D&D and genre over time (1974-1984)

OSR types will typically tell you that the original mode of D&D is sword & sorcery of the type that was popular when Gary Gygax was writing. In other words, guys like Robert E. Howard were back in print (the famous Frazetta cover volumes), the Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser stories were popular, Jack Vance was popular, and “pastiche” writers like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp were at their peak. In my opinion, this is both true and also untrue. It’s true that that’s what a significant portion of fantasy looked like in the early/mid 70s if you trawled through your typical bookstore or library shelf. And no doubt Gygax really liked that kind of stuff and heavily leaned on it for basic implicit setting assumptions. Famously, the Thief was supposedly based on the Gray Mouser to a great degree, and the magic system was heavily influenced by (or even copied explicitly, according to some) from Jack Vance.

However, by the time D&D came out, high fantasy had become extremely popular. The Lord of the Rings was very popular, Ursula LeGuin was popular, etc. It’s a little hard for Gygax or his OSR adherents to claim that D&D was explicitly sword & sorcery and not high fantasy when the game explicitly included elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, balrogs, rangers based on Strider and more as core, integral elements of the game. Gygax famously claimed in a column in Dragon Magazine that the inclusion of such was a bait & switch to get high fantasy fans into the game, where the fun would convince them to stay. However, this claim always struck me as disingenuous, and even if Gygax himself believed that, my experience with my friends in the 70s and early 80s was that high fantasy fans did not abandon their high fantasy preferences and play Leiber, Howard and Vance inspired settings as they adopted the game. Even Greyhawk itself didn’t feel much like the Hyborian Age or Nehwon but more like the Medieval real world with funny names and some Middle-earth elements generously sprinkled in here and there. Every setting that I ever fooled around with or played in was much more high fantasy than sword & sorcery when I was younger. And we drew maps based on the famous Christopher Tolkien map included in the copy of Lord of the Rings. True; many D&D maps from this era were hexmaps, but every novel, every story, and eventually almost every D&D map published started to resemble them as well.

Conan the Renegade. True S&S, or military fantasy pastiche?

High fantasy was always in the DNA of D&D from the very beginning, and it became more prominent very quickly as D&D absorbed more and more high fantasy fans; or at best, fantasy fans that weren’t particular between styles of fantasy and were happy incorporating any element from any style of fantasy into their game. But mostly high fantasy, because that was quickly becoming, if it hadn’t already, the default mode of fantasy that most fantasy fans thought of first. As an aside, not only was Lord of the Rings in print by this time, but so was Earthsea, Deryni, Narnia and Prydain. Shannara and Thomas Covenant would follow shortly, and before long the Belgariad and Riftwar series. Most of these were already out before AD&D itself was, but they certainly predate 2e, and clearly by the time D&D became 2e, the expectation of the game was that it more resemble those high fantasy works than anything by Howard or Leiber or Moorcock (Moorcock himself is, perhaps ironically, considered high fantasy by many critics.) But that change doesn’t mean that D&D changed from sword & sorcery to high fantasy between 1974 and 1984. Quite simply, the high fantasy was always there, although its influence and overtness grew swiftly during that decade. Gygax may have not understood why anyone would want to play a wizard or elf, but he made those options available, and they were among the most popular from the get-go.

In addition, early D&D had a lot of other stuff in its DNA besides sword & sorcery and high fantasy. Science fiction, post apocalyptic, planetary romance and horror all put their two cents in, although these gonzo elements were often novelties and had relatively low sticking power, other than a few minor elements like the displacer beast or the gorillon. Horror seems to have been the most successful, with vampires ripped straight out of Dracula, zombies pretty much straight from George Romero, and plenty of Lovecraftiana. But that stuff was always in fantasy anyway; a lot of the Howard Conan and Kull stories could be considered Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own right, and Solomon Kane was even more overtly horror-influenced. Psionics has an uneasy relationship with the rest of D&D, but it does survive from its importation into the game straight from science fiction, at least. The old gratuitous slick Heavy Metal was maybe a better description of D&D's implicit setting than anything specifically sword & sorcery. I don't know for sure what you'd call that kind of gonzo 70s van art type of fantasy, but it didn't necessarily resemble the sword & sorcery of Howard or Leiber very much.

Perhaps most jarring is that any attempt to link early D&D to sword & sorcery explicitly can only be done at the implicit setting level anyway (and as seen above, I don’t buy even that.) Nothing about D&D, especially as it was played, resembles sword & sorcery. Going into a dungeon, and then “resting” in between dungeon delves to recover, train or level up, spend your money on improvements, is completely unlike anything in sword & sorcery. The zero-to-hero leveling paradigm is also nothing like any sword & sorcery character; Conan, Fahfrd, the Gray Mouser, or Elric are all supremely competent adventurers even when striplings. And the character-driven sword & sorcery genre has little to do with the ensemble D&D adventuring party, especially as it was played in the early days with large groups and a dozen or more characters all participating at once, not to mention hirelings and other assorted followers and hangers-on. If anything, the fellowship of the Ring is a more true-to-life model for D&D parties as they were played, and no genre of fiction at all really resembles the “story” of D&D of “clearing dungeons” for loot and competency advancement.

However, now that I’ve spent all of this time attempting to debunk, or at least validate my opinion, that early D&D was never really sword & sorcery, it’s certainly worth pointing out that it was more like sword & sorcery in most respects than it later came to be. The implicit setting may have been more like a more humano-centric and overtly Medievalesque high fantasy setting, but it was more likely to feature some more overt sword & sorcery tropes than it did later, for the most part. Much of the way campaigns were expected to be structured, and for that matter, the way modules were written, would likely have resembled some sword & sorcery tropes such as punchy, action-packed short stories that weren’t necessarily meant to be stitched together into a “novel” form or over-arching campaign metastory, and the stakes were usually lower and more modest, much more like sword & sorcery. Whether or not the characters were heroic high fantasy archetypes or charismatic antiheroic roguish archetypes from sword & sorcery was, as it is today, up to the actual table and players, not the game itself; although high fantasy archetypes like the paladin were included early on. (It’s worth pointing out that antiheroes were increasingly common in American and western literature and entertainment outside of the fantasy genre during this period. James Bond and the so-called Man With No Name were already household names by 1974. Dirty Harry had been out for a few years, and Death Wish also came out in 1974. You don't need to refer back to Howard or Leiber to get antiheroes.)

James Maliszewski of Grognardia calls this period the Golden Age of D&D, and although I disagree with his assessment that this would resemble sword & sorcery, I think his delineation of its limits in time is spot on. Let me quote his brief description of it:

Golden Age (1974-1983): This is the era of D&D's ascendancy and, for me, its perfection. The argument could be reasonably made that the "pure" Golden Age ends somewhere between 1979 and 1981, depending on whether one considers the completion of AD&D or the mass marketing of the game through the Moldvay Basic Rules to have struck a heavier blow to the culture of early D&D. If one wants to make such fine distinctions, the period between 1979/1981 and 1985 (or thereabouts) is the Electrum Age, which straddles the tail end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver. The Golden Age is one of "gonzo pulp fantasy," with a hodgepodge of influences, particularly Howard, Vance, Leiber, de Camp, and Pratt. The dungeon remains the linchpin of adventure design and the sandbox is the assumed role for a campaign setting.

He's correct both in that the release of AD&D and Moldvay changed the culture of D&D, but perhaps only indirectly. Both were responses to changes in the player base as the game became more popular, marginally more mainstream, and certainly attracted large numbers of new fans who simply wanted the game to pull more in the direction of their tastes and preferences, which were not the same as the  original wargaming crowd the mid-70s in Wisconsin. New focal nodes of player bases sprung up that led the game in different directions, or even experimented with abandoning D&D altogether to develop something more along the lines of what those regional players bases were looking for. By 1983 the Mentzer boxed sets were out, and the Ravenloft module was published, and by 1984 the first Dragonlance novels were in print and selling like gangbusters. By that point, none of those products very closely resembled sword & sorcery at all except in a number of superficial ways, and they set the direction for the game much moreso than what came before. But as I said, this coincides pretty well with similar movements in the fantasy genre overall; sword & sorcery was still in print, but new stuff was rare. Conan pastiche novels were being written, but arguably being novels, they had already abandoned one of the core defining elements of being sword & sorcery; they weren’t short stories with punchy, pulpy action, they were longer and focused more on more complex plots and characterizations. Eddings, Feist, Brooks, and more were what mainstream fantasy looked like by the mid-80s, not Howard, Leiber and Moorcock.

Which makes for a good stopping point for this post, and I’ll come back to 1983-4 for my next one and talk about the trajectory of D&D leading up to and through the release of 2e. The release of a new edition actually was probably driven more by business needs for more sales and the removal of “family unfriendly” elements that were causing the game bad PR than it was a marker for a change in the direction of the game, really. D&D after the release of Dragonlance was on an unbroken cultural trajectory up until TSR went bankrupt and the brand was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.