Part 1: Two types of fantasy literature and
their divergent perspectives on adventuring heroes
Most decent gamers
know that the game should center on the player characters. If a gamemaster
overemphasizes the setting at the expense of the group that is supposed to
represent the setting’s heroes, the players will quickly tire of the game, and
move on to something else. But most decent gamers also know that playing their
characters as murderhoboes is a negative example to be avoided, or at least downplayed
to the extent possible. Players whose characters lack all meaningful social
bonds, and only interface with society when it presents him (typically) with
someone to kill, something to take, or at best, something to buy are commonly
looked down on for reducing a multifaceted and immersive tabletop gaming
experience to a video game without graphics.
To a known extent, the
imperative to keep the focus squarely on the PCs, and, on the other hand, the need to embed
them within a larger social environment which is replete with particular
institutions, hierarchical orders, histories, and symbolic systems point in
contradictory directions. Allowing for a little oversimplification, we might
say that each approach is informed by a distinct fantasy aesthetic (both of which influenced fantasy gaming in important ways). The
‘hero-driven’ perspective in which society functions as a backdrop is rooted in
Swords & Sorcery and Weird Fiction genres. The social world inhabited by
their protagonists is violent, corrupt, broken, or simply distant, and
irrelevant in terms of helping them overcome the challenges that face them.
Their societies have lost, are unaware of, or are actively trying to conceal
any information that the heroes might find useful. In these genres, the
significant loci in which meanings are created are: ruins, hidden or abandoned
laboratories, lost tombs, grottoes in which mysterious cults perform grotesque
rituals. These “dungeons”, along with the proverbial taverns (and occasionally
libraries) where tips about these sites may be sought, and entertainment
between adventures procured, form the central axis around which the world of
adventurers revolves. In the nodes where the adventuring life happens, the
shackles of civilized society weaken or fall away completely, creating a space
for the heroes to explore freely, to prove themselves on the basis of merit,
not accident of birth, connections, or knowledge of arcane social codes.
The resonance of this
aesthetic with the Myth of the Frontier that animates a specifically American
imaginary is, of course, far from accidental. The figure of the heroic loner
(with his posse) echoes the gunslinger of the Wild West – rootless, always on
the move, operating beyond the law, laconic. He is not necessarily a
cold-blooded killer, but violence is his preferred method for dealing with
problems. He is not typically driven by greed, but the procurement of supplies
that allow him to perpetuate his way of life require him to take what he needs
beyond any payment he receives for putting his gun up for hire. He is not
necessarily racist, and perhaps even admires and emulates the free and noble
savages that live beyond the frontier; but Indian Country is the terrain in
which he operates. He is not necessarily amoral, and generally lives by an
idiosyncratic moral code, but he is usually at odds with authority figures,
and pessimistic about reintegrating himself into society when the frontier
becomes closed.
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| Blaze Tracy, a prototype of the FRPG "adventurer" |
The closure of the
American frontier at the end of the 19th century, combined an
ever-greater integration of the United States as an imperial power with the
rest of the world produced literary mutations of the Wild West genre that
became the progenitors of modern fantasy. The invention of “Western
Civilization” to legitimate the US joining of the Allied cause reflected the
end point of the conciliation process between the culture of American and
European elites that had been moving in different directions since the 18th
century. Aspects of European history became sacralized, in order to locate the
roots of the Euro-American “miracle” that enabled the West to establish
dominion over the whole world. Many of these aspects evinced a heavily
racialized character. But in popular culture, the pseudo-Aryan Cimmerian nomad
Conan rejected the stifling, corrupt, arcane, and effete character of
civilization, just as Depression-era America struggled with the legacy of
global economic integration and the burdens of becoming a global power.
Simultaneously, the heroes and antiheroes of Lovecraft’s Weird Fiction
confronted the immigrant, the politically mobilized but still undereducated
industrial worker, the native, whose culture the Western intellectual was now
charged with studying, understanding, and managing. But unlike the European
colonial administrator who promised rationality and progress as the fruits of
his mission civilisatrice, Randolph
Carter and Charles Dexter Ward faced only an uncaring and irrational universe, social
atomization and isolation, gargantuan monstrosities that hid at the bottom of
the ocean and on distant planets, and could expect only madness as the reward
for their efforts. For Lovecraft, the frontiers of civilization and science neither offered freedom from the dead hand of civilization, nor held promise of eventual social salvation or integration.
The second, European
strand of fantasy literature, offered a very different perspective on the
relationship between the hero and society. To be sure, the foundational works
of the Epic or Heroic Fantasy genres exhibit certain similarities to their
American counterparts. They were critiques of industrial and secular society,
and celebrated the country at the expense of the city, and counterpoised the
Heart to Instrumental Reason. They championed a binary morality that did not
seek an understanding of different cultures, but called for a resistance to,
and if possible, the decisive defeat of Evil. They incorporated a decidedly
retrogressive vision of history: society degenerated from an ancient Golden
Age, rather than steadily progressing into the Kingdom of Freedom. And they
drew upon historical and folkloric exemplars whose images had been formulated
during the period of the Völkerwanderung, when the Roman Empire collapsed, and
the limes avenged themselves and
engulfed civilization. The martial monster-slayers like Beowulf, and the
cave-dwelling saints of early Christianity were not wholly dissimilar to the cowboy
heroes of the American frontier.
Nevertheless the
valence of this type of fantasy literature differed profoundly, and in some
respects, diametrically from the Western, Swords & Sorcery, and Weird
Fiction. Its heroes, rather than being antinomian frontiersmen, were deeply
rooted. The hobbits who played a decisive role in the epic struggle depicted in
the Lord of the Rings were everymen who loved their country. Though Frodo’s
struggles as the Ringbearer ultimately made it impossible for him to
reintegrate into the Shire’s bucolic lifestyle, he retires to the paradisical
Valinor, rather than becoming a harrier and critic of civilization. The Ranger
who would have been the main hero of a Western or Swords & Sorcery
narrative comes to terms with his own limitations, and settles down: he marries
the girl, and accepts the responsibilities of kingship. In contrast to Conan,
who also became a king, Aragorn does not seize Gondor (though some Russian interpreters beg to differ), but comes to rule it by right of descent, and
marries a high-born immortal princess, not a stolen concubine. For Tolkien, Aragorn
and Arwen were conscious attempts at a(n) (English) mythmaking. The frontier
hero Blaze Tracy, and of course Conan, were, of course, also (American)
mythological figures, But whereas they and their authors stood for breaking
with established tradition, Tolkien stood for recovering a lost one. Whereas
their values were entirely pragmatic, and typically at odds with those of
religious authority, Tolkien presented the marriage in the Return of the King
as an echo of a peaceful Nordic religion, which had become displaced by violent
Viking myths in the imagination of 19th century ideologues. For
Tolkien, no less than for his friend C. S. Lewis (though in more oblique
forms), myth bore a normative, not an iconoclastic, function.
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| The Epic Fantasy hero rejects the frontier, and promotes social reintegration |
Similarly, though
different realms may side with Good or with Evil, they tend toward representing
genuine societies. Orcs and people from the "wrong" parts of the world do ally
with the Dark Lord, but they are not irredeemable or evil in an absolute sense
– even Sauron was not always so. More importantly, there is no undifferentiated
civilization or society. Instead, there are men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits –
all with distinct characters, traditions, histories, political institutions,
and above all, languages, that make
them unique. In some quarters, there is a tendency to glorify the earliest days
of Dungeons and Dragons, when it was more of a stylistic hodge-podge including
science fiction and weird horror elements, and before the sui generis fantasy elements asserted their dominance. The elements
that gave D&D its mass appeal are the same ones that made the Lord of the
Rings trilogy, both in print and on screen, the most successful of fantasy
franchises.
Along with language
and customs, history also serves as a
grounding element for epic fantasy. Certainly, the narrative takes place at a
time of crisis, when the normal flow of time has been broken by an irruption of
a world-shaking evil whose existence has long been forgotten. And yet, the institutions
that are contemporary to the narrative – the Northern and Southern Kingdoms,
the line of Numenorian kings, the elven realms, and the Dark Lord’s Ring very
much derive from the antiquity of this same world that is breaking through the
newer archaeological strata that have accumulated in the interim. When that
happens, they are recognized as part of that
world’s past, not some utterly alien element or incommensurate temporality
for which the mundane world is of no importance. And in the end, when the crisis
is overcome, the restoration of normal time with the dawning of a new Age is of
the utmost importance. The new Age may be prosaic, it might lack the beauty of
the old (with the departure of the elves), but it is a time in which a decent,
ordinary life (of, say, a hobbit) is possible, and the preservation of such a
life bears inherent worth, because the world continues to be threatened by
cosmic evil, that aims to wipe out or conquer all life. The significance of the
mundane comes across even more clearly in more recent epic fantasy. George R.
R. Martin’s world is also threatened with annihilation, yet the author insists
on suffusing it with a more-or-less believable economy and states system. The
main characters find themselves in existential conflicts, yet ones heavily
colored by the imperative of dynastic restoration.
To return to the main
issue: if the epic fantasy tradition, with its greater emphasis on the social
situation of its heroes is a legitimate and deeply rooted influence on fantasy
role-playing games, how do we go about immersing fantasy RPG heroes in such a
world? It should go without saying that the degree of immersion is a matter of
personal taste, and for most game masters, it lies along a continuum, rather
than being a simple choice between a Swords & Sorcery dungeon world and an
Epic Fantasy milieu. There is no reason for everyone to prioritize the latter. A
world where the power of society is all-embracing certainly constrains player
action beyond a point that would be realistic or enjoyable (though playing in
such a dystopian world could offer its own rewards). But the point is, there is
no reason to automatically assume that the setting for a fantasy RPG is
properly an extrapolation of a Western-type frontier.
In Part II, we will analyze
the historical emergence of the “adventurer” as a concept and sociological
type, and discover that both are rooted in a process of mutation of a mature
civilization, closer to that depicted by epic fantasy, rather than one being
born de novo along a frontier, or one experiencing a complete or near complete
collapse of key social structures that is exemplified by Swords & Sorcery
or Weird Fiction.
