Barbarians in 3.5 actually get base 4 Skill Points per level, which is more than Clerics, Fighters, Paladins, Sorcerers, and Wizards. I always took this as meaning that D&D Barbarians were intended to have more going on than just rage-smashing - stealth, tracking, nature lore, etc.
He eventually becomes king, so he’s definitely an intelligent tactician. He just had limited life experiences having been raised as a slave and then a gladiator.
One of my favourite characters was a wizard/barbarian lizardman. He believed that if you defeated a powerful foe you could gain its power by eating its heart (and also knew that this wasn't literal, it was a cultural thing). He explained to the party that he was very smart because "I ate a wizard, once." In fact, the wizard had had a Headband of Intellect that Xarg took from his corpse. He disguised the headband by wrapping it in crude leather decorated with teeth, making it look like a tribal collar thingy, so that people didn't know how important it was.
Another good reason why he switched the item's form factor from headband to collar, much less likely to come off that way. Especially since lizardmen don't really have good foreheads for headbands to begin with. :)
Though it was rather amusing that with the headband on he was actually the smartest member of the entire party. He was also often the voice of restraint and mercy. While he believed that it was important to slay powerful foes and devour their hearts, conversely it was bad to slay weak foes. Not only is it a waste of time and effort, those foes could one day grow to become worthy challenges if you let them go. Or at the very least be worthy foes for some other future foe that's working their way up to challenge you themselves.
He had basically made a cultural belief system out of XP grinding.
No problem. It was a random find at the library for me. I was looking for the next Wheel of Time book, but it was out and these Conan books were right there. I picked them up and loved them.
Yes, it’s hard to do anything new in fantasy without departing the genre norms and being reclassified as magical realism, sci fi, speculative fiction, weird lit, etc. But really it’s just fantasy without the trappings of the genre.
Some examples:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – a absolute banger of a fantasy novel – gets classified as alternate history. Wut?
A Thousand Years of Solitude – wins a nobel prize in literature – oh, that’s definitely not fantasy, right? Except it is…
Book of the New Sun – it’s got all the trappings of an epic fantasy travelog, even the emo main character. Medieval society, magical artifacts, weird and wonderful creatures (the ones that steal memories are so creepy!)… but no elves, and the setting is post-technology, so it’s sci fi. (If you haven’t read it, and enjoy a challenge, this is a serious recommendation.)
The Fifth Season – it and its sequels win three Hugo awards for sci fi (they aren’t that good in my opinion, but I digress) – but the main character is an earthquake wizard, and the whole thing is basically a magic system. No dwarves though…
So if you’re an author and you’re trying to sell a fantasy scenario that just a little off course, you don’t want to stray too far or you end up on another shelf in the bookstore. So we get Shannara and Wheel of Time and Mistborn and Elric of Melniboné and more and more. Some of it is quite good, but all of it is basically fan-fiction for LotR and Conan. Or Dungeons and Dragons, which is itself LotR/Conan inspired.
You’re not wrong about Stardust, as that one was explicitly an homage to pre-tolkein fantasy.
American Gods is surrealism or magical realism. I wonder what shelf it’s on in my local bookstore. It belongs on the shelf wherever Marquez, Borges, and Murakami are, in my opinion. Ironically, Tolkein could be a “new” god inside this book, one that is created out of modern nostalgia for the old gods.
One of the ways I ask myself: “is this fantasy that follows the trappings of Tolkein or Conan?” is to rephrase the question as “if you set a D&D campaign in this universe, aside from the local lore, would you have to change much?”
Earthsea very nearly fits. High magic, but not medieval. The tropes were not as established in 1964 when Earthsea was conceived, and Le Guin pushed back against them somewhat. It’d make an excellent D&D setting. I should really reread it. I recently got a nice illustated single volume copy, but haven’t cracked it except to look at the illustrations haha.
Discworld is so much a parody of the tropes, but still contains the tropes. It’s still medieval fantasy with high magic. It would make a great D&D setting if you were looking for a comedy oriented campaign. Hell, it’d be super fun to DM this campaign. Just imagine Death as an NPC haha.
The first time i saw North by Northwest, it was a little jarring realizing Hitchcock basically invented the modern action/suspense/thriller genre with that wonderful movie. So many references suddenly made sense.
My most recent read through of WoT was while falling asleep. Those sections were fucking boring even then. Most of the time I would remember 10-15 minutes worth and then rewind to what I remembered the next night. During the slog I didn’t even bother sometimes.
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