Mazes & Minotaurs is what the first fantasy roleplaying game could have been if its authors had taken their inspiration from Jason & the Argonauts (yes, the 1963 movie with all the cool Ray Harryhausen monsters) and Homer’s Odyssey rather than from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts & Three Lions.
So let me ask you this
What if the inspiration of D&D had been pirate tales, pirate movies and the swashbucklers with the random inclusion of magic instead of Tolkien, Howard, Lieber and Anderson?
Personally I can see some Faerie stuff creeping in (Elves and Swashbuckling have been a good fit far longer than Xtreme Legolas) and lots of Vance, but where else would this lead us?
Darned little armor. We probable would have a dueling table for fancy 1 on 1 swordplay.
ReplyDeleteThe game would have always had guns and cannons.
Okay ship to ship battle rules, only a little stumbling about in dungeons type environments looking for buried treasure. Lot's of weird islands.
Alexander Dumas' The Three Magic Missileers?
ReplyDeleteI agree with JD though I suspect a Medieval and Sword and Sorcery expansion would have been out pretty fast.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I am still grinning at GSV's joke, there is a lot of truth there. Dumas meets Vance basically
It would probably look a lot like a more streamed-down, less chart-driven version of En Garde.
ReplyDeleteQuite possibly. I am sore tempted to write the thing down the lines. I'd mine in the vein of mazes and minotaurs I think
ReplyDelete