that’s not the fault of Gygax. They were taking rules for war games and trying to apply them to fantasy. What’s fantasy? Well, it’s all the authors you mentioned. It’s anything. it’s how you resolve, “I’m going to try to take it.” The gem? “Ya.” from the Ogre king?. Yes, they created Greyhawk and Faerun and several others, but it wasn’t them that pushed that on everyone else.
Blame the authors that followed that latched onto the game framework - they could’ve gone a hundred different ways - done a hundred different things, but instead they absorbed and spat it back out because it sold.
Eh. I think it works for the likes of Eddings, but dipping into the sanctioned fair of Weiss and Hickman or salvatore and my argument probably fails a bit. BUT…i’ll still say there were tons of authors not on the TSR payroll that contributed far more than just gygax did…
I think you guys are piling a lot of sins on the game creators that should be laid at the feet of novelists.
Gygax & Co didn’t create Grayhawk world to constrain players or their campaigns or to tell then where the Dark Elves “must” live. They published them because the Dungeon Masters at the time (meaning the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who found the game) were lost as to what to do next.
We picked up the starter set box in 1981 or so, devoured the rules, and ran our buddies through “Keep on the Borderlands”. And then… we didn’t know what to do next. So we ran to the hobby store and (after mowing a few dozen lawns to raise cash) bought whatever other modules we could find. And we ran them too.
Eventually it dawned on our twelve-year-old brains that we could make our own adventures. But getting out a pad of graph paper and drawing connected boxes with the occasional little “s” symbol was one thing – creating a whole world out of nothing was something else entirely. We just didn’t have that level of organization or creativity at that point in our young lives.
Grayhawk (and later Forgotten Realms) was just a money-making venture to provide kids like me with a mostly-empty framework to slot our graph-paper dungeons into. It was intentionally vague and generic so that anyone with any idea could slot their stuff into the continental map and instantly have some cities and towns nearby. Hell, Pazio’s ridiculous game world is aggressively this way.
No, it was Greenwood and Salvator and the other authors that took these largely-empty gameworld sandboxes and imposed the annoying level of mediocrity and generic fantasy on them… putting down on paper that this world contained absolutely every monster in every published TSR sourcebook plus every class, plus every culture that had ever been alluded to in any supplement.
I don’t really understand the complaint about generic fantasy. I like elves, dwarves, and halflings. I don’t want to pretend I’m an insect humanoid or a fish humanoid, or some other weird humanoid. And I’m ok with an Asian inspired world, but isn’t that then just generic Asian fantasy? What’s exotic to Western culture may be generic to another culture.
Empire of the Petal Throne came out from TSR not all that long after D&D was published, so it’s not like Gygax was opposed to other settings. I suspect he thought it was great. Creators seemed to flock to the generic Western Medieval fantasy setting though. It’s possible that was as much fan-driven as creator-driven.
This is now showing on the cable channel MGM+. If your cable package includes MGM+, you may be able to stream it for free using your cable system’s on-demand feature (e.g. I can do that on Xfinity.)
Mind you, it’s also on Paramount+, and also available for rental in the usual places. This is just to show how dinosaurs like me who don’t have Paramount+ but still have the cable package with a million channels can save a few bucks.
I watched this over the last two weeks or so on P+. This was just delightful. After watching the excellent Willow TV series on Disney+ recently and now this extremely fun movie with a charming bard and a fat dragon, I have to rethink the whole “it’s fantasy so I probably won’t enjoy it” bias I still have against the fantasy genre.
I enjoyed it also. It’s done $208M world wide, so it may be close to covering its production costs of $150M, but it’s still a likely loss due to the marketing costs. I can only hope it does well on TV, streaming, and DVD because I’d like to see another one.
We watched this last night and I would agree with whoever up thread said if you liked the Guardians movies you would like this. It isn’t a perfect film, kinda slow getting started, and until you get some back stories you care nothing about the characters, but about 1/3 of the way in it gets up to speed. There really are some laugh out loud moments and good action sequences.
So a decent, not great, movie with some very funny bits.
That’s a good way of putting it. Or, to put it another way, when I sit down on the couch to watch a movie I’d be happy if they were all as entertaining as this one.
What I liked about this movie was the way they made is about who the daughter cared about (who really was her mom in her eyes). I think that idea put this movie up just a notch that i was not expecting.
I’ve watched it like six times and it’s been a blast every time. I don’t know if it’ll dethrone Hot Fuzz for me as most rewatchable film but I have a feeling it’ll be up there.
“The sale will include a talented team of employees, a content library of nearly 6,500 titles, active productions for non-Hasbro owned IP like ‘The Rookie,’ ‘Yellowjackets’ and ‘Naked and Afraid’ franchises, and the eOne unscripted business, which will include rights for certain Hasbro-based shows like ‘Play-Doh Squished.'”
Meanwhile, popular IP in the family brand division like “Peppa Pig,” “Transformers,” “Dungeons & Dragons,” “Magic: The Gathering,” “My Little Pony,” “Power Rangers,” “Play-Doh,” “Monopoly” and “Clue” were not only excluded from the deal, but will see “significant development, production and financing capabilities” support across film, TV, animation and digital shorts as they’ve been rolled into Hasbro’s brands licensing and merchandising operation.
Seemingly so. Yellowjackets has worth as a critical darling with some amount of dedicated audience and obviously the “unscripted” shows can easily be flipped to digital services for some quick cash, but the big ballers like Peppa Pig, Power Rangers, and Transformers will remain with Hasbro.
