The Atmosphere of the 1970s

With the reader's kind permission, I'd like to continue this series, as one reader put it, "disentangling and pursuing to various lengths" its elements.  I'll recall the reader's memory and repeat that it is 1973, I am 9 y.o., there is no D&D anywhere in the world and I retain all the knowledge up until the present day I'm writing this, as I have time travelled back to the year stated.  For me, this is merely a thought experiment, combining elements of my life at the time with the real problem of how does one get a campaign started in a world without most of the conveniences we have at present, where no one conveniently knows the game or has even heard of it.

The first thing on my agenda is, as I said, the making of the setting.  I prefer to run the Earth as a game setting, but I must begin somewhere on the globe.  Given the limitations already thus described, and knowing I'd have to sell the game to a group of young persons, I think of all the places in the world that the best start would be in the wilds of Britain — that being the forested counties of the west bordering upon and including Wales itself.  First because it's actually easier running D&D in an region that is a mixed wilderness and fairly civilised place; secondly because the region believably speaks English, and my early players would have no formal understanding of "common" languages; and thirdly because it already retains, for many at that time, a strong memory of the adventures of King Arthur and Robin Hood, thus making the setting an easier sell.

Incidentally, I personally have no memory of the Lord of the Rings at that time.  I have no anecdotal memory of the "Frodo Lives" meme post 1967, nor of the popular music inspired by the books between 1970 and 1974.  I was immersed in science fiction in the 1970s ... I had no interest in fantasy fiction until after my actual introduction to D&D in 1979.  Nor do I remember any of my peers or friends talking about this Lord of the Rings book, or even the Hobbit.  My first encounter with the Hobbit, which inspired me to read the book (and be relatively disappointed by it), was the 1977 Rankin/Bass film that aired November 27 of that year — which I watched that night on television, with great pleasure.

Thus I don't believe I could rely much on Tolkein's cultural value regarding my peers.  Though the Hobbit was published in 1973 and the Lord of the Rings in 1954-55, his works floundered in obscurity for decades before they made their way into mainstream culture.  Tolkein died in September of 1973, a little more than three months before my thought experiment, and just as he was barely seeing the beginning of society's claiming of his work.

I want to pause here, as this reflection gives me a excuse to recall such things as Tolkein's influence on fantasy thought and imagination — always a good subject for a D&D blog.  I wish to make the observation that Tolkein was phenomenally talented as an "imagineer" in the Disney-sense; he invented, and gave flesh to, many marvelous and fantastic concepts that continue to grip the zeitgeist of literature and RPGs.  He deserves tremendous accolades for those contributions.  I'm very glad he lived, I'm very glad he chose to break with the sentiments of his day, I'm very glad he was able to conceive dualities between mythological and historical texts and to apply those concepts in a manner sufficient to relay what was possible in both literature and social phenomenology.

But Tolkein was not a great writer.  His books are not great books.  They are viewed with a synchophantic nostalgia by many, who deliberately blind themselves to the poor sentence structure, the clumsy narratives, the second-rate adaptations of earlier, better works, the periods of excessive overwriting, the agonising horror of digressions into perfectly awful characters that should never have escaped an editor's hatchet ... and, for me, the painful overuse of juvenile-fiction tropes of marathon prepositional phrasing coupled with a plot line that runs like a tour guide repeating, "... and we're walking, and we're walking."

The reason why Tolkein floundered for so long is simply that he deserved to.  The culture for which he wrote admired writing; the culture in which Tolkein thrived was one transformed by the media of radio and television into McLuhan's "culture of ideas."  What matters to our culture is that orcs, as a concept, exists at all ... not that they were "written well."  The culture's priorities had to change into something that could celebrate the ideas Tolkein invented while at the same time mostly ignoring the process by which those ideas came into being (i.e, "writing").  Today, Tolkein is far, far more impressive as a movie than he is as an author — though he had nothing whatsoever to do with the movie, or the concept of even the 1977 Rankin/Bass film ... because he was dead by then.

Those few who grip to Tolkein as an author fail to impress — merely because it's so obvious how tiny and frivolous is the selection of books with which they compare Tolkein.  If a person has read a mere hundred books twice in their lifetime, then it's certain Lord of the Rings would seem monumental ... and more so if that reader had read the tome a dozen times or more.  Time spent re-reading and re-reading Tolkein is time not spent reading something else ... a mathematical calculation that seems lost on the fan.

But let's have this digression end here.  My point has been to outline to some degree that the world of imagination in 1973, and the few years after it, have very, very little in common with anything we're familiar with today.  Jaws won't appear in theatres until June 20, 1975.  Star Wars won't happen until May 25, 1977.  Even Logan's Run, which only the oldest will remember as a huge phenomenon in the culture of science fiction, won't arrive until June 23, 1976.  Prior to these adventure giants, the largest single phenomenon of science fiction culture in 1973 is Planet of the Apes.  As far as pure fantasy goes, the giants were the Conan series, John Carter of Mars and Tarzan; but these pulp fiction wonders were universally panned by the main stream in general — until, again, the mainstream changed, to where the quality of writing underneath Conan mattered less than the concept of Conan himself.

In short, when convincing players to jump into a game like D&D, useful cultural references just aren't available.  Gygax and the boys really were stumbling into something unusual and rather fantastic at the time I'm waiting for my school to burn down that Christmas of '73 ... but of course, without any resources to pitch the concept they were building, early D&D relied upon the remarkable changes that would come about as technological and directorial choices began to forge a new fictional landscape with the late 1970s.

In 1973, we're really in the weeds.  Which is, again, a reason why my focus would have to be on building a game version that I could run ... before even considering the effort of pitching it to players.  As I've already said, my little self is going to enter Grade 7 in 1976, transferring to Junior High ... at which time I would meet a whole new group of friends post-elementary.  Friends who played tactical wargames.

The Original Fantasy

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

Matthew 16:18-19, The King James Version

"And when we reached the first step of the stair
It was white marble, polished to such gloss
That, even as I am, I saw me there;
And dyed more dark than perse the second was -
A calcined stone, rugged and rough in grain,
And it was cracked both lengthways and across;
The third step, piled upon the other twain,
Seemed all of porphyry that flamed and shone
Redder than bright blood spurting from a vein,
And this, God's Angel held both feet upon,
And on the threshold of the door he sate,
And that seemed made of adamantine stone."

Canto XI:94-104, Dante's Divine Comedy, Purgatory; translated by Dorothy Leigh Sayers

Begging the reader's indulgence, I wish to give a small 'geography' lesson.

Film and everyday culture has traditionally proposed that, within catholicism, that moments after passing away the first thing that you'll find yourself facing is the Gate of St. Peter, described above by Dante.  Naturally, this is all folk tales and fun, so we have made much mock of it in the last century.  Some depict an endless line at the gate; others the possibility that 'failing' at the gate involves a trap door and so you're dropped into the other realm in a wonderfully comic shock. It has long been a western notion that there's a conversation that you're bound to have with St. Peter when the time comes, where you'll explain your actions, give Peter and God a good talking to about the mistakes they've made or simply moon the bastard for all the crap you've had to endure.  But you don't have to worry about any of this if you happen to be an expert in parkour - because then you'll just leap the fence.

If we adopted the world of seven centuries ago, however, the time of Dante, you might be surprised to find yourself nowhere near a gate, but in fact at the mouth of a river - an earthly river, in fact.  The souls of the good were supposed to gather at the mouth of the Tiber, below Rome, at the infamous port of Ostia . . . at one time, the busiest port in the world, this being where grain was unloaded from Egypt to feed the enormous population of Rome.

This assumes that you've been a good and repentant Christian; if you haven't been, you'll find yourself on the banks of the River Acheron, waiting for the Demon Charon to ship you over into hell - and meanwhile you'll be pestered by clouds of stinging gnats.  But let's be generous.  Let's assume you've at least - as many say they will - repent at the very last moment, on your deathbed.

So there you are in Ostia, with all the other shades that have died.  You haven't any substance any more, your 'body' does not cast a shadow and there's not very much to do except speak to some of the others who are also waiting there.  You might, if asked, take up an instrument (which you'll be surprised to discover you still possess, if you're a musician), but for the most part you're too anxious for that.

You're waiting for an angelic pilot who will return with a boat that will take you completely to the other side of the world, the antipode of Ostia.  This turns out to be quite seriously in the middle of nowhere, a long, long way east of New Zealand, a lucky call for a church and Dante who did not live in a world where New Zealand or Australia were known to western Scholars.

That's 41.74 S, 167.76 W

Finally, the angel shows up - and takes hundreds with him, but not you.  Then this happens again and again.  The decision-making process does not seem based on first-come, first-serve.  You begin to realize that the leaving it off until the last minute idea seems not to be working that well.

Don't misunderstand me.  There's a reason why, on this blog, I spell it 'gawd' and not 'god.'  I'm a sinful bastard, quite ready to pay my coin to Charon and let havoc progress from there.  All I'm suggesting is that there was a rhyme and reason the manner in which mythical constructs are built - and be reassured, there is no more complicated and complex fantasy landscape than that of hell, purgatory and paradise.  And here Dante codified it all up for us.

At last, you get a ride.  The angel wills the boat around the world at unbelievable speeds (not being limited by physics) and you find yourself at the shore of purgatory.  And there, no, I'm very sorry, you do not see a gate.

What you see is a beach and a lot of reeds and a fellow who doesn't even happen to be a Christian. This is Cato of Utica, called the 'younger' to separate him from his great-grandfather.  Cato is 49, impatient, stern and anxious to get you off the beach and on your way, since there are others coming.  No, he isn't here to listen to complaints.  He speaks and you find yourself jumping at his tone, hurrying on your way up to the first terrace of ante-Purgatory.

Yes, that's right, you're not even in Purgatory proper, yet.  You're lucky, though, for the first terrace - the worst - is for those who were once part of the church but were excommunicated.  These poor schmucks have to spend 30 years for every year of falling away from the church wandering endlessly about the terrace . . . wandering, wandering, wandering.  Not you, however.  You're not of their breed, so you climb your way up through the nooks and crannies to the second terrace - and there, you learn you are among the indolent.

That is, you've waiting your whole life to get your shit together - and lucky for you, you did at least manage to do so before you died (you're not in hell forever, right?).  Unfortunately for you, however, a great mood of melancholy overcomes you and you flop onto your ass, your arms resting on your knees.  You are tired, oh so tired.  The sun is terribly hot.  Slowly, you crawl away, getting behind one of the great rocks on the terrace, where you find some shade - and there you pant, languorous, up to doing very little.  After a time, the sun moves and you do too, keeping in the rock's shade, waiting for the sun to set.

And this you do for the number of years that you have lived your life up until the moment of your death.  Twenty years, fifty years, eighty years.  Lax, winded, lolling, prostrate, disabled . . . and waiting.  Waiting with nothing to do and only other helplessly tired, formless souls to keep you company, all of you too tired to do more than contemplate your state.

Here you stay, waiting for the long years of your life to pass, until finally, after all that, you may yet get to see the gate described at the top of this post.

Here, too, I leave you, to think about Appendix N, and the contents thereof - a lot of cheesy, second-rate writers of the last century or so, whose context was so distantly remote from the time in which your characters live that their characters might as well be space cowboys.

I can't honestly recommend Dante.  He is a bitch to read, entirely because he is so far removed from our present experience, even our ideas about life and death.  I cannot manage him without notes and a lot of patience - that I don't suppose most have, unless they've adapted themselves to the understanding that there is a great deal to be gained in working hard for hard-to-acquire knowledge.  If you have not tried Dante yet; or if you have tried Dante and failed to get through (as I did, disastrously, my first three times), then I don't imagine you're going to take me seriously if I say, "read this."

After all, it's good to have a strong understanding of 13th century Italian history.  It's good to have a solid grounding in Greek and Roman literature, plus history.  It's good to have more than a passing comprehension of the church that once ran the western world.  Before I could, in all good conscience, recommend Dante, I would first tell you to read all of that.

This isn't easy.  This takes commitment.  You've gotta want it.

Then again, you've already got your whole life to sit around on your ass once, don't you?

Little Visions

Give the automatic car a moment of thought.

I went on-line looking for the picture that the interior of the car ought to be, and couldn't find it.  All the photos I could find had the passengers sitting in the car exactly like they do now.

The car is automatic.  It drives itself.  You sit in the car, you lay back, you go to sleep, there's a ding, and you're at your destination.  Believe me, when someone finally engineers the computer that correctly drives this car, it will react faster than you can, and in an accident it will protect you faster and better than anything you can do for yourself.  If an automatic car you're in gets into an accident, you'll want to close your eyes and feel the bubble wrap encase you and keep you alive.  And it will be better able to do that because you will not be facing forward; you will be facing the center of the car.

All four seats will be.  Which means that you'll get into the car with your three friends and chat the way you would in your living room.

Which means when you get together to play D&D, you'll get into your car, you'll organize your game while it picks up the first player.  Then you'll cover some details with him while it picks up your second player, then while it picks up your third player.  Then you'll play while the car drives to a great restaurant three counties over for the next hour and a half.  You'll get out, you'll have a quick, light meal, and then you'll play D&D as the car drives you back home.  And that is going to be how you run your game 25 years from now.

And if you have more than three players, they'll be in another car behind you, connected on a private channel linked between the two cars.  If the party gets divided, you'll all pull over to the side of the road, the non-running party will get into the back car, and chat, and drink - because everyone can get drunk if they want, it's an automatic car - waiting while you deal with the front group.  Then you'll switch cars.  And everything about your world that was a finger touch away on the computer of the first car will be a finger touch away in the second car too, because it's all linked to your phone/personal computer anyway.

None of us will care that we are travelling. Covering distance won't be work, it will be time, and a little cost, and we spend that same time anyway.

Won't it be convenient when we won't have to spend it forcing ourselves to focus on something we've already seen everyday, afraid that if we don't, a moment of distraction will kill us or someone else.