RPG/Drizzt/Forgotten Realms rambling, part the first

[telophase]

As some of you know already, I've recently been reading some old-skool RPG novels, mostly in an attempt to find out why the character of Drizzt Do'Urden is so incredibly popular.

The answer is...so far, mostly the hell if I know. Well, not quite. I think if I'd encountered him at a much younger age (say, 14), when I had not so much discernment in my literary tastes, I'd have been totally into him, fluffy little angstbunny that he is. Now, not so much.

While I'm reading these books, I keep getting distracted from the character of Drizzt by the overall badness of the setup. I'll admit that I've never played Forgotten Realms, which these books are tie-in novels for, or for that matter any RPG that hadn't been seriously altered by the GM and players into something with a hell of a lot more internal consistency than your general off-the-shelf RPG. This is a side effect of being an Anthropology geek in a group of friends made up of Anthropology and Classics geeks.[1] So I am, perhaps, a wee bit more sensitive to this sort of thing and seeing cultural groups in the game world that are very obviously Earth cultural groups with the serial numbers filed off and a thin coat of paint slopped on DRIVES ME UP THE FUCKING WALL.

Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk started out based on The Lord of the Rings (with the serial numbers hastily filed off after legal threats from the Tolkien estate, IIRC), and accreted various trappings of a sort-of Heroic Age as viewed through a 20th-century lens. The idea is that you get to be the hero (and the Hero, in true mythic fashion) of the story, battling incredible odds and fearsome enemies, and in the end, if you your character survives, you get the loot and the girl and the acclaim.[2] So they took the basic ideas in Tolkien's work, removed all the things that gave it depth, consistency, and meaning, and went to town with the rest.

There's been all sorts of creative spinoffs and re-imaginings since, but the basic heroic ideal is still going strong.[3]


Forgotten Realms

Anyway. So far I've read two and a half books in the Forgotten Realms wrold - Homeland and half of Exile, the first two books in the Drizzt Do'Urden backstory, and The Crystal Shard, which is teh first book Drizzt showed up in, as an ensemble character. Wherever it was that I read that TCS was his first appearance said that Drizzt was a secondary character, but I think whoever wrote that description was unfamiliar with the concept of an ensemble cast, which is what it really is. There's an ostensible hero, who even kills a dragon with serious help, but it's structured to be similar to an RPG, where you have a group of 5 or 6 players working as a group to get through the plot, each with his or her own piece of the action.

I should, perhaps, mention that these books were all published around the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s and one would hope that some of the skeevier racial and gender imbalances have been fixed by now in more recent game worlds and books, but I am not entirely optimistic about that.

As you can see, my basic acquaintance with the Forgotten Realms world isn't very much, only what I've gleaned from the books. There's a mishmash of characters and cultures that makes no logical sense whatsoever. The Crystal Shard is set in a remote frontier area named Ten-Towns that's near both mountains and tundra (it might actually be on tundra, but I'm not sure), where ten towns eke out a living around a set of lakes wherein live knucklehead trout. The entire economy seems to be based on said trout, especially on the scrimshaw they produce on trout bones.

I'm going to repeat that. Scrimshaw. On trout bones. And no, there's no mention of the Great Whale-Trout, the Enormous Bony-Plated Trout, the Narwhaltrout, or anything that would lead us to believe these trout are any larger than your average trout. And the only scrimshander[4] we see at work in the entirety of the Ten Towns is a halfling, who's pretty lazy.

These ten town are named things like Bryn Shander, Termalaine, Targos, Caer-Konig, Caer-Dineval, and, inexplicably, Bremen. And the lakes they're on are prefaced things like "Maer" and "Lac," resulting in a complete linguistic mishmash. And not in a good way, either. You tend to get a linguistic mishmash in areas that have been overrun by various cultural groups in their history,[5] but there's no sense of hsitory here.

This tundralike wasteland and nearby mountains also support a large population of creatures including the wild tundra yeti, a tribe of giants, a colony of dwarves, goblins, and several other RPG random-encounter monsters. Plus several tribes of barbarians - called "barbarians," because everybody in an RPG world is defined by their class first and any other affiliation second. The barbarian tribes are loosely-disgused Native American tribes with Scandinavian characteristics stapled on top, who also occasionally herd reindeer. (Nobody in these games ever seems to recognize that the Vikings weren't rampaging tribal barbarians 100% of the time, but instead were farmers during the growing season, supplementing their subsistence farming with raiding or trading as the opportunity struck. It's called a REALISTIC ECONOMY guys!)

Needless to say, there are no women or children in any of these. Oh, they're present in the sense that part of the townsmen's motivation is to protect the chillun' and wimmenfolk, and they're referred to in the plural as in "The women and children ran towards the boats, away from the fighting" (not an actual sentence, just one I amde up that's similar to many), but there's no sense otherwise that there's anything to a manly, heroic life doing scrimshaw and fishing and bashing random monsters that involves the other two-thirds of the human race.

"But wait!" I hear you say! "What about Cattie-brie?!" What about her? She is technically a character in the sense that she has a name and an occasional line, but her entire utility is to make it seem not so out of the ordinary that Bruenor, the major dwarf character, would adopt a human boy, since he'd adopted her. And she gets to flirt with the boy alter, when they're grown up, and then be all understanding when he heads off to fight a dragon or something. But more on her later.

Actually, more on everything later. I've wiffled on enough as is, and it's getting late. You'll have to wait for my SO FASCINATING THOUGHTS on racial skeeviness, horrible naming, and Salvatore's penchant for just making up words without using a dictionary later, when I can type some more.

I'll jsut leave you with this thought:

I took The Universal Mary-Sue Litmus Test for Drizzt Do'Urden and he got a 79 where anything over a 50 is scored as "Kill it dead."




----
[1] When we played the boardgame version of Civilization - yes, Virginia, there used to be, way back in the mists of prehistory, a boardgame version - we'd argue over the correct name of each city we founded. And I once threatened to play the Greeks and name every single city Alexandria. I sort of wish I'd gotten to do that.

[2] It seems not to have occurred to the originators, and to lots of game designers since, that girls might want to play, or that girls (and some boys) playing might want to see competent female characters that serve in roles other than Evil Queen, Buxom Wench, or Accessory.

[3] Did you know there's an animated Dragonlance thing? I saw the DVD cover in Blockbuster the other day! Anyone here seen it? How bad is it?

[4] Used by R.A. Salvatore, which means, judging by his track record of word usage, that it may not actually be a word.

[5] Torpenhow Hill, in other words, "Hillhillhill Hill"

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I read them, but from what I recall, you've only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

I almost commented saying "but for what it's worth, i do seem to remember cattie-Brie getting to do more later." Then i tried to remember what she did, and came up an absolute blank, but from what I remember of other things going on in later books, and I realize that, nope, it probably isn't anything to write home about.

(But you know, for an English major focusing on writing and the classics with full double minors in psychology and philosophy, they did make for nice escapist reading that didn't require the brain power that didn't exist to be spared for it.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

She's actively completely useless in this one. That's one of the things I'm getting to in the subsequent post. XD

(I understand escapism!)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Linguistic mishmash drives me NUUUUTS. C. doesn't get it, but when I run into a story where characters from the SAME CULTURE are called Sarah, Edward, Madison, Prudence, Elyzabyth, A'tryn'iel, Sertialen, Bkar, and Finghoo, I start throwing things.

(I mean, I wouldn't if there were some reason for it, but there never IS a reason for it.)

Pet peeve. Sigh. And yeah, some enforced Anthro 101 would significantly raise the level of fantasy worldbuilding. (SF these days is usually a little less egregiously bad, I think, but it's definitely not totally off the hook in that department.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The towns are supposed to be on some sort of trading route, so that you get desert-dwellers passing through, and I don't know if the mishmash is supposed to be reflective of that or not. It's not very good at it.

OTOH, from my understanding your average caravan isn't going to stick with the goods from beginning to end anyway - so you WON'T get desert-dwellers in the tundra on any sort of trade route, because they sold the cargo on some time ago, and bought a new cargo to take back home. You might get the occasional traveler like ibn Battuta, but not much more.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Yesssssssss. And don't forget the related syndrome of historically-inappropriate names; if a book is set in, say, 1800s New England (or a serial-numbers-filed-off fantasy AU version thereof), but half your characters have names like 1990s Hollywood starlets? Whoops, there goes another dent in the wall...

(Cassie Edwards is horrible about this -- I spent hours and hours one increasingly-nauseated evening poring over summaries and sample pages on Amazon, and finding that it seemed like about 3/4 of her heroines had monikers better suited to daytime soap opera characters or stripper stage names than the various USAn-historical settings. It's still nowhere near as egregiously awful as her handling of native characters, but I must admit I took some small, snarky comfort in seeing she couldn't even write the white folks properly, either...)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

The barbarian tribes are loosely-disgused Native American tribes with Scandinavian characteristics stapled on top, who also occasionally herd reindeer.

*grabs paperbag, sits in corner and hyperventilates quietly*

Stuff like the early Dragonlance and Shannara books are what pretty much started bouncing me off modern high fantasy in the late 80s -- I'm sure I would have eaten those books up with a spoon when I was, say, twelve, but by the time I was in my late teens and early twenties I was growing increasingly impatient with picking up book after book with such blatant file marks on everything, and the periodic attempts in the years since to peek back in via whatever top-seller was being recced by friends as the latest, greatest thing DID NOT HELP matters any.

(Thank heavens I am finally getting much better recs from much better friends; I was starting to think my increasing allergy to the genre was reaching near-fatal levels.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The "early teens" thing is probably why I read the Shannara books for so many years. Then again, the first one I read (also my first fantasy novel) was the sole Shannara book he ever wrote about a fighter girl with a complicated past getting to be the main character(who was, you know, fighting entire islands of monsters and rediscovering and rescuing lost races while her cousins had the bad guys run circles around them), instead of the Generic Farmboys With A Special Destiny And a Token Hot Girlfriend. It created expectations!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Looking back at that sentence, I see I failed to add in the qualifier "stereotypical" in front of "Native American", but I somehow expect you already figured that one out. XD

A little education is a dangerous thing, innit? Dragonlance was OMG AWESOME when I was in high school and the first year or two of college, but I lost interest in it afterwards.

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

THIS IS WHY I CAN NEVER READ FANTASYYYYY. oh man. such a good laugh though. i'm facinated! i can't wait for more

[telophase.livejournal.com]

There is good fantasy out there, I swear!

Unfortunately it's hidden by all the CRAP.

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

I know whereof you speak. Dear gods of fantasy RPG land, I know -- because I was once a very young artist working for a now-vanished PC game company that had the AD&D license in the late 80s/early 90s. I feel your pain. At least I got to giggle over that crap on company time -- we joked that you could hear the dice rolling on every page -- and also pore over a lot of preliminary sketches drawn by Larry Elmore and Keith Parkinson, et.al. The artists that TSR had on retainer at the time were so much better than the writers, it wasn't funny...

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

My sister's wedding featured what I suspect was half of TSR as bridesmaids, and after talking to a few of them, I'm not surprised at anything you're telling me. Of course, this was back when TSR was nothing but a workfare program for otherwise unemployable Marquette University English majors, and some of the geniuses with whom I conversed at my sister's reception were probably the main reasons why the Wizards of the Coast buyout came at precisely the right time.

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

I gave up on the AD&D tie-in novels after one "strong" female character (read: body like a Playboy starlet, with a name and gooby powers) was practising her swordwork. Outside her house. During the daytime. In the nude.

There's only so much written-for-teenage-boys I can take.


On the other hand, it was these novels that got an old friend of mine into reading; he was seriously dyslexic and had never previously found anything easy enough to read that wasn't aimed at small children. So there is some good in them. Somewhere.

[the-z.livejournal.com]

I've read almost all the Dark Elf books Salvatore's crapped out. The original trilogy was pretty common fare for fantasy novels. I forgave the characterization because I'm a fan of classic heroes and they're no more "realistic" than any you find in these top-selling fantasy novels. What I think makes Drizzt so OMG HE GETS ME T_T is his "tragic past".



Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman couldn't have done it any better.

I can't say I disliked the books. I read them through to the end. I do like the Forgotten Relms world for some of the world construction (but then I've played table top in the environment). After the Trilogy, though, the "Drizzt is so crazyawesome you just don't get it" mentality got a little old. I mean, what does the guy do for an encore? An RPG character should certainly be retired to NPC status when they reach godlike levels. ;)

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

An RPG character should certainly be retired to NPC status when they reach godlike levels.
Word!!!

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Moooooooooooooooore!

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

Did you know there's an animated Dragonlance thing? I saw the DVD cover in Blockbuster the other day! Anyone here seen it? How bad is it?

If you mean the one that was released back in January, it is skin-clawingly bad. Not even in the so-bad-it's-good category, despite the fact that they managed to hire some pretty famous actors as VAs.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to rent it, just because it has Michael Rosenbaum as Tanis.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

If it helps, I get grand entertainment from seeing the huge piles of remaindered Forgotten Realms books stacked up in front of the Skiffy section at the flagship Half Price Books in Dallas. What's even funnier is opening the front cover to see if these were books sold on remainder by TSR, or if someone lurved it and kissed it and wrote her name on the inside of the cover and hung onto it for years until the rent was due. I find a lot of the latter these days, and poking through the Gaming section is an archaeological expedition in its own right.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I haven't been over there in a few months to look, but I note that at my local Half Price there's lots of Forgotten Realms books ... but no copies of the ones starring Drizzt. It seems his fans haven't gotten quite desperate enough to sell them.

[vestaka.livejournal.com]

ahaha excellent. Just the thing for my early morning.

And yes, I play the board game civilizations. Except after a while we turn it into some horrendously cut throat game where half of us team up with the other half and then start having raiding parties to get all the sheep or wood or whatever we're missing from the other half. *laughs*

The movie for dragonlance is pretty painful. And I *like* terrible movies of epic badness, but even I can't stomach it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm not terribly good at the board game, although I have fun playing. My best game ever was once when I played North Africa, and my resources were so poor that everyone ignored me for most of the game. I quietly built up my technologies without anyone noticing, then at the climax of the game loosed the Barbary Pirates upon the Mediterranean. :D

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

I think if I'd encountered him at a much younger age (say, 14), when I had not so much discernment in my literary tastes, I'd have been totally into him, fluffy little angstbunny that he is. Now, not so much.

That's it, bang on the head. At one point I gave away nearly all my paperback fantasy books because, while I had enjoyed them in Jr. high and high school, they just don't stand up to a discerning reader's scrutiny. I tried to reread Crystal Shard and had to put it away before all my memories were soiled.

It's like, in our heads we build up the ideas and presentation of the story to be better than the original and then when we go back we are hugely disappointed. The same thing happens with anime/cartoons; which is why I won't go out of my way to buy boxed sets of cartoons I liked as a kid. He-Man was awesome when I was eight; not so much now.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

Oh man! I totally love these books.....but it's because I read them when I was waaaaaaaaaaaay too young to know any better. But, lol, you've so pegged them.

[chomiji]

As a female gamer in the 1980s, I despised that stuff so very, very deeply ... I salute your intestinal fortitude, reading this stuff!

Back in the late 1970s, TSR cheerfully offered to take the basic ideas for ICE's Rolemaster system off their hands for a flat fee and no royalties, figuring no one else was going to publish it. ICE retaliated by starting their own company, which still exists (although it's undergone bankruptcy reorg at least once) and gaining the official licensing for Tolkien's stuff in game form (which, sadly, they lost in the re-org, several years before the first movie came out).

Anyway, the kind of stuff you're describing made us feel very proud of the ICE publications, especially when ICE got Angus McBride* (!!!) to do some covers. If you check out this one from 1989, that's the female character up atop that golem/animated statue, trying to cut its head off. Other pictures of her (McBride did a series of covers featuring the same adventurers) show that although she has a short skirt, she also has a fairly realistic figure, cropped hair, and a proper chain shirt.

(Yeah, I can't let an RPG discussion go by without mentioning the Olden Days ... very sad, I know.)

---

* The late McBride was the star illustrator for Osprey Books' historical weapons and armor volumes, beloved by miniaturists the world over, who use them to get accurate info for painting little lead figures.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

She's got a short skirt, but I notice so does the male fighter. XD

(OK, so he's also got tall leather boots that would provide some protection while her legs are bare, but I suspect that's pandering to the perceived buyer.)

It's way better than one of the TSR artists drawing a female fighting character in a full-length leather skirt with a thigh-high slit up one side, and then mentioning in the artbook that he always thought it would be appropriate armor for a woman. WTF?! Dude obviously had NO CLUE how stiff leather needs to be in order to provide protection, and how impossible a floor-length armor-level leather skirt would be to move in.

I used to rant about female "armor" on book covers enough to my friends that one of them mentioned he got scared when he saw a new cover with Yet More Impractical Armor on it. XD

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

I read Salvatore's stuff throughout middle/high school FAR TOO MANY TIMES. Enough so, that unfortunately, most of the plot stuck with me. I want those brain cells back so I can use them to remember more important things.

And yeah, looking back now (especially with your commentary!) I can see how much it sucks.

On the name thing: The whole random-name-stew deal is probably because hack authors realize HOW BLOODY HARD IT IS TO RESEARCH CULTURALLY-CONSISTENT NAMES, and then don't bother to do it.

P.S, because I am reasonably fair even to the likes of Salvatore: Catti-brie (why in god's name would you use a cheese for the last half of a character's name?!) does actually get a personality after a while (but not in the original series) and even gets to kick at least one big, dumb, barbarian male around.

[seajules]

My sister adored the Dragonlance books when we were teens. I tried to read one, and gave up when I could hear the dice rolling during the fight scenes. Never tried another RPG-based book after that, though the Brooks and Eddings I glutted on instead weren't exactly better (Lackey at least had actual active female characters and tackled ideas of sexuality).

Scrimshander, at least, is correct.

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

I generally avoid fantasy for just those sorts of reasons, SF generally has a higher level of coherency. Not always but usually. And there is some good fantasy, it is just hard to find among the chaff.

But the FR, oh, such a train wreck of a setting. Layers upon layers of . . . silliness and characters loved by their authors.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I had some further thoughts on this which inspired me to play devil's advocate* in a minor way.

First, TSR did actually publish an RPG with a detailed original fantasy background in 1975, just a year after the original version of D&D came out. I believe it did not sell very well. Of course TSR may have taken the wrong lesson from that - it might have sold better had it been published in a less expensive format (it was a largish boxed set with maps and such), or had it been presented as a D&D supplement rather than a separate game which used D&D mechanics.

Second, it occurs to me that TSR's frequent generic Tolkienesque approach may be somewhat justifiable when aiming at novice roleplayers. Which, back in 1974, they were because that's about all there was, and even much later they still were since they were the biggest brand in the market.

When you start reading a fantasy novel, you don't have to know anything about the background. The characters know things at the start, and you learn what you need to know as you go along (assuming a competent author). This is fine since you do not need to make any decisions. In a game, you do need to make decisions and therefore need some understanding of the world (unless you were pushed through a magic portal to another world, which is just as hoary a scenario as anything TSR ever used).

Obviously players could be given background material to read before the first session of a campaign. That works fine for experienced gamers, but a lot of first-timers would probably balk at it - or, more importantly, TSR probably thought they would. Failing that you either set the game in a fictional world which everyone at the table knows, or you use something very generic, so vague knowledge of medieval Europe and Tolkien will see you through. (There have been games aimed in part at new players which took the former path, e.g. TSR's Marvel Superheroes and West End's Star Wars RPG).

From that perspective TSR's default setting in their later products seems reasonable enough to me (Original D&D I'm sure didn't have any of these thought processes behind it - as far as I can tell it was basically "put this thing a bunch of us have been playing in a box").

This is not to suggest that this excuses them carrying over this lack of good worldbuilding to settings such as Forgotten Realms. If people are going to play in a specific world, with sourcebooks and maps and everything, they need to read background material. Therefore there is no excuse for having stupid background material. Even less does this excuse the same lack of attention in novels.



* Well I would, wouldn't I? I've had this nickname for 20 years.

Record of Lodoss War

[estara.livejournal.com]

Is probably the best animated RPG tv series. I'm not sure if they used AD&D as the foundation but I think it was one-or-the-other western RPG... at the beginning of the first episode they even start out with a live-action table-top rpg bit where the players are suddenly dragged into the anime world of Lodoss - not that they ever come back to them at all...