Saturday, November 13, 2010

What If: The Inspiration had been Pirates

One of the more interesting ideas that has come from the OSR is the "faux revival" game "Mazes and Minotaurs" which the author describes as

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?

5 comments:

  1. Darned little armor. We probable would have a dueling table for fancy 1 on 1 swordplay.
    The 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.

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  2. Alexander Dumas' The Three Magic Missileers?

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  3. I agree with JD though I suspect a Medieval and Sword and Sorcery expansion would have been out pretty fast.

    And while I am still grinning at GSV's joke, there is a lot of truth there. Dumas meets Vance basically

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  4. It would probably look a lot like a more streamed-down, less chart-driven version of En Garde.

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  5. Quite possibly. I am sore tempted to write the thing down the lines. I'd mine in the vein of mazes and minotaurs I think

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