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I grew up reading Tolkein and then playing D&D. It seemed to me along with everyone in our playing sphere that D&D was set in Middle Earth, not Medival Times. It wasn't long after the original release when the Gods & Demigods manual was released to help clerics have someone specifically to worship. I never ever thought this game was in any way trying to model reality. Then, of course, you have the various astral and god planes of existence. The only "setting" that makes sense to me for D&D is bringing Middle Earth and myths into a game setting.

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D&D world draw heavily from Middle Earth but also from other authors like Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, … The list is officially documented as “Appendix N” in AD&D 1st ed manual[0]

Kind of like Warcraft, I personally started playing around the Warcraft 2 release and it was always kind of the same world of everything medieval fantasy mixed in, never realistic.

[0]https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n...

From the D&D original author:

> The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game.

Edit: citation

I’m amused that people use the actual canon and not just asserting a god into existence

A lot of that is because the gods are usually part of some sort of pantheon or otherwise juxtaposed with other deities in some fashion. They have followers and creeds and lore and all these other elements that slot into the larger world. If you scoop them out, aside from just changing their name/look, you have to replace all of that in theory.

I find this surprising. I can barely get my players to learn the rules properly. I struggle to imagine people making lore accurate characters. One, because it’s a lot to learn. Two, because it’s specific and kind of dumb. We just use dnd canon at will to supplement but otherwise make everything up as desired.

Different strokes for different folks. Many people actively enjoy having a mass of written lore to consume, and prefer having a well-defined setting to act as a foundation to their stories. It's a safety net of sorts.

Back in the day we’d play the same characters for a year or so. Some background lore is nice to have in this case. It makes everything more interesting.

My primary gaming group everyone goes out of their way to learn the rules and make lore accurate characters, or build onto the lore. Regardless of which system, setting or game we are playing. We do a lot of homebrew though.

In a current PF2E game, my Cleric has a deity and I do RP him to stay in Ragathiel's favor. It's explicitly called out and I don't think it's dumb at all...

Sure. But is Ragathiel any better than Bjorn’er, the god of rapturous dance that I just made up? Imo, no. If someone wants to choose a predefined god, sure. If someone wants to make one up? Also sure.

The only thing I’d be fairly vocal about is that until some lore has reason to enter the narrative, it isn’t canon. E.g. the space faring races that appear in both dnd and pathfinder

You made up god may turn out to be an arch-fey who got a little in over his head.

I mean, objectively yes I do think Ragathiel is better than Bjorn’er because there is actual lore, thought, and consistency there. [0]

Look by all means, if you want to bring your own deity or $WHATEVER to a table I don't think most reasonable DMs and players would even bat an eye but you'll absolutely be expected to put some degree of effort into this beyond just showing up unprepared and cooking shit up on the fly.

[0]: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ragathiel

I would argue it’s even better role play if players don’t know things though. If you meet some followers of Bane, a player who knows the lore will probably deem them to be a bad guy. If they have no idea, they will roll knowledge to see if their character would know. The DM providing information based on character knowledge checks is generally a great source of fun.

The DM saying “yeah I know you know Bane is a bad guy but I made your roll for it and you failed so you need to pretend you don’t know that” is never very good even if the players try to obey the spirit of things.

That would be bad DMing and isn’t an issue with using an existing pantheon or not.

Indeed, some folks do re-role until fate favors their egos... lol =3

In a way, the more modern video game mechanics based on traditional starter-map games must also choose between a chaotic open-world, or a structured linear mission story (often degrading into a rail-game like snakes/chutes-and-ladders.)

Certainly, many of the iconic characters were a mix of several genres:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Dealer_(painting)

It was initially about people having fun, and a shared experience with friends on a rainy day. The golden age before the rise of the Internet. =3

In higher level campaigns, you can literally go to other planes and interact with the beings there. The deities in D&D are literal physical beings that you could just go and interact with (although depending on the deity and the context they might not take kindly to being bothered). A lot of prewritten modules specifically are about stuff with various deities; even Baldur's Gate 3, arguably the most played prewritten module in some time (it was popular enough to go mainstream and win GotY) heavily features lore from deities and in a few places in the story you (or another character) can directly have short conversations with some of the deities.

I don't see why it's "kind of dumb" if people enjoy playing that way. Tabletop RPGs have always had a wide spectrum of playstyles where some people follow the rules rigorously and some people ignore them entirely, and being consistent with lore is just another dimension on that. Every successful group will settle into a pattern that's comfortable for them.

The lore itself is kind of dumb. That’s ok. Most TTRPG stories will be pretty dumb. They can still be awesome. Imo plying your own dumb story is a lot better than someone else’s dumb story.

I would say it’s not ideal for different players to have different levels of knowledge about the world for non game reasons though. It’s better when most of it is freshly discovered.

I used to play with a guy whose character was a Paladin of the God of hardtack, and before he used his Paladin skills he would in real life take out a plain white cracker and eat it.

There's actually a race in D&D, the Kuo-toa, that did exactly that.

Hm, while D&D borrowed a lot of the trappings (and creatures) from Tolkien, I think Middle Earth is all about birthrights and kings and noble (elven or "old human") bloodlines. Tolkien is all about the legacy of your blood, ancient prophecies fulfilled that have to do with birthrights, vassals and fealty and whatnot... and I believe none of this plays an important part (or at all) in classic D&D.

If you like at the skills of each class then it's pretty obvious that wizards, rangers, halflings, elves, dwarves, and orcs are modeled after Gandalf, Aragorn, the hobbits, etc.

Gandalf calls Aragorn the world's best hunter, and Aragorn literally listens to the earth (in the pursuit of Merry and Pippin) like the Ranger class skill. If D&D isn't based on LOTR, weird that so many of the classes are 1:1.

Then look at the way Dragons in D&D affect their environment (e.g. the weather changes as you get near a dragon's den) and it's even more obvious that D&D is based off LOTR. Not to mention the assault on Minas Tirith beginning with a change in weather due to the power of Sauron (or the way Saruman changes the weather on Caradhras). Or look at the mechanics of being frightened, that's pretty much the core class trait of the Nazgul.

Reading LOTR after reading through the Player's Manual makes it extremely obvious where each of the class skills came from - the came from events in LOTR.

Yes, but that's it: the trappings of LotR. I don't think there's anybody that would deny the elf, dwarf, halfling, ranger, wizard [1] of D&D are based on LotR.

The thing is D&D stops at the trappings of LotR, and completely ignores Tolkien's world is a kind of feudalism, with vassals, oaths, birthrights, "noble blood", etc. Upstarts are frowned upon in Middle Earth, and in fact, much shedding of tears is caused by people overstepping their bounds or wishing to dethrone their rightful lords. The very concept of "rightful lord" is so very Tolkenian. Denethor in his pride forgets he is a mere steward and not the rightful king of Gondor. Saruman in his pride forgets he is tasked with a "sacred" task and should seek no earthly glory. Wormtongue covets both Eowyn and the throne of Rohan.

D&D has none of this, as the article explains. You can "earn" your way to having a fortress, lands, etc, without the pesky concept of vassalage. D&D is all about the upstarts seeking fame, coin and glory.

[1] except D&D's magic is Vancian in nature, unlike LotR's. You cannot "learn spells" in LotR, and in fact, Elves don't even consider what they do magic and are suprised of it being called as such.

I assume you haven't read anything written by Vance, because magicians in there are so much more like wizards, especially in the '70s, and arguably still today, than anything Gandalf ever did. Such as their continual quest to amass more spells and their memorizing of The Excellent Prismatic Spray.

If you read the books D&D lists as influences, it's pretty obvious where most of this stuff comes from.

Agreed. And not only the spells: magicians in Dying Earth (Vance) behave pretty much like the psychopathic murder-hobo trope of the D&D player stereotype.

Vance's magicians are childish, petty, reckless, vindictive and power hungry.

Hah yeah. I like to say that D&D has the soul of Vance with a coating of Tolkein. It's not 100% true as there's lots of influences, but as a DM reading that series made me think "this explains so much".

IIRC D&D was so directly based on Tolkien that they used the terms "halfling", "goblin", and "magic user" to avoid a fight with the Tolkien Estate over the terms "hobbit", "orc", and "wizard". This article thus makes little sense to me: how many half-elf magic users do you see popping up in medieval history?

D&D was definitely, uh, borrowed quite heavily from Tolkein. Even using creatures that Tolkein invented.

Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII

Pretty much, except World War 1.

I must have missed the part where Gondorians and Orcs where sitting for months in trenches opposite to each other fighting for the same few kilometers of ground?

The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to Tolkien.

from ww1 we know that Tolkien took a strong dislike in industrialisation which made war and killing much more effective than before. Hence the "good" hobbits as traditional farmer-like society, and evil portayed as destroying the natural realm.

Tolkien has specifically stated that the Dead Marshes were inspired by the appearance of Northern France after the battle of the Somme. And that Sam is a reflection of the privates and batman he served with. That said, he explicitly denies that WW1 or WW2 had any influence on the actual plot.

I don't know how much you want to take the Tolkien's word for it (death of the author and all that) but there it is.

That's the "hot" period of the war. Before that there were several centuries long war of attrition between Dunedain, their allies and proxies of Sauron.

The capital city of Gondor, Osgiliath, was turned into ruins, front going straight through. And before that, the same thing happened to Minas Ithil. Those big towers next to Black Gate? Those were fortifications built by Gondor. But after Great Plague, which was probably a biological weapon of sorts, there weren't enough people to man them.

What we see in lotr, is essentially last days of war. When one side is barely clinging on, and can muster only localized offensives.

This impression looks more like the main events of the movie.

You have the several turns on the Battle of Osgiliath, and Boromir alluding to Gondor paying the cost for holding the frotiers with Mordor.

I think the Osgiliath battle lasted for many years? Not exactly trenches, but it was the only suitable river crossing in that area

It was one swift attack that managed to push the Gondorians out of the eastern half of the town, that also marked the beginning of the war, and one surprise attack with boats 9 months later to take the western half that a few weeks before the end of the war.

I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.

Trench warfare thing is a thing, a big thing, about WW1. But it isn’t the only thing that happened in WW1. It looms large in our imaginations, probably because it impacted the geopolitical situation, and that’s what we see through the zoomed out lens of history.

But Tolkien experienced WW1 in first person. When people say his books were influenced by WW1, I think they mean the experience of soldiering.

Somebody already mentioned the marshes. The Nazgûl are also described as spreading a sort of deep, supernatural sort of dread; not normal fear, but something that shatters the will of hardened soldiers, just by looming over the siege of Gondor. That could be influenced by the experience of artillery bombardments, without explicitly referencing it.

It is also a story in which the good guys are agrarian, and the bad guys are industrial; this was possibly influenced by the experience of being on the receiving end of industrial warfare. I hear it is unpleasant.

Wasn't "one ring to rule them all" a metaphor for nukes?

Not really, though I suppose you can interpret art how you like:

The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.

Letters, no. 226

Probably not, it doesn’t seem to have any direct power to just, like, blast stuff, as far as we see on the page. I think it is more like a wide-ranging enhancement to all the forces of evil if they get it. The power of every orc waking up on the right side of the bed to go do the day-to-day work of evil every morning.

There's no doubt a lot of WWI in there. I would guess that part of his goal was to talk about the universality of much of what was going on. For that he'd need to draw from a lot of history, and he had first-hand experience with WWI.

But the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb. The ring gets a pretty big promotion from an Gyges-style invisibility ring in the original edition of the Hobbit, to a civilization-destroying force in LOTR.

There's also arguably a Japanese influence on the Orcs, as an army of people who don't look quite like the English and are fighting hard for a way of life the English don't understand. Japan was England's ally in WWI but an enemy in WWII.

> But the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb.

Sorry but no. The ring had been written into existence before 1937 (in the Hobbit) and it's darker nature in TLOTR was defined sometime in 1938, long before anyone knew about the bomb [0]. Much later, Tolkien specifically addressed the relationship with WW2 by saying IIRC that if the ring war had reflected the real war, the allies would have used the ring against Sauron and Saruman probably would have made his own in the chaos that followed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructing_The_Lord_of_the_R...

The Ring also has some very nebulous power up effect that it would give to the forces of evil. It isn’t at all clear what it does, just that it would be real bad for the bad guys to get it.

If it was a nuke, presumably Elrond would have mentioned that, haha.

I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical power or something like that. If it fell into the hands of evil, it would mean the arc of history was going their way, all the little dice rolls would bend imperceptibly their way, they’d wake up just a little more energized than the forces of good every day, etc etc. It is better that way, because it becomes a battle for the soul of Middle Earth.

> I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical power or something like that

The Ring was a force multiplier for Sauron (who had in effect transferred some of his power into it, for whatever reason). He could already wield extreme control over his underlings (and we see what happens when he gets distracted at the very end) and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. All of these capabilities would have been enhanced if he got it back. He would also have been able to perceive the actions (and thoughts?) of the other ring bearers (i.e. the elves). And perhaps a load of other things that Gandalf and the other experts didn't know about (they didn't appear in middle earth until long after the ring was forged).

Tolkien continually revised his writings and published in 1954. I'm sure there are some hints looking back in retrospect at his earlier drafts.

And we know he changed the Hobbit to give the ring more power in later editions, for example making it irresistible to Golem. This sort of changed was likely propagated throughout the LOTR drafts as he made the ring more powerful.

Yes, but Tolkien knew from the outset (in approx 1938) that the Ring absolutely could not be used. This was the whole point of Frodo's mission, that the Ring must be destroyed, even though the details of the tale changed substantially as Tolkien wrote and rewrote.

By 1944, Tolkien was already writing about Frodo trudging through the dead marshes on the way to Mordor, bearing the hideous burden of the Ring. The bomb was still a year away.

Tolkien has repeatedly and explicitly said that he never wrote allegories for anything, and that he simply wanted to write a good story.

Of course he also readily admitted that his own experiences and views on life influenced his writing. He went off to fight in the trenches with his university friends and he was the only one to come back. This obviously leaves a mark. And if you read his writings aware of his views on Catholicism, then obviously quite a lot of that shines through as well.

But all of that is fairly subtle. The notion that this or that is an allegory for such and such is pretty much always wrong. Tolkien just wanted to write an entertaining story – nothing more, nothing less.

With a large work of fiction and a large set of real-world events, you can find allegories in everything. Doesn't mean the author intended this.

I never said it was an allegory. I think you're confusing two ideas. One is whether the story in as allegory, and the other is whether Tolkien was inspired by one of the most significant events in the history of humanity.

He said if he had written an allegory it would have a different ending, as in if he wanted to preserve a one-to-one mapping things would have changed. But there are story types that are not allegories and which also are influenced by things.

"Inspired by events, and write them into your story" is what an "allegory" is.

An allegory is a moral fable. It's a similar genre to Aesop's fables or parables. A relatively familiar example is Animal Farm.

Thank you!

Sadly my English teachers in high school wouldn’t accept this as a response to their request for an essay on Tolkien. It was extremely frustrating, to say the least, given his repeated stance on the matter.

The great thing about interpreting LOTR as an allegory for WW1 is it nicely explains the lack of female characters, without us needing to say critical things about an author we like.

Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel say what?

This is largely an issue of definition. When Tolkien spoke of disliking allegories, he was largely referring to the medieval tradition - https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/an-allegory-is-not-the-sam... - where you are quite explicitly making a direct connection to a specific thing.

He did, however, love to speak of "applicability," which many people would call allegory today. The One Ring, for example, is clearly meant to to embody power and the temptation of it/addiction to it. This is pretty unambiguously true! What Tolkien didn't want was for people to view The One Ring as some specific embodiment of power, e.g. the atomic bomb, and instead for readers to draw parallels to their own lives, experiences, and knowledge. To him, this was "applicability," but in the modern discussion of literature this sort of thing would still often be called an allegory.

I'm sorry but the proposed metaphor is just completely unworkable. The ring is not "too powerful for humans" it's not useful at all to humans! it induces irrational desire for it, but actually is of minor real utility, one person at a time can become real stealthy, it's cool but it's not beating an army. oh but actually when you try and use it for that minor ability, it secretly calls goons on you. Not desirable!

So it's like the atomic bomb, except there's only exactly one, and only the nazis can use it as a bomb, when the americans have it it just poisons the local groundwater a bit. But they have to keep it around and just let it do that because it's really important to guard it against the axis getting their hands on it.

The Ring provided much more power than that, especially to bend (masses of) people to your will, see their minds, etc. It was believed that if Sauron got it, he would be unstoppable. IIRC, some character said it provided power matching the user's 'stature'.

> the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb.

Didn't he write mostly before the public knew about the bomb?

Legends of magic rings (and crystal balls) that have malign influence are much older than Tolkien.

Definitely both imho. Tolkien’s own ww1 experience shines through. But then his sons served in ww2 and you can feel a lot of bilbos pain come through as Frodo has to take on the burden of fighting evil.

You can clearly see the pain at the end of return of the king where Frodo and Bilbo together just leave. They had both been through too much and are basically shell shocked.

It’s really hard to not view it as an allegory of the journey of two generations through ww1 and ww2 imho.

thats a little reductive.

Tolkien was influenced by many things, such as the rings of the nibelungen and other proto germanic stories, his studies of the english language especially in its older forms, christianity for core values, and indeed his experiences in ww1.

Yes, of course. Tolkien was massively well read and obsessively created whole worlds, as can be seen in things like The Silmarillion.

> thats a little reductive.

I prefer to think of it as dimensionality reduction :)

DnD is primarily based on Jack Vance and Michael Moorecock’s fantasy. Moorecock’s work being a direct rebuttal of the pastoral conservatism Tolkien was peddling.

Gygax was adamantly not a fan of LoTR. The creatures of DnD are clearly not based on Tolkien’s works, and the player races you believe Tolkien invented predate his work by centuries.

Damn peddled pastoral conservatism! I far prefer the pansexual libertines of Baldur's Gate 3.

Howard and Burroughs rather than Vance and Moorcock, though Tolkien would be number three. Gygax only argued otherwise after he was sued by the Tolkien estate.

I would say that the description of dwarves as middle-sized strong men that live underground and are known for good forgery, and elves being tall, old, singing folk indeed comes from Tolkien. Previously Dwarves were imagined as magical folk with powers more close to Cinderella's God Mother, and if I'm not mistaken, Elves too (i.e. dwarves were elves really) according to Germanic mythology. For example, if you read Andre Norton's Witch World this world differs greatly from Tolkiens' - especially in this matter.

Elves were more imps than tall, eternal sages. See Santa’s elves.

The word "Eldritch" as in "Eldritch Horror" comes from the same root as the word Elf.

Elves were terrifying forest creatures akin to djinn. They were horrors that would give you amazing things at a terrible cost, and from the medieval period we hear only the stories of the rare survivors of their actions.

(like Tam Lin who was given temporary immortality at the cost of being the slave of the elf queen and being tithed to hell unless some other mortal saved him)

or would literally kill you and drag your soul to hell if they encountered you

(the Wild Hunt)

or tricksters who would ask you for a favor and in the process attempt to steal you away as a slave

(there was a midwife who was summoned to help with an elven childbirth, after she was done the husband tried to get her to eat or drink of their food, but the elf-wife had warned her that if she did she would become his property)

They were not cutesy Santa's helpers or Legolases (Legolai?) or whatever flavor anime blonde girl you're thinking of. They were horrors you hoped to never encounter, the dark things in the forest looking for their next plaything.

Ah, I was referring to physicality not the personality. They hold the Trickster archetype prior to Sinter Klaus and Tolkien for sure. At least in Asian cultures a fox (trickster) sometimes has wisdom.

Have you read Susanna Clarke? Her faeries are like djinn if djinn had hopes and plans of their own. Amoral, egotistical, slightly insane, and sometimes petty beings of immense power, born of ancient pacts with the elements of nature.

> Elves were more imps than tall, eternal sages. See Santa’s elves.

Post-christian elves were diminutive. But Tolkien was using pre-christian myths as a foundation for the LOTR. The elves leaving Middle Earth is a metaphor for the old legends being replaced by sanitised children’s stories.

Chainmail drew heavily on LotR, in no small part because Chainmail was heavily influenced by 'Rules for Middle Earth,' and halflings were even explicitly called hobbits early on, there were explicitly balrogs, etc.

Gygax himself lists Tolkien and The Lords of the Rings in Appendix N in the 1e DMG.

After Saul Zaentz started threatening lawsuits about the similarities Gygax did a lot to distance D&D from LotR and Tolkien but in the mid 70s this was hardly the case.

D&D is obviously not just a recreation of Tolkien-esque fantasy, particularly since the players weren't even anything resembling heroes in the early editions and instead just adventurers trying to eek out a living, but the idea that D&D is anti-LotR is largely revisionism from Gygax and TSR trying to avoid a lawsuit from the person who owned the merchandising rights.

Not as much as you'd think. D&D's conception of elves, dwarves, and halflings was straight out of Tolkien, and...that was very nearly it as far as really unique elements (barring a few monster names and specific magic items, out of hundreds). Those three races are highly visible but kinda superficial. The Howard/Burroughs/Vance/Moorcock/etc. style of swords-and-sorcery/murderhoboism is a lot more deeply baked in.

> Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII

Tolkien was a/the leading scholar and Old English and the associated languages and cultures, including the myths. His knowledge was far deeper and wider than Beowulf. Much of the material in his books were from those myths.

Also, WWI was perhaps the greatest influence on Tolkien's life. Tolkien was an officer at the front; almost all his friends died in that war and his entire battalion was killed or taken prisoner (while Tokien was away recovering from illness).

Yeah, the way I played, I read the parts of the books about magic, combat, monsters and chatacter development, and ignored anything about society, filling it in with my own teenage ideas.

Also for me same experience, only difference is the setting, I was playing Dragonlance

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