I Was Right

A while ago, when writing about the Conan book I had read, I said “Oh my god, it’s Dungeons and Dragons.”

A week ago, Wired had an article about Gary Gygax, which included the sentence: “[Gygax] was a fan of the Conan the Barbarian books by Robert E. Howard and wanted to try to capture that sort of swashbuckling action in a war game.”

I also said “D&D is often described as “Tolkienesque”, but the basic narrative structure is not very much like Tokien at all.” The Wired article continues: “Interestingly, he loathed the major fantasy touchstone of the time, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. It was so dull. I mean, there was no action in it,” Gygax says. “I’d like to throttle Frodo.””

So yes, I’m just gloating about being perceptive. Mind you, I write these games for a living; I’d really better be perceptive about them.