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Friday, March 30, 2012

Literary Interlude: Megadungeon Origins

I thought I'd write a brief post related to things I've read in the past week or two. First, an article I read today about how A Song of Ice and Fire/A Game of Thrones is not historically accurate because the middle ages were actually kind of boring. This is from a medieval historian, mind you; in particular, he points out that the majority of medieval battles were very short and mostly involved running away. It's a strong argument for making morale rules a bigger part of the game.

The other thing I've read has been A. Merritt's The Moon Pool, plus I've just started Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race. There's a lot I could probably say about the influences of The Moon Pool on D&D; it has a race of frog-people, for example. But I was reminded of the occasional comment I've heard that the specific fictional activity of D&D -- dungeon-crawling for treasure -- has no literary precedent, except maybe Tolkien's underworld expeditions in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These are high-fantasy, lacking the more mercenary aspect of D&D adventures; there's a quest to save the world in LotR, and even the slightly more mercenary dwarves of The Hobbit also have a high purpose of reclaiming a lost inheritance. In contrast, Conan or Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser at first seem a better precedent, with "heroes" planning to steal a legendary object in the Tower of the Elephant or taking on a job to assassinate someone's rival.

The only problem, in the eyes of some, is that the vast majority of these swords & sorcery adventures don't seem to match the original old-school experience. So where did dungeon-crawling for treasure come from?

Part of the difficulty may just be too strict a definition of a literary antecedent. People have been looking for (1) a swords & sorcery adventure, (2) seeking treasure, (3) in a huge, sprawling underworld, (4) filled with monsters, (5) and intelligent humanoids, (6) and tricks and traps. They aren't finding a swords & sorcery story that fits all those points, and in particular there don't seem to be creature-infested megadungeons in S&S.

But if you broaden the search outside swords & sorcery, you find a long tradition of "lost world" adventures many involving exploration of caverns -- or ruins, in The Moon Pool -- which leads to discovering a vast underworld, inhabited by dinosaurs, other creatures, and advanced civilizations with wondrous artifacts. You might argue that the adventurers are seeking knowledge, rather than treasure, but in some cases there *is* treasure involved, or one of the party members betrays the others for the promise of treasure.

And as an aside, the lost world adventure derives from the earlier allegorical travel tradition, which is where the visitors that Brendan discusses on his blog came from; the viewpoint character from our own culture originally was describing a wondrous land for the purpose of warning or educating us. As travel allegories added adventure to create lost world and sword & planet genres, authors slowly winnowed out the allegory aspect, which made the visitor less and less necessary, until finally some pulp writers began writing from the viewpoint of characters in completely fictional worlds, with no visitors at all.

15 comments:

  1. While D&D was inspired by all those appendix N sources, it became it's own genre, with it's own conventions. In D&D or any rpg the "visitors" can be written into the story, or they can be the players themselves, rather than the character in the game/story.

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  2. Well, take The Lost World by Conan Doyle for example - you have the party, the exotic location, the monsters, but the "treasure" is the prestige of discovery and the setting is nominally modern. Fafrhd and the Mouser are probably the closest to the adventure/treasure paradigm and the party is always two plus the occasional henchman. You're right that the dungeoneer paradigm emerges from a combination of these elements, Moria, Vance, Conan, Van Helsing, but fails to accurately simulate any of them because it becomes its own thing.

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  3. Even so, there are stories in which those things occur. "Thieves' House" by Leiber, in which Our Heroes (you know the ones I mean) raid the lower, labyrinthine cellars of the local thieves' guild in search of loot - particularly the Skull of Ohmphal, with great ruby eyes.

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  4. Underground labyrinths appear in the works of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, at the very least. In ERB, there are tunnels and passages beneath the ruined cities of Mars, complete with lost peoples, creatures, and treasure...and, of course, there are also underground areas described in Pellucidar and the Tarzan novels. If Tarzan never explored the tunnels beneath Ophir, he wouldn't be able to afford his lifestyle!

    I am tempted to say that Gardiner Fox also described dungeon-like settings in his novels, but I am not 100% sure about that. Gary admired Mr. Fox's writing, and knew the man, so any such ruins on Llarn or discovered by Kothar etc. would be influential.

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  5. The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair, another Appendix N book, has a massive underworld accessible through the basements of houses and inhabited by degenerate elves. There's also King Solomon's Mines by Haggard. And the massive labyrinth in the Tombs of Atuan.

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  6. Good examples. Which is why I was sort of shocked when I heard people who were obviously familiar with Leiber or Howard state that there was no literary precedent for crawling through a megadungeon, searching for treasure. Hence, my speculation that these people were being super strict: "The Lords of Quarmall" doesn't count because The Twain are hired champions, not treasure seekers, in that particular story; many Conan stories don't count because humanoid races are scarce and the subterranean locations are either "not megadungeon enough" or are sparsely inhabited; The Gods of Mars/Warlord of Mars don't count because John Carter is looking for Dejah Thoris, not treasure; "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" has no treasure hunt and is too Dunsanian to be S&S; and so on. Or perhaps they just feel that S&S examples are too sparse to explain why D&D wound up the way it is.

    I think including the large body of lost world adventures, as well as "pulp archaeology" and sword & planet, as proper D&D sources helps demonstrate that exploring a vast underworld is really a pretty well-covered theme in literature. Since many examples of these are listed in Appendix N, it's hard to figure out why some people don't count them.

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  7. Jason and the Argonauts? Theseus and the Labyrinth? Orpheus in the underworld? You have to be absurdly strict not to see a tradition here.

    Glad you're reading B-L: I've been meaning to ever since Jess Nevins' articles on him.

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    1. I've been wanting to read The Coming Race ever since Colin Wilson described it in The History of the Occult. It's a major influence on occult and new age thought. Which is kind of ironic, because so far it seems like the "vril" force in the book was really kind of an afterthought to support his real intent: to write a social and political essay.

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  8. ...I guess I'm saying I don't understand the analytical difference between an entrapping labyrinth and a megadungeon and an underworld, unless you claim that saying "more than one minotaur" is a giant creative leap. Depends on the arguments being made, perhaps.

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  9. Interesting to connect this to the lost world genre. Not something I had thought of before. I think I'm with Richard. The underworlds of mythology always seemed like a pretty direct inspiration.

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  10. By the way, thank you for mentioning Bulwer-Lytton. His writing looks like a fascinating body of work, and I had never heard of him before. And it seems to be largely or completely in the public domain. There are some high quality ebooks here:

    http://manybooks.net/authors/bulwerly.html

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    1. Even if you hadn't heard of him, you have almost certainly heard phrases that he first penned. "It was a dark and stormy night" was his, as were "the pursuit of the almighty dollar" and "the pen is mightier than the sword".

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  11. I watched the 1959 version of Journey to the Center of the Earth recently and was surprised at how much like D&D it felt. Not a megadungeon exactly, but ruins of a lost civilization, dimetrodons, and the weird magnetic effect in the central sea.

    Like Roger's example the "treasure" was the prestige of being first.

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    1. Yep. From what I recall, the book was pretty much the same way. I was also thinking that The Time Machine (Wells) could serve as a megadungeon inspiration as well, particularly since the underworld-dwelling morlocks were translated into a D&D monster.

      If you consider just Journey to the Center or the Earth, The Time Machine, and Burroughs, those alone are a good enough fit to explain the inspiration of megadungeons. Those sources are famous even outside of fandom.

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