Yup, you nailed it. The influence is obvious. Bands of outlaws, wild frontiers, wide open spaces, isolated cities, gold diggers (and gold is more important than birth)... have a lot more to do with western tropes than medieval tropes.

Might be because of REH indeed... or just the tropes Gygax and Arneson were familiar with.

There are also obvious medieval/arthurian tropes - castles, jousting, mythical European monsters (there might be a sasquatch somewhere), so, a bit of both - but society resembles western more than medieval (no fiefs, vassals, aristocrats, etc., just bands and henchmen).

Quote from: Hakdov on February 07, 2022, 06:50:07 PM
One of the main influences on early D&D was Conan and stories like Beyond the Black River and Wolves Beyond the Border are basically western stories set in a fantasy world.  I'd also wondered which western fiction authors wrote books that could be mined for D&D ideas.  For something more recent, watch the western horror movie Bone Tomahawk.  Just switch the cannibal Indians for orcs and you have a D&D adventure.

Okay so lemme see if I got this straight...early D&D is basically reskinned westerns, and the way you do that is to reskin indigenous people as...orcs. Is that right?

huh. I feel like I've heard that argument before somewhere.

Quote from: Zirunel on February 07, 2022, 07:52:39 PM
Okay so lemme see if I got this straight...early D&D is basically reskinned westerns, and the way you do that is to reskin indigenous people as...orcs. Is that right?

huh. I feel like I've heard that argument before somewhere.

Not really.  The cannibals in Bone Tomahawk are no more representative of American Indians than the mutant cannibals in movies like Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes are representative of the Scots-Irish.  They're already basically orcs, or maybe orcs filtered through the aesthetics of something like Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Quote from: Zirunel on February 07, 2022, 07:52:39 PM
Okay so lemme see if I got this straight...early D&D is basically reskinned westerns, and the way you do that is to reskin indigenous people as...orcs. Is that right?

huh. I feel like I've heard that argument before somewhere.

Why not?  The picts in the Conan stories are clearly based on American indians. 

Quote from: Quasquetonian on February 07, 2022, 08:20:14 PM

Quote from: Zirunel on February 07, 2022, 07:52:39 PM
Okay so lemme see if I got this straight...early D&D is basically reskinned westerns, and the way you do that is to reskin indigenous people as...orcs. Is that right?

huh. I feel like I've heard that argument before somewhere.

Not really.  The cannibals in Bone Tomahawk are no more representative of American Indians than the mutant cannibals in movies like Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes are representative of the Scots-Irish.  They're already basically orcs, or maybe orcs filtered through the aesthetics of something like Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Okay so not being familiar with the movie I did a Google image search. Not a lot of joy there, 99% are just Kurt Russell doing reaction shots. But I did find a couple images of the horrors and one looks like it has tusks coming out of its cheeks. So yeah, it looks pre-orced. Or pre-ogred. And grey. Not very indigenous. Is there any implied connection with native Americans at all? If so it's not obvious in the images I saw.

Quote from: Zirunel on February 09, 2022, 03:32:55 PM
Okay so not being familiar with the movie I did a Google image search. Not a lot of joy there, 99% are just Kurt Russell doing reaction shots. But I did find a couple images of the horrors and one looks like it has tusks coming out of its cheeks. So yeah, it looks pre-orced. Or pre-ogred. And grey. Not very indigenous. Is there any implied connection with native Americans at all? If so it's not obvious in the images I saw.

Yes and no.

The movie isn't about race or identity, but it addresses those things.  I don't want to get into spoilers, but I can say that the cannibals are descended from Indians, which is enough for the white characters in the movie to view them as Indians, especially at first.  However, there's an educated Indian in town who they call on as an expert on the nearby tribes and he says to the sheriff, "Men like you would not distinguish them from Indians, even though they're something else entirely."  He refers to them as "troglodytes" and describes them as "inbred animals who rape and eat their own mothers."

The cannibal clan has more in common with folklore about Sawney Bean and his family and movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and Wrong Turn than any Indian tribe.

Yeah, they are much more like monsters than indians. 

As far as a literature reference to the "D&D World as a Western" there's the entirely western-themed setting in Joe Abercrombie's Red Country. It's even standalone (ish), although reading the 4-5 books that occur before it (and the 4 more after it..) wouldn't be time wasted at all if you're not already familiar with him.

Red Country is easily my least favorite book of his.  The First Law trilogy is pretty awesome though. 

Orcs are orcs, but they've certainly been treated as many different peoples... indigenous, vikings, mongols, huns, etc. They've also been portrayed as demons, humans twisted by sin, "worms of the earth", cursed elves, mutated humans, and so on.

Depends on the setting.

In Orcs of Thar it seems like they are a parody of indigenous peoples.

Quote from: Quasquetonian on February 06, 2022, 12:16:50 AM

Quote from: zend0g on February 04, 2022, 11:35:11 PM
Nope, never saw the very tenuous connection which I guess requires copious amounts of squinting to see. Almost every D&D setting is a retelling of European/Mediterranean history which some ancient empire(s) substituting for Rome and various small kingdoms mimicking various early medieval European counties as they slowly rebuild.

You don't have to squint that much to see it, do you?

Emirkol the Chaotic is probably my favorite D&D art.  I love it!  That drawing uses the Street of Knights, Rhodes.

Quote from: SHARK on February 04, 2022, 08:48:49 PM
Greetings!

Here is an old classic Country song, from Marty Robbins. "Big Iron".

I was listening to the song earlier while working on my campaign, and it made me think of all the different elements of the American Old West that have influenced the D&D game, especially so in the early years of both development as well as gaming.

The wild frontier, saloons, independent sheriffs, absence of central authority, sparse, wild countryside--not to mention isolated border forts, bands of savage Orcs, ruthless bandits and outlaws. There is also the influence of the "Gold Rush" frontier town economy, saloon girls, charlatans and con-men, snake-oil salesmen, traveling preachers, solid, salt-of-the-earth homesteaders, the wisened old bartender, so many themes and characters transposed over into the game from American Old West influences.

Some pretty neat things, I think.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I am sure there is influence, but I have also seen a lot of very reductionist: it is always really just the old west, and I think that misses all the different influences that went into a game like D&D (it also tends to ignore that for most players in its heyday, westerns were considered a very old and not as relevant genre: I grew up in the 80s and saw some westerns but by far I was much more likely to watch other genres at that point---and I can't say westerns had much direct impact on my gaming). Also a lot of western tropes exist in other genres and other periods (you can have forts on the edge of civilization in Roman times for example, and Ancient China had frontiers where law and order had less of a hold. Plus, the western often entered into other genres and was filtered through them (again you have a lot of wuxia films that are clearly inspired by Spaghetti westerns, which are themselves inspired by American westerns, but at that point the tropes are so filtered, I think it is a little more murky). Not saying there isn't a western influence. Clearly it was a huge genre in the US and that must have impacted Gygax and the sources of inspiration he drew on that weren't westerns well could have been influenced by that too. But it wasn't the only genre. You had lots of golden age of hollywood adventure and epic movies that also played a role. I think different historical periods also were influential but often done in an anachronistic or historical romance kind of way (like say old Robin Hood movies). But when I think of my own campaigns, I was a lot more influenced by stuff like Ancient History and a variety of fantasy and horror novels and movies than westerns (and I am sure some residual western elements were present in those perhaps) 

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on February 17, 2022, 11:54:58 AM
I am sure there is influence, but I have also seen a lot of very reductionist: it is always really just the old west, and I think that misses all the different influences that went into a game like D&D (it also tends to ignore that for most players in its heyday, westerns were considered a very old and not as relevant genre: I grew up in the 80s and saw some westerns but by far I was much more likely to watch other genres at that point---and I can't say westerns had much direct impact on my gaming). Also a lot of western tropes exist in other genres and other periods (you can have forts on the edge of civilization in Roman times for example, and Ancient China had frontiers where law and order had less of a hold. Plus, the western often entered into other genres and was filtered through them (again you have a lot of wuxia films that are clearly inspired by Spaghetti westerns, which are themselves inspired by American westerns, but at that point the tropes are so filtered, I think it is a little more murky). Not saying there isn't a western influence. Clearly it was a huge genre in the US and that must have impacted Gygax and the sources of inspiration he drew on that weren't westerns well could have been influenced by that too. But it wasn't the only genre. You had lots of golden age of hollywood adventure and epic movies that also played a role. I think different historical periods also were influential but often done in an anachronistic or historical romance kind of way (like say old Robin Hood movies). But when I think of my own campaigns, I was a lot more influenced by stuff like Ancient History and a variety of fantasy and horror novels and movies than westerns (and I am sure some residual western elements were present in those perhaps)

For the most part, I agree with you.  D&D was influenced by pretty much everything that was bouncing around in American popular culture from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.  The biggest and most immediate influence was the sword and sorcery revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but the designers and first-wave players all grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Western was at its peak.  We know Westerns made an impression early on.  Co-founder Don Kaye played a gunslinger in Gary Gygax's fledgling D&D game.  And then, when coming up with an idea for a non-fantasy follow up to the wildly popular D&D, Kaye, Gygax, and Brian Blume decided to publish Boot Hill.  So, while the Western had faded as a genre by the time that D&D went mainstream in the 1980s, things were different early on.

And, while it's true that other genres have elements similar to or inspired by the Western, especially settlements on the frontier, I think D&D's representation of these is influenced most strongly by the Western.  Characters roam around with weapons strapped to their hips, the taverns are essentially saloons from Hollywood Westerns (right down to the obnoxious frequency of barroom brawls), and there's usually something like a general store where characters can buy everything from holy water and 10' poles to crossbow quarrels and iron rations (although iron rations are more of an early 20th century thing).

Quote from: Quasquetonian on February 17, 2022, 06:58:48 PM
And, while it's true that other genres have elements similar to or inspired by the Western, especially settlements on the frontier, I think D&D's representation of these is influence most strongly by the Western.  Characters roam around with weapons strapped to their hips, the taverns are essentially saloons from Hollywood Westerns (right down to the obnoxious frequency of barroom brawls), and there's usually something like a general store where characters can buy everything from holy water and 10' poles to crossbow quarrels and iron rations (although iron rations are more of an early 20th century thing).

I think this is exactly right.

The D&D tavern is really an American invention, but it has its roots in English history (especially the very act of "adventuring" and hiring "adventurers").  American taverns were places to find mercenaries going back to colonial times until very recently.  The US Marine Corps was born in a tavern, and the first recruiter was a tavern owner.  That was a common occurrence in American history for centuries.  If a Sheriff needed deputies he would go to a tavern and deputize willing and able-bodied men.  There are still state laws on the books, in particular the American Southwest, that allows Sheriffs to temporarily deputize citizens and form a posse ( derived from posse comitatus). Need armed men to take on local bandits?  Form a posse.  This is a common theme in D&D games from the very beginning.  Even the 5e Starter Set has a bandit problem that needs to be resolved by adventurers.  All of this is closer to colonial America and the Wild West than the Middle Ages, and it's much better if we recognize that and build campaigns that capture those themes.