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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:12:42 GMT -5
OD&D Inspirational Author Day 2020Today, March 15th - the Ides of March, is OD&D Inspirational Author Day and by that I mean authors that have and do inspire my campaign and my thinking on how I run my campaigns.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:14:13 GMT -5
The author I want to highlight in this year is one of the first authors I read as a boy. My father and his younger brothers had several of the early Tarzan books in hardback written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The books are old enough, it is possible that my grandfather read them too. They had been passed down from brother to brother and then they came to me (the oldest son of the oldest son) from my youngest uncle who is only 7 years older than I am. His genres are adventure novel, fantasy, lost world, sword and planet, planetary romance, soft science fiction, historical, and westerns.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:15:23 GMT -5
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:16:03 GMT -5
Tarzan is a great inspiration for my OD&D worlds and campaigns. It has been noted that OD&D has an implied setting of a post-apocalyptic world. It is a world of ruins and the dungeons beneath them, lost civilizations and former greatness. A world struggling its way back up from some long ago disaster and fall of civilization.
What does Tarzan have to offer? Lost cities (Opar and others), lost empires (Opar and others), lost civilizations (Opar and others), unusual creatures (dinosaurs anyone) and many other things. A trip to the center of the earth (a tie-in to the Pellucidar series.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:16:33 GMT -5
They are rollicking good stories, with a lot of action and a ton of incredible world building. Some people want to be highly critical of ERB and some of those criticisms are just, while others are overblown. I would submit that if you cannot ever put things in the context of when and why they were written, you will lose out on a lot of things that our rich literary history has to offer. First and foremost ERB was writing at a fast pace for the pulps to put food on the table. Second, his characters grew and changed in some ways as the years went by and as the financial urgency in his life gradually ebbed. Third, many of the things that some focus on went completely over the head of a 7 year old in the early 1960s and for quite a few years afterward. The beliefs and attitudes of that 7 year old where influenced much more heavily by his parents and not by the books he read. The distinction between reality and fantasy was clear in my home.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:25:12 GMT -5
In addition to Tarzan, there was the Barsoom series and John Carter of Mars(sword & planet), the Venus series(sword & planet), the Caspak series, the Moon series(sword & planet), the Mucker series, several standalone science fiction stories, several Jungle adventure novels (two of which involve time travel), several Western novels, two historical novels ( The Outlaw of Torn and I Am a Barbarian), a number of other standalone novels. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Mar 15, 2020 22:25:34 GMT -5
I have read all of these, some of them over ten times. As a result I have a large bedrock of world building ideas at hand. While ERB is IMO one of the gold standard authors for action and adventure, his world building earns him unrivaled gold status in that arena in my opinion. He has created many earth based worlds, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, Martian moons, fictional islands, and other worlds. All of them have rich and unexpected detail and they can be mined over and over for ideas. The movie Avatar borrowed a enormous amount from ERB for the creatures of that world to the extent that ERB should have been given writing credit for the movie IMO.
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Post by mao on Mar 16, 2020 6:09:45 GMT -5
I read a lot of ERB as a 14-17 year old. I read all 11 John Carter Books as well as several Tarzan and others. in fact I think I read all 11 John Carter books 5 or 6 times. I think I read all the David Inns/Pelucedar inner world books. I remember being very disturbed by the end of the last Pelucidar books where David was imprisoned and ties into a Tarzan crossover,
I also read a lot of peripheral books by Lin Crater and others. I read the Tarzan crossover "Hadan of Ancient Opar" which gave a background of Opar at its heights instead of a ruin. I read ERB Master of adventure which was a sort of Cliff Notes of all his works, can't recommend this book enough.There was also a book by Phillip Jose Farmer that put a lot of early 1900 characters in a place where they were all descended from a meteor that irradiated the Grand parents of all the ERB characters ie Sherlock Holes, Doc Savage, etc)as well as many others from other authors,and provided a fictional biography that was written in a style that pretended it was non fiction.
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Post by randyb on Mar 21, 2020 8:49:04 GMT -5
I read a lot of ERB as a 14-17 year old. I read all 11 John Carter Books as well as several Tarzan and others. in fact I think I read all 11 John Carter books 5 or 6 times. I think I read all the David Inns/Pelucedar inner world books. I remember being very disturbed by the end of the last Pelucidar books where David was imprisoned and ties into a Tarzan crossover, I also read a lot of peripheral books by Lin Crater and others. I read the Tarzan crossover "Hadan of Ancient Opar" which gave a background of Opar at its heights instead of a ruin. I read ERB Master of adventure which was a sort of Cliff Notes of all his works, can't recommend this book enough.There was also a book by Phillip Jose Farmer that put a lot of early 1900 characters in a place where they were all descended from a meteor that irradiated the Grand parents of all the ERB characters ie Sherlock Holes, Doc Savage, etc)as well as many others from other authors,and provided a fictional biography that was written in a style that pretended it was non fiction. Farmer's book is titled "Tarzan Alive". I have a battered paperback copy on my bookshelf. He followed that volume up with "Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life", which gave a similar biographical treatment to the far more extensive corpus of Doc Savage novels, and expanded the interconnectedness of the great pulp heroes. Burroughs himself is fundamental to understanding the origins of our hobby. Those who came before him were sparse; Kipling coming immediately to mind. Those who came after were legion, including Howard, Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, and even Tolkien. I recommend that you do not dismiss or downplay Barsoom, Pellucidar, or Venus in applying Burroughs to our hobby, even though those settings had post-medieval equipment in the hands of the protagonists. The fantastic experiences available in our hobby are no more confined to pre-modern pastiches than was Burroughs - or any of those who came before or after him. |
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Post by mao on Mar 21, 2020 8:58:36 GMT -5
Tnanx for the info, I figured I was not the only one to have read them. Have an exault!
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Post by El Borak on Apr 1, 2020 0:27:28 GMT -5
I have always loved Tarzan, John Carter and all of the other ERB characters. Great fun when I was a boy and great fun passing them on to my kids and now my grandkids.
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Post by mao on Apr 2, 2020 6:40:40 GMT -5
John Carter on Barsume(MarS) was my fav ERB. The read the 11 books more times than I can remember. As a 16 year old just finding the great pulp authors I pent the summer of 1976 learning about ERP, Lovecraft Asimov , and Bradbury. It was an awesome 3 months of pure reading. Alas, I moved on to D&D the next summer so I left the classics to adventures
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Apr 2, 2020 16:21:01 GMT -5
Alas, I moved on to D&D the next summer so I left the classics to adventures  You know you did not have to give up reading to play D&D.  |
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Post by mao on Apr 5, 2020 6:23:06 GMT -5
Alas, I moved on to D&D the next summer so I left the classics to adventures You know you did not have to give up reading to play D&D. thats easy for you to say, I truely have a one track mind |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Apr 5, 2020 14:16:31 GMT -5
You know you did not have to give up reading to play D&D. thats easy for you to say, I truely have a one track mind It is easy for me to say, I read constantly. Whereas I do not have the option of playing D&D constantly. Of course, if I could play D&D 12 hours a day, you would not see me online. |
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Post by Hexenritter Verlag on Apr 12, 2020 23:09:12 GMT -5
I have to admit to being a late bloomer when it comes to ERB, as I have only read one book so far the Princess of Mars. I plan on reading most of his works eventually.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Apr 12, 2020 23:31:02 GMT -5
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Post by El Borak on May 2, 2020 4:04:20 GMT -5
Wow! PD, that is a great place to start and it is public domain. |
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You know you did not have to give up reading to play D&D. 
