The Campaign: Where We're Playing, We Don't Need "Genre Lines"

Look, blasters! This must be Blackmoor.

Folks, it's time to talk about the thing far too many gamers over the decades freak out about in fantasy RPGs- and thus in all forms of Dungeons & Dragons: tech.

This is despite one of the classics in Appendix N having them as an explicit item of native technology that heroes and villains alike wield.

See that? John's packing a brace of pistols to compliment his sword, and they get used. (Oh, and don't forget that telepathy is a thing in the Barsoon books.)

You know what else is in those books? Airships. With guns.

All this is to remind all the folks that lose their minds over Muh Strict Genre Lines that they can go fuck themselves. Those conversion notes between Gamma World/Boot Hill and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition aren't there for shits and giggles; Gygax and others back in the day knew damn well how blurred genre really was- something artificially created by the predecessors of the SJWs that are riding OldPub's corpse into the ground like Slim Pickins road the bomb. As I said last week, AD&D is Thundarr- not Tolkien. Don't let the Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings fool you.

Far too many gamers have had far too constrained notions of what fantasy is for far too long. If there is any benefit to be gotten out of the last couple of generations since Cultural Ground Zero hit, it is that this former state of blurred genre lines between the fake-and-gay "fantasy/scifi" split (itself a midstep towards their erasure) means that it is easier for people now to accept strange technologies alongside their swords and sorcery once more.

In short, we can thank the videogame and Manga/BD sets for unfucking what the Futurians (et. al.) fucked up by murdering the Pulps first and then giving the paperback novels crippling obseity by 1980. (You're welcome, Jeffro.)

And it's going to be this week's theme for the blog: "Wondrous Technology In D&D."