Review of Gary Gygax's Living Fantasy
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Living Fantasy is the first book in the series that I've picked up. I don't have enough of an interest in fantasy organized crime to pick up the first book, The Canting Crew. If I wanted to incorporate a canting, organized underworld into my gaming, I'd probably go to the library and borrow the 1984 book of the same name by John McMullen, which was itself titled after the 1699 work A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, In Its several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggars, Thieves, Cheats, &c. McMullen, a historian, describes the London underworld of 1550-1700 as semiorganized, with specialized division of 'labor' and its own economy, but not the hierarchical mirror of society presented by some earlier accounts and by Gygax. (It's understandable that Gygax would play up the power and cohesion of the underworld; the Thieves' Guild a la Lieber is a staple of fantasy gaming.) Similarly, I didn't buy World Builder, the second book, which was cowritten by Gygax and Dan Cross. Its subject, the taxonomy of natural and artificial objects in a fantasy world, is more interesting than The Canting Crew's to me, but I have shelves groaning under the load of two decades of RPG books, and a $30 price tag puts me off anything I'm not very interested in.
However, I love Living Fantasy, as its title is apropos in three ways. In order to understand why I find it such a notable work by Gygax--in my opinion, the culmination of his thinking on the role of society in RPGs--I will describe the presence of the social in his earlier works.
The role of society in Gygax's writings
In the original D&D rules (1974), society is
visible in few ways. It serves as a guard against outrageous
character behavior
(the "angry villager rule"); one can build a stronghold as a sink for all those looted gold pieces (this high-level-only activity is D&D's
greatest grant of creative power to
players, permitting them a sort of co-DM status with their own
dungeon); it is a source of
followers (again, for high-level characters); and a source of tax
income for stronghold builders. There is an alignment system that
reflects social norms, but it is not strongly situated. My dim
impression of the fantasy
works (pulp and otherwise) from which D&D drew its inspiration is
that by and large, they too pushed society to the background.
Society in a de Camp & Pratt, Howard, Lovecraft, or Vance fantasy
story (at least in those that I've read)
often acted, as in D&D, as background
color, or perhaps as
opposition (especially for Vance's fantasy protagonists).
Characters in stories of this type are often not deeply embedded in
society, being outsiders or malcontents.In the original 1st edition AD&D rulebooks (1977-79), the structure of society is used as a justification for the rules (e.g., the argument that demihuman level limits are necessary for a human-dominated milieu). The angry villagers are gone, but strongholds and taxation are present in more detail, as are alignment and helper NPCs. The distinction between henchmen and hirelings (respectively, people who follow you but who can lose their loyalty, and mercenaries) is discussed, and a broad array of the latter are categorized, although again, their usefulness is mostly cast in individual terms. Gygax notes in the Dungeon Master's Guide (1979) that societies will vary from campaign to campaign--indeed, he presents a list of forms of government to aid in this regard--and thus defends the lack of a social class system in AD&D. (Many words in AD&D were devoted to defense of its rules and assumptions; they amount to scattered but highly revealing designer's notes.)
The World of Greyhawk (1980, 1983), despite being a campaign setting, is similarly silent on social details (deliberately so, I believe, as an intended grant of creative power to individual GMs), except for those with direct relevance to individual characters. For example, orders of knighthood are described, as goals for characters to strive for. There are discussions of demographics, racial characteristics, and the history of the setting, but few descriptions of social roles, commerce, custom, or other such material. Gygax's only additional discussion of the role of society in AD&D occurs in Unearthed Arcana (1985), in which, against his earlier advice, a social class system is included (UA, p. 82), mainly (IMO) to contextualize the new cavalier class.
In the Mythus RPG (1992), a Socio-Economic Class (SEC) stat is generated at the beginning of chargen, and determines the range of Vocations available to the Heroic Persona. The classification of a character's companions and associates is greatly extended. A character's associates might plot his or her downfall out of jealousy, or even be the character's social or economic better and thus have leverage over him or her. This discussion incorporates SEC, as do the rules of Mythus. There is considerable discussion of investment and other means of making money, again tied closely to the rules. Mythus' setting book, The Epic of AErth (1992), discusses societies comparatively, but most detail is historical or concerns the artifacts of each country.
Gygax's latest RPG, Lejendary Adventure (1999-2000), has no social class system, although it does have Low, Middle and High equipment lists, and a character's social class is loosely determined by his or her Order, which like a character's Vocation in Mythus is correlated with social class. (The class structure used in Unearthed Arcana--upper, middle, and lower classes, each with upper, middle, and lower subdivisions--was reused in Mythus and again in Living Fantasy.) It is similarly detailed in its discussion of NPC attitudes toward characters based on their relative standings, and adds a Repute statistic to track a character's, well, repute. The steady addition of social metrics such as Repute and SEC to Gygax's RPGs should alert readers that his opinions regarding society in RPGs have changed over this 25-year span.
Living Fantasy, in three respects
This brings us to Living
Fantasy. The book presents a clear rationale for its
subject: Gygax wishes to describe a medieval society possessing
relatively advanced technology (even 18th century in some
cases--somewhat too advanced for my liking), but,
crucially, without gunpowder, which ended the supremacy of the armored
knight in our world. There are thus many anachronisms relative to
real-world European medieval society, but they are identified as such,
so GMs who wish their coaches, sailing ships, or dinner menus to be
more historically faithful are warned where Gygax departed from
medieval history.The book describes the places and people of this posited society, and is notably both evocative in its descriptions and sufficiently quantitative to be useful without excessive on-the-fly GM creation. If you want to know the composition of a gypsy train wagon by wagon and how they work a crowd, the order of precedence of feudal offices, what a merchant might be doing on a typical afternoon, or what a laborer's hut would be built of, it's in there. Many objects (e.g., coaches, boats) are concisely described, although relatively few diagrams are used; for descriptive purposes, this does not appear to me to be a major problem. Much of the book is discursive, expounding on the structure of this Gygaxian society--its class system, the role of organized religion, the availability of travel, and so on--and the effects of these factors.
As I said above, I feel that Living Fantasy is an appropriate title for this work in three ways. First, the depth of detail regarding the operation of fantasy society is unprecedented in Gygax's earlier work; the book is a sociological treatise by this standard. We are treated to discussions of many, many aspects of the daily operations of this society at all levels; it would not be feasible for me to discuss even a majority of them in brief. For example, the means, lifestyles, and social mobility of the upper, middle and lower classes are described for twenty pages; the subsequent seven-page description of the underclasses covers criminals with plenty of detail for my taste.
Second, the society described in the book is dynamic. As an example, we get ten pages of descriptions of a typical day, hour by hour, for many members of society, ranging from courtesans and laborers to lords and prelates. Time is no longer merely a causal constraint on characters as in 1st edition AD&D, but here determines what other people are doing in detailed ways. This is a clear departure from the basically static "friendly dungeon" depictions of communities in early D&D material, such Gygax's The Keep on the Borderlands (1981), and is a huge aid to GMs who cannot simulate the ongoing activities of many NPCs in the back of their minds, and who do not wish to script events, yet who wish to present a realistically changing picture of the world to their players.
Third, Gygax describes his changing opinions regarding the relevance, to game play and rules structure, of Gygaxian fantasy society. If your FLGS has a copy, flip to pp. 111-113 and read his description of his change of heart regarding the importance of ecclesiastical authority in fantasy society. This discussion is, like many others in Gygax's later work and especially in Living Fantasy, focused on a shift from the individual to the social. Deities and Demigods (Ward & Kuntz, 1980) included a foreword by Gygax, who emphasized the importance of properly role-playing clerics to an AD&D campaign. But for him, Jim Ward, and Rob Kuntz, at that time the concern was with individual role-playing of a limited type ("OK, I need to sacrifice a goat, in an oak grove, at the summer solstice, while wearing purple. No problem.") and not with situating cleric characters in a highly religious society. In Living Fantasy, the defensiveness of some of Gygax's earlier discussions of proper play has subsided; we see him considering the effect of active, spell-granting deities on the temporal power of a fantasy church, describing how a polytheistic church might be semihierarchical rather than composed of disjoint sects, and above all, seeing his earlier stances as inadequate. Gygax's fantasy is indeed alive, and has changed greatly in its focus over the last 30 years.
Conclusion
A critical reader might observe that Living Fantasy's perspective on
society, while much richer than in Gygax's earlier works, is still that
of an outsider. The prestige and wealth of the upper classes are
presented
as great motivators for larcenous or ambitious characters; but what if
a character is rich? There is a persistent equating of character
wealth with player power, in a mindset for which acquisition of power
is the ultimate goal for players, to be controlled carefully by the
GM. In this regard, I would say that Gygax's picture of fantasy
society has become more Vancian over time. I could see Cugel
strolling the streets depicted in Living
Fantasy, but not Conan.If you are thinking, "But I don't care what Gary Gygax says," then I gently suggest that you should. Even if you believe that Gygax's work is no longer relevant (and to me and many others, it is), you should consider that as principal author of the seminal D&D and AD&D RPGs, Gygax's shadow in the hobby is long; it falls on many games and gamers, up to and including the present day. Moreover, his reconsiderations of these fundamental elements of Simulationist D&D-fantasy campaigns are carefully thought out, and (in my opinion) very interesting as developments of his original stances. If Gygax had remained at the helm of TSR, this is what AD&D's latest Dungeon Master's Guide would contain regarding society and the campaign. (What a Gygax-controlled AD&D would have looked like after twenty years is an interesting question; broadly, I think it would look a lot like Mythus, but with lower conceptual unity due to compatibility requirements.)
I have not presented a detailed breakdown of the contents of the book, as this was not my intent. You should flip through a copy and see what grabs you; a lot of material therein grabbed me. It has been an enjoyable read for me, and I suspect it will see regular use in my gaming, a rare distinction among my RPG books.
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