the natural home of immersive player empowerment"

You're basically saying that any setting is "the natural home of player empowerment.

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[info]ewilen
2007-08-09 02:16 am UTC (link)
Nah. You're just lighting onto a small part of what I'm saying, and using that to be a wise-guy.

I may have been too young to specifically identify it as Spaghetti Western, but that's what I was thinking. Amoral wanderers looking for treasure and adventure, confrontations with the Other (orcs as Injuns), etc., etc.. Fantasy that had a Wild West/frontier feel to me, is the fantasy I was headed toward.

But it's not like there aren't cross-genre influences which are stronger in some cases than others.

Nevertheless, your logic fails. I might as well have said, "I realized what I was doing bore little resemblance to Tolkien, and later I saw that it was closer to S&S". The intermediate identification has nothing to do with the conclusion.

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[info]zdashamber
2007-08-09 04:40 am UTC (link)
Your "good setting design = there are no good guys" sounds true to me... It made me think about Amber (eh, what doesn't?), where the usual setting is nothing but the personalities of the royalty of Amber... Who are all manipulative monarchists who start wars and attack their kin and kill people who look at them funny. Works well.

Of course, it fails when the NPCs are one-note jackasses: only if there's some potentially nice connection with the PCs are the NPCs something other than an irritating roadblock. (Oh, you collect orchids, too?!/You like my dress?/You're doing this under protest to save your wife? etc)

I think a big useful chunk of every NPC being a bad guy is that bad guys have plans to do things. Good guys may have plans to do things, but they're things the PCs probably want to see done, so what if the PCs go ahead and join the NPC? They might get outshone, trampled. With a plotting bad guy it's easier to see where the focus of the game needs to be.

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(Anonymous)
2007-08-13 01:24 am UTC (link)
I think there can be good guys in a good setting so long as they aren't a major force in the world and so long as they aren't perfect. I think the far more critical thing is that the setting simply simply be messy and imperfect. Setting designers need to resist the urge to populate the setting with groups and organizations that operate efficiently and effectively. And if you simply make the setting messy and imperfect, it will naturally have elements that offend modern sensibilities rather than having to purposely add them in. Sort of like the real world.

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An article on swords & sorcery
[info]ewilen
2008-06-27 06:48 pm UTC (link)
Just putting this link here for safekeeping:

The Demarcation of Sword and Sorcery.

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