I’m like a level 20 Bard IRL so I picked up on his particular Bardly skillsets right away. He was bullshitting and charming people into doing his bidding the entire movie. He was more Bardly than Rodriguez was Barbarian(ly).
I ran a halfling bard that did not sing or play an instrument, but spoken word/orator. So yeah, totally see how that could be seen in Pine’s character and doing inspiration.
I really liked that my bard character, but that campaign folded after only a couple of sessions. This was 3-4yrs ago. He also like the Pine character in that he wasn’t much in a fight.
I mean, that’s awesome. I sincerely wish I’d gotten that same sense from it, that’s definitely what I was hoping for.
So in watching the special features of the blu-ray – which just arrived yesterday – they had the actors and others do a short D&D campaign a week or so before shooting. It also sounds like what happened in that campaign made it into the movie as well, which explains a lot I feel.
Can’t wait to watch it again.
Also, the gag reel is a delight. You can tell they had fun making this.
I always love it when that comes through in a film.
I thought the big game at the end was an extremely heavy nod to tabletop games, since they had a grid dungeon, chests, etc. I enjoyed the movie but wanted a bit more action, oddly enough.
Fair enough, but that was a really small part of the film.
They had the dragon covered, but I was definitely looking for some more dungeon. :)
Well said, that’s what I was after, too. More, “oh crap, what’s on the other side of this door?!” action. Plus they missed the boat not having at least one blatant, “okay, we’re going to open this chest to see what’s inside, but we’re doing it from the side while holding our breath.”
Needed more 10 ft poles.
When Gary Gygax died, one obituarist noted that he did more than any other single person to make fantasy generic, and I think that’s 100% correct.
High fantasy writers pre-D&D were few, but their worlds and their aesthetics were very different from one another (William Morris’s Anglo-Saxonist epics; Lord Dunsany’s hashish dreams; CS Lewis’s living Christian otherworld; James Branch Cabell’s black comedies, which drew on Slavic and Celtic myths that weren’t familiar to most; ER Eddison’s elitist paradise, where gods create whole worlds for superior mortal heroes to screw and make war in; Tolkien’s demihuman megahistories going all the way back past Creation).
Sword and sorcery was much more generic than high fantasy, thanks to all the Conan imitations, but even there you had Elric, who couldn’t have been more different from Conan and had a completely new relationship to good and evil, and Jack Vance’s picaresques, which were at once epic, exotic, elegant, and hilarious.
What D&D did was 1) mix all these things together, so there really wasn’t any coherent aesthetic anymore, and 2) quantify everything, so all mystery and wonder are gone, down to the minutiae of everybody knowing to use blunt weapons against a clay golem. This is when the glossy paperbacks came in and fantasy really became genre fiction, so repetitive that “my elves live underground and my dwarves live in the forest” and “here are seventeen distinct types of dwarves” counted as originality. What had been and should be the least predictable genre became one of the most predictable. There are exceptions that prove the rule, of course (like Book of the New Sun), but they’re as rare as high fantasy books were pre-D&D. Fantasy fans buy the same shit over and over and always want more, just like mystery and romance fans.
And D&D didn’t have to be that way. Look at Runequest (as set in Glorantha) or Empire of the Petal Throne, 70s RPGs whose worlds are absolutely their own (and not coincidentally predated the invention of RPGs). Warhammer (esp 40K) somehow managed to give a post-Tolkien mishmash an all-new feel. Even post-Gygax D&D had cool settings like Dark Sun.
But no, the fucking Forgotten Realms McFantasy wins out, because people are like that. And now it’s a movie.
Might still be good though.
You wrote all that about a movie you haven’t even seen yet?
I lived it.
99% of the fantasy I know is the distilled slurry poured down my gullet through the funnel of Gygax’s D&D, with a fairly late-in-life Peter Jackson chaser. And despite a very heavy diet of fantasy videogames all the while, I was none-the-wiser from any of those. It’s all been so generic, such a predictable series of mace-weilding clerics and constitution-boosted dwarves and halfings with bonuses to their thieving abilities.
So imagine my surprise, at the age of 55, to read Jack Vance and finally realize what an Ioun Stone actually is. What a wizard could be. What a genuinely weird place a fantasy world can be. Fuckin’ Gygax, man.
Yay, Tom’s reading Jack Vance! How exciting.
My boys, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, never get any love.
Oh man, I loved those books! I should give them a re-read, been a long time.
Vance was so good. The (first couple) Dying Earth books were a big influence on Wolfe for New Sun, and they’re almost as rereadable. Some of his explicitly sci fi stuff is fun, too.
Isn’t Greyhawk even more “generic fantasy” than the realms? It was the one campaign setting I never got into back in the 2e days, although I wasn’t much of an FR guy, either (though I did read a couple of R.A. Salvatore books). Dark Sun was the king as far as I’m concerned, but there was some other interesting stuff, too. Planescape was pretty weird. Birthright had a cool dead-gods-plus-Highlander concept with some realm-management mechanics, and speaking of weird there was Spelljammer, my DM buddy’s favorite. Everyone loves space hippos and sentient amoebas.
I would agree with that, Greyhawk seems to be the D&D version of an Arthurian setting, so about the most derivative fantasy setting there is.
Greyhawk has my highschool crush and uber hawt goddess waifu Wee Jas. Therefore, it is the superior campaign setting.
Well that’s probably better than Hugh Jass.
