Today, March 15th - the Ides of March, is OD&D Inspirational Author Day and by that I mean authors that have and do inspire my campaign and my thinking on how I run my campaigns.
The author I want to highlight in this year is one of the first authors I read as a boy. My father and his younger brothers had several of the early Tarzan books in hardback written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The books are old enough, it is possible that my grandfather read them too. They had been passed down from brother to brother and then they came to me (the oldest son of the oldest son) from my youngest uncle who is only 7 years older than I am. His genres are adventure novel, fantasy, lost world, sword and planet, planetary romance, soft science fiction, historical, and westerns.
Tarzan is a great inspiration for my OD&D worlds and campaigns. It has been noted that OD&D has an implied setting of a post-apocalyptic world. It is a world of ruins and the dungeons beneath them, lost civilizations and former greatness. A world struggling its way back up from some long ago disaster and fall of civilization.
What does Tarzan have to offer? Lost cities (Opar and others), lost empires (Opar and others), lost civilizations (Opar and others), unusual creatures (dinosaurs anyone) and many other things. A trip to the center of the earth (a tie-in to the Pellucidar series.
They are rollicking good stories, with a lot of action and a ton of incredible world building. Some people want to be highly critical of ERB and some of those criticisms are just, while others are overblown. I would submit that if you cannot ever put things in the context of when and why they were written, you will lose out on a lot of things that our rich literary history has to offer. First and foremost ERB was writing at a fast pace for the pulps to put food on the table. Second, his characters grew and changed in some ways as the years went by and as the financial urgency in his life gradually ebbed. Third, many of the things that some focus on went completely over the head of a 7 year old in the early 1960s and for quite a few years afterward. The beliefs and attitudes of that 7 year old where influenced much more heavily by his parents and not by the books he read. The distinction between reality and fantasy was clear in my home.
In addition to Tarzan, there was the Barsoom series and John Carter of Mars(sword & planet), the Venus series(sword & planet), the Caspak series, the Moon series(sword & planet), the Mucker series, several standalone science fiction stories, several Jungle adventure novels (two of which involve time travel), several Western novels, two historical novels (The Outlaw of Torn and I Am a Barbarian), a number of other standalone novels.
I have read all of these, some of them over ten times. As a result I have a large bedrock of world building ideas at hand. While ERB is IMO one of the gold standard authors for action and adventure, his world building earns him unrivaled gold status in that arena in my opinion. He has created many earth based worlds, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, Martian moons, fictional islands, and other worlds. All of them have rich and unexpected detail and they can be mined over and over for ideas. The movie Avatar borrowed a enormous amount from ERB for the creatures of that world to the extent that ERB should have been given writing credit for the movie IMO.
Hope to see you next year when I talk about Robert E Howard.
The author I want to highlight in this year is one of the first authors I read as a boy. My father and his younger brothers had several of the early Tarzan books in hardback written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The books are old enough, it is possible that my grandfather read them too. They had been passed down from brother to brother and then they came to me (the oldest son of the oldest son) from my youngest uncle who is only 7 years older than I am. His genres are adventure novel, fantasy, lost world, sword and planet, planetary romance, soft science fiction, historical, and westerns.
Tarzan is a great inspiration for my OD&D worlds and campaigns. It has been noted that OD&D has an implied setting of a post-apocalyptic world. It is a world of ruins and the dungeons beneath them, lost civilizations and former greatness. A world struggling its way back up from some long ago disaster and fall of civilization.
What does Tarzan have to offer? Lost cities (Opar and others), lost empires (Opar and others), lost civilizations (Opar and others), unusual creatures (dinosaurs anyone) and many other things. A trip to the center of the earth (a tie-in to the Pellucidar series.
They are rollicking good stories, with a lot of action and a ton of incredible world building. Some people want to be highly critical of ERB and some of those criticisms are just, while others are overblown. I would submit that if you cannot ever put things in the context of when and why they were written, you will lose out on a lot of things that our rich literary history has to offer. First and foremost ERB was writing at a fast pace for the pulps to put food on the table. Second, his characters grew and changed in some ways as the years went by and as the financial urgency in his life gradually ebbed. Third, many of the things that some focus on went completely over the head of a 7 year old in the early 1960s and for quite a few years afterward. The beliefs and attitudes of that 7 year old where influenced much more heavily by his parents and not by the books he read. The distinction between reality and fantasy was clear in my home.
In addition to Tarzan, there was the Barsoom series and John Carter of Mars(sword & planet), the Venus series(sword & planet), the Caspak series, the Moon series(sword & planet), the Mucker series, several standalone science fiction stories, several Jungle adventure novels (two of which involve time travel), several Western novels, two historical novels (The Outlaw of Torn and I Am a Barbarian), a number of other standalone novels.
I have read all of these, some of them over ten times. As a result I have a large bedrock of world building ideas at hand. While ERB is IMO one of the gold standard authors for action and adventure, his world building earns him unrivaled gold status in that arena in my opinion. He has created many earth based worlds, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, Martian moons, fictional islands, and other worlds. All of them have rich and unexpected detail and they can be mined over and over for ideas. The movie Avatar borrowed a enormous amount from ERB for the creatures of that world to the extent that ERB should have been given writing credit for the movie IMO.
Hope to see you next year when I talk about Robert E Howard.
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