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RPG/Drizzt/Forgotten Realms rambling, part the first
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, ifyou 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 dragonwith 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"
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
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
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"