The Inspirations of Gamma World

Based on the comments to the second part of my recent post on My Top 10 Non-D&D RPGs, my opinion that Gamma World should be viewed more as an example of the "dying earth" fantasy genre than as an example of straight-up post-apocalyptic science fiction was well received. This got me to thinking a bit more about Gamma World and its inspirations. While I suspect I'll dig more deeply into this in future posts, for the moment I wanted to present what editors Tom Wham and Timothy Jones had to say on this matter.

In their May 21, 1978 foreword to the first edition of the game, they write:

Drawing inspiration from such works as The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's animated feature film Wizards, the referee of a GAMMA WORLD campaign fleshes out the game, adding any details he or she deems necessary, and thereby creating a unique world in which day-to-day survival is in doubt. The rules are flexible enough to allow for a variety of approaches to the game – anything from strictly "hard" science-fiction attention to physical probabilities to a free-flowing Bakshian combination of science-fiction and fantasy.

What's apparent from this section of the foreword is that, as written, Gamma World was intended to be a fairly open-ended set of rules without a specific feel beyond whatever the referee introduced into his own campaign. In this respect, it's not unlike Dungeons & Dragons (and indeed most other early RPGs). The explicit inspirations mentioned above are eclectic, though none of them strike me as particularly "hard science fiction." The fact that every edition of the game that I ever owned (1st through 3rd) called itself a science fantasy game is telling.

Still, I think this is a topic worthy of further discussion. I believe there is more going here than is popularly imagined. If nothing else, it'll be yet more grist for my delving into the literary origins of roleplaying games.

Pulp Fantasy Library: No Night Without Stars

One look at this cover and you can tell that Andre Norton's post-apocalyptic novel, No Night Without Stars, was published in the 1970s -- 1975, to be exact. Though not set in the same world as her earlier Star Man's Son, Norton deals with many of the same situations and themes as that novel, such as outcast protagonists and the search for knowledge from the world before. Also like Star Man's Son, No Night Without Stars is fundamentally optimistic, as evidenced by its title, which is a paraphrase of something a character says toward the end of the novel.

... we have tried long to live upon the remnants of the Before Time, ever looking backward. But why should we? There is no night without a star, so the blackness of our night can be lighted by our own efforts. We are ourselves, not the Before Ones. Therefore, we must learn for ourselves, not try to revive what was known by those we might not even want to call kin were we to meet them.

Where No Night Without Stars differs from its predecessor, I think, can be seen in the text quote above too. It'd be an exaggeration to say that this is an "angry" novel; I'm not sure Andre Norton had it within her to write in that way. Nevertheless, there's a much greater sense in No Night Without Stars that the path forward for post-apocalyptic humanity lies not in rebuilding the past or in cleaving to the social structures created in the wake of Armageddon, but in challenging them and seeking something genuinely new.

This should come as no surprise, since the novel tells the story of Sander, an apprentice smith generally regarded by his people, rather unsubtly called "the Mob," as being of little worth. Their estimation of his abilities comes from the fact that Sander dreams of mastering "the Old Learning," so that he might work metal in ways superior to that of his benighted kin. Rather than abandon this dream, Sander chooses self-exile -- "go-forth rights" -- to travel outside the boundaries of Jak's Mob into distant lands where he believed he might find the secrets that he sought. Along the way, he meets a mysterious woman named Fanyi, who claims to talk with spirits. Like him, Fanyi seeks the knowledge of "the Before Men," although for very different reasons. She agrees to accompany him and form a temporary partnership for mutual gain, but, of course, events soon take on a life of their own.

No Night Without Stars isn't one of Norton's best stories. I certainly prefer Star Man's Son to it in most respects, but it's still a quick, enjoyable read. Compared to most contemporary sci-fi, it's extremely short and straightforward, providing the reader with very digressions or sub-plots. Likewise, the novel's setting is largely undeveloped, giving us only the briefest glimpses of its features and inhabitants, let alone its history. I can't say this bothered me particularly, since, as ought to be well known by now, I find such thing too often become excuses for authorial self-indulgence, but I won't deny that I'd have appreciated at least a little more detail in No Night Without Stars. As it is, it feels more like a sketch than a complete novel, which likely affected my final estimation of it.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Quag Keep

I hate gaming novels.

I've read only a couple over the years that I didn't think were utter rubbish and many more that were. Consequently, I've sworn off even attempting to read such novels anymore, if only to save my slowly disintegrating sanity. That's for the best anyway, since I consider the advent of the gaming novel to be one of the signs of hobby's self-referential decadence. It's hard enough to keep pre-packaged settings free of "story" as it is without novels creating dozens of characters whose epic exploits forever change those settings, thereby feeding Ouroboros.

The problem, of course, is that some gaming novels sell very well -- far better than the games on which they are based. That's why Lorraine Williams was said to have considered jettisoning D&D entirely and focusing TSR's publishing efforts entirely on the gaming novels that it spawned. For many younger gamers, gaming novels are their first introduction to fantasy literature, being for them what the works of pulp fantasy were for earlier generations of gamers. Were most gaming novels well-written, even as pure escapism, this might not bother me so much, but I fear that, with few exceptions, they don't meet even that meager criterion.

Quag Keep, a 1978 novel by Andre Norton, is a gaming novel -- the very first. Set in Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk, it concerns a ragtag collection of six adventurers, such as the swordsman Milo Jagon, the elf Ingrge, and a lizardman named Gulth, who all find themselves compelled by means of a geas to make one another's acquaintance and embark on a quest together. This geas seems to be tied to strange bracelets they all wear, bracelets from which dangle oddly shaped polyhedral shapes and that occasionally give them flashes of their having been other people on other worlds. As the novel unfolds, the true nature of these characters becomes more clear, as does the nature of the geas and the quest they're undertaking, although I can't say that any of it should come as a surprise.

Quag Keep is a very odd novel. It's far from Norton's best, even if its central premise is potentially intriguing. I would love to know more about its origin and what role Gygax and TSR had in it, since the author specifically thanks Gygax for his "invaluable aid." For me, the real interest here is in its portrayal of the World of Greyhawk, a setting that had not yet been published for gaming purposes in 1978. The setting Norton describes is recognizably Gygaxian in its nomenclature but many other elements, such as the war between Law and Chaos, seem unfamiliar. Are they based on earlier conceptions of the setting than the one published by TSR or were they wholly the invention of Norton? I wish I knew.

Despite its flaws, Quag Keep is worth reading, if only as a historical document of a time before gaming novels were commonplace and a distinct genre of fantasy literature. That an established and much-esteemed science fiction and fantasy author like Norton would be the one penning it rather than a game designer-turned-novelist is even more noteworthy and reminder of the very different relationship D&D once had with genre fiction.

An Evocative Quote

The eternal war between Law and Chaos flared often in Greyhawk. It was in a manner of speaking a "free city"--since it had no one overlord to hold if firmly to his will. For that reason it had become a city of masterless men, a point from which many expeditions, privately conceived and planned for the despoiling of ancient treasures, would set out, having recruited the members from just such masterless men as Milo himself, or perhaps the berserker only an arm's length away.

--Andre Norton, Quag Keep (1978)

Pulp Fantasy Library: Witch World

Gary Gygax didn't specifically list the 1963 Andre Norton novel, Witch World, as an influence on Dungeons & Dragons in the Dungeon Masters Guide, but I find it hard to imagine he hadn't read it. And while I wouldn't argue that the book was the primary inspiration for anything in the game, the general tone and setting of the novel are very much in line with the older pulp fantasies that did inspire Gygax and Arneson.

Witch World tells the story of Lt. Colonel Simon Tregarth, a dishonorably discharged World War II soldier, who runs afoul of organized crime and finds himself running for his life. Through the agency of a man renowned for helping people "disappear," Tregarth finds himself transported to another world, one where magic is real and strange cultures abound. This world gives Tregarth a second chance at life and he embraces it with great zest, entering the service of one of the world's many nations and falling in love with a practitioner of magic, Jaelithe, with whom he develops an unusual -- and potentially dangerous -- link.

Witch World is very much a descendant of the sword-and-planet genre exemplified by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom tales and his imitators. Here, as in its precursors, a man from our world travels a parallel one where he finds himself possessed of power and influence unlike any he's ever known. His appearance is literally revolutionary, setting into motion a great change in the established order of his adopted world. The book also freely mixes magic and technology, as the main antagonists of the book are technologically advanced refugees from yet another world. Indeed, Witch World presents a setting in which comparatively few of its inhabitants are in fact natives, with the others having come to it just as Tregarth himself did.

Witch World proved to be Norton's most successful book, spawning not just sequels to the original but all manner of spin-offs, many of them not written by Norton herself. I think many of these later efforts are less "primal" than Witch World and deal with stories and themes that I frankly find uninteresting and that aren't particularly inspirational for the kind of D&D games I prefer. But the original remains a classic and is well worth a read, if you haven't done so. Andre Norton was a very fine writer and her best tales are rightly regarded as among the best in the genre. Witch World is one of them.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Star Man's Son

Yes, I know this cover bears a different title than the one in the header of this post. There's two reasons for that, one practical and one historical. The practical reason is that I simply couldn't find a good image of the original 1952 hardcover release of this Andre Norton novel. The historical reason is that, in the 1954 Ace Double edition (which it shared with Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's Beyond Earth's Gates) bearing the title Daybreak - 2250 A.D., the novel went on to sell over 1 million copies, thereby ensuring that a large number of sci-fi and fantasy fans would read its story, including Gary Gygax, who cites it in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, and James Ward, who considered it a seminal influence on his own Gamma World.

Star Man's Son tells the story of a silver-haired mutant named Fors, who lives in a post-apocalyptic North America some centuries in the future. Because of his genetic background, he is distrusted and feared by the Puma clan of which he is a part. He is tolerated primarily because his father, Langdon, is a star man -- a scout and explorer who aids his people by traveling widely in search of knowledge and ancient technology. Fors dreams of one day following in his father's footsteps, a dream made even more urgent when his father disappears in the lands of the Beast Things, mutants who may or may not be degenerate humans. Eventually, Fors realizes that the other star men will never accept him as one of their number and so sets off, in the company of a mutant wildcat with whom he can communicate telepathically, in search of a lost city that was supposedly left intact amidst the devastation that destroyed human civilization.

Star Man's Son is a fun and inspiring novel, one of my favorites by Norton. There's no question in my mind why it exerted such an influence over not only Gygax and Ward, but a host of science fiction and fantasy writers since it was first published. The story -- an outcast on a quest to prove his worth, both to others and to himself -- is an old one, but it's one with which most people, espcially young men, can empathize. Add to that the terror and mystery of a world destroyed by man's own folly and you have the recipe for a classic adventure tale. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend you do so, if only to see the wellspring of what would eventually become science fantasy clichés. But Andre Norton wrote these things first and, in my opinion, best and deserves to be given her due.