This post at Grognardia took me to this very nice essay at The Cimmerian. Take that Moorcock! I vastly prefer Tolkien to Moorecock, so I am somewhat biased, but I enjoyed the essay. It makes me want to reread some Tolkien. I don’t think I’ve cracked open any of that stuff since the films came out, which was almost eight years ago (I once joked I was looking forward to the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring almost as much I was to getting married, since they happened within a month or so of each other). That is too long, perhaps. But I’ve got another Epic Read on my plate just now, so Frodo, Sam, et al may have to wait a bit. What am I reading now? I’ll let you know when I’ve finished the first book!
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All the excitement generated by del Toro’s upcoming two-film version of The Hobbit has gotten me thinking about the novel a bit. It was seminal in my childhood, but that didn’t stop me from a reaching a critical realization today on the drive home: The dwarves in that story accomplish almost nothing whatsoever.
Let’s look at the evidence:
- The dwarves get captured by the trolls. Gandalf saves them.
- The dwarves get captured by goblins in the mountains. Gandalf saves them.
- The dwarves (and Gandalf) get cornered in trees by goblins and wargs. The eagles save them.
- The dwarves get captured by spiders. Bilbo saves them.
- The dwarves get captured by elves. Bilbo saves them.
- The dwarves can’t get in to the mountain. Bilbo goes in (in all fairness, this was his job all along).
- The dwarves don’t kill the dragon. Brand of Lake Town does.
Granted, the dwarves do a lot of damage in The Battle of the Five Armies, but it takes the eagles to turn the tide against the goblins.
Am I missing something, or did those dwarves kinda suck?
Much blood and internet ink has been spilled about the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Many, many reviews and thoughts have been written. Even though I’ve read through the PHB, I am still firmly in the “I need to play it” camp. Yet as I read through this book for “Arcane, Divine, and Martial Heroes” and in particular the ranger class, I had a realization — if this book somehow were transported through time to 1986, the year I started playing D&D, I am not sure I would have liked it.
I really got into D&D for one reason (okay, three). First, Ricky Terzo seemed like a cool kid and he played it with his older brother (who was kinda scary but also cool). Second, I read The Chronicles of Narnia in third grade and the idea of wizards and such stuck with me. But the real reason was, that 6th grade fall, I read The Hobbit for the first time and it kicked my 10 year old ass. I suppose the Narnia books planted the seed, which was kept watered by things like A Wrinkle in Time, but The Hobbit dumped Miracle Grow onto my love of fantasy. Mrs. Ricks had a copy in her classroom library — the tan mass market paperback with the original Tolkien illustration of Bilbo riding the barrels into Lake-Town on the front. I don’t remember why I picked it up, but I checked it out, took it home, and devoured it.
The Hobbit, of course, was just the beginning. “WAIT! There are three more books?! And Bilbo’s ring is somehow evil! Gimme those things!” So I snagged Fellowship from my cousin’s house (She worked at a bookstore; her copy was a mass market stripped cover. The blue one. I still have it. Sorry, Paris, but you were supposed to throw that away anyway). Christmas that year was spent at my mom’s in Maryland and I read The Two Towers. Christmas morning I opened the Red Box Basic Set. I was in. School started again, Ricky moved away, and all my friends began playing D&D.
What does any of this have to do with the 4ED ranger? Do I really have to spell it out for you? I began playing D&D because I wanted to participate, somehow, in stories like The Lord of the Rings. For awhile, I wanted to participate IN the Lord of the Rings. That following summer, we spent the better part of our waking hours in a quest for The Bow of Legolas. Tolkien had a HUGE influence in how we saw and played the game, even if, as Gygax claimed, he had little influence on the construction of the game itself. When we “graduated” to the hardback AD&D books, we were all enamored with the ranger. Now, we could play Aragorn and his Dunedain! There he was — skilled woodsman, magical powers, even the freaking name of the class was RANGER! Awesome! (And you don’t have to tell me there were all sorts of non-Tolkien stuff in the 1ed ranger. I know about the giant fighter and the favored enemy and the two weapons. NOT Aragorn. I get it. But the class was called a RANGER!)
(Ironically, I cannot remember ever actually seriously playing a ranger until I was in graduate school. And he got turned into a chimera. That sucked).
The point is that Tolkien led me to D&D. The Tolkien elements in D&D kept me there long enough for the game to become entwined with my adolescent identity. But now, there is very little Tolkien left in that ranger, because he’s not a semi-magical tracker at all. Now, he’s an archer or a two weapon fighter. He’s a striker who deals lots of damage. He has some cool combat stuff. But I don’t look at him and say “I want to play this class because it sounds like those cool guys Aragorn was part of!” So I don’t see the 11 year old me really being interested in this stuff, because it has little to do with the reason I was playing the game in the first place.
Hold your flaming, folks. I know I am not 11 any more. I am not remotely claiming Wizards of the Coast stomped all over my childhood. That was 20 years ago. The 11 year olds of today know LOTR through the movies. They’ve encountered fantasy through all sorts of different mediums — there’s video games and manga and Harry Potter and all sorts of other things (although why there isn’t some Harry Potterish stuff in this game now I don’t get. Didn’t a few kids read those books? A few kids that maybe want to play games where they can do Harry Potter sorts of things?) I am just saying a big reason I got into D&D in the first place doesn’t appear to be in D&D anymore. The game has moved on. I have moved on. Both are inevitable. Yet there is still this nostalgic lament that, had this book been my edition of D&D, I may have passed it by. And who knows what would have happened then.
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