Quote from: jeff37923;924725I don't know. Beowulf and the Niebelungelind (SP?) were around long before modern fantasy.

But neither big in popular culture nor the wargaming community. In a way, Tolkien "saved" Norse-Germanic style myths from complete Godwin.

Quote from: TristramEvans;924706Actually, a Napoleonic Fantasy game sounds incredibly awesome. Imagine an Appendix N composed of Baron Munchausen, The fantasy writings of The Sisters Bronte, The Sharpe series, The Charterhouse of Parma,  Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Massé , Gulliver's Travels,  Niels Klim's Underground Travels, The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, and The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World

Thanks!

Also by Simon Tyssot de Patot, the first Hollow Earth scifi. Sounds pretty cool. From Wikipedia...

QuoteLa Vie, les Aventures et le Voyage de Groenland du Révérend Père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange [The Life, Adventures & Trip To Greenland Of The Rev. Father Pierre de Mesange], Tyssot de Patot introduced the concept of a Hollow Earth. This was the first time that the notion of a journey to the center of the Earth was depicted in a realistic, pseudo-scientific fashion, as opposed to the various mythological journeys to Hell, such as Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Tyssot de Patot's book predates that of Danish writer Ludvig Holberg Niels Klim's Underground Travels (1741) and Jules Verne's classic Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864).

Quote from: abcd_z;924671You have been drawn into a bizarre alternate universe where everything is mostly the same, except RPGs don't really exist. Neither do the books that inspired Gygax and Arneson.  Everything in Appendix A no longer exists. No Lord of the Rings books, no Conan the Barbarian stories, and nothing that drew from the landscape that sprung up around D&D.

It's your job to cobble together a new proto-D&D to jump-start the RPG movement, but you have to base it on books that have actually been printed. Except for the lack of RPGs and RPG-derived stories, everything else is the same.

What stories do you use as inspiration? What kind of character classes do you end up with?

I'd base them on the Mancer series by Don Callander, the Drenai cycle by David Gemmell, Zelazni's Amber, and some anime, then;).

Don Callander's Mancers aren't using precise lists of spells, and it's far from typical fantasy. Gemmell seemed to be writing from his faith, his experience as a bouncer and his historical knowledge. And Zelazni only learned what RPGs are later in his life:).

So, basically, I'd have no classes. What I would have is a system that allows for purchasing spell effects on the fly.
Importantly, the wizards and non-wizards having different roles and power levels, and mostly not opposing each other directly, but each player would control one of each "category", including a stable of mook-level characters.

So, troupe style and freeform magic? I'd probably end up with Ars Magica or the latest Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk:D!

Well there's still previous literature and fairy tales.

all of the oral tradition (folk tales, fairy tales, etc)
1001 Arabian Nights
The mythological stories of every culture of the world
The histories of every culture of the world
Other creative authors you didn't blacklist - Poe, earlier gothic literature, renaissance literature...

The sources that were heavily mirrored in all the sources you listed are still there. They're just in less modern/gamey forms, which are often even more interesting than the modern/pulp forms.

Maybe Scientific Romance, cf Marcus Rowland's Forgotten Futures.

Germano-Nordic mythology is at least as rich a possible source as Greco-Roman. Instead of Mazes&Minotaurs, Fate of the Norns.

Or we might very well get Mouse Guard, which is almost completely free of D&Disms

I'm thinking we'd get a pulp-like game very reminiscent of Flashman's adventures at the height of the British empire mixed with the splendor of Jules Verne's fantastic tales set in la Belle Epoque. Or something like that.

Quote from: abcd_z;924671You have been drawn into a bizarre alternate universe where everything is mostly the same, except RPGs don't really exist. Neither do the books that inspired Gygax and Arneson.  Everything in Appendix A no longer exists. No Lord of the Rings books, no Conan the Barbarian stories, and nothing that drew from the landscape that sprung up around D&D.

It's your job to cobble together a new proto-D&D to jump-start the RPG movement, but you have to base it on books that have actually been printed. Except for the lack of RPGs and RPG-derived stories, everything else is the same.

What stories do you use as inspiration? What kind of character classes do you end up with?

The overwhelming majority of current fantasy stories are shallow imitations of Tolkien. He invented the genre.

The only genres that aren't related that I can remember off the top of my head are Pulp Fiction (Conan, John Carter, etc), Call of Cthulhu, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Fairy Tales, New Weird, Mythology, Shakespeare, Faerie Queene, Afrofantasy and Asian fantasy.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;924941The overwhelming majority of current fantasy stories are shallow imitations of Tolkien. He invented the genre.

Well, not quite, but he popularised it.

QuoteThe only genres that aren't related that I can remember off the top of my head are... Call of Cthulhu, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland...Shakespeare, Faerie Queene

Those...aren't genres.

Quote from: TristramEvans;924945Well, not quite, but he popularised it.

And in various essays he credited a number of precursors and sources of inspiration.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;924941The overwhelming majority of current fantasy stories are shallow imitations of Tolkien. He invented the genre.

Ehhhhhhhh.......yeah, that's not quite right.

There is a profound difference in fantasy literature pre-1980 or so and after that watershed.  The 80's and 90's were the era of "bloody fantasy trilogies" and oh yes, they were sad Tolkien derivatives, but there was no small amount of influence from D&D creeping in there.  Personally, I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact D&D had on fantasy lit in terms of homogenizing it.

I strongly disagree that "the overwhelmingly majority of current fantasy stories are shallow imitations of Tolkien".  The largest subgenre of fantasy fiction by orders of magnitude right now is paranormal romance.  Even if you want to stick with "trad" fantasy, it's Martin that's the ur-inspiration: historical settings with the serial numbers filed off and a bit of magic thrown in far outnumber the Tolkien clones.  It's true that authors like Sanderson, Erikson and Feist are producing stuff that looks Tolkien-y in places, but that's because their works are based on their college D&D campaigns.  So the Tolkien is secondhand at best.

Quote from: daniel_ream;924984Ehhhhhhhh.......yeah, that's not quite right.

There is a profound difference in fantasy literature pre-1980 or so and after that watershed.  The 80's and 90's were the era of "bloody fantasy trilogies" and oh yes, they were sad Tolkien derivatives, but there was no small amount of influence from D&D creeping in there.  Personally, I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact D&D had on fantasy lit in terms of homogenizing it.

I strongly disagree that "the overwhelmingly majority of current fantasy stories are shallow imitations of Tolkien".  The largest subgenre of fantasy fiction by orders of magnitude right now is paranormal romance.  Even if you want to stick with "trad" fantasy, it's Martin that's the ur-inspiration: historical settings with the serial numbers filed off and a bit of magic thrown in far outnumber the Tolkien clones.  It's true that authors like Sanderson, Erikson and Feist are producing stuff that looks Tolkien-y in places, but that's because their works are based on their college D&D campaigns.  So the Tolkien is secondhand at best.

Even Sanderson feels very little like Tolkein in things like Way of Kings. Way of Kings felt more like Earthsea meets WWI with a bunch of weird world building thrown in to me (and not WWI in the sense you had in Lord of the Rings, but more in a Paths of Glory type way).

Quote from: daniel_ream;924984Even if you want to stick with "trad" fantasy, it's Martin that's the ur-inspiration: historical settings with the serial numbers filed off and a bit of magic thrown in far outnumber the Tolkien clones.

Martin is the most popular writer in this style, not the ur-iginator.

The problem is that the OP and subsequent doesn't spell out a sensible point of departure to extrapolate from.

Especially when there is an obvious one.

QuoteOctober 29th 1916
We regret to announce the death of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in the attack on Regina Trench during the Battle of Somme. He is survived by his wife Edith and his family including ......

Some context

While published in the 1950s, the Lord of the Rings took off in popularity in the United States in 1965.


RE Howards' Conan Stores were published in the 1950 by Gnome Press and edited by Sprauge deCamp. By the early 60s they had a falling out and de Camp was looking for another publisher to publish Conan stories. This led to Lancer books publishing their heavily edited series of Conan stories starting in 1966. The Lancer series was instrumental in making science fiction fans aware of RE Howard and Conan.

One thing to consider is if the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings were never published what would be the fate of the Lancer series? The Gnome Press books in the 1950s were probably a forgone conclusion and would likely not been butterflied away by Tolkien's early demise. And same for de Camp falling out with Gnome Press and trying to shop Conan around. But I think it obvious that the success of LoTR had to have some impact in Lancer's decision to make a multi-volume Conan series under de Camp direction. Perhaps Lancer would have still published Conan in the late 60s but in the modest form that Gnome Press did.

And as for the other fantasy novels in the 1960s you will have to go through each one and see when the decision was made to write and publish. I doubt that any fantasy author was overly influenced by Tolkien until after the release of Brooks' Swords of Shannara in 1977. Pretty much before then everybody was doing their own thing, and if there was any influence it was from the pulp era of the 1930s.

However in terms of what Publishers were willing to buy and market, Tolkien had a huge impact in the United States after 1965. And Tolkien had an impact on publishing because LoTR caught on with the cultural moment of the time. And I don't think Conan would have had the same appeal. I think Conan worked in part it was an effective alternative for people seeking out more fantasy after finishing Lord of the Rings. Without Tolkien, Howard's writing (even under all of de Camp's edits) still would have shown just not as brightly.

Which leads to the OP. This would shift the culture stew that Gygax and Arneson was drawing from. There was already a bit of a bias AGAINST fantasy in the wargaming community. But it was sustained because Tolkien was just that popular. Without Tolkien, fantasy and perhaps medieval wargaming would have been relegated into an obscure corner.

In my opinion the likely possibilities are

1) Hammer/Universal Horror monsters
2) espionage in the spirit of James Bond, the Saint, Man from U.N.C.L.E., etc.
3) Western
4) Science Fiction military adventures

This would be bias heavily towards what miniatures and props they had access too.