Jeffro Johnson on Margaret St. Clair

Margaret St. Clair

I'm an opponent of the politicization of gaming, just as I'm an opponent of the politicization of fantasy and science fiction literature. That doesn't mean I'm against political fiction or even political gaming per se. So, what do I mean?

Many of the best works in classic fantasy and science fiction were certainly political to one degree or another. What I'm against is one political group - in current times, it's a vocal and bullying minority within the left - taking on the self-imposed role of gatekeeper and censor against authors and political views in opposition to their own or whom they don't like.

Why am I against this? Well, largely because, as strongly as I may feel about certain political issues, some of the fantasy and science fiction novels that I have learned the most from and/or have enjoyed the most have been written from a point of view opposed to mine, often diametrically opposed to mine. People are people, and just because you disagree with them, or even just because they (you think) are objectively wrong about this or that, doesn't mean they don't have something important (to you) to say. Indeed, I would even argue that this is largely how we learn.

I'm not bragging about having a particularly tolerant point of view, or whatever. Rather I assume many if not most readers in the genre have similar experiences and would agree. It's only human, I think.

That's why the bullies want to stamp it out.

Jeffro Johnson makes a number of "controversial" claims in his recent book, Appendix N: A Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, some of which are, I suppose, in some sense "political" if the term has any meaning. He makes some counter-intuitive observations and arguments about sex and sexism, as well as Christianity - observations and arguments that have not unsurprisingly raised the hackles of some on the left. One of his recommendations is "regress harder," which sounds, and arguably is, reactionary (if that term has any meaning). Not that there's anything wrong with it.

But I think it's important to note that this is only one aspect of Appendix N (an aspect that I think is more than fine, but still). Or rather, if it is the primary aspect, it's meaning may be misunderstood. The authors and books on Gary Gygax's Appendix N list are a diverse lot. About the only things they have in common are 1) they're all on the list, 2) they're mostly forgotten or neglected by current critics and readers, 3) they all influenced to a lesser or greater extent the rules mechanics and/or vibe of original Dungeons & Dragons, and 4) they're all (or almost all) hugely worthwhile to read.

The politics and philosophies of the authors are all across the map.

One of the things I've always admired about Johnson, is despite his opinionated viewpoints (a condition of most OSR bloggers and commentators, of course), he always goes out of his way to find and promote the best or most interesting claims from a wide diversity of people - especially those who might have different politics. This is true for the bloggers he favorably cites or riffs on. It's also true for the authors he talks about in Appendix N.

This might sound like I'm heaping praise on Johnson. Actually, I'm not, or not per se. Rather, it's the natural human approach. And it's how most fantasy and science critics used to go about things. It's only the contemporary politicized bullies that have a problem with it.

Consider the author Margaret St. Clair (1911-95). St. Clair is one of the least well known authors on the Appendix N list, at least today. I'm fairly well acquainted with the history of fantasy and Appendix N lore, but I had never known anything about her (other than knowing she was on the list), and had not read her.

But Gygax included her on his list. Why?

Let's put that question aside for a moment and look at Johnson's first paragraph on her in his chapter, "Sign of the Labrys by Margaret St. Clair":

Margaret St. Clair’s formula for an original novel is to start with a realistic dystopian near-future, then layer in a major fantasy element for counter-point, incorporate widespread drug use and hallucinations, and finally throw in at least two over-the-top science-fiction elements that (in comic book fashion) fail to disrupt either the setting or the plot overmuch. It’s a potent combination that so dazzled her publishers that they could only explain her writing talent as being due to her feminine proximity to the primitive, her consciousness of the moon-pulls, and her Bene Gesserit-like awareness of “humankind’s obscure and ancient past.”

Chances are you've never read St. Clair, but if that bit doesn't make you want to read her, I don't know what.

St. Clair was the son of a Democrat politician, a feminist (I think), a Wiccan, a sometime devotee of nudist colonies (along with her husband) and a lifelong supporter of the American Friends Service Committee. In other words, not exactly a right-wing Heinleinesque sort of figure.

She was also, quite probably, one of the inventors (in terms of her influence) of the megadungeon:

Take, for example, this recent comment from game blogger DM David:

In the fantasies that inspired the game, no character explores a dungeon. At best, you can find elements of the dungeon crawl, such as treasure in the mummy’s tomb, orcs in Moria, traps in a Conan yarn, and so on.

This is just not the case. The archetypal Gygaxian dungeon really does have a literary antecedent, and it’s here in this book [Sign of the Labrys]. Each level has a different theme, from living areas for survivors of the apocalypse to scientists and their unusual wandering monster creations, creations, and on to the VIP level, where everyone is doped up on euph pills. Exploration is a key part of the plot as the lower levels are only connected by secret passages. At the same time—just like in the best dungeon designs—there is also more than one way to get from one level to the next and sometimes ways to bypass levels entirely. Finally, the action of the novel is focused on exactly the sort of thing that consumes the bulk of so many game sessions to this day: a battle within a dungeon by two rival factions.

As far as I know, no one has ever made this connection, even though Gygax telegraphed it, more than forty years ago. (The "official" Appendix N list of 29 authors appeared in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, published in 1979. However an earlier and shorter list, containing 21 authors - 20 of whom would carry over into Appendix N, appeared in the December, 1976 issue of The Dragon magazine under the heading "Fantasy/Swords & Sorcery: Recommended Reading, From Gary Gygax.")   

Not to rub things in against poor feminist blogger Cecilia D'Anastasio, but her tyrannical patriarchal Gygaxian dungeon was actually in part invented by a Wiccan pacifist.

There's much more in the chapter than this, including more of an argument and explanation for the megadungeon thing, and more about the complexity of St. Clair's Wiccan (yes, Wiccan) perspective. You'll have to read it on your own. But here's how the chapter ends:

No, after thinking this over, there is really not one thing I’d change about this book. From the publisher’s bizarre back cover blurb to the original inspiration of the Gygaxian megadungeon, from the drug-infused apocalypse to the bizarre mixing and matching of science-fiction and fantasy elements, this book is a masterpiece. There’s something intensely satisfying about the fact that conventions in tabletop games that we take for granted today sprang from something that was so fiercely original. This is a book that is so weird on so many levels that it really shouldn’t even exist. That’s why it’s awesome.

My own view is that Johnson is rekindling an interest in these works, just as Lin Carter and Ballantine Books did in a different way in the sixties with their "Adult Fantasy Series." And other authors and bloggers are starting to take up the challenge.

As the fantasy and science fiction author John C. Wright says in his Introduction to Appendix N:

Ignore the Thought Police. Read. Decide. Learn to enjoy what you enjoy. Because the heritage belongs to us all. And who knows? You may find the books that your favorite author read as his favorite books when he was young. All these worlds are yours. You have merely to claim them.

Personally, I find that an invitation almost impossible to resist. Clever scribbler, that John C. Wright.

All these worlds are yours. You have merely to claim them.

Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N: Preview to a Review

I'm midway through reading Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N: a Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, published by Castalia House. I'm going slowly and it's been a sort of surreal experience for reasons having nothing to do with the book itself. Rather, since Appendix N is not yet available in hard copy, and since I do not own a Kindle or tablet, I'm reading it entirely on my iPhone - a first for me. And for reasons of pride or habit or whatever, that means I'm reading it exclusively on busy train rides. It's sort of an experiment. I'll probably reread it quickly on my desk computer.

The book is wonderful.

If you haven't read Appendix N but you've heard a bit about it, I wonder what you think it is. I had thought it would be more of a straight literary analysis of books that Gygax and others claimed had influenced D&D, which would of course have been fine. But in fact there are many more references and discussions of gaming than I anticipated, which is more than fine.

It's interesting to compare it to the discussions of the relevant fantasy literature in Jon Peterson's Playing at the World. A bit of the same ground is covered, but of course Johnson has the space to go into much more detail, as well as marching into new and interesting territory - he does a lot more than look at alignments or the Vancian origins of magic, etc. Just to take one example, there's a neat discussion of how Vance's Dying Earth setting was perhaps at least part of the inspiration for the random encounter tables on Castles in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures - inspiration that was largely overlooked or forgotten, as well as becoming somewhat of a lost opportunity as the game developed.

Peterson was the neutral historian, a stance that was precisely appropriate for his task. I've read his 698 page book twice and think it's clearly the book of record on the overall historical topic, as well as being endlessly fascinating. But I can see how some (who might have a mild aversion to long history books or whatever) might call it "dry."

Johnson's Appendix N is anything but, partly because the genre of Appendix N (it was for a while - still is? - number one in the Criticism and Theory category on Amazon) allows for and requires more in the way of opinions - an area in which Johnson does not disappoint - but also because, unlike the historian, Peterson, Johnson is writing as an active gamer, in part for active gamers. So, for example, in the middle of a discussion of L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall - a book that I inexplicably didn't like twenty-five years ago, but that I am now convinced I must read again - there's an out of the blue (or so it first seemed) detailed discussion of how to run a good "domain game" in Dungeons & Dragons. Of course, the discussion makes sense in the context of de Camp's book. High-level player-characters run by 21st century players are in somewhat the same position as the time-traveling 20th century protagonist of Darkness. But it was still a delightful surprise.

Johnson also incorporates some input from current game bloggers, as well as including in his appendix, reviews of three game products as well as a fascinating interview with Tunnels & Trolls designer Ken St. Andre.

In fairness to me, or to my initial misunderstanding of the contents of the book, Johnson had earlier summarized some of his conclusions after reading and reviewing (in blog form) most of the Appendix N literature. None of them directly addressed game questions per se. If some of the following claims sound counter-intuitive or even a bit outrageous, I urge you to read the arguments for them in the book:

• Tolkien’s ascendancy was not inevitable. It’s really a fluke that he even became the template for the modern fantasy epic
• A half dozen authors would have easily been considered on par with Tolkien in the seventies . . .
• Entire genres have been all but eliminated. The majority of the Appendix N list falls under either planetary romance, science fantasy, or weird fiction. Most people’s readings of AD&D and OD&D are done without a familiarity of these genres.
• Science fiction and fantasy were much more related up through the seventies. Several Appendix N authors did top notch work in both genres. Some did work that could be classified as neither.
• It used to be normal for science fiction and fantasy fans to read books that were published between 1910 and 1977. There was a sense of canon in the seventies that has since been obliterated.
• Modern fandom is now divorced from its past in a way that would be completely alien to game designers in the seventies. They had no problem synthesizing elements from classics, grandmasters of the thirties, and new wave authors.

Read the rest here.

Full review to follow, but if anyone who hasn't purchased or read it yet, wants to jump on board now, you won't be disappointed.

Alignment in OD&D and Zylarthen, Part II

One of the greatest of the Appendix N novels

So the first comment on the last post by Reverance Pavane (aka Ian Borchardt) asked some great questions that deserve more detailed answers than I initially gave. I'd like to reprint the comment in full here:

I think you are starting out with an assumption here brought on from later editions that alignment is actually "a moral outlook." I personally don't think morality came into it until the Good/Evil dichotomy was introduced in Greyhawk. Before this it was what it literally said it was - an alignment with a faction - whether that was the seelie/unseelie of Andersons' A Broken Sword, the eternal battle of Moorcock's Elric series, or even something as obscure as the reality/unreality of Brunner's Traveller in Black. 

That being said people generally prefer order ("may you live in interesting times" is a curse for a very good reason) so Law often gets equated with being a desirable or good quality. The fact that many "monsters" are in the Chaos list make it inherently bad. 

My personal response to the original OD&D list was to consider Law to be akin to civilisation, and Chaos to be akin to the wilderness. (Although to be more precise the Chaos elements were those who either raided civilisation or directly opposed the expansion of civilization. ) As more and more of the wilderness is conquered and brought to order and settled it moves from Chaos to Law. The traditional dungeons, for example, could be considered bastions of Chaos. (This follows more of the Brunner model.)

I'm going to break this down into two questions about alignment in OD&D:

1. Is alignment a moral outlook as opposed to (merely) an alliance with a "side"?
2. Is Law vs. Chaos equivalent to, or does it at least track (in some fairly close sense) Good vs. Evil?

Now, I think Ian is right that by the time we get to the AD&D Players Handbook (1978), it was a moral outlook, which doesn't mean it necessarily started out that way in 1974. AD&D also introduced a nine-point alliance scheme, which explicitly contrasted the concepts of Law and Chaos with Good and Evil, and this was foreshadowed in Basic D&D (1977) with the five-point system. But this leaves unanswered the meaning of the terms before that, as well as in the Moldvay/Cook, Basic/Expert set (1981) a few years later, which reverted to the three-point system).

Also, Ian is correct in claiming that there might be a difference between successive iterations of OD&D, for example, between the first edition "The Three Little Brown Books" (1974) and Greyhawk (1975). Among other things, it might be the case that Greyhawk was a sort of bridge between the original edition and AD&D.

Let's go to the sources. First, two from Appendix N (fantasy authors and texts that Gary Gygax explicitly cited as inspirations for D&D)--Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) and Michael Moorcock's Elric series (1961-). Here we'll crib somewhat from Jon Peterson's Playing at the World. Then we'll look at the text from to Chainmail (1971-), The Three Little Brown Books, Greyhawk and an article Gygax wrote in The Strategic Review (1976). I've read both Anderson and Moorcock but it's been a while. (No, I'm not going to reread them for this blog post.) So I'm going to rely somewhat for quotes and such on Peterson's book.

In Three Hearts and Three Lions a Danish anti-Nazi resistance fighter, Holger Carlson, finds himself transported to an alternate universe early middle-ages, where he becomes involved in a struggle between Law and Chaos. Most humans are on the side of Law, whereas elves, trolls, giants and many other monstrous creatures are on the side of Chaos. Some are neutral between the two, such as the swanmay, Alianora, whom Holger will fall in love with. Later, after he is transported back to 20th century Europe, he decides that the struggle between Law and Chaos is being fought or refought as the current war between the Allied powers and the Nazis.

Now, here the focus is obviously on sides. "Holger is frequently questioned about his allegiances: 'Which side be ye on? Law or Chaos,' Alianora asks him, to which he replies, after hesitating, 'Law, I suppose'" (Peterson, p. 181). Chaos has it's ugly and monstrous components, but it is also frequently attractive, at least superficially, exemplified by the sexually seductive elves. So while Chaos may certainly track evil, its partisans do not all go around dressed in black with skulls on their standards. That Law and Chaos are more sides and not precisely moral outlooks is apparent in the fact that Holger--an adult man who has obviously already made some important moral choices in his life--has to identify them and (so it seems) decide between them, as opposed to just being one or the other.

But these sides are not independent of personal moral behavior.

The most striking illustration of this in the novel is the incident where Holger, mindful of his missed opportunities for dalliance with the Faerie, surreptitiously palpates the breast of the sleeping Alianora--not exactly at his most pious. Virtually as soon as he does so, the party is attacked by a giant, whom Holger attempts to repel by invoking the names of the Holy Trinity. The giant replies dismissively, "Too late for that, mortal, when you've broken the good circle by your sinful wishes and not yet made act of contrition" (Peterson, p. 184).

Here and elsewhere, Chaos is linked (to a large extent) with sin and evil conduct, while Law is identified with Christian morality.

Moorcock, in his Elric series, also features a struggle between Law and Chaos. But as befits a 1960's-ish New Wavy skeptical leftist (that's not a criticism as much as I think a relatively accurate characterization) has a moral metaphysics that is a bit more, shall we say, nuanced. The hero, or more precisely anti-hero, Elric, has a Chaotic god as a patron, and carries a sword "forged by Chaos to vanquish Chaos" (Peterson, p. 182). So he variously "allies" as well as fights against both sides. Whether these sides can be slapped with the labels "Good" and "Evil" is questionable or perhaps merely semantic. Moorcock is at least coy here by flirting with the conventional interpretation, calling the Lords of Chaos "the Dukes of Hell".  However, Moorcock seems to imply that peace resides in keeping a "Balance" between the two (Peterson pp. 182-3). And while Elric is certainly not a paragon of conventional virtue, the thrust of the series is that individual moral conduct is in any case somewhat separate from the "eternal struggle" of Law and Chaos.

While Anderson's and Moorcock's conceptions of Law vs. Chaos are quite different, I'm going to jump ahead and put my cards on the table right now. However one comes down on the meaning of the terms (and we'll shortly see what OD&D and Zylarthen have to say about that), labeling the struggle as one between "Law vs. Chaos" as opposed to labeling it as "Good vs. Evil" just sounds cooler.

What's wrong with cooler?

Next, Chainmail...

Cantico Del Sole

For RPG Pundit.

Screw "Appendix C"!

Er, okay.

What is Appendix C?

Appendix C is the list of 'classic' great books that are allegedly light years above, in terms of profundity and intellectual heft, what most people usually read. Here is a partial enumeration:

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Shakespeare, anything he wrote
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Leo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Hesiod, The Theogony
I Ching
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Plato, anything he wrote
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

This is taken from suggestions made by RPGPundit in his recent blog post "Screw 'Appendix N'!" (I stole my title from him.)

Well screw that. (As the Pundit might say. The 'screw' thing is of course taken from the Pundit. But no, I won't lower myself even further by repeating his use of the 'p' word.)

Whoa! Before this gets too heated, let's step back a bit. Am I suggesting that all of the above works are not worth reading (in some sense of the phrase)? No. Am I suggesting that, all things being equal, they're not all on average more worth reading than, say, a random selection from the shelves of Barnes & Noble? No (though, since they're on average longer, and life is finite, all things may not be equal).

I am suggesting that putting them on a pedestal and implying that all (without exception) are just so much better for you to ingest than any of the books on that other Appendix, is just so much bilge.

According to the Pundit, the works on Appendix N are only 1% better than the most hack-like romance novels or TV show tie-ins. Hemingway is 99% better. Hemingway? Seriously? That's bilge.

We all know what other books are on Appendix C. We read (or at least we were assigned) many of them in high-school and college. The list features mostly dead white males, of course. But recently more and more dead white females and dead 'people of color' have been appended to it. A few of them may not even be dead, but if not, they're probably pretty elderly and aren't writing anything, or at least not writing anything worthwhile anymore. Occasionally they make speeches at book festivals.

Who created the list? No one in particular or exclusively. But many participated. That hippy high-school teacher with the 'Speak Truth to Power' stickers on his office door, and who thinks Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 election helped to perpetuate the list, though he added Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker to it. So did the grey-haired college professor with the pipe, the one that none of his colleagues speak to because he didn't think Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 election, though he threw in a few more Romans and Greeks to it. Mortimer Adler, one of the greatest intellectual hacks of the 20th century, also stands accused. So does William Bennett. Alexander Macris, whose 'Ted-Talk' the Pundit cites approvingly, is also part of the problem.

Ted-Talks are the Star Trek novels of the half-educated.

So why am I against Appendix C? Well, to be frank, many of these works (to again, speak like the Pundit) sort of suck. Gibbon's opus is a misleading and often inaccurate anti-Christian screed. Nietzsche was insane. Virtually all of his 'arguments' are either tautological and thus trivial, obviously invalid, or feature conclusions (deduced from false premises) that are morally repellent. Plato is the most overrated philosopher in history (which obviously says a lot). John Stuart Mill isn't on the above list, but he's on the larger list. Don't even get me started with him.

But don't you need to know who these people are and what their arguments are (such as they are) in order to get along at certain types of cocktail parties? Well, yes. Or at least, yes, if you're not good-looking or charming enough to succeed without answering Great Books trivia questions. But I didn't know we were talking about cocktail parties.

Look, the above are just my opinions. I completely and utterly concede that. But that's precisely the point. Don't blindly take my word for any of it. But by the same token, don't take anyone else's word that all of these books are a hundred times better for you than reading another Conan novel. They might be. But then again, they might not.

By all means, read. Read a lot. Read outside of your ideological boundaries and preconceptions. No one I know treats Appendix N as gospel (despite the claims of the Pundit). But many many people (including the Pundit?) treat Appendix C as gospel. That's silly. Don't be silly.

Think for yourself.

What is the OSR?

I don't care.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not one of those 'why can't they all shut up and just play?' people. Bloggers can't shut up. Nor should they. But as will be clear in a moment, I'm more interested in describing a type of game or a style of play that we shall call Old School, for lack of a better term. On the other hand, defining the OSR movement--when it started, why it started, who started it, and then of course the inevitable (for some) what went wrong, who led it astray, etc. etc, and so on and so forth--is not my bag. Among other things, I wasn't there. If you were there, that's great, and my sincere thanks if you contributed to resurrecting or bettering Old School gaming in even the smallest way. But in a certain sense (and don't take this in the wrong way) I don't really care about that either. Or rather, I'm not going to swoon because, say, in your opinion Encounter Critical was more important or characteristic of the movement than Swords & Wizardry or whatever. Indeed, if you make that sort of claim coupled with the logical fallacy of claiming that it's true because, well, you were there, that's just going to annoy me. Partly because I'm jealous of you. I'm lazy and usually late to parties anyway.

So what is Old School? Just to be scrupulously fair, balanced and non-confrontational, let's discuss that question partly in reference to an entity we'll call The Man. Also for the fun of it, and very uncharacteristically for this blogger, the following 25 propositions will be asserted briefly, with little extra detail or explanation.

1. The Old School is not The Man.
2. The Old School wants you to do the imagining. The Man wants to imagine things for you.
3. The Old School treats you like an adult (even if you're a child). The Man condescends to you (even if you're an adult).
4. The Old School wants you to roll up a character. The Man wants you to build one
5. The Old School gives you 100 pages of rules (or 25 pages of rules with multiple columns and really tiny print). The Man gives you 400 pages of rules and 500 pages of description (see 2. above).
6. The Old School's text is difficult to read because the text is small. The Man's text is difficult to read because there's an image overlaying it.
7. The Old School wants to kill you (often or at least sometimes). The Man wants to hold your hand through 29th level.
8. The Old School wants the wandering monster to be randomly determined. The Man wants your solving a puzzle to be randomly determined.
9. The Old School isn't 5e. The Man wants you to think that it is. (If you disagree, that doesn't make you a bad person. I hope we can laugh together over a beer sometime...at how wrong you were on this issue.)
10. The Old School doesn't want your money, or at least doesn't want very much of it. Or when it does, it gives you a really nice collectors edition that you will always treasure (even if you get it two years late). The Man wants to sell you multiple 'Core' books at $50 apiece, and then wants to sell you additional 'Core' books with numbers added to them--'Core Book 2', 'Core Book 3', and so on--for $50 apiece. It will also cost you an additional $50 to have your hand held through 9th level (not including the battle mats).
11. The Old School wants you to become a hero. The Man lies to you that you already are one.
12. The Old School speaks Chaotic. The Man speaks Abyssal.
13. The Old School defines you by your actions. The Man defines you by your character sheet.
14. The Old School wants you to explore dungeons. The Man wants you to explore your character's sexual preferences.
15. The Old School is sexy. The Man is a sex theorist.
16. The Old School offends you (sometimes). The Man is offended by you.
17. The Old School wants to see what happens. The Man wants to plan things.
18. The Old School loves your unpredictability. The Man hates it.
19. The Old School gives you good art, sometimes even great art. Or at least it wants to when it can afford it. The Man wants to pawn off tacky looking videogame-like images on you as art, thinking you won't notice.
20. The Old School gives you art that stimulates your imagination. The Man gives you art that stimulates your torpidity.
21. The Old School is C.L Moore. The Man is Katherine Kurtz.
22. The Old School is a brilliant amateur historian repairing shoes in his basement to provide for his family. The Man is a $400,000 Kickstarter.
23. The Old School embodies diversity. The Man preaches it.
24. The Old School wants you to make choices. The Man wants you to be part of his story.
25. The Old School is you and me. The Man is too. Or it's who we're tempted to conform with or suck up to. We don't have to.

Fight On!

OSR Art Friday: Cover of DragonQuest

The above piece was penned in 1980 by Jim Sherman--perhaps better known for his work in comics including Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes.

Before continuing I wanted to answer a few objections to this sort of picture that I find annoying:

No one actually looks like that. Of course they do. Come to my gym sometime. The weight room looks like a Frazetta painting without the jungle ferns. I'll introduce you to a hedge fund manager who is the spitting image of that guy.

It's unrealistic. It's true that an odd thing about this particular illustration is that it features a sandaled, Conan style warrior in a Northern European fantasy milieux. Note the pine trees and the Germanic Cinderella's Castle-style dwelling in the background. But consider this: I often wear light clothing in my condo, even in winter. I hate sweaters. They constrain me. Our friend probably had similar tastes. But out of a window on a cold stormy afternoon, he noticed the dragon padding down the cobblestone road with dragonish murder in his eyes. Our friend quickly grabbed his helmet, sword and shin guards and then slinked from pine tree to pine tree, finally surprising the dragon from behind. He posed for a picture before sprinting back. Brrrr...

Enough joking around. The above painting illustrates the pulp/comic book aspect of old school fantasy art. As we shall see, it was only one strand of old school art, but it was an important strand. Since 3.5e it's been pretty much gone from TSR/WOTC/Hasbro products and is nowhere to be found in 5e.

That's a shame.

Curiously, Hasbro currently owns the rights to DragonQuest, which while never really catching on in a major way apparently still has a small group of loyal followers. It went through a number of editions, the first two in 1980 and 1982 by the fading war-game company SPI, vainly trying to hitch a ride on the roleplaying game steamroller. SPI was then purchased by TSR which put out a 3rd edition in 1989.

On an interesting side note, if you don't like the pine trees, above, the layout people for the 2nd edition probably agreed with you. For their cover they used the Conan-like figure and the severed dragon head but whited-out everything else. You can see it  here in Grognardia's useful retrospective post on the game. This is the cover and edition that many of us remember. I have it in a box somewhere.

I picked the piece partly because I like it. Yes, it's cheesy and silly--especially that grin. But I think it works. I also wanted to emphasize the obvious point that 'old school' sensibilities in fantasy art do not merely apply to products put out by early TSR.

But we can find many similar efforts in official Dungeons & Dragons publications. Here's an illustration from the very first issue of The Dragon from an article titled 'Hints for D&D Judges, Part 2: Wilderness':

It appears to be a Dave Sutherland piece. So, to the Tom Wham 'funny-stuff' and the David Trampier sort of 'Dungeon-noir' drawings, we might add the slightly more pulpy and comic book-like tone of Sutherland. One of these Fridays we'll feature one of his illustrations.

Finally, this post is a kind of stand-in for the planned second installment on the Eldritch Wizardry cover. Before I sidetracked everything by first talking about clothing, I wanted to make a second point that the Eldritch Wizardry cover represented the lost pulpy element of old school art. Practically every literary source listed by Gary Gygax in his famous Appendix N (the link is to one of Martin Ralya's useful blogs), had one or more pulpy covers attached to it, either in the magazines of the 30's and 40's or the mass-market paperbacks of the 50's, 60's and later. One could say that some of it was sexist, borderline pornographic or just plain stupid or bad. But there was also a huge amount of good in it, and Its studied abandonment by the current market leading roleplaying game is a net loss.

Fight on!