True origins of RPG concepts

Cafe Society
1

Fantasy role playing games, be they pen & paper or electronic, are filled with a vast variety of original ideas and concepts… a great many of them stolen.

One major source of theft is mythology, Greek, Norse, Celtic or (rarely) other, but game designers often find their ideas outside the pages of Bullfinch - inspiration is commonly found in the works of Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, Jack Vance, Tolkien and others. The belief being, if you have to steal, steal from the best, or at least from whoever the guy in the previous game stole from.

Let’s try to trace the origins of fantasy RPG (or science fiction, if you like) rip-offs. Here are a few examples (all from D&D, but don’t let that limit you):

Vorpal Sword - everyone’s favorite decapitator. From Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky.

Trolls - trolls are common throught northern myth and its derivatives, but the D&D regenerating troll was invented by Pol Anderson in Three Hearts and Three Lions.

Gythyanki - emaciated mind-blasters. A race of beings by that name is mentioned by George R.R. Martin in his “known Universe” books from the early 1970’s (Tuff Voyaging, Nightflyers, Dying of the Light). They’re described as a “slave race” with psychic powers.

Elven Boots - elven cloaks are from Tolkien, obviously, but the matching footware, which makes no sound and leaves no footprints, is from Dilvish the Damned by Roger Zelazny.
So, any more to add? Ever wondered where the hell they came up with a certain beast or artifact, and would like to ask around? Now’s your chance

2

Ioun Stones (magic crystals that orbit the user’s head and granted increased physical/mystical powers) and the concept of memorizing spells and then forgetting them after they’ve been cast both come from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books.

3

Immune to slippage too, which in at least one case almost got the lead character killed.

4

Did it get caught on something or something?

-FrL-

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I read an interveiw in which Ed Greenwood himself mentioned that Elminster was a cross of Merlin and Gandalf. (I think it was a Dragon Magazine interveiw, but might be mistaken.) Halflings and Kender both are taken from Hobbits. Dragons, dwarves, and a lot of other things are also taken from various cultural myths. That is part of why people play the games, after all. Because we like to play “let’s pretend” and have fun with folk tales, legends, and myths.

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Is Darth Maul’s double-bladed lightsaber the inspiration for the double-bladed sword of 3.0?

The ring of invisibility is probably Tolkien, although maybe it can be traced to something earlier (I’m thinking the Norse Ring cycle, which I’m not very familiar with).

The folding boat and the maul of the titans and the returning property on thrown weapons can be traced back to Norse mythology, the creations of the dwarves.

The Mirror of Mental Prowess will clearly tell the user who the fairest one of all is.

The Phylactery of Faithfulness is based on Jewish tradition, as are golems (in the loosest possible sense, natch).

Blink dogs=hounds of tyndalos? I’m not sure about that one.

Pipes of the Sewers=Pied Piper.

Djinn come from Persian mythology.

Daniel

7

Spelling it “dwarves” instead of “dwarfs” was popularized by Tolkien. :slight_smile:

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Does a black pudding have a pedigree older than The Blob? Do Locathah predate The Shadow Over Innsmouth?

Daniel

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How about the ring of Gyges?

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Wow, cool! I’d never heard of that! That’s why I love this place.

Thanks!
Daniel

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Gnolls were originally taken from Lord Dunsany. Probably The King of Elfland’s Daughter, but I’m not 100% sure any longer. Gnolls as they appear in current editions are very different than Lord Dunsany’s, though, Lord Dunsany’s, and the original D&D version, being crossbreeds of gnomes and trolls.

The Law-Chaos stuff, back in OD&D before they added the Good and Evil and removed the law/good chaos/evil equivalence, was taken from Moorecock’s work.

There’s a subrace of Halflings in the Forgotten Realms called Ghostwise Halflings, which I would be very surprised if they weren’t based on the Wolfriders from Elfquest - they’re small, wild, tribal and telepathic. (Although they ride eagles, not wolves.) Although that’s only suspected, not known.

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That’d be a stretch. Blink dogs are generally friendly and like people, while hounds of tyndalos… not so much.

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I agree. On the other hand, the idea of teleporting dogs is such a bizarre idea that I wonder whether it’s purely coincidental. I do know that I used blink dog stats in a game once but described them as leaping out of corners and edges to attack the PCs; my twelve-year-old cousins were appropriately freaked out :).

Daniel

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There is a tradition of English ghost stories featuring large, spectral hounds, that might have been a shared ancestor for both canines, although the ghost dogs weren’t a whole lot more friendly than the hounds of Tyndalos.

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Oh, that reminds me…The Displacer Beast is based on the Coeurl from A E van Vogt’s story Black Destroyer, from the book Voyage of the Space Beagle. (The Coeurl also appears in Final Fantasy, in a form rather more like the original.)

16

The Aslan and K’Kree races in the SF RPG Traveler are essentially the same as the Kzin and Puppeteers in Larry Niven’s Known Space books. I’ve read that the Vargr race from this game is similar to a wolf-like alien race in a Poul Anderson novel but I’m not familiar enough with his works to cite it.

17

This thread made me think of this (showing that D&D predates Tolkien!).

18

I’d suspect that the Aslan owe rather more to C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur, who’re much more similar to how the Aslan are described in Traveler (with some samurai admixture thrown in, IMO).

Some of the older D&D monsters have their origin in an oddball assortment of plastic “prehistoric monster” toys – including dinosaurs, and what became the bulette and rust monster. I think there might’ve been another critter in there that got AD&Dized, but my set only had those two. (and I spent many a moment pondering why the not-yet-a-rust-monster had a propeller on its tail)

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RPGs seem to be largely inspired by whatever happens to be popular at the time. Check out RPG boards and people are talking about running games based on 300 or Heroes. In the past they were talking about running games based off of The Matrix, Kim Possible, or the Transformers. Heck, I once played in a game based on the movie Undercover Brother. Which was a lot more fun than the movie.

Marc

20

Well I know little (well nothing really) about these “blink dogs” but Lockjaw, a giant teleporting bulldog has been a character in Marvel comics for probably 30 or more years.