Greetings!

In a different thread, ForgottenF talked about Sword & Sorcery being a particular *Literary Genre*--and D&D, as a game, has certain elements of Sword & Sorcery influence in many ways--while also NOT having Sword & Sorcery influences in other aspects.

SHOUTING INTO THE VOID! *Laughing*

I can definitely see some strong Sword & Sorcery elements influencing D&D, while other aspects of D&D have nothing to do with Sword & Sorcery elements, and in many ways, are contradictory or reject them.

With modern D&D, honestly, I think that WOTC has very much distanced itself from Sword & Sorcery, and fully embraced My Little Pony World instead. The whole happy ponies, blue-haired Woke freaks, and a weird, Anime kiddies vibe that is being cultivated in D&D nowadays. And, it isn't just WOTC D&D. Other third-party publishers and writers have embraced the whole Woke agenda and the happy, "My Little Pony" Barney World, like Sly Flourish. Sly Flourish has recently published a book for D&D which includes an extended lecture and diatribe about "Anti-Colonialism" and instructing gamers how they need to think about and play D&D.

Modern D&D seems very much dead-set against anything to do with Sword & Sorcery elements.

It is definitely interesting to think about Sword & Sorcery influences for D&D. In my own Thandor world, I heavily embrace Sword & Sorcery elements in my game, and within my worldbuilding and campaign structure. The world is harsh and brutal, magic remains mysterious and dangerous, great kingdoms rise and fall as wars, hatred, slavery, and violence are common everywhere. The world has a heavy degree of chaos and sudden violence and disaster, in the sense that there is a dynamic of violent Chaos and destruction ever-present in the cycle of the world. This dynamic also easily allows for mysterious warbands and individual champions and heroes to rise out of nowhere and make a name for themselves.

So, what are your thoughts on this, my friends? How much Sword & Sorcery elements do you embrace in your own campaigns? Do you think WOTC and much of the gaming industry have also rejected Sword & Sorcery?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I think the whole literary genre influence thing, Sword & Sorcery or something else, is not as complicated as people make it out to be, because the discussion gets all tangled up in emulating versus story versus simulation, when it's really quite simple.

In early D&D various literary genres influence settings, not game play.  It's a mix of Sword & Sorcery, horror, epic fantasy, Westerns, etc. influence.  The game is played in the kind of setting where a fateful, lucky, or incredibly skilled or smart character might turn into a literary hero, but they can just as easily turn into a statistic.  Which is more detailed, long-winded way of saying I agree with those who contend that the surviving characters are the ones that come closest to emulating the protagonists in the different medium.

Setting informs game play.  Setting is not game play.

The Jack Vance Dying Earth novels are probably the closest analog, and not just because of an adaption of his ideas into game mechanics (mangled as with any adaptation across mediums). He kills off named NPCs frequently enough that the idea of one of his protagonist dying seems like a real possibility, even though analytically we know he doesn't.

My game embraces Philotomy's Mythic Underworld and I use a lot of Dunsany, CAS and Tolkien in my games, so there is a fair amount of S&S, which sometimes perplexes younger players, especially the Mythic Underworld aspects, just last night it got them, and they realized that they are prowling around in not just an illusionist's tomb (or is the other tower on a nearby mountain the actual illusionist's tomb?) but also in an environment that is hostile to them yet works for the strange creatures they encounter.

I live in the "literary world" as my wife is a fiction editor extraordinaire, as well as a writing coach, so we talk about this stuff *non-stop*.

And we fight about the differences between gaming and writing and how they're connected *ALL THE TIME*.

The summation by me, currently, is: Gaming is not literary writing. Writing is GMing and solo-play jerking off. GM's *most certainly* can be influenced by literary writing tropes, and that's good only if the GM actually understands the genre and knows where and how to tweak it. Also, gaming-tropes (like D&D in general) are their own genre, which apes other genres.

Case in point - the idea that a Wizard, a Fighter, a Thief and a Cleric all band up to plumb the depths of a tomb for <X> is pretty basic, and a standard gaming trope. I could pitch that to nearly any gaming table, and while some would be totally up for that, others might ho-hum about it, we'd *all* recognize it immediately. The funny thing is I've not included a single bit of context to any of it, and yet we'd all recognize it for a gaming trope.

The moment I start putting specific context to it, the Fighter is Cimmerian with this backstory that puts him about 6th level, and his Thief friend Subotai is a Hyrkanian, and the Cleric is a renegade Priest of Mitra, and the wizard is this Uncle Iroh-sounding Wujen named Mako, and each of them have this backstory of bloody high-adventure with each other, it takes a different shape. They have different motives to raid this tomb which might be the culmination of many adventures filled with death, blood, riches won and spent, trial and tribulation. But in no other genre would such a gathering make narrative sense outside a S&S framework without "circumstances" that demand gaming-tropes be involved.

Gaming tropes of the "D&D My Little Pony Edition" are simply the layering of tropes of a stripe from individuals that I'd say have never really consumed much content that we all associate with Appendix:N. They are younger either chronologically, or emotionally (or both) and such fare would be upsetting. And it's to their loss imo, but whatever.

How much does S&S influence D&D? I think Appendix:N speaks for itself. I think a more accurate question would be "How much does S&S influence YOUR individual fantasy games?"

For me, 90% of the time, it is the foundation of all my fantasy games. I'll do you one more specific - my S&S games are of the Moorcockian variety - where life generally sucks, the players PC's are going to fight tooth and claw for everything they get, including a punch in the jaw, and a poisoned dagger in their spleen, for their hard efforts. But cosmic forces move as they will in the background, and each of them may have a chance to change the world. Be it locally, or fundamentally.

And that set of parameters are what I lay over any setting I run. Greyhawk, Realms, my own homebrew, any and all - S&S is there aplenty. Even if it is not expressly intended by the setting. Scratch that. ESPECIALLY when it is not intended by the setting.

The depressing thing isn't even D&D so much--even self-professed "Sword & Sorcery" games like the crappy new Monolith version of Conan, reject key elements of the genre and pepper their games with safety tools & trigger warnings.

It's not "official" D&D, but I think "Hyperborea" does a solid job of keeping that S&S vibe, though there's lots of Vance and Lovecraft in there too.

But yeah, with WOTC you're pretty much getting Furby Fantasy nowadays.

My current campaign, the Hyborian Age, is all swords & sorcery. This world is dark, gritty, and brutal. Evil lurks around every turn. Magic is to be respected and sometimes feared. Strange beasts populate the land. Only the strong (of both mind and body) survive.

No elves, dwarves, gnomes or other demi-human races. No fairies, brownies, sprites, or the like. It's a world of primal forces and raw magic. This is dark, sword-and-sorcery fantasy.

I was heavily influenced by the original stories by REH, the Marvel comics, and the films done in '82 and '84. the '09 film is ok, but even though is probably the one most true to REH's stories, whoever wrote and directed didn't get it right.

I do have a selected few books done by Robert Jordan back in the day. Haven't read any of the de Camp material.

I think this is worth mentioning: HPL's influence. Howard, for the short period he was a part of it, was included in the "Lovecraft Circle" of writers. There were cross-over of ideas, tropes, themes, etc. of what would be called the Cthulhu Mythos later by Derleth.

With that being said, you can't have sword & sorcery without at least a small amount of cosmic horror being incorporated.

A HUGE resource is The Hborian Age d20 Campaign website. Much of this can easily translated into whatever system you are using.

 There are no S&S elements in 5e. WoTC cut the balls off of D&D and made it a eunuch.

Sword and Sorcery will continue to have little to no effect on modern RPGs that are mainstream.

Sword and sorcery as a genre is gone for what the designers now grew up with. Fantasy to the new designers and MoDeRn AuDiEnCe is what they grew up with:

Harry Potter, Final Fantasy video games, basically anything from the mid 90s to now.

Quote from: SHARK on January 06, 2025, 10:32:27 AMSo, what are your thoughts on this, my friends? Do you think WOTC and much of the gaming industry have also rejected Sword & Sorcery?

Yes. There are several reasons for this, mostly because the values of S&S (individualism, freedom, self-reliance) deliberately conflict with the values of Gen Z (collectivism, obedience, self-loathing) but mostly this:

Quote from: Wikipedia S&S entryA hero's main weapons are cunning and physical strength. Magic, on the other hand, is usually only used by the villains of the story, who are usually wizards, witches, or supernatural monsters.

Most of the 5E players want to BE the wizards, witches, and monsters. Or at least a quasi-caster of some sort. I've been told by my players that normal fighters are "boring." Magic is safe and predictable (but this was true before 5E) so much so that the OSR is now overdosing in the other direction. That might be a good thing.

Quote from: SHARK on January 06, 2025, 10:32:27 AMHow much Sword & Sorcery elements do you embrace in your own campaigns?

Somewhat. I lean towards "Game of Thrones plus Lanhkmar," so I guess the latter element has some S&S.

I've been thinking about this throughout the day, and the more I do, the more I think the answer is right there in Appendix N. If you look through the authors listed, Sword and Sorcery is actually a clear minority. I haven't read all the included authors, but of the ones I'm familiar with, only Leiber, Howard and Moorcock are clear exemplars of the genre. Poul Anderson did write some S&S, but the books cited are not that. Zelazny, Saberhagen, and Vance are debatably S&S, but outliers to the genre at least. Much of the rest of the list is made up of Sword & Planet, Science Fiction, Pulp/Cosmic Horror, Space Opera, and Mythic/Folkloric Fantasy.

That shows in the final product. I agree with Steven Mitchell that the Dying Earth probably is the single biggest influence on the worldbuilding of early D&D. Just by mashing that together with Three Hearts and Three Lions, it's easy to see how you could arrive at something much like Blackmoor. But the fact is that D&D's brand of fantasy has always been a genre-hybrid, mixed together from disparate elements that appealed to its creators.

That's appropriate in a way, because all these genre labels are ex post facto anyway. They're applied by later readers looking back on an era of writing where they largely didn't exist. If you asked Robert Howard and HP Lovecraft at the time, it seems they would have said they were working in the same nebulous "weird fiction" genre. As far as I understand the history, these subgenre categories only really started to get codified in the 60s and 70s, well after a lot of foundational texts in them were written. Given that, the change in tone in recent years is less about it specifically moving away from S&S, and more about a general disconnection from the game's roots in the freewheeling pulp and mid-century eras of genre fiction.

Post 1/2

If you want raw S&S at this point it is in games like Barbarians of Lemuria/Legend, Marauders & Magi of Mu and similar games. As I mentioned in another post, classless games kind of lead to a better sense of becoming a legend than class based games, at least in my experience.

Post 2/2

That said, the OP question is about S&S, so let me address that. I'll use Moorcock, Howard and Leiber again, as I consider them the archetypal examples of the genre. Something is more or less Sword & Sorcery in my judgment according to the extent to which it complies with the genre conventions typical to the stories of Kull, Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, Hawkmoon and so on. Given that framework, and with the understanding that there are wide differences between even just those three authors, here are the primary ways I think D&D is not Sword and Sorcery:

Characters: S&S is a genre largely defined by its protagonists, and the archetype of the wandering, largely mercenary, adventurer hero. D&D characters don't match this archetype at several levels. S&S heroes are super-competent, usually elites in their field. Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser are repeatedly established as the 1st and 2nd best swordmen in Lankhmar, respectively. An S&S hero is pretty much always an elite fighter, and most of them are multi-competent as well. Conan and the Mouser  are both amazing fighters and amazing thieves. Elric is competent magician. Fafhrd is good singer, and so on. D&D's niche classes and emphasis on gritty realism grind against this.

Level-based progression also does. "Zero to hero" generally isn't a thing in S&S. Barring the occasional prequel story (often written after the fact), the heroes usually emerge into the story fully formed, and then remain very stagnant as regards their skill/power levels.

Magic: D&D magic is way too common. In S&S stories, magicians are rarely protagonists or POV characters, and magical items are few and far between. D&D's approach to magical items is most reminiscent of Dying Earth, with some nods to Tolkien (in things like the Cloak of Elvenkind), but again Jack Vance is debateably S&S and Tolkien flat out is not. Magical weapons are entirely absent from most stories in the S&S genre, and where they do appear, they are unique and usually permanently tied to the hero. There's no selling your +1 sword because you got a +3 sword. That's a game convention of course, but the existence of it creates a world where magical tools are far more common than they are even in Dying Earth.

As far as the actual magic system, it's Vancian, albeit with some significant changes. Spells in Dying Earth appear to be something anyone can learn. Magic-User isn't a "class", so much as it just means someone who has learned some spells. They also appear to be far fewer in number and more powerful. Each of the Cugel novels only sees a handful of spells cast in its entire length, whereas a D&D wizard will cast multiple spells every day as a completely normal routine.

Anyway, Vance's magic is pretty unusual for S&S fiction, and the D&D system based on it is terrible for replicating the feel of magic in Howard's stories. It fairs a bit better replicating Leiber or Moorcock's take on magic, but it's still a stretch. AFAIK, divine magic does not exist in S&S at all. If priests know how to use magic, it's the same magic that sorcerers use. This I think is just something you have to accept, though. Every good fantasy universe has a semi-unique take on magic, and no game system is going to be able to cover them all.

General Worldbuilding: D&D has elves, dwarves, goblins, gnomes, and so on. It has since very early in its lifespan. You can cut them out, but there's no denying they're part of the classic iteration of the game. S&S fiction does often include non-human races, but rarely ones so clearly based on European folklore, and anything non-human is usually fundamentally hostile to humanity. Monsters in S&S are generally rarer and have unique, supernatural or even science fiction provenance. The "Dungeon Ecology" of D&D would not fit in those fictional worlds, though again, it tracks better with Dying Earth or with Folkloric Fantasy like Tolkien/Anderson.

Like I said above and in the previous thread, none of this is necessarily a mark against D&D. D&D is its own thing, and all the more interesting because of it. It just isn't "sword and sorcery", at least not simply so, and not without a lot of alteration of its classic formula. Personally I like the term "dungeon fantasy", as a means of describing D&D's unique admixture of ingredients, and the many, many imitators that have cropped up since it came out.

Post 3/2

I wrote all that and then realized I wasn't addressing the actual thread topic. Just grinding my own axe.

Quote from: SHARK on January 06, 2025, 10:32:27 AMSo, what are your thoughts on this, my friends? How much Sword & Sorcery elements do you embrace in your own campaigns? Do you think WOTC and much of the gaming industry have also rejected Sword & Sorcery?

I love Sword & Sorcery. I wouldn't make such a fuss about it if I didn't, but I can't say it actually influences my campaigns much. The last two campaigns I ran were Dragon Warriors and Dolmenwood, both firmly in the folkloric fantasy subgenre, which has conventions often in opposition to S&S. The next thing I run might be S&S. I'm waffling on doing a Lankhmar campaign, and I've been wanting to do one in Howard's Thurian Age forever, but in either case, D&D is not going to be the game I would choose to run it.

Regarding the wider fantasy gaming scene: Wokeness is an issue to be sure, but at I think fantasy as a whole has become too self-cannibalizing. D&D created Dungeon Fantasy, which exploded in popularity in the 90s and 00s, and combined with the influence of J-RPGs and anime, produced the self-referential Frankenstein's Monster that dominates fantasy fiction now. The genre has become too self-aware, too intent on navel-gazing about its own tropes and deconstructing itself. That's usually a sign of a genre facing imminent collapse, so maybe something new is on the horizon. Who knows?

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 06, 2025, 03:06:00 PMPost 2/2

That said, the OP question is about S&S, so let me address that. I'll use Moorcock, Howard and Leiber again, as I consider them the archetypal examples of the genre. Something is more or less Sword & Sorcery in my judgment according to the extent to which it complies with the genre conventions typical to the stories of Kull, Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, Hawkmoon and so on. Given that framework, and with the understanding that there are wide differences between even just those three authors, here are the primary ways I think D&D is not Sword and Sorcery:

Characters: S&S is a genre largely defined by its protagonists, and the archetype of the wandering, largely mercenary, adventurer hero. D&D characters don't match this archetype at several levels. S&S heroes are super-competent, usually elites in their field. Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser are repeatedly established as the 1st and 2nd best swordmen in Lankhmar, respectively. An S&S hero is pretty much always an elite fighter, and most of them are multi-competent as well. Conan and the Mouser  are both amazing fighters and amazing thieves. Elric is competent magician. Fafhrd is good singer, and so on. D&D's niche classes and emphasis on gritty realism grind against this.

Level-based progression also does. "Zero to hero" generally isn't a thing in S&S. Barring the occasional prequel story (often written after the fact), the heroes usually emerge into the story fully formed, and then remain very stagnant as regards their skill/power levels.

Magic: D&D magic is way too common. In S&S stories, magicians are rarely protagonists or POV characters, and magical items are few and far between. D&D's approach to magical items is most reminiscent of Dying Earth, with some nods to Tolkien (in things like the Cloak of Elvenkind), but again Jack Vance is debateably S&S and Tolkien flat out is not. Magical weapons are entirely absent from most stories in the S&S genre, and where they do appear, they are unique and usually permanently tied to the hero. There's no selling your +1 sword because you got a +3 sword. That's a game convention of course, but the existence of it creates a world where magical tools are far more common than they are even in Dying Earth.

As far as the actual magic system, it's Vancian, albeit with some significant changes. Spells in Dying Earth appear to be something anyone can learn. Magic-User isn't a "class", so much as it just means someone who has learned some spells. They also appear to be far fewer in number and more powerful. Each of the Cugel novels only sees a handful of spells cast in its entire length, whereas a D&D wizard will cast multiple spells every day as a completely normal routine.

Anyway, Vance's magic is pretty unusual for S&S fiction, and the D&D system based on it is terrible for replicating the feel of magic in Howard's stories. It fairs a bit better replicating Leiber or Moorcock's take on magic, but it's still a stretch. AFAIK, divine magic does not exist in S&S at all. If priests know how to use magic, it's the same magic that sorcerers use. This I think is just something you have to accept, though. Every good fantasy universe has a semi-unique take on magic, and no game system is going to be able to cover them all.

General Worldbuilding: D&D has elves, dwarves, goblins, gnomes, and so on. It has since very early in its lifespan. You can cut them out, but there's no denying they're part of the classic iteration of the game. S&S fiction does often include non-human races, but rarely ones so clearly based on European folklore, and anything non-human is usually fundamentally hostile to humanity. Monsters in S&S are generally rarer and have unique, supernatural or even science fiction provenance. The "Dungeon Ecology" of D&D would not fit in those fictional worlds, though again, it tracks better with Dying Earth or with Folkloric Fantasy like Tolkien/Anderson.

Like I said above and in the previous thread, none of this is necessarily a mark against D&D. D&D is its own thing, and all the more interesting because of it. It just isn't "sword and sorcery", at least not simply so, and not without a lot of alteration of its classic formula. Personally I like the term "dungeon fantasy", as a means of describing D&D's unique admixture of ingredients, and the many, many imitators that have cropped up since it came out.

 D&D in it's current form has ZERO S&S elements at all. Reason: too "scary" for the rainbow-haired, muti-pronoun, narcissist croud.

Secondly, even in past versions of D&D, S&S was only a PARTIAL influence on the game. Many other authors and forms of fantasy were an influence. D&D was never 100% S&S and it never claimed to be.

Quote from: bat on January 06, 2025, 03:02:30 PMIf you want raw S&S at this point it is in games like Barbarians of Lemuria/Legend, Marauders & Magi of Mu and similar games. As I mentioned in another post, classless games kind of lead to a better sense of becoming a legend than class based games, at least in my experience.

I just got my physical copy of Barbarian of Lemuria... Ohhhh lordy, it's gooood.

Quote from: SHARK on January 06, 2025, 10:32:27 AMHow much Sword & Sorcery elements do you embrace in your own campaigns?

In my homebrew games, swords & sorcery is the primary influence.

Quote from: SHARK on January 06, 2025, 10:32:27 AMDo you think WOTC and much of the gaming industry have also rejected Sword & Sorcery?

Yes, although I don't find that surprising. The swords & sorcery genre is mostly unfamiliar to younger gamers. Their fantasy influences tend towards Middle Earth, Game of Thrones, Hogwarts, and Bleach -- not Conan, Kull, Fafhrd/Grey Mouser, Corum, and Kothar.