Quote from: TheHistorian;971213While the first few modules were focused (on giants or drow) or DID try to explain the weirdness (tomb of horrors, white plume mountain), no one wanted an entire adventure of fighting through a just a giant ant colony, so all the oddities started getting mashed up and dungeons lost cohesion.

In the early days, megadungeons were not cohesive. Nor were they intended to be cohesive. Their might be an ant colony on part of level 1 (giant ants, their victims, and parasites), hobgoblin caves on level 2 (hobgoblins, their prisoners, and maybe an ogre ally or ruler, and the giant's bowling alley on level 5 that still had giants who occasionally stopped by to bowl a few frames, but overall the intention was to present a medley of monsters.

Quote from: Voros;971265Not sure what that statement means. From early on a lot of those interested in RPing over dungeoncrawls were from sf/fantasy fandom. And Barsoom and 98 percent of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories have nothing to do with anything you could call a dungeon.

98%? Really? Its been decades since I read those books, but I recall several stories where John Carter of Mars went into some subterranean city. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser spent a bunch of time shrunken in size and running around with the rat people in the walls and one entire F&G book was set in Quarmall which was a dungeon city.

I didn't crunch any numbers but exploring ruins only really appears in a few early stories. An entire book was not set in Quarmall, that was a novella. The only novel Leiber wrote with Fafhrd and Grey Mouser was the picturesque Swords of Lankhmar, which as I recall had no dungeon sequence of any importance. Most of their later stories take place on the sea, in winter landscapes and of course Lankhmar. Leiber clearly like to mix it up.

I haven't read all the Burroughs' Carter books but Princess of Mars, Swords of Mars and Chessmen of Mars have no dungeon sequences that I recall. Course to a hammer everything looks like a nail and often RPG readers seem to see a dungeon in every mention of ruins or lost city in a fantasy story.

Quote from: Voros;971288I didn't crunch any numbers

That was exactly what I was pointing out.

QuoteI haven't read all the Burroughs' Carter books but Princess of Mars, Swords of Mars and Chessmen of Mars have no dungeon sequences that I recall. Course to a hammer everything looks like a nail and often RPG readers seem to see a dungeon in every mention of ruins or lost city in a fantasy story.

If your definition of dungeon is exactly like a TSR D&D megadungeon then you are correct Mars and Newhon don't fit well. Neither does the fairly extensive underground portions of the Hobbit or The Fellowship of the Rings. But all three sources clearly inspired TSR D&D dungeons.

A novel's protagonist isn't likely to repeatedly enter the same dungeon do stuff for a while, leave, then come back later and do some different stuff.  Nor is a novel likely to feature many unrelated groups of protagonists who repeatedly enter the same dungeon do stuff for a while, leave, then come back later and do some different stuff. Intentionally the ability to run multiple groups on repeated trips was a feature of TSR megadungeon design philosophy. The needs of a novel are quite different. So unsurprisingly we don't tend to see exact or even very, very close matches.

To satisfy you I went and looked up a list of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories and about five out of thirty seven (or thirty six if you don't count Swords of Lankhmar) could be said to be 'dungeon' adventures if you stretch that defintion. So about 14 percent.

Barsoom it seems to me is more of an influence on having fights against monsters, lost races and general high adventure than even perpherial dungeons. To say everystory with a city underground is a dungeon seems to be over-reaching. There is some kind of underground city in Chessmen but it is just a setting for a typical capture/rescue/arena sequence that could be anywhere.

This seems to just reinforce what I've said before: too often RPGers are obsessed with reading these books through a D&D lense come hell or high water.

Quote from: Voros;971299To satisfy you I went and looked up a list of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories and about five out of thirty seven (or thirty six if you don't count Swords of Lankhmar) could be said to be 'dungeon' adventures if you stretch that defintion. So about 14 percent.

14% sounds far more likely than 98%.

To be fair, for Mars I was only considering the first few stories with John Carter. With the Mars stories I lost track and interest way before that series ran out of novels. I've read a number of them that I forgot. Like the one about the spiders that have [strike]human[/strike] Martian* heads. Not a human-headed spider. Actual human heads...from actual humans. :rolleyes:


* Yes I know virtually everyone on Mars is not actually human. But the author himself mostly includes only the most superficial of differences e.g. skin color.

Looks like you were editing while I was replying. Chessmen is where we start getting John Carter junior and Dejah Thoris junior. Also when my interest waned.

Quote from: Voros;971299This seems to just reinforce what I've said before: too often RPGers are obsessed with reading these books through a D&D lense come hell or high water.

Can't speak for others, but I'm old enough to have read the books before D&D was published (and did so). So for me, the lens focuses the other way.

I'm not saying there is no connection, Gygax listed those authors for a reason. Just saying I don't think they are as important to the game as that and often dealt with lots of material, the majority, that had nothing to do with D&D dungeons. I can't see what you'd learn about D&D dungeons from those books, they resemble D&D dungeons only in the most basic ways. They're more of value in terms of setting, magic, monsters and character.

REH's Conan stories fit the mould much better, as do stories like The Maze of Maal Dweb by Clark Ashton Smith (until the final twist).

Quote from: Voros;971313Just saying I don't think they are as important to the game as that and often dealt with lots of material, the majority, that had nothing to do with D&D dungeons. I can't see what you'd learn about D&D dungeons from those books...

Could just be that crotchety old guys who remember playing and DMing back in the day also fall into the categories of (a) people who read some of those books before (and while) they played D&D and (b) people who (unlike some folks today) didn't have a lot of trouble adapting to dungeon crawling and dungeon creation.

Are those causal or coincidental?

I don't know. But it seems better (and more reasonable) than trying to assert that we were innately smarter/better/faster than are the gamers of today, many of whom don't appear to have read the pulps stories from the 1930s, didn't play tactical wargames or miniatures battles before playing D&D, and whose notions of Orcs, Elves, Dwarfs (or Dwarves as Tolkien preferred), and Paladins are shaped by Warhammer and World of Warcraft instead of The Lord of the Rings and Poul Anderson.

Quote from: Voros;971299To satisfy you I went and looked up a list of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories and about five out of thirty seven (or thirty six if you don't count Swords of Lankhmar) could be said to be 'dungeon' adventures if you stretch that defintion. So about 14 percent.

Barsoom it seems to me is more of an influence on having fights against monsters, lost races and general high adventure than even perpherial dungeons. To say everystory with a city underground is a dungeon seems to be over-reaching. There is some kind of underground city in Chessmen but it is just a setting for a typical capture/rescue/arena sequence that could be anywhere.

This seems to just reinforce what I've said before: too often RPGers are obsessed with reading these books through a D&D lense come hell or high water.

Sorry to interrupt the thread.

Voros, you're PM box is full.

Now back to your original thread.

Quote from: Bren;97130214% sounds far more likely than 98%.

To be fair, for Mars I was only considering the first few stories with John Carter. With the Mars stories I lost track and interest way before that series ran out of novels. I've read a number of them that I forgot. Like the one about the spiders that have [strike]human[/strike] Martian* heads. Not a human-headed spider. Actual human heads...from actual humans. :rolleyes:


* Yes I know virtually everyone on Mars is not actually human. But the author himself mostly includes only the most superficial of differences e.g. skin color.

Wouldn't that be 86%?

Quote from: Dumarest;971447Wouldn't that be 86%?

Yes.


Complementation and all that, but I suppose I could have been clearer.

"Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits..."

Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition, vol. 1, "Men and Magic," p. 3 (TSR, 1974)

Back in the ancient times, there were plenty of DMs who did not like dungeons. Many of them played RuneQuest.

Its a personal preference. I love them. They work for me. But I've run plenty of overland fantasy stuff.

In fact, I doubt my campaigns in TSR's settings - Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Ravenloft and Planescape - had many dungeons as adventures. Certainly rare compared to my home grown OD&D campaigns which have lots and lots of dungeons.

Quote from: Bren;971302To be fair, for Mars I was only considering the first few stories with John Carter. With the Mars stories I lost track and interest way before that series ran out of novels. I've read a number of them that I forgot. Like the one about the spiders that have [strike]human[/strike] Martian* heads. Not a human-headed spider. Actual human heads...from actual humans. :rolleyes:


* Yes I know virtually everyone on Mars is not actually human. But the author himself mostly includes only the most superficial of differences e.g. skin color.

What, are you talking about the kaldanes in Chessmen of Mars? They didn't look much like humans (or Barsoomian) heads, and they weren't from actual humans. They were almost entirely brain, and rode about on the nearly brainless rykors that they bred to resemble red Martians without heads, to the nervous system of which they could connect.

They are the only monster I ever had in my OD&D dungeon that actually got a horrified reaction from a player (when the kaldane mage disconnected from the rykor the PCs killed and scuttled away).

The hero met giant spiders in a later book, but they didn't have human/Martian heads; the depraved ruler of Ghasta had tapestries (woven from the threads spun by those spiders) painted with depictions of "spiders with the heads of beautiful women, and women with the heads of spiders" but "in all the figures that were depicted there was nothing represented as nature had created it. It was as though some mad mind had conceived the whole."

I sure wish Dungeon Masters would stop coming to my house, abducting me, and making me play their dungeon-only campaigns.