Introduction

Swords & Sorcery: Quest and Conquest in the Age of Magic
Designer: Greg Costikyan
SPI, 1978

An imaginative world of fantasy simulation game. The time is: the year 974 After the Faith.

The illustration at the head of this article was reprinted from issue 16 (the April {Fool’s} issue) of Fire & Movement, and was done by none other than Rodger MacGowan. Issue 18 of F&M contained many letters to the editor on this subject, from which the following quotes were extracted:

• F&M’s experiment with pornography was sublimely gross. - Also please use better taste. I didn’t care much for the wayward elf.
• Perhaps I am being overly prudish, but why invite charges of poor taste.
• Grow up, get rid of the nudes.
• And of course, the ubiquitous: Chauvinist, sexist pigs.

It would appear that although the average wargamer may be more educated, the average wargamer also seems to be more conservative. *deep sigh* -ed

It is still open to question, in the author’s opinion, whether a board game, or even a roleplaying game, can sufficiently capture the flavor and feel of true, high-heroic fantasy. Although SPI’s War of the Ring (based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) had a far more appealing background than SPI’s Swords & Sorcery (S&S), the former game was not without its problems, specifically as being seen to tamper with a too highly famous vision. It may be acerbically stated that those who really want to feel the high-heroic fantasy sense of wonder should either re-read the classics of the genre, or read any of the huge number of para-Tolkienian works on the market. (Among the best, recent examples being Mark Sebanc’s Flight to Hollow Mountain, The Talamadh, Vol. 1. Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans, 1996). It is said of J.R.R. Tolkien that he both opened up and closed the genre of high-heroic fantasy, since anything that followed would simply be seen as derivative.

The distinction between high-fantasy and so-called swords & sorcery may not be as clear cut as some might think. The classics of swords & sorcery, e.g., Conan by Robert E. Howard and Elric by Michael Moorcock, posit a world easily as far removed from the many inanities of typical D&D as the Tolkienian vision. There is a harsh Nietzscheanism, an invocation of a hard, difficult world, in many works conventionally considered swords & sorcery. Another clear distinction was the fundamental innocence of the high-fantasy milieu, especially as typified by Tolkien’s particularly chaste writing, and the sexual elements of swords & sorcery, which probably reached their apotheosis in the works of Lin Carter and John Norman.

D&D, as it is probably most commonly experienced, seems far removed from the charming, graceful Tolkienian mythos, while lacking any real sense of the Nietzschean texture of the Conan vision. It is often repeated that D&D amounts to the personalized power fantasies (tinged with obvious sexual elements) of frustrated and often highly intelligent adolescent North American males. There may be a highly unnatural element to all these florid scenarios. For example, one of the things that irritated the author about this approach was when some avid D&Ders had calculated out that Gandalf was at most a seventh level wizard, which meant he had little appeal to those who were at the point of battling gods and demons. Another passage that typifies this tendency was the snide comment that Dante must have borrowed from D&D manuals to come up with his descriptions of Hell. Yet another example is when dragons firing machine gun bullets were introduced into a D&D campaign.

These kinds of criticisms of D&D have probably been voiced for a long time now. In fact, some might suggest that such a discussion of the topic is at least a decade or more out of date. After all, there is now a proliferation of enormous varieties of role-playing milieux, some of which might, theoretically speaking, be more to the taste of persons who wish to be more serious.

Nevertheless, the author feels it is important to look at D&D as lying at the root of all roleplaying games. It is clear that D&D is a specifically late-modern, North American phenomenon. No other earlier society could have generated the leisure time available to be consumed by this tendency. No earlier society could have been as flippant about appropriating numerous world mythologies as sheer entertainment ... being so completely unserious about these. No other earlier societies would have accepted the obsession of its youth with vicarious violence and sexuality in flights of fancy, to the detriment of what had to be learned about the nation’s real history, its place in the world, and the tasks which awaited the young as the bearers of the national heritage.

It must be said, however, that for most young people, these new identifications took the forms of rock music and/or pop culture, whereas for more reflective and intelligent persons, the alluring pseudo-worlds of D&D were offered on a platter, as it were.

D&D and historical board games have little in common. It could be argued that the former is open-ended, amorphous, devoid of real history and sociology, a mere chimera or riot of imagination. The latter are rooted in the once familiar to everyone (and once, very necessary to know) terrain of history. Alternative history board games remain tied to exploration of history, whereas science fiction board games are often based on historical and sociological extrapolations of previous history. At the same time, D&D often distances itself from the graceful, allegorical elements of high-fantasy literature, and the creative-nihilist Nieztschean overtones of so-called swords & sorcery. So D&D conforms fundamentally to the kind of vision of open-ended progress, amorphousness, florid lifestyles, wish-fulfillment fantasies, etc., which increasingly come to characterize the late-modern world. What may be positively said about the D&D milieu is that it still tries, to some extent, to share in the Tolkienian high-heroic fantasy vision. In that sense, it is far more positive than the new crop of extremely dark, bleak future and occult-horror roleplaying games.

The main lesson of writing in the high-fantasy genre is that the writing must be done almost completely straight. The author must at all points attempt to strengthen the willing suspension of disbelief ... he or she must take the world they are describing entirely seriously. It is also probable that a person rooted in real religion or history will find it easier to sub-create a world -- Tolkien, for example, was a devout Catholic and Christian. Similarly, the reader who is deeply rooted in real religion or history will no more tolerate flippancy in the main text of the sub-created world, if they find it attractive to begin with, than about the core beliefs of his or her actual lifeworld. So for those kinds of persons, the genre of comic fantasy does not work. (Incidentally, the Faith in S&S is treated in a highly derisive manner.)

SPI was trying to appeal to a large element of the most stereotypical D&D mentality when it chose to make the background of its S&S game a thoroughly ridiculous world. The very title of the game is a kind of joke, as the term is sometimes used to express disapproval of a stereotyped and cliched kind of work. The fact is that the highly physically attractive components of the game, the full color map, the character cards illustrated by Tim Kirk, and the colorful counters, as well as the highly-detailed 56 page rulebook, were in enormous contrast to the stupid background. (What could have been considered instead was a somewhat generic, but entirely serious background.)

Although it might have worked on the level of game mechanics, there was something very off-putting about the whole thing. In any event, the game probably looked too complicated to attract the average D&Der into playing it, while most historical gamers had no interest in it. Although one heard of the map and background being used for D&D campaigns, one also suspects it was too jejune even for that. It probably failed to interest even one D&Der into picking up a historical boardgame. And it would certainly have little appeal to those who loved fantasy literature in a more noble way. Thus, it missed appealing to any of its potential markets. It may be noted here that the multiplayer fantasy empires boardgame, Divine Right (not to be confused with the D&D roleplaying background currently featured on the Wizards of the Coast/TSR website), was able to generate enough interest to become a roleplaying background and milieu for some D&D players.

Admittedly, it was released much earlier, and one could argue that the earlier a given game was released, the more influence it has had. (For example, the boardgame White Bear and Red Moon, and its attendant roleplaying game, RuneQuest, set in Glorantha, became a very prominent background.) S&S simply had no such dynamic mobilization of interest on its behalf. In retrospect, it could be seen that S&S was a signpost along SPI’s slide into oblivion, and its eventual takeover and destruction by TSR.

Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher, with an Honours B.A. in History and English Literature, M.A. in History, and Master of Library Science (M.L.S.), all from the University of Toronto. His work has appeared in Telos, The World & I, Alberta Report and The American Enterprise, among others. His interest in gaming began in the early 1970s. Gaming publications include Fractal Spectrum: The Magazine for the Creative Gamer, and Vindicator: Science Fiction and Fantasy Board games. You can write to him c/o The Editor.