Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [80]
In addition, Mark continued to be influenced by other pop culture texts as he continued to develop Cuthalion. To an extent, he did want to remain true to the Tolkien universe, and used both the movies and the books as influences for Cuthalion’s character. However, other texts were influential as well. At one point, Mark decided that he was no longer completely happy with Cuthalion as a bowman, and he thought long and hard about how to incorporate more hand-to-hand fighting skills in Cuthalion’s repertoire. When I interviewed Mark, he said that part of his impetus for changing Cuthalion was that he had just watched the Conan the Barbarian movies and really wanted to incorporate some of that fighting style into his Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) character. However, when looking at what kind of hand-to-hand weapon Cuthalion might acquire, Mark turned back to Lord of the Rings. In an email to Scott, he explains that he re-watched the Lord of the Rings movie and discovered that “in reality there’s one of almost every kind of sword used by the elves except the longsword.” Thus he rules out the use of the longsword. Like the DM’s choices, however, Mark’s choice is not just a matter of a certain look or feel that he is trying to capture from movies he has watched, it is a choice that must work for the gaming group as a whole. Mark also rules out the bastard sword because Alex’s new character has one, and he doesn’t want to “steal his thunder.” In addition to adapting the character to new images from pop culture that appeal to him, Mark adapts the character in a way that will work for his real life gaming companions. Mark is not animating Cuthalion in a world that is primarily authored by someone else, but is authoring his own character based on influences from popular culture.
From Gaming to Literature
As we saw in chapter 3, sometimes D&D games also influence published novels. The Temple of Elemental Evil (Temple) was one example of this. There are two different types of influences at work here. On the one hand, we have novels that are specifically published for an audience of gamers. These books are usually printed by a gaming company, such as Wizards of the Coast, and the author may be restricted by needing to keep the book in the published game setting. As we saw with Temple, a savvy D&D player could figure out what spells from the rule books were cast and perhaps even what skills the different characters possessed. Another type of influence, however, is the less direct influence of D&D on fantasy literature. Just as it influenced countless games in terms of its mechanics and rules, the settings and monsters of D&D have influenced modern day fantasy writing.
One well-known author of D&D fantasy books is R.A. Salvatore. Salvatore writes in the Forgotten Realms universe as well as other settings and is best known for his characters Wulfgar and Drizzt Do’Urden, who were created when he wrote for TSR, Inc. In an interview with Rebecca Goings (2001), Salvatore talked about his experiences writing D&D novels. Some of the challenges writing for a gaming company come for Salvatore in having to make his characters conform to the D&D world and rules. He explains that he rarely uses wizards as key characters because of all the rules that surround them. He also explains that sometimes gamers want the characters to line up perfectly with the game, and sometimes character sheets with statistics are created for his characters the way they would be for a player character within the game—something he finds frustrating. Because of these limitations, Salvatore also writes books set in his own world (the Demonwars series) rather than Forgotten Realms (as cited in Goings, 2001). When asked if he ever writes up a book based on