You all ever own or read these old Fantasy anthologies? It was hard to wrap my head around them (except for Joe Haldeman’s single contribution…Joe is always very readable) as a kid, but revisiting them, I can follow better.
On a different note:
Man, 70’s Sci-Fi/ Fantasy writers generally didn’t seem to take care of themselves. They seem to have lower then normal life-spans
Or they had a very dark life ex: Marion Zimmer Bradley
I read the first 3-4, but had the exact same problem with the series I had with most other anthologies of the era: the characters I liked, or storylines I liked, would appear once or twice and then fall out of the storyline. Same issue with the Wildcards series - tons of stories about various entities I couldn’t care less about, but the more interesting, or flawed, or unique ones were almost always one-shot stories.
@Wendell_Wagner also mentioned the series in the linked thread, where I mentioned the exact same issue.
As for your secondary points, well, there’s the oft-repeated issues about creative stories coming from tortured souls. The issues for HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and other authors of earlier generations show it’s far from limited to the authors of the 70s.
Yup. The aforementioned Haldeman story is a one-off…until way down the line when someone else brought back the character he offed.
I’ve only read the first one. I was very surprised when I realized that it postdated Dungeons and Dragons, because it seemed very much like the sort of thing that inspired the game.
I think it had its own obscure RPG
It never had its own RPG, as far as I know, but in 1981 Chaosium released an RPG boxed set for Thieves’ World that included stats and gaming notes for nine different RPGs - pretty much every fantasy RPG on the market at the time. The idea was apparently to reflect the shared world ethos of the anthologies by making it into a game setting that could be played in any game system - a sort of shared game world.
When I was in college, one of our players decided to run a short-lived AD&D campaign (2nd Edition was the version at the time) based off of Thieves’ World. I believe he was using the Chaosium supplement for our game. It only lasted a few sessions from what I can recall.