For some unknown reason, Gygax's style came to mind when I read the following.
I have always felt that Gygax wanted the player-characters to be mostly magnanimous conquerors.
QuoteResponding to an eager audience of British boys hungry to read about soldiers, missionaries, and explorers living on the fringes of Great Britain's expanding empire, adventure fiction found renewed popularity and, to some degree, renewed cultural prestige in the mid-to-late Victorian period. Though awash in violence, fighting, killing, and cannibalism, adventure stories were more than bloody entertainment; they prepared young readers to imagine themselves as colonizers, tempting them to issue forth from Britain in search of places to explore, civilize, and rule. The ideological power of these narratives is determined by the willingness and capacity of the young, male readers to reduce the distance between themselves and the characters they were reading about. Rather than regarding characters from a distance, smiling at their foibles and mildly appreciating their successes, adventure stories encouraged the reader to indulge in courageous suffering and triumphant conquests in a more immediate way, replacing the characters with images of themselves, the readers, plunging into the action. ...
...Traditional class and gender hierarchies coming under attack at home were translated into a colonial context in which white, male European adventurers could comfortably reaffirm their superiority to the natives through firmly entrenched hierarchies based on racial difference. Rather than cruel profiteers, the British are represented as conquerors motivated by the ideals of "civilization" and "progress." As powerful victors, their triumphs get associated with the positive qualities of the sublime--vigor, boldness, bravery, and magnanimity--and their successful encounters against terrifying natives make the British protagonists stronger, more invulnerable, and more heroic than they were before their adventures began. Stripped down, it is a logic which says that the British are great because they are able to tame enormous savagery.
Source:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6528/The-aesthetics-of-adventure-the.html
Gygax was an advocate of adventure fiction as entertainment, and he would probably say that the above text thinks too much about mere entertainment.
But somehow I see this notion of a Victorian conqueror as exactly typical of an ideal D&D hero. The heroes must confront treachery -- preferably without becoming treacherous themselves. The heroes must emerge from danger with their skins and their principles intact.
At the risk of over-analysing a game about elves and wizards...
it seems to me that the colonial ideas about 'primitive' people are split into two parts in Dungeons and Dragons. Human barbarians tend to embody the good parts, and humanoid creatures like orcs tend to embody the bad parts.
BBC History magazine recently had an article about the military situation for Victorian soldiers in that while the popular, media driven view is of well armed, industrial age regiments shooting down charging hordes of tribesmen armed with swords, the reality was that many of the countries conquered by Britain were in fact relatively modern in terms of access to firearms and tactics. You only need to see the original film version of Four Feathers to see this mythologising at work.
In fantasy I don't think its too much of a stretch to see that bad guys are always 'uncivilised' in some measure whether as brutal orcs or sadistic emperors.
I think you have to take it very literally to say that D&D is claiming it as the ideal. Rather D&D is buying into a popular construct of a hero and one that you can find in probably every culture's own take on jingoistic heroic fantasy. Go back to the medieval lays like Song of Roland and William of Orange or Beowulf and the aimof the stories is very much the same
"Take up the White Man's Burden;
Send forth the best you breed,
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captive's need..."
Civilize them with a longsword? I guess it's a possibility. That said, I always saw D&D as having more influence from Robert Howard's stories as any of the Victorian era adventure fiction; stories where civilization is the enemy, something to be fled from at every opportunity, and returned to only to sell the loot, drink the proceeds, and gear up for the next great adventure.
Quote from: Last KnightCivilize them with a longsword? I guess it's a possibility. That said, I always saw D&D as having more influence from Robert Howard's stories as any of the Victorian era adventure fiction; stories where civilization is the enemy, something to be fled from at every opportunity, and returned to only to sell the loot, drink the proceeds, and gear up for the next great adventure.
Yeah, D&D takes more than it does from Conan than it does from Solomon Kane (which
does have a nasty undercurrent of "black people are befuddled savages at best, monstrous threats to civilisation at worst: we Europeans need to conquer the salvagable ones and kill the rest if we are to survive", at least in some readings). Conan is an "uncivilised" man who tends to either fight a) decadent civilised men or b) debased uncivilised men who lack Conan's code of honour. Sometimes the debased uncivilised men are being manipulated by decadent civilised men, sometimes Conan is joined by other honourable folk - civilised and uncivilised, of all genders and hues - it's a lot more nuanced than the White Man's Burden. (Of course, Conan does end up being boss of whichever group he attaches himself to, whether it's a jungle tribe or a pirate crew, but I can think of at least one instance where he was co-ruler with a black woman).
Quote from: WarthurYeah, D&D takes more than it does from Conan than it does from Solomon Kane (which does have a nasty undercurrent of "black people are befuddled savages at best, monstrous threats to civilisation at worst: we Europeans need to conquer the salvagable ones and kill the rest if we are to survive", at least in some readings). Conan is an "uncivilised" man who tends to either fight a) decadent civilised men or b) debased uncivilised men who lack Conan's code of honour. Sometimes the debased uncivilised men are being manipulated by decadent civilised men, sometimes Conan is joined by other honourable folk - civilised and uncivilised, of all genders and hues - it's a lot more nuanced than the White Man's Burden. (Of course, Conan does end up being boss of whichever group he attaches himself to, whether it's a jungle tribe or a pirate crew, but I can think of at least one instance where he was co-ruler with a black woman).
Solomon Kane did have a lot of nasty racist under(and over)tones, which I guess - like the HP Lovecraft story where the protagonist's cat is named "Nigger Man" - can really only be justified as a sign of the times in which the tales were written. Even in the Solomon Kane stories, though, white man - specifically, the Aryans - were classified as 'the most vicious, the most successful savage', and Kane beats those 'lesser savages' not through civilized cunning, moral imperative, or technological superiority, but by being more violent, vicious, and ruthless than they are.
I'm sadly working right now, but if I remember when I get home I'll dig out my copy of the collected tales and look it up.
Quote from: Last KnightSolomon Kane did have a lot of nasty racist under(and over)tones, which I guess - like the HP Lovecraft story where the protagonist's cat is named "Nigger Man" - can really only be justified as a sign of the times in which the tales were written. Even in the Solomon Kane stories, though, white man - specifically, the Aryans - were classified as 'the most vicious, the most successful savage', and Kane beats those 'lesser savages' not through civilized cunning, moral imperative, or technological superiority, but by being more violent, vicious, and ruthless than they are.
Yeah, that's the case, at least sometimes. One of my problems with the Kane stories is that Howard is maddeningly inconsistent about what he actually wants them to be about: sometimes the white man is, indeed, simply the most successful savage, but sometimes that's not the case. The last few stories seem to give hints that he'd finally decided what direction the series was going to evolve in - but then he dropped Kane when he came up with Conan.
Edit to add: I reviewed the Solomon Kane stories here (http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-219.html) if you're interested in seeing more of my thoughts on the matter.
That's an interesting review. FWIW, I never really saw the raw hatred of dark people that you suggest, but maybe I was reading it too leniently. When I get home, I'll look through again, I rather enjoyed the stories as a whole.
I think some of the flaws you pointed out were (as you brought up in the conclusion) chiefly the marks of a writer trying to come to grips with his art. Also, concerning his sudden abrupt end to writing Solomon Kane stories in favor of the Conan stories, this was the same thing Robert Howard did with Bran Mak Morn, Kull of Atlantis, and even Conan himself - he often said that he wrote the stories as the characters told them to him, and when the characters stopped talking, he could write no more. It would have been interesting to see what he'd come up with next; I've heard that he was moving into the Western genre, although I haven't come across any stories in that mode.
Thinking about things like racism, class structures etc. can enrich our games if we use them constructively rather than getting in a huff about people talking about them.
For example, I've now built two fantasy worlds that are strongly influenced by materialist interpretations of history (amongst other things) and it's helped me to clarify issues like how social structures work in society, how a polity can flourish or flounder, how different species can relate to one another. I used this knowledge to make these interesting and vital parts of the game and to enliven the world rather than suppressing them as distractions from what was going on.
Quote from: Last KnightThat's an interesting review. FWIW, I never really saw the raw hatred of dark people that you suggest, but maybe I was reading it too leniently. When I get home, I'll look through again, I rather enjoyed the stories as a whole.
You might have to comb a little for them - I can't recall, off the top of my head, the specific stories it happens in. That's the problem, really: Howard's attitude to race is so
inconsistent it's hard to know what to expect from him (and hard to guess what his actual feelings were). Sometimes he's downright progressive (a black woman running a pirate ship and being treated by an equal by Conan? Score!), sometimes he's precisely the reverse.
I suspect it's a consequence of the sort of guy he was - broody, like his heroes, and prone to sudden mood swings.
The pulp era adventure tales are a direct outgrowth of the Victorian adventurer novels combined with a variant on the likes of the penny dreadful. So I can see a slight connection between D&D & the Victorian outlook.
The adventurer is above the rest of humanity & can accomplish great things or terrible misdeeds based on morality & acceptance of taking up this burden, simply taking care of oneself while respecting others, or discarding it all & only looking for yourself regardless of what that does to others. Hrm, a "new" view on ye olde original Law, Neutral & Chaos.
The Solomon Kane stories have been the most edited of Howard's works IIRC, even the Baen "unedited" paperback was edited. I can't recall if the current single volume TPB is truly unedited or not, but it's the most likely to be unedited content wise of any easily available edition.
Quote from: Last KnightAlso, concerning his sudden abrupt end to writing Solomon Kane stories in favor of the Conan stories, this was the same thing Robert Howard did with Bran Mak Morn, Kull of Atlantis, and even Conan himself - he often said that he wrote the stories as the characters told them to him, and when the characters stopped talking, he could write no more. It would have been interesting to see what he'd come up with next; I've heard that he was moving into the Western genre, although I haven't come across any stories in that mode.
Or if a genre just wasn't working for him, though I'm not as sure of this for Kane as for say his detective stories. Also if a market dried up he switched characters, sometimes to the point of filing off names and finishing a tale for a new character & usually a different magazine.
There are at least two recent collections of his Westerns, both by University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books), The Riot at Bucksnort and Other Western Tales (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/The-Riot-at-Bucksnort-and-Other-Western-Tales,671793.aspx) & The End of the Trail (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/The-End-of-the-Trail,671798.aspx). Oddly enough I was reading an article on Howard's Westerns early this morning. Will check & see what it recommends. Can't recall what the difference is between these two books. Tired on a Monday, there might be another publisher that covers his westerns currently but I can't recall who that might be.
Quote from: WarthurI suspect it's a consequence of the sort of guy he was - broody, like his heroes, and prone to sudden mood swings.
That's one thing that helped for filing off stories started under one hero, most of his heroes are pretty much the same & more or less an idealized REH. And yes REH had many contradictions in real life (& he was also a white Southerner in the early 1900s).
One reason the Westerns have gotten increasing focus in the past 40 years or so is they are to some stronger or at least more real than his fantasies or historical fictions. Howard was able to draw on his own experiences & local culture. You also see more humor in them & his other more modern day tales.