A Geek History of Time - Episode 353 - Ed Examines Vance - no, Not That One, a Different One

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

You know, the thing is, you have reached farther for less good. To be blunt, the money in tabletop games isn't great. We have to wind up with the Church of England because obvi, I'll start. I mean, you're here to be the expert, but in the appeal. That one oddly doesn't make me angry. Because, you know, who's the boss? You know what? I'm going to keep my head down and be as inoffensive as I can to many.

to everybody possible. And that's it. You want to fight? I'm going to dry hump your leg until we're friends. Of course, reminded me of that one woman that I went on a single date with who said, you know, the downside about my job is that we don't show kids drowning anymore. This is a geek history of time. My name is Ed Blaylock.

I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California. And I just realized in like the last. 36 hours that apparently, and this is kind of a new thing, when I get frustrated enough, particularly with students, my internal monologue actually starts sounding different. The voice in my head actually changes, which I don't know if anybody in our listening audience has this experience. It might be more common than I think, but what I think is just me is I found out that my frustrated interior monologue voice starts sounding like professors. Drac from the Disney cartoons.

Hmm. I sound like a cartoon German rocket scientist. You kids, is just being so stupid. Yeah. And so that was a bit of a discovery while I was doing supervision after, after release yesterday. So, yeah, that's what I've had going on. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony.

I'm a U.S. history and economics teacher up here in Northern California at the high school level. And this will trigger warning. This involves bodily injury. But it's quite an interesting story. My son was dancing with his cousins the other day. And they're little and like to jump up and twist and turn and stuff like that. And he was jumping up and twisting and turning. But he has closer to my body mass than he has to theirs.

And as he was mid-twist, apparently he landed and continued twisting and and basically dislocated his left patella. It went to the outside of his leg, like like 90 degrees, you know, toward, toward the side. So here's what's wild. His mom is at his mom's house. His mom, I mean, he falls down. He's screaming out. He's grunting in pain.

and he's he's like me so he's very sensitive to the pain but he's not like me because he hasn't had much of it so I've learned to just be like well that hurts a lot moving on um it's like damien what's your pain level at I can't see out of my left eye so I'm going to say it's a nine but anyway shockingly high my pain level right now yeah let's come on we got shit to do Right. He does not have that. I don't know if that's good or bad, so he's feeling it and he's on the ground. He's writhing apparently. She springs into action and she actually goes to start reducing his kneecap back to place. Now, the thing about dislocations is the sooner you can get it back in, the better it is because the inflammation hasn't had a chance to kick in to stabilize. Right. So if you get it back there, then the inflammation will do its job. we are imperfect creatures, right? So she goes to do that. My daughter notices from across the room what's happening.

She sees what her mom's leaping to do. And I don't mean actual leaping. I don't think so anyway. She sees what she's going to do. And she sees that my son is beside himself with pain. And my daughter doesn't know necessarily about dislocations or anything, but she saw that like, okay, here's what's up. And there's probably some discussion of, oh, God, it's over here.

I need to push it back into place. Hold still. Right. So my daughter from across the way turns to my son and says, William, Dean likes pie and babes. And he stops, looks over and starts laughing right as his mom relocates his knee for him. He missed all the pain because what happens with a reduction is it hurts like insanely and then suddenly the pain is completely gone because everything's back to normal. Right. Right. So he missed that part because of my daughter's quick thinking. Mentioning a show, neither of them have seen, but they've run into this character in their D&D game. Right. So I was... Nice. Yeah. I mean, if it happened at my house, I would have, rightly so, stabilized the leg, gotten medical people on the line and probably taken them in or gotten an ambulance out. Right. Yeah, yeah. Because that's probably what most people are.

can and should do. My ex-wife, on the other hand, is a nurse. And so she was able to actually kind of work things. And again, she's not an ER nurse, but she had enough in there. And so she sprung into action. So, like, of all the things to, all the places to have it happen, thank goodness. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, props to her. Yeah. And I'm sorry just the fact that, you know, babes and pie. Yes. Or pie and babes, whichever way. But yeah, yeah. Oh, it was great. Yeah.

And I love the way that your kids consistently look out for each other. Uh-huh. Me too. Yeah. That's a really wonderful thing. Oh, it is. Yeah. So I've been training him on crutches today.

And I told him afterwards, I'm like, look, I'm being rough on you or insistent on you because you've got to get this right. Because this will not be the first time you're on crutches. Yeah. You probably will end up on crutches at some point again in your life. That's just how it goes. And I might not be around to coddle you. So as much as I want to cradle my baby boy, I got to show you how to get up and down the stairs and you need to fucking listen. And he's doing great.

He's doing fine. But like I've got him doing laps in the front room. Like I showed him the dark crystal so he could see how the Landstriders move. Oh, yeah. And I was like, that's how you're supposed to go. Yeah. So anyway. Yeah. Anywho, you better have something because I don't.

Well, I do. I do, actually. I don't have anything particularly big, but I do have something. You know, it's okay that we do an hour show or an hour and a half show. I'm sure that some people don't need all this cowboy bullshit. Yeah, indeed. So I want to ask you. I've thought about how to open this, but I think the way I'm going to do it is like this. What is your favorite class in D&D, specifically Dungeons and Dragons to play?

And what is your least favorite class in Dungeons and Dragons to play? And why? So it has no surprise to anyone. I really like the Bard. Yeah. Okay. And I've had the most fun playing bards. Yeah.

However, I hate that I can't answer to this just like straight with like two words. Yeah. I really love playing bards. However, I've really enjoyed playing a rogue because of the character I imbued it with. Okay. Class-wise, I like the rogue more. Okay. Because the rogue, I'm sorry, I like the bards.

more because the rogue I have found is how am I going to outsmart the attack of opportunity that I'm about to elicit? Right. It is like 70% of the fun of playing the rogue that I play. Okay. So that's fair. The bard, on the other hand, it's like, what are we doing today? Okay.

I've got a spell for that too. And I really love playing a rogue that has no combat spells. Or a bard, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah, there has no combat spells. Now, that being said, I actually think I prefer a monk above all.

Really? I do. And I've never had fun playing one. Wow. It's really weird. And I think that has to do with where the group that I game with was mentally and in terms of gelling together and stuff like that. I have tried to play a monk, I think, twice with that group. And the second time, I was like, okay, I've got a cool backstory.

I'm going different with this monk. I'm going to do this cool thing, you know, da-da-da-da. And then we ended up in fucking Borovia. And I'm like, I did not design this character for this world. This is not going to be fun. Yeah. So, but I love the monk. I love the idea of the monk.

I love the idea that I don't have to carry anything. Nothing can be taken from me that would reduce my capabilities in combat. And I'm basically an anti-wizard. Okay. So I love the monk. I haven't had good experiences with it. I've had wonderful experiences with the bard. And I've really enjoyed playing the rogue.

So pretty much something deck space, something that's the opposite of me. Okay. As far as what I've had the least fun playing was actually one of my favorite characters, but it just wasn't fun to play him mechanically. And it was a cleric because he just basically was a battery of extra hit points. Yeah. Which very cool. but what do you do this round Damien

I move three feet so that I can charge these guys over here and then I'm gonna I'm gonna do the hustle and everybody's gonna get hit points yeah and but he was powerful he was cool he was he was like doing really cool shit but like it was dull during combat yeah no I can believe that

the rogue that I play now basically he does the same thing but with potion And he is so much more fun Because I am running around Being a battlefield medic And just sliding under tables Jumping over this And then you know

Tossing a potion down your gullet Because I took thief So it's a bonus action Not a full action Which means I can like it's fun He is like He is mash You know

So yeah Yeah yeah But okay So least favorite experience Has been a rogue Okay Least favorite class I think is a warlock.

Okay. Because it requires the DM to spend more time on me than the other characters because of my patron. Okay. I don't like how it's, it's even though the bard is the look at me class. Yeah, the warlock is the one that like, yeah. Yeah. Okay, I can see that. So, so yeah, that would be.

So what have I named like five of the 12? Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, you managed to kind of dance around the one that I was looking for. Oh. So my, for, for me, um, oh, the class. Guess what mine was. Yeah, I should have. Yeah.

Because I can guess yours. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Three guesses in the first two to. Yeah. So here's the thing. I wind up playing a paladin. Yeah.

75 plus percent of the time. Okay. Um, but my, like thinking about the times when I have, I have had the most fun at the table. Mm-hmm. Um, one of, one of my characters comes to mind that I have, that I have brought around for every single edition of the game. Uh, and that is my, my thief. Okay. I, I refuse, even though the nomenclature is still rogue, I refuse to call him a rogue.

He's a thief. He was a thief back in AD&D. Mm-hmm. And I play him every edition when I play him. I play him with a certain low key level of kind of maybe like a genre awareness. Maybe not like full fourth wall breaking, but like I have I have. This is what thieves do. Yeah.

Well, I have bounced between so many worlds that like I've stopped even being human. Like there was a time I was a half elf. I don't know what the fuck happened there. you know, like he's aware of the fact that he's been bouncing around between experiences. Okay. And if you call him a rogue, he will rant about, I am not a fucking rogue. Any idiot with a scruffy haircut can be a fucking rogue.

I'm a thief, asshole. I have skills. Like, I was a member of a guild, all right? Like, I'm a professional. And so I've had an incredible amount of fun playing that character for decades. now. And so in a way, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, the permutations of, of how am I, how am I going to do Eber and Halfcoin this time around? Every time the addition changes has been a, has been a fun thing for me. And so the rogues thieves have a, a special kind of

place in my heart. Sure. I wound up and I've, I've told this story before, um, the, the, the campaign that I played in in college, the very first year, I showed up late. Mm-hmm. And we needed a wizard. So you slotted in. And I slotted in. And he wound up being kind of one of my one of my definitive kind of, you know, role-playing experience characters.

And I wound up having a whole lot of fun playing him. But for the first like six months, maybe not six months, first couple of months of playing him, it was, it was not a lot of fun. And especially in AD&D at low-level wizards were just no fun. And so as a class, I think my least. favorite throughout all of 80s throughout all of d and d since advanced dungeons dragons first edition has probably been the wizard you know how you say wizard i have i've come to realize that for me in my in in my older years now i guess um it's about the character yeah like i don't really

seem to care what the class was because i loved the character of that cleric right and cool things were happening to him it was just the combat mechanic that sucked the character was a lot of fun he's a lot of depth you know I played a wizard and I don't ever play wizards I played a wizard

like I played a in our game remember I had the sorcerer who was like you know experiencing tremendous PTSD as the game went on yeah and that was unlocking his abilities he was a trauma wizard basically but like I played a wizard who was essentially

I was like what do I do I do like how can I play a character where Dex is the dump stat and so I built a character around that and he was a kindergarten teacher and so all of his spells that were offensive spells were kindergarten tools so magic missiles were crayons chromatic orb was that little thing that like where does the star go where does the square go where does the circle go and it launched you know like that's hysterical oh it was so fun and his whole thing was like, well, I got to protect my village.

All these kids, they need to be able to come to school next year. I better take my skills on the road. Like, this is what I'm going to do for the summer. He was on sabbatical. Yeah. And his whole, his whole thing was like he used Presta Digitation all the time to encourage people. He's like, here's a cookie.

You need flavor it the way they liked it. And like, so he was just like the sweetest old man, like this little fat gnome. And I made Dex's dump stat. I was like, I'm going to see how long I can make him live. Like, it's been characters for me. Like, I love that. Yeah. So anyway, and I think I made him as offensive as possible.

Like, I don't think I made him an abjuration wizard. I think I made him like a conjuration wizard. Whoever like, you know, you are convocation. Yeah, evocation wizard. He was. And so he was like ready to, he was a fucking arsenal. And invoker. An invoker teaching kindergarten.

I'm sorry. I I oh you see oh you see yeah of course of course that would be an idea that would come to you yeah no that's brilliant I love that so yeah yeah so now the reason yeah the reason that I bring that question up is because the the mechanic the mechanic of the way spells work I'm not going to say magic in general because magic is a permeating thing that There's all kinds of different ways that magic works. Right, right. If that makes sense. But the way that spellcasting specifically works in Dungeons and Dragons is a meme like all its own, right? It is its own trope. And every role-playing game that has decided we're going to have spellcasters in our game has somehow been responding to

D&D. Yeah, of course. Okay, because D&D is the 500-pound gorilla granddaddy of tabletop fantasy role-playing games, so obvious. Like, you know, it's kind of a self-obvious statement, but for the purposes of my thesis, it kind of

needs to be made. Sure. And the way that D&D put all of that together is a very war-gamy, very game balancey kind of you know if we just let wizards cast whatever spell they want to whenever they want to then they're going to be more powerful than everybody else and like that's very resource intensive yeah yes and playing wizard winds up being a resource management kind of kind of exercise right as a as a fighter or a fighter type you're mostly looking at the tactical situation and you are considering you know who do I who am I going after

or what am I going to do, right? Sure. For being a wizard, you're tactical. You need to be tactical. You also need to be logistical. Yeah. Because when you throw that fireball, if you're only level five,

and we're in second edition AD&D, you're only getting that one today. So you need to know when to hold them and when to fold them. Sure. No when to blow things up. No when to run. And that's only if you have Expeditious Retreat though. Yeah, well, would you have it as a fifth level lizard?

Expeditionist retreat is one of the phase. Oh, it's like a first level spell. All right, yeah. So, and if we're in second edition, AT&D, you better have the Expeditious Retreat cast and ready to use before you do the Fireball. Right. Anyway, because there's no bonus action. None of that crap going on. Exactly.

But, you know, when you think about. Wizards, when I talked about Mage the Ascension a while ago, you know, we talked a little bit. We didn't really get into the level of depth that the topic deserves, but we talked a little bit about the lore surrounding wizards and wizardry and spells and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, Merlin didn't have to worry about spell slots. Merlin just said, all right, well, you know what? Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to turn. I'm trying to remember whose army it was.

Gwinevere's father's army. I'm going to cast an illusion on them so they look like their trees, depending on the version of the story. Either I'm going to make them all look like trees or I'm just going to make them all invincible. So they're going to, you know, show up and surprise the anime and whatever. Right. You know, he didn't have to think about that. When he got, when he in turn was trapped by whichever one of his female apprentices, apprentices you want to attribute it to,

whether it's Morgan Lafay or Nimue or whoever, she didn't have to worry about, okay, well, what level is this spell? I'm going to try to cast on him. Like, there was none of that was going on, right? You know, wizards used language and writing and all of this kind of stuff. And very often spells were very ritualized, right?

Right, which always struck me because, again, I grew up with the role-playing game. so it's like just go punch him in the nose you know like you see him pulling out a cauldron right like he's dragging that thing to the front of the army shoot him with an arrow let's go yeah see see yeah you you think like a sword and sorcery fan right in that subgenre that's a thing who's like i also do some wacky shit but if i punch you in the face that's gonna crimp your style Right. Yeah.

I also think I think a little bit practically, you know, as far as that goes. That's true. You know, my explanation for how my students should all work together on the same question, not divide up the work. Yeah. Because then if you divide up the work, one of them plagiarizes, then you're all tagged with it. That's terrible. Yeah. Or if like their question is a thing that would really help you on your essay, but you never touched it.

You have no idea. You're, you know. So I always tell them, I'm like, you all attack the question at the same time. Cuss and discuss attack it like ants on a corpse Like I just I'm very practical analogy I wish I could use metaphors like that with my sixth and seventh graders But they're probably get frowned on right but yeah But but so I think yeah I would be like has anybody tried punching him in the nose

Like I just want to float this idea out there I mean you you see it's gonna take him 20 minutes He's he's still filling the cauldron's not even half full guys Like, I see like 80 guys here just standing here with bows. Can you could just lose? Is that the command? Come on. Guys, come on.

Like, you can aim. You don't have to make it artillery. Like, let's go. You know, like I would see myself. Yeah. Doing that. Yeah. Stephen Brust has a great quote from the Jureg series.

No matter how subtle the wizard a dagger between the shoulder blades will always cramp his style. Yeah. You know, it's, it's Jack Burton style. Yeah, there you go Hit him in the between the eyes with a dagger See what happens Just like come on You know worst case scenario

He's mad at you He was already gonna turn you into pigs Yeah Like oh no What have you lost here really Right a dagger Yeah you know Give a shot

Yeah so Okay But So so So it was all very ritualized like you said Yeah so it was all very ritualized In the lore And then we have Dungeons and Dragons

Which is now this way That popular culture perceives wizards. Like you can see references to, you know, spell levels in in stuff that isn't, isn't even AD&D adjacent. Whenever, whenever another piece of media references wizards, yeah, there is a distinctly Dungeons and Dragons character to it now. Even in the, the Turfee, racist wizard school stuff.

Yeah. That's true. Yeah. You know. Yeah. So, yeah. And so. And then on top of that, even when you were playing a cleric, as a cleric, it's a little bit, a little bit less so in more recent editions.

But as a cleric, as a bard, as an illusionist, as a sorcerer, you have a chart you refer to that tells you this is the way your supply curve operates for your spells, right? Yes, yes. And, you know, and again, from a game mechanic standpoint, there's a meaningful reason to do that, right? Because you want to have the challenge as a game master, you want to kind of have an understanding of like where your characters are on the power curve so you can challenge them without like automatically overwhelming them unless you're a deck. And you don't want them running through everything because then it's not fun for them. It's not. Yeah. Yeah.

So, like, there's really great reasons for that in game design. And I think Dungeons and Dragons, and especially depending on a setting, has kind of struggled with ways to explain that in universe. And part of the reason for that, part of the reason for that, part of the reason for that, being the way that works is because Gary Gygax was a fan of a very specific science fiction writer who almost nobody outside of Dungeons and Dragons and even a lot of people in Dungeons and Dragons have heard of. And his name is going to start with an H. I guarantee you he's going to be a fucking Navy guy.

His name does not start with an H. Then it's anybody's guess as to what military branch he's served in. his name is Jack Vance Jack Vance okay and the system is even referred to as Vancey and Magic you know people people who are really big

you know game design nerds people who get into like you know this this role playing system is better than this role playing system because that kind of stuff they refer to it as Vancey and Magic which is you know you have spell slots and you fill your spell slots and you do all of this

and so Jack Vance has had a very profound, if kind of narrow, impact on our popular culture out of... Through D&D, because of Gary Gygax being a huge fan of his. Right. He's had this impact on our popular culture

and like the fantasy genre since then. Uh, out of, out of scale to his level of, general notoriety. This feels kind of like the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. Okay. He's the white line, and then his impact is suddenly this full spectrum. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I like that. I like that metaphor.

Thank you. So, you know, if you ask most people who the biggest literary influence was on Dungeons and Dragons. Like if you, you know, outside of, you know, Gen X, Grognards like me, like us, but more me. More you.

I'm harder. You read things. Yeah, I'm harder core. I'm hardcore about it than you are. When, if you, if you ask, you know, a general audience or a younger broad spectrum gamer audience, who do you think is the biggest literary influence on T&T? The overwhelmed, like, you're going to get several different answers, but the biggest one, the largest percentage is probably going to say

J.R. Tolkien. Oh, yeah. You know. Elves, dwarves, humans, Rangers, wizards, forks. Yeah. Halflings. Halflings. You know. What I have, yeah,

what I have in my notes here is, you know, elves, orcs, dwarves, halflings, et cetera. But yeah, I didn't even think of Rangers as a thing, but yes, 100%. Yeah, yeah. Now, but if you scratch deeper than that, you're going to find Vance

and you're going to find a very very very heavy layer of Vance and it's not just the spell system it's it's tonal it is it is the the particular

kind of story that Dungeons and Dragons tells is not Tolkien adventurers in D&D certainly in A D&D and D&D And even now to a lesser extent, well, maybe not to a lesser extent, but even now in fifth edition, with a much broader player base and a much broader, you know, variety of kind of stories that get told, at the end of the day, heroes are still very much more advanced than they are Tolkien in D&D. And the narrative is much more advanced than Tolkien.

So we're going to talk a bit about the man here first. So he was born in 1916. He died in 2013, just shy of his 97th birthday. Wow. He's seen some shit. He had, yeah. Like his first living memories might involve people wearing masks to avoid the flu. Yeah.

Could very well. I swear to God, he was born the same year as Robert McNamara. Could be. Yeah. Anyway. I don't remember. So born in 16, died in 13. Yeah.

Native San Franciscan. Oh, wow. Yeah. I was born in San Francisco, spent most of his childhood on his mother's family's ranch in Oakley, in Delta. Yeah, yeah. He and his, the sources that I was able to get to didn't go into detail about what exactly happened, but they mentioned his parents splitting.

So I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but he wound up mostly him and his siblings and his mother were supported by his grandfather. Well, so he was born in 16. When did you say he remembers the splitting? The date wasn't something that I was able to get. I'm just thinking like the depression hit and a lot of times a parent would go off and work and they, depending on where they ended up working. The company that owned the mind would not say what happened.

to them. So it just sounds like I think the the amount of parental abandonment in those areas. And remember, they were pulling jobs from all over the place, right? Right, right. But the amount of parental abandonment,

you actually need to adjust those numbers now because of how many cavens went unreported, how many deaths went unreported by mining companies alone. How many rail accidents? heard.

Exactly. And they don't want to pay that out. So, yeah. We don't know. He just walked off the job. Right. Along with eight other guys that day.

It was very weird. It was very strange. Yeah. So anyway. Capitalism. Yeah. So, so he had a very early love of Edgar Rice Burroughs,

especially Tarzan and the Barsoom novels. Oh, okay. Okay. We'll get back to the Barsoom novels a bit later. and he was a big fan of Jules Verne. Okay. Yeah. In the Depression when he got older and he got old enough to work in, you know, 1930s terms, which is to say by the time he was a teenager,

he held a wide variety of jobs. He was a bellhop for a year, which he said was the worst working year of his life, apparently. Jack London had a similar experience. Yeah, he worked on a gold dredge. What's, is that like where you're... It's gold. gold mining in a river, you know, sluicing, yeah. He entered UC Berkeley in 1936, so at 20 years old, he got into Berkeley.

I swear to God, Robert McNamara did the same thing. But, okay. He spent six years at Berkeley. He studied mining, engineering, physics, English, and journalism. Okay. So broad spectrum of interests. You know, if you wanted to be favorable, you could say he was, you know, had a wide range of interests and was kind of a, you know, Renaissance student. If you wanted to be less charitable, it was like you couldn't figure out what the fuck he wanted to do, you know?

Right. He wrote his, oh, go ahead. Real quick, Robert McNamara, born in 1916 in San Francisco, ends up going to UC Berkeley, graduated from Piedmont High, but ends up going to UC Berkeley graduates in 1937. Oh, how? Yeah, they were really close. Yeah. Yeah. So it was at Berkeley where Vance wrote his first science fiction story.

He wrote it for an English class and the professor shat on it in front of all of his classmates. Oh, man. And here we have a science fiction submission from Mr. Vance. Vance referred to it as his first negative review. I'm just imagining Vance as being like Owen from throw mama from a train now. Yeah. Yeah. One guy in a space helmet killed another guy in his space helmet.

What? Yeah. Yeah. They found a magic rock. I was afraid it would be ruined. Yes. Sorry. I just really like the quotes of him.

No, no, it's that's, that's, yeah. So he's 25 years old in 1941 He's We know that he's going to go on to be an award-winning American science fiction author He's living on the West Coast What do you think he did during the war? Oh, let's see

Shipbuilding Wow I was expecting your response to be Well fuck obviously joined the Navy. Like, come on, how many of these guys we talked about? His name doesn't end, start with an H. So I said it was anyone's guess.

Yeah, okay. No, I'm going to say shipbuilding, because Richmond's right fucking there. Well, you're actually right on the money. My notes here, all in caps, because we got to where I am in my notes from a different path than I had originally planned. But all caps, no, he did not join the Navy.

I mean, long-time listeners are still going to enjoy that. Yeah. Interestingly, though, he was working as an electrician at Pearl Harbor, at the shipyards at Pearl Harbor in December of 41. Or he was there until a month before the attack. He resigned his job a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor happened. He worked as a rigor at the Kaiser Shipyards. Okay. Yeah.

And then he cheated on an eye test because he always had bad eyesight. Okay. And by the 80s, he was legally blind. And his later written works were all done with very early voice to text programs that were actually written by friends of his. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's kind of cool. And, oh, interestingly, as an electrician at Pearl Harbor, part of what he was doing was degousing ship hulls, like doing the magnet thing? Yeah.

Okay. Is that to keep static from happening and? And it has to do, yeah, essentially. Gotcha. And so he was, he worked as rigor at the Kaiser Shipyards before memorizing an eye chart in order to pass the eyesight portion of the test. And he served in the merchant marine. Okay. So technically not the Navy.

Right. Well, because his name didn't start with age. Yeah. But he's still shipboarded on the water. I'm still on the ocean, yeah. He remained a lifelong lover of boating. Okay. But he held a whole bunch of jobs.

Like he was getting published starting in the 1950s, starting in the 40s, but then into the 50s, he was getting published doing short story stuff and that kind of thing. Are we talking like pulp magazines, though? Yes, yes, later, later pulp magazine stuff. Okay. And, but he was not, he was. wasn't making enough money from it to just be a full-time writer. And so he held a whole lot of different jobs. He was a rigor.

He was a ceramicist. He was a surveyor. He did a lot of different jobs. Sure, sure. And then his writing, when he would be successful, when something of his would take off, he and his wife would travel and they'd go and they'd live in the Caribbean for six months, or they'd go to Thailand for six months. They'd go to someplace else.

So he traveled extensively during his life. He was very well traveled. And he was, like I said, he was a lifelong lover of sailing. And he was also very close friends with both Frank Herbert, who we've talked about on the show, and Poole Anderson, who I think I've mentioned once or twice in the background of stuff, who's a very big part. Herbert and Anderson are both a big part of the new wave in science fiction. and Vance isn't considered so much part of the new wave, even a lot of the stuff he writes kind of reflects new wave ways. Stylistically, he was more old school.

Like his prose style was much more pulpy than the new wave guys. And so he participated in the late 40s. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance. He was speaking with, you know, the artists and the writers in the area at that time kind of as part of that movement. He was also a founding member of the Swordsman and Sorcerer's Guild of America, our S-A-G-A, which was a group that worked to promote the sword and sorcery subgenre. Okay. And his right, he is best known for fantasy and science fiction writing, but he also wrote, mysteries.

And his science fiction and fantasy stuff, which is what we're going to wind up focusing on mostly because of what I'm talking about here, it tends very strongly toward the pickeresque. Pickerask. Pantagruel is a pickeresque. I'm trying to think of other titles. How about explaining what it is? Because you know I'm not going to know any fucking titles.

Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, I forgot. who I'm talking to. Pickarest is oftentimes it's used as a tool of satire but it is very exaggerated very melodramatic

things are cartoonish in some ways for in advance's case it's mostly for the sake of of an entertaining story, but in, you know, the original kind of pickeresque stories, they were written as social commentary. And so things were exaggerated in order to make a point about, like, the nobility being effete. Okay.

You know, you could say that Gulliver's Travels is a pickeresque novel. Okay. You know, so it's outlandish. The way in which I'm using the word is it's just very, very outlandish, very, very, very, very, very, um, you know, so it's outlandish. exotic and in in vance's case touching on the weird okay um so he has all of these fantastical cultures and creatures and and things going on in his stories and the influence of burroughs his planetary romance is especially clear in a lot of his science fiction stuff my favorite example would be the novel big planet uh which is the the the

conceit is the title of the book, which is there is this planet that's been colonized for little more than a century. And it is, it has the same standard, it has the same gravity or very close to it, the same gravity as Earth. But it's like three times the size of Earth. Okay. And so, um, it's, um, metals poor, you know, the density of the crust is different and all this kind of stuff. Right, right. And so, and so it's, it, he, he gives a scientific explanation for it, but it's mostly an excuse for him to, uh, write a story where his characters have to make a long journey over the surface of this exceptionally large planet. Okay. To get to where they're going. Um, because they crash land, because their spaceship is sabotaged. Okay. Because the whole reason that

they're there is to stop the villain, Charlie Leicitter, who is a gunrunner and slave trader, and they're trying to knock down his illegal weapons importation scheme, and they're trying to stop him from slave trading. And his title, to give you an idea of kind of the way Vance's whole world, get built. Charlie Leicitter's title is he is the Bajarnum of Bojolay. That's that's Bojolay is his territory and his title is Bejarnum. So, you know, we have a lot of this kind of, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to make up this title that kind of sounds a little bit like P.T. Barnum.

Right. Like it's, it's like a Basha or, but Bajarnum of Bojolet, which. And that's a kind of wine. It's, yeah, it's, it's. you know, and so the book is a really entertaining adventure yarn. And it's a novel, but it's really it's a string of vignettes as this group of earth officials, kind of like cops, basically, Earth agents. Okay.

Are trying to get from their crash site to where they're going to capture the by Jarnum of Bojolay. And they go through one territory where everybody lives in these, you know, 30 meter tall trees. Okay. And all of their travel has to be, you know, in gondolas, strung along in vines, you know. And they get to another place where they encounter this monster that comes up. They get to a, to a fen. There's this huge bog stretching out in front of them for they can't even tell how far.

Okay. And out of the fog in front of them. they see this looming shape and they've been warned by the locals that you know you got to worry about you know the serpent and this looming shape comes comes comes out of the fog and it's this big long neck with what looks like one big eye and it's making these weird popping noises and you know for a moment they're kind of shaken but they're earthmen like they have they have science and reason on their on their side they're not these suspicious you know locals and so they hide and they kind of wait and they watch and it turns out that you know the monster

is another group of people in the bog who have built this thing, you know, like the Jabber Walk. They've built this machine in order to, you know, keep people out of their territory and they're able to, you know, deal with that. Okay. And these are the kind of stories that he tells over the course of the novel. And it's kind of one of these after the other, each one of them getting them closer to where they're trying to go.

Right. And so we don't see a, billions very much in his science fiction. Okay. And in his fantasy, we, we, the only non-human creatures we see are out of weird fiction. They're transdimensional entities, you know, one, one of which, uh, the, the, the hero, Kugel in, in the novel Kugel, the clever. Mm-hmm.

Which I'm going to spend more time talking about later. Kugel is sent by a wizard who essentially blackmailes him into doing it to recover the spatterlight which is this very powerful magical thing that he gets a description of it's so many inches long and it's got one one kind of scalloped edge on it and it's kind of triangular in shape and he winds up finding it and brings it back to the wizard and finds out that the wizard has been collecting spatter lights, and this is the last one.

And what he's doing is he is rebuilding the body of this colossal, interdimensional fish creature that he's going to essentially, like use the body as like a floating power suit to oversimplify. And so, like the creature, when the body gets built, some semblance of the creature's consciousness gets woken up and, and possesses the wizard. And then Kugel has this alien beastie to deal with.

So, you know, that's a non-human. And we have another group of non-humans in one series of his novels. But otherwise, all of his, all of the antagonists are either humans or they are species that are explicitly like descended from humans. and we're just so far in the future that they've become different. Okay. And we don't need to have aliens in his stories, and we don't really need to have elves or dwarves orcs or any of that

because the settings in which he writes are so far in the future that the cultures and the societies that he imagines. His world building is one of the things that's amazing about his writing. he just he he creates these these cultures that are idiosyncratic enough that you like whoever the viewpoint character is in dealing with them we as the reader are dealing with aliens even though they're as human as you or me but their culture is so different or they've got some semi-comical idiosyncrasy that the main character has to figure out how to deal with and get around you know, well, you know, until you're wearing a hat, I can only, I can only speak to you, you know, for a minute at a time. You know, I don't remember any specific examples, but it's, it's things like, well, you know, you're, they're not going to talk to. You know, he has, the character has a guide who tells him, they're not going to talk to you because you're wearing the wrong kind of hat.

Okay, well, where do I get a hat? Well, you'd have to buy one and the hat seller can't talk to you until you have a hat. yeah so you know that that regular logic thing yeah that that kind of thing yeah Kugel has to deal with a lot of that stuff over the course of the over the course of the novels that he's in um and so I mean it's played for comedy and sometimes it's played for you know melodrama and pathos um but it's it's decidedly weird and and the weirdness that we see in some of early Dungeons and Dragons.

Like if you look at some of the stuff that's in, you know, but before AD&D in the early boxed sets from Dungeons and Dragons, you can see that there is some of the same, same kind of tone. There is this same kind of weirdness. There's the same consciousness of concepts out of weird fiction, like multiple planes of existence and, you know,

powerful beings in other realms. And if you think about the way the planes of existence, as they are canonically described in D&D work, in a lot of ways, that's kind of an extrapolation of the cosmology that we see in Vance's writing. There are parallel dimensions that are full of very powerful creatures, most of whom show up as antagonism. most of whom are clearly evil and want to devour and defile everything in our universe that they can touch. And there are there's at least one notable example

that I can think of where there's a very clear implication that one of these entities is more of a threat to a female character than to the male protagonist because Vance is a product of his time. Sure, sure. And is a threat in a very sexualized way to that female character, you know, because it's, it was, he was writing this in the 60s. You know, he's a product of his times.

And so, like, you can see these, these kinds of ideas kind of written into and in all kinds of places, the concepts that are in Dungeons and Dragons. and Gary Gygax specifically mentions the Tales from the Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld, I think, are the two novels that Gygax references in the appendix to the first advanced Dungeons Surragans, dungeon master's guide. When he's saying, you know, for further reading about, you know, further reading in the fantasy genre, you know, that has been instrumental in kind of develop what this game is about, look at these sources. And, like, Fritz Lieber is on the list, and Tolkien is on the list.

But Tolkien is down at, like, 18 or 19. Sure. Which, as a massive Tolkien nerd, when I read that the first time, as a high schooler, I was personally offended. It was like, how can you put Tolkien this low on this list? My God. And now, you know, looking at it as a 50-year-old, I'm like, yeah, kiddo, look at the game. Like, yeah.

This is obviously And at the time I didn't know who Jack Vance was So like I just saw Tales of the Dying Earth And this other thing And I'm like that sounds like science fiction What the hell are you talking about? And so that's the next thing

I want to talk about Is in Tales from the Dying Earth It is set Kugel of the Clever And the Collection of Stories That is Tales of the Dying Earth And in Eyes of the Overworld And there are a couple of other novels

set in it. The setting of the dying earth is incredibly far in the future and the sun is starting to go out. It has turned red. At midday the sun is red in the sky, not white or yellow.

And there is this overwhelming sense of melancholy or even of dread kind of just hanging over everything because it is very clearly, you know, it might not happen for another thousand years, but everything is clearly on its way out. Right. It's, it is as plain as the sun in the sky. Like, there has been a change.

There is no getting better from this. Yeah. It's just a matter of when. And everything is impossibly old. Okay. All of the civil, like there are some of the civilizations that the main characters and the various stories in the dying earth run into. that are new, but if it's a new society, they're living in the ruins of an ancient one

that has long since gone away and they don't even know who they were. And as the universe is beginning to decline, the laws of physics and the barriers between universes are starting to thin. Okay. So, yeah, again, you go back to the planes and D&D, the veils between them.

Yeah, and the influence of weird fiction and, you know, lovecraft and those kinds of ideas. And humanity achieved incredible levels of super science and essentially, you know, advanced technology that's indistinguishable from magic. But it is clearly described as technology. Like, this is a tool of the ancients. But nobody knows really how it works. we just know you point it and goes zap, right? Right. And then that exists alongside magic.

Okay. Because physics is falling apart and magic works now. And so he wrote the dying earth. The first stories of the dying earth. He wrote during his time of the Merchant Marine. And they were published in 1950 for the first time. And Vancey and magic

This is the first place we see Vancey and magic The act of magic And the act of writing Again in lore were deeply intertwined Vance wanted his wizards to be cooler than Merlin Like he wanted he wanted to be able to have his wizards Do cool shit with a wave of their hand And you know speaking speaking a word right

And and and and, you know, be kind of action hero wizards, for lack of a better word. And previously, wizards in sort and sorcery had all been slow and vulnerable like you were talking about. Can somebody just go up and punch him in the face? Like, we tried that, right? And he didn't want his wizards to be as vulnerable to that kind of stuff.

He wanted them to be the cool kids. Sure. And so he wanted them to be able to use spells of devastating power like the most excellent prismatic spray. Sound familiar? Does, yes. Yeah, if you read Vance, you're going to see that like, oh, wait, I know that spell.

I know that spell. Right. I know that spell, you know. Because Gagax just like fucking lifted it all. Just straight up, pulled it and printed it and was like, what's he going to do? And as far as I know, he did nothing. I think if somebody pointed out to him,

and probably went, oh, all right, cool. Right. You know, whatever. But so for the purposes of his narrative, you know, he also had to challenge, just as his dungeon master has to challenge their players, Vance had to challenge his wizards. Otherwise, you know, there'd be no story.

So what he, the concept he came up with was that the concept involved in magic are so mind-twistingly difficult to wrap your head around. Right. And the very act of learning the spell or memorizing the spell starts kind of casting the spell. And so there's this like humming of energy kind of going on. Yeah, kind of going on in your brain.

And so when you complete the spell and cast it, like it, it, it, It disappears. You forget it. And in order to do it again, you have to spend time studying and rememorizing it. And so, but he didn't introduce the idea of spell levels because he didn't need to in his narratives. You know, basically anytime a wizard in advance story actually casts a spell, somebody is just going to get vaporized. This is essentially, you know, it might be to present. spray and they just poof, you know, or,

you know, it might get noted that, oh, that time when I cast the excellent prismatic spray, I saw them fold in upon themselves into the, you know, end's dimension or whatever, you know. But whatever it is they do, a spell is basically a, you know, button push, make that problem go away. And by that problem, I mean, that dude over there. Right. He's a

problem. Make him go away. And so what Vance came up with as a way to get around earlier tropes about wizards in his narratives, Gygax looked at and went, I can use that as a rationale not to have wizards be absolutely overpowered from the jump. Right. Which is interesting because he also had very, like, it's clear that when he was making D&D, he started with the wizard because he also had no understanding of like how many blows a person who's trained with a sword could strike in six seconds. Right. Yes. You know, and so like, okay, the wizard gets to do one of these. So clearly the fighter will just do one of those. Right.

like so it's and then yeah yeah and then when he got called on that which i think probably happened fairly quickly because anybody who did fencing right you know to college level be like uh you can hit somebody a lot faster than that with a sword it was like well you know you get you get one you know the the round uh reflects you know there's a whole lot of backing and forthing and everything but you're going to get one shot to really do something right yeah so which is like all right you know it but it's it's the same problem that we have with hit points though, right? Yeah.

There's the school of thought of like, if you get hit for 18 hit points and you've got 30, you're really feeling it. And then there's the other school of thought of like, you're not at zero yet. So it's only the one that drops you to zero that actually lands because if you're in a knife fight or if you're in a sword fight, it's the one that you get hit for real that really stops you. Like it is rare to get like, don't get me. it's rare to get like a scratch and have that like truly affect your combat capabilities. Right.

Because like if you get like if you get hamstrung, he's going to kill you with the next blow. Like there's, you know, and whereas in D&D you get like 18 points and then four rounds go by and you took no damage. And then you take another 12 and you get dropped. Right. So it's, it's, you know, like there's multiple schools of thought there. Yeah. Yeah. There's no mechanism for bleeding.

Right. or called shots, like, I take the needle out of my hair and stab the guard in the eye. That's going to end it. But in D&D, it's like, okay, about 19 of those will actually kill him. Yeah, you're going to need to hit him another 18 times. Right. So I put, you told me, I put the needle through his eye. Well, yeah, but you only did one hit point.

Right, because it's an improvised weapon, you see. So it's the equivalent of like when I bite down. on a nacho and it stabs me in my hard palate. Yeah. Yeah, it's about right. Now, he's a commoner, so only he needs five nachos to kill him. But yeah, like, like, yeah. Son of a bitch.

Yeah. You know, and there, to be, to be fair, to be fair, you know, you're trying to create a story where everybody's a heroic figure. Yep. Number one. So getting one shot is not very heroic.

So okay. Very true. And, you know, how do you, how do you come up with a way to represent, okay, look, you know, he landed a solid hit to, you know, your chest. Right. But, you know, you're wearing armor and whatever, whatever, but like you've been bruised. And so, like, you know, how do you represent these things in an abstract way on a tabletop? Like, you know, there's, you know, we can. no perfect way.

Yeah, we can shit on every system and the way it handles it if we really want to, because none of it is going to, if you want to tell a fun story, you're not going to be able to be very realistic about it. If you want to tell a realistic story, you can... It's not going to be very fun. It's not the first time a player gets hit, it's not going to be very much fun. No. And I'm looking at you Millennium's End and my friends when we played that.

Because... And this is one of the... problems that like when we were talking with Matthew Foreback like he designed his games to be like you'd better figure out a way to not shoot your way through this and I think I said

it then and there too I was like that doesn't sound like as much fun right because it doesn't because you have guns on the cover yeah like we want to use them you know yeah like like there

I've been role playing games that I've I've really seen some really clever ways to step around it. For instance, like hit points represent you being conscious. And when you go down, the bad guys leave you alone. They don't stomp your head into oblivion. Like it's not that kind of a game. Like Avatar, The Last Airbender, the role-playing game. Right.

The mechanic is such that it takes you out of the combat. And they can dictate how you're out of the combat. But it's not lethal and it's not injurious forever and stuff like that. Right, right. Yeah. So. Yeah. And that third generation tabletop game design where people thought about those things because those problems had come up.

Right. So as much as anybody who listens to the show knows how much we in this podcast enjoy giving Gary Gygax a really hard time. Because on a lot of levels, he does deserve it, you know, to be fair, this was the first time anybody had tried to figure out how to do this. so like there are going to be some kinks in the system, right? Oh, absolutely. And again, given his origin in terms of like where this game system came from, yeah, of course, okay, you could see the straight line to it. Of course it's not going to be what we have now.

Right, right, right. So, and at this point, it's also worth noting that Vance's wizards were also students of science and the super science that had been left behind by human civilization for the 20,000 years, or however many, you know, countless years between our present and their time. And so the Dungeons and Dragons spell clone is taken from Vance because cloning is a thing,

wizards do and it is a principal plot point in one of the eponymous tales of the dying earth a wizard falls in love with he creates a partner in a in a cloning matrix and she's delightful and he loves her

and she loves him and he you know she says she's lonely So he goes and he wants to make another her for to keep her company while he's in his study doing stuff. And something goes wrong with the cloning matrix. And so the copy of the first one has a warped view of the world. She literally says everything I look at is hideous and deformed. I cannot see beauty.

I cannot recognize any of this stuff. And so the wizard says, all right, well, you know, you don't want to be here. You know, with me and essentially your mother, your clone mother. So, you know, here are, and it's very much like a legendary hero tale. He tells her, you know, here's a sword to defend yourself and here's this thing and here's this thing. And, you know, go off and make your way. And, you know, maybe if you can find whoever this other figure is, they might be able to help you. But I've this, what I, what I, when I created you, I used, you know, the extent of my knowledge and I don't know what went wrong.

So go find them and maybe they can help you. Right. And so she goes off and has a hero's quest. Okay. Yeah. You know, and so cloning is a key component of the story. And so he consistently told these stories that kind of blurred the lines between science fiction and fantasy. And very early on in Dungeons and Dragons, there was a lot of stuff that did that.

The Blackmore setting. was very clearly an homage to Vance. And it was this forbidding place up in the farthest north of Greyhawk where if you could get past the black ice, there was this incredible super technological city, you know, living in the middle of this very medieval Europe kind of setting. And then the... the adventure to White Plume Mountain

is a very early Dungeons and Dragons module where the journey to White Plum Mountain, I think it is, where the players wind up inadvertently wandering through the hallways of a crashed starship. And you pick up key cards. Nice. And they had to figure out how to describe,

how do you describe plastic? right in a way where players who know what plastic is aren't immediately going to realize this is plastic right right you know

so there's some wonderful wonderful writing going on there and there was a device in it where you know the DM would hold up a picture of the artifact you picked up and they'd say okay how are you holding it what are you doing with it

what are you touching whatever whatever and I managed to shoot myself in the arm with a needler because I picked it up and I looked at it the wrong way yeah held it the wrong way and being the

the veteran gamer I was I was like okay on that end that looks like a very large barrel so I'm gonna turn that side away from me and turned out yeah I gotcha

yeah the little end is the dangerous end and as the third level wizard I took a full five hit points of damage and that was a bad day like and then

my DM for the next, you know, 10 years, anytime you wanted to knock me down and Peg, I'd be like, oh yeah, tell me about the needler, Ed. Oh, shut up, Ryan, I don't want to hear that. Never letting me live that down. And so, you know, we have this coexistence between a very pulpy kind of science fiction and fantasy,

which has a very heavy kind of pulpy element to it. Mm-hmm. And, you know, then the last thing that D&D owes to Vance, well, first, I want to talk a little bit more about Vancey and Magic. So every single, and I touched on this earlier, but every single spellcasting class has, it's not explained the same way. Like clerics don't forget their spells. Right. But your deity allots you a certain number of miracles you can perform in a day. Right.

And before you can perform any more, you have to go through your religious ablutions, right, in order to do that. Right. You know, and in early editions of the game, the same thing with the druids. That was what you were doing, was praying to whatever druidic deity gave you your spells. Mm-hmm. And, you know, in second edition, A, D&D, when the Bard first shows up in his current, in its their current incarnation. You have to, you learn your spells like a wizard does.

So you have to spend your time, you know, studying. You don't have as many spells, so you don't have to spend as much time doing it because you're not a nerd. Right. But, you know, you are explicitly using magic user type spells. And then, you know, those ideas then get carried over. from first edition AD&D

into second edition AD&D and they don't go through very much of a change between first and second edition. And then they go into third edition and third edition goes, you know what, what if I want to play a spellcaster? But at first level,

I don't want to be useless after I cast my one spell for a day. So you know what we're going to do, we're going to come up with a spell casting class that can cast like, you know, three first level spells a day at first level. Oh, and we're also going to make it so that, like,

it doesn't make sense that your strength makes you hit harder, but your intelligence doesn't give you any other kind of bonuses. Like, what's up with that? So we're going to make it so, you know, your intelligence or your wisdom or, oh, hey, charisma is now going to be a spellcasting stat. So that won't be everybody's dump stat anymore. Right.

well number one enter the sorcerer because hi i'm a charisma based spellcaster who at first level has a base number of like three first level spells a day number one also this is the point at which bards became you know hey how you doing in terms of spells instead of these glass jaw effetes that like oh you rolled badly you could be a bard i guess like Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, barred and fighter in the early editions were kind of the, in second edition, it was like, well, you can play a bard. Right. Yeah, no, you can be a fighter. All that requires is having at least a nine strength. Like, you can do that. Yeah. Fuck. You remember, like, oh, I want to play this character. Well, here's hoping the dice are nice to you.

Like, you know, because there were certain requirements that you had to play certain classes. Like, good luck playing a paladin. Oh, you'd better roll really high and it's only 3D6. Like, yeah. Just like, you're like, yeah. Or the, it's in order. Like, yeah, my friends and I, um. Issued that quickly, I assume. Oh, real.

I was only friends with dogmatic people. I swear to God, they all fucking did it like that. All the way up until 5E. You might remember. Yeah. I do, I do remember. Yeah. Yeah.

I had to infuse a lot of things. And it was like, well, You rolled randomly on the personality chart and you got a five. I'm like, I don't want to fucking do that. I wanted to do this. Well, you didn't roll. And it's like, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, no. My friends and I very quickly went to, okay, so here's the deal. We roll four, die six, drop the lowest. Mm-hmm. And you got to, and we, we furthermore, because we were like, we don't, we don't want to be normal. We want to be heroic. So.

Right. you can you can re-roll ones and twos so you know drop the lowest and if the lowest is a two or a one you you just get to keep re-rolling it okay um so i found that i like the most

is you roll seven dice okay start all your stats at eight you roll seven dice and you add those dice to the eights you can't spill it up a die so if you roll a six it's a six you can't make it a two and a four it's a six

So you just roll seven dice. So you still get the randomness, but you also, everything starts at an eight. So you at least have some baseline where everybody's similar. Okay. Yeah. And it's really cool because you're like, okay, well, I, and I have Mulligan rules. Like if you got no sixes on your roll, re-roll that shit. Yeah.

You know, if you got more than three ones on that, or if you got three ones or more, re-roll that shit. Yeah. But like you roll seven dice and you place them where you want them. Yeah. I've actually come for a long time. I really hated point-by systems, but I've kind of come around to them. See,

it's funny because in Star Wars, the West End games, it is point-by. It's 100% point-by. But I don't like it in D&D. It's because Star Wars doesn't have a class system. And so you advance how the fuck you want after that. Yeah.

Whereas D&D. You need to pick what you do. So then it's just like, who can math better? Yeah. You know. Yeah. So,

yeah and and like charisma as a stat for charisma yeah so we're we're in 3.5 and now charisma is a spell casting stat so like you can't afford to you know dump stat that shit anymore everybody universally somebody in the party is going to have to have a meaningful level of of personality and yeah you know you're gonna need a face force of force of character like yeah um and so then Sorceres got introduced and that was well you know You know your spells all the time You don't need to memorize your spells

But like they wear you the hell out Right And you know Depending on what the spellcasting class is from there Because then we get the warlock And then we get I don't even know Like the proliferation of spellcasting classes From 3.5 onward

Um And And the in-universe explanation for why it was that way varied from class to class, wizards, it remained. No, no, you got to study. You got to rememorize your spells. Right. And- Just like fighters, it remained.

You study fighting. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And so we have those ideas or the rationale of the way that works with wizards. And I think I would venture to say Gygax's thinking of that mechanism, we owe to Vance's writing. Yeah. And so we have that.

And furthermore, when people say that, you know, Tolkien is a literary influence on D&D, they're not, I mean, they're not wrong, obviously. but what they're overlooking is fundamentally the Lord of the Rings is a story about a a set of protagonists who are driven by a combination of combination of very very high-minded ideals and it is an epic story of the fate of the world between essentially the devil and the forces of light and you know, their and their major manipulator

an angel who is overworked and tired of everybody's shit, right? Also, that squad has four NPCs and varying levels for all the characters. I always find that very true Yeah Like now it's everybody advances at the same time

Right yeah But you have the four hobbits are all NPCs Every goddamn one of them is an NPC They are Boromir and What's his name? Aragorn? Yeah him

Those two guys They're clearly You know the the two Marshall guys You have Gandalf who's more powerful He's already level 20 Oh he's the D-E MPC.

Yeah. I'm sorry. He's not a player character. He's a DMPC. Yeah. He's the one that the player, the DM was like, you've decided to do what? You're going to need some help. Okay.

Nobody, nobody rolled wizard. Okay, that's cool. So you have five NPCs then. Right. And then you've also got, you've got a dwarf and an elf because it's first edition. That's all you get. It's box set. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're a dwarf and an elf. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's, that's.

A fighter arranger, dwarf and an elf. Yeah, that's it. Like, the other half of the fellowship is NPC. And again, the Ranger outranks the fighter, and the fighter is probably the lowest-level character because the elf outrangs the Ranger, and the dwarf is, like, probably a little bit under the Ranger. Yeah, I mean, you know what? I think I'm going to need to write this down as a note.

We actually need to go through and, like, have our debate. because I would I would argue Eragorn is an NPC Erigorn is an NPC He drives the plot too much Well okay See here's the deal he's kind of a human McGuffin

He has a couple of Find him Yeah he has a couple of very important Maybe human macguffin is over That's the character's meeting in the end Yeah all right I'd see the way The way I interpreted it is

They got together and the DM said, okay, what's, what's everybody going to do? And four members of the group said, we've all decided we're playing halflings with these shitting grins on their faces. See, I think it's like, oh, shit, no, no. I think it's much more. I gave up my lineage.

I sit in the corner. It's like, okay. I guess the plot's going to come to you then. Four halflings show up, and one of them has a magic ring. It's your job to protect them all. Go. like and then it's like and then you meet your buddy Boromir at the fellowship you know and that becomes the inn where everybody meets because that's where all the PCs meet yeah you know I see

that theory but I still don't think the hobbits are NPCs I think Gandalf is an NPC um one PC thing that any of the fucking hobbits do they all do NPC shit oh I'm sorry I'm sorry you don't think you have never been in in a game where somebody went Oh, wait, there's a skeleton sitting on the edge of the well. I'm going to go up. I'm going to touch it. You never, never. In, really?

Think of it this way. They all blew their saves. Or, no, they all blew their search checks. And the DM's like, fuck, how am I going to move the action now? One of the guys you're protecting. We have very different interpretations of that. Yeah, okay. I get, I mean, I get your argument.

But no, that says the thing is. Because he wasn't doing anything useful. He wasn't like, I search. oh, you rolled a one. Oh, fuck. It wasn't that. It wasn't Han Solo stepping on a twig.

It wasn't that. He was not moving a plot at all prior to that moment. And the only thing he did to move that plot was to, we're going to have combat tonight, guys. Like, you're not going to get out of a fight. Like, come on. Okay.

I mean, again, I see your logic. But I just, I've seen enough cadres of players just spend their time, goofing and twiddling their thumbs and being idiots about it. Sure. That, like, Marian Pippin, I'm like, Marian Pippin are like first or second level rogue characters being played by people who are like intentionally fucking with the DM.

Like, that's, you know, that's my own head canon. Yeah, that's a lot more work. I understand. But that's, that's my head canon for it. But my point for the purposes of this episode. was that like Frodo takes on the

the responsibility of carrying the ring to Mordor. Yes. You know and his friends aren't going to let him do it alone and Samwise isn't going to let him do it alone. And Aragorn doesn't really know if he can, if he

has what it takes to be the king and do better than his ancestors but you know it's the right thing to do and so he's going to go and you know, Legolas is all in it. Gimli is not going to let himself get shown up by a fucking elf. So he's down. And Boromir is like, this is directly affecting my homeland.

Like, right, goddamn now. So, okay, fine. Yeah. Right. They're all motivated. Borrameer might be the only PC. That's a really good point. It might be a solo run that ends badly.

Like, okay, well, I'll tell you what. Well, events a plot a little way. and I'll do a lot of writing about it. You can read it and then you're going to show up your character's brother. Yeah. You know, as a Gileas. And then, like, I don't know how to explain what happens in the novels after that because.

Right. Right. You know, I feel like, you know, in order for this to work, Frodo, at least Frodo has to be a player character because he's the one who's there like all the way through. Yeah, true. But, you know, but so they're, the, the, the conflict. is epic in scale. The stakes are epic in scale. Like the extent to which the stakes are personal is this is really dangerous.

And if we fuck this up, we're going to die. Yes. And the whole world will die with us. But that's, that's like, that's, that's everybody's stakes, right? Their, their individual stakes in it is, I have this responsibility to save the world. Right. Yep. And if you look at your average Dungeons and Dragons party, their motivations are not that grandiose.

No. They become that grandiose. They can over time. Yeah. Yeah. If the DM decides, you know what, I'm going to turn this into an epic storyline, the DM can certainly do that. And a lot of the narrative structure of the early, like, adventure. module series kind of lead that direction.

Like in the in the in the in the in the series against the giants you wind up eventually going up against Lolf in the abyss because it all leads to queen of the demon web pits you know right you're fighting you know to prevent lulth from taking over the world. So like that happens right right but the starting point for characters is as a first level fighter, you know, you're a small-time mercenary or a militia member who's decided you're going to go out and, you know, try to make a name for yourself and get glory and fame. You know, as a wizard, you know, the stakes are, I'm going to go out and, you know, my goal is to learn and get more powerful and, you know, whatever your character's individual goal is, you know,

99% of the time in a D&D campaign, you're not like starting out as an angel who's been sent by Monway to guide the realms of men. Like, that's not a thing. That's narratively, that's not a way Dungeons and Dragons campaigns work. Right, right. Like you might write that up as your backstory and it's like, but I have amnesia and whatever and whatever. And your DM is like, all right, yeah. We'll find a way to work that in when you get to level 20. Yeah.

But like right now, you're level one. Right. So like, this is where we're starting. And, and so the stakes in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign are much more personal.

You know, the modern, especially the modern school of dungeon mastering, game mastering, very much points to, okay, you know,

in session one, we're all going to work out, you know, who are your, who are the, who are the people in your character's life that are important to you?

What is, what are your, You're, you know, what are the narrative hooks that the DM can pull on? How do you all know each other? Like, are we all going to meet for the first time in the end? Or have you all been working together for a while? You know, you work all of these kinds of things out. And so the stakes are much more personalized.

Right. The scale of the stakes is generally much, much lower. All of these things are much more. yeah, again, much more personal. Okay. Vance's characters are the masters and mistresses

of personal stakes. Like the story that I mentioned earlier with the character who goes off because, you know, she has to find a cure for like literally her whole perception of the world being twisted. That's a thing for her. Like her having that problem. is not going to lead to the destruction of the world or the enslavement of thousands or anything like that.

It's like, no, I got to, essentially I have to find a way to lift this curse, right? The main character, Cugel, the Clever, is an asshole. Qigel is very much a what's in it for me kind of guy. He has no moral qualms about almost anything. He will stab people in the back. He will steal candy from small children. You know, he's he's all about him and getting by and getting ahead. And so he's motivated to go on the quest that's at the center of the eyes of the overworld.

because the wizard the wizard that hires him somehow manages to capture him and implants him with a like an alien centipede basically

that can read his mind and the alien centipede wants to get back to its mate which the wizard has and so anytime Qigel does anything that's going to mean running off on a journey of his own

and, you know, giving up on looking for the eye of the overworld or anything like that. The centipede in his guts grabs hold and bites down and he's struck with crippling pain. So, like, he wants to get this thing so that he can get back to the wizard,

get the centipede taken out of his guts, and then kill the wizard. Like, you know. Right. And the wizard's motivation is, I want the eyes of the overworld because I want to be able to join. this you know cadre of people who live in this utopian paradise you know that only they can that only they can

interact with because of these magical lenses called the eyes of the overall so like the world is the world is coming to an end but that's not anybody's fault sure you know we're we're all living in a decaying world that's just the way it is but you know so the stakes of the story again are not I mean they're they're intense because cougal has to get get this done in order to, you know, get free of, of this centipede in his guts. But it's not like it's the end of the world if he fails. Right. Right.

And so the tone of D&D and the tone of characters going down into a hole in the ground in order to come out with treasure is 100% of Vancey and convention. Okay. And I mean, isn't that drawing on much older convention? I'm just thinking digging for buried treasure is a thing, you know? Well, yeah. Yeah, very much. And but within the context of the fantasy genre in the way that it's the way that it works.

Okay. You know, and also, you know, when you look at when you're going into a dungeon in the early kind of modules that were written, for Dungeons and Dragons what did this used to be? Why is this hole in the ground here? You know You are right turns out it's a keep Yeah as as an adventurer you are living in

a world that has had a whole bunch of ancient civilizations you're living in a world that is old and the ruins of prior generations or prior epochs of your world

are where you go in order to find fortune and glory and whatever. And again, the oldness of the world is a very Vancey and thing. The fallen, you know, we are now living in a new society that is built on the ruins of one much older. That's a theme everywhere in Vance's work.

And it's a theme that's everywhere in early Dungeons and Dragons. You know, and so then, you know, if you watch the way that fantasy stories have developed since Dungeons and Dragons came out. Are you talking like Dragon Lance? That kind of stuff. Well, I'm talking like Dragon Lance, which overtly was a series of modules for the game. You know, and the development of the various settings for the game.

You know, those are evolutions away from that first generation, but they all still carry that same DNA. but then if you look at later fantasy stories written by other people, you know, if you look at the Stones of Shinarah, if you look at, in some ways, the sort of truth series, there are conventions that you can look at and you can see,

well, you're getting that from D&D, and D&D got that from Jack Vance. Gotcha. If you look at a lot of the low fantasy stuff that came into, that started being written in the 70s and into the 80s, there is a very strong influence from Dungeons and Dragons. You know, the wizards always start out being kind of weeful. And then, you know, as time goes on,

they get more and more powerful than you can do more and more stuff. And it's very clearly following a similar kind of progression. you know, in what they're able to do. And, you know, the stock adventuring party trope becomes a thing in literature. And, like, looking back at, like, Conan, right? He pretty much is just him. Sometimes it's him and another.

But it's never a party. Right. Yeah. Um, uh, darn it. Michael Morcock, uh, the white wolf. Um, Elric took me a minute. Elric, similarly to Conan, it's him. And it might be him and a sworn companion who like, you know by the end of the book,

Elric is going to wind up killing him because that's what Elric does. But like, it's, it's him and one or two other characters, right? It's not a party. Like, Elric might be at the front of an army. depending on what phase of the saga you're talking about him in, but he is himself, right? And in anime,

add up to anime fantasy that, you know, when they decide they're going to do a Western-style fantasy story, it's always your stock adventure party. And in recent years, it's become a very self-conscious kind of trope. It's like, you know, this is like, you know, we got to,

do this because this is this is the convention oh yeah order of the stick absolutely does a send up of it it's you know oh yeah you know when roy first meets oh god i i forget who he first meets i think he first meets um the dwarf whose name uh escapes me durcon durcon thank you when they first meet uh dircon's like no no we got to go to this inn right here and then just sit in the corner don't don't put it posters and then sure enough people are like lining up Yeah, and that's how they build their party. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, all, and so all of these, all of these tropes that we see now are either consciously or unconsciously, like, depending on how far they're removed from, Dungeons and Dragons directly, they're all responding to that game. And by, again, as my thesis, by extension, they're responding to. Vance, almost always Vance. Sometimes Tolkien, sometimes Fritz Lieber, but almost always Vance.

Yeah. And so, you know, that's kind of my point in a nutshell. Yeah. And, you know, I just think that Jack Vance, he won all kinds of awards.

He won Hugo and a nebula. He was very well, regarded as a writer amongst people who read who are you know significant fans of science fiction literature he was he was you know beloved yeah but Tolkien has this very large uh he draws a lot of water yeah he casts a very very long shadow yeah and and he he is like his name if you go out to somebody in the street say who is your or Tolkien people I might have to think for a second, but they'll be able to say,

oh, yeah, Lord of the Rings, or the Hobbit or whatever. If you go out in the street and say, who is Jack Vance? He'll be like, did he play for the Eagles? Right. You know?

Yeah, yeah, nowadays, yeah, to be like, is he related to the vice president? You know, and I think he deserves more, he deserves wider recognition. Sure. Because he's also just a fun writer

who did a lot of really good stuff. cool so that's that's what I have this evening so what do you what do you think what is your response reaction

he's a sci-fi writer and yet his greatest influence well I'm not going to say greatest but the focus of your of your podcast this episode was his influence on fantasy yeah and it's just it's really did he write any fantasy

well yeah the the dying tales of the dying earth is is a fantasy It's fantasy that plays with the line between fantasy and science fiction. Right. Right. So it is explicitly fantasy. His Leoness trilogy is very much more traditional fantasy,

but it's very much written in his style with his kind of, uh, uh, with his prose kind of, kind of manner. So yeah, he did, he did, uh, more standard fantasy and he did more standard science fiction. but the dying earth and the stuff related to the dying earth is fantasy that is very much science fiction adjacent. Right. You see, that actually kind of reminds me also of John Milius's total and complete misunderstanding of Conan and the fevered cocaine dream that he and Oliver Stone used to write their first draft of Conan. and the fevered cocaine dream that he and Oliver Stone used to write their first draft of Conan the Barbarian. It was supposed to be, yeah, it was supposed to be Conan the Barbarian fighting against like futuristic goblins and shit.

Right, yeah, I remember. And so it just feels like, you know, they were falling over backward into the games that Vance was playing by doing like, no, no, it's fantasy, but it's on an ancient, really large world and stuff like that. Like it's yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's kind of cool because you kind of see the, the liminal nature of sci-fi. Here's why sci-fi and fantasy are booked together in, in bookstores. You know, they attract nerds, obviously, but also at some point,

you can go so fantasy that it becomes sci-fi, and you can go so sci-fi that it becomes fantasy. Well, yeah, it's not Asimov. Who said it? any sufficient i want to say it's uh arthur c clark said uh any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic right if you go if you go far enough into super tech it's magic like don't don't don't try to explain to us how the quantum whatever whatever the fuck works it's magic a lightsaber is yeah is space wizards you can yeah yeah the force yeah

it's space fan like right yeah um um and And in a way, what you actually wind up seeing is the opposite also being true that any sufficiently detailed system of magic becomes a kind of science. You know, so a lot of the time you'll see steampunk being a – having a fantasy kind of route that, like, well, you know, magicians figured out that you can do this with fire elementals, whatever. Right. And like, you know, we're going to take, we're going to take magic and we're going to make it the basis of an industrial revolution. And you're like, okay, so you're just proving the inverse of Arthur C. Clark. Like, I mean, honestly, like, in sci-fi and fantasy, both involve at some level, they both involve people mining.

Yeah. We can't get away from this shit. Yeah, we can't, yeah, no matter what. It's just extractive economies. And precious metals. Yeah, well, I mean, the magical metals aren't going to mine themselves, David. Even though you have telephonies. Well, you're still mining.

Even if you're, even if you're mining with your mind, you're still mining. You always have people breaking their backs in the mines. Like, it just, it's... Well, you know, you can imagine the end of the world before you can imagine the end of capitalism. That's all. Oh, man. Okay, yeah. I was paying attention when we did a Marxist analysis of Andor.

Like I was there. Because in Andor, he's fucking mining at some point. So you're never going to get away from it. No. Yeah. So yeah. The dividing line between the two of them can be very spongy. Yeah.

And if you're sufficiently motivated, you can turn one into the by brute force. Mm-hmm. You know. Yeah. And sometimes you get great stuff out of it, and sometimes you kind of get crap. Yeah, I mean, I remember, I'm remembering the, the, um, Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood. And he treated Morgan, uh, Freeman's character, the Moore as though he was magical.

Right. Right. Right. Which, uh, there's a trope there, but there is a trope there. But at least this time, it was based in the fact that the Moore's, were really fucking good at science. Like he had a spy glass. And I remember he's like, he shows it to him. And he's like, gets out, sorry, his Moorish friend show, I think his name was Salam.

Salam shows Robin Hood the spyglass. Robin Hood looks through it and gets out his sword and tries to stab at them. And he just looks at him and goes, how your people ever conquered us? How did your backward people ever conquered us? And Robin Hood hits him with, God only knows. Which is a great fucking line because it's about the crusades and it's terrible. But like he was using magic. But it was just, you know, ground glass.

Those lenses. Yeah. Or heves, the one that figured out how to, you know, stop a baby from being worn breach. Right. You know, magical abilities. And then the one woman who did have magic, like, you know, she used her fingers to scrape a ceramic bowl, which still gave me goosebumps. Yeah.

But yeah, like, but yeah, I'm just, I'm just thinking of the times where, like, tech becomes magic and magic becomes tech. So, yeah, yeah. Like in the Matrix, I mean, that's straight up. Yeah. I know Kung Fu. Like, that's magic. Yeah, it totally is. But it's tech.

But it's explained away because. Right. Computers. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, he is also the Messiah. Yeah. Speaking of weird ways to blend the two genres.

Yeah. And I had a thought and it was really profound, but it got lonely and left. So I'm going to have to wait for it to come back. Okay. But yeah, you know, the two are linked in that they both involve imaginative leaps. Yeah. And then it's how do you use? use that imaginative leap and how

interested are you in how that leap happens. So like hard science fiction is, okay, the leap here is we figure out fusion engines. Right? We figure out how to make that work. And that's, that's pretty explicable and that that could

eventually, it's actually fairly likely to happen at some point, right? Right. And like, okay, so now I'm going to, now I'm going to look at when we have access to fusion power, How what's that going to do and what is what how am I going to turn that into a story, right? That's that's hard science fiction and then squishier science fiction is like, okay, we figure out how to travel faster than light. And we do it by warping space and, you know, we're traveling through the cosmos doing stuff and it's it's not quite space stopper, but it's pretty close. That's Star Trek, right?

And then you have Star Wars, which is like fantasy wearing a robot suit. Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, we both love Star Wars. Yeah, it's the only fiction I read. Yeah. But like if you want to call Star Wars science fiction, you have to really squint. It's not.

And that's the thing. It's like, because I can tell you as the guy who doesn't read much fiction, it's not sci-fi because I like it. Like, sci-fi requires way too much thought on my part. Okay. I can see that. Yeah. I have a question for you because I know that sci-fi is, and I think we've covered this in an episode, I don't know what the fuck.

Yeah. But probably something about a guy who's in the Navy. But sci-fi looks at humanity. It tells us about ourselves in the far-flung future, right? Tells us some aspect of society. It tells us about society. Tweet this thing and here's what it does to society. This is a person getting by in.

a society. Yeah. Step with society or, you know, they, they received a call to action and it separates them from society, but it's always about society. Our society. It's a reflection of it. It's a fun house mirror reflection of us. Yes.

It's an examination. It's a critique. Yeah. As it should be. Right. What does fantasy do for us? It's not just escape. Does it show us our, like our mythical?

Fantasy. Yeah. Fantasy. Uh, The examinations that we get in fantasy are moral. Oh, okay. That's my really quick, as you're asking, as you're asking the question,

I'm starting to try to think about it. And if you look at, you know, like low, low fantasy works like the Jareg series by Stephen Brust, it is, it is a reflection on us. It is a reflection on, various aspects of our modern society, but but the the thing that we wind up looking at is the morality of of the way that society is operating and the and the roots of the morality in which that society works. It talks about racism. It talks about

classism and economics and all that kind of stuff, but there is a distinct moral coding and in the case of the Jareg series, it is explicitly an amoral analysis. It is the part of the point is the conscious statement by the author that, you know, my main character is a bad guy who does bad things. He is an assassin and that means murdering people, right? and, you know, the myth series, and now that I've made this statement, I'm now looking for cases where I can justify what I've said,

so bear with me. Okay. The myth series by Robert Asperin is comedy, and it's kind of, you know, wacky comedy, but it gets into, again, it's a bit of an inversion of the earlier generation moral, kind of stories that were told by fantasy.

And again, it's a case where explicitly look, we're in this to make money. And what as the humanoid lizard mentor to the main character keeps complaining about his kid, you're too nice. You've got too kind of heart. How do we wind up getting out of these situations? You keep getting us into these situations because you can't listen to a sob story without falling for it and getting sucked into it. You know, you're too compassionate, knock it all.

off, right? The Lord of the Rings, obviously, is a huge morality play. Like, the bad guy is basically Satan, you know. So that doesn't really need an awful lot of explanation. Anything talking about King Arthur is a story about moral stand or moral corruption or the challenge of living up to it. a moral code or moral failure. Let's see. Because I'm thinking, I'm zooming out on fantasy.

And everything you're talking about is the why we have to do things the way we do them. Okay. And it's not a critique. It's a reminder. And to me, that's mythology. And this is not me criticizing at all. I'm just trying to distinguish because it seems like sci-fi. is sociology

and fantasy seems to be mythology. I see what you're saying. And again, this is the guy who doesn't read either. Yeah, yeah, but you consume media. I do. You know, even though you, I mean, you don't read fiction in the form of books, but you watch movies and TV series. That's true.

That's true. And you participate in our culture. So, like, you know, these tropes are coming at you just like are coming at anybody else. Yeah. And I see what you're saying. I think there is, just like we've said, there is a lot of room for overlap. Yeah. Because in the process of having the moral core to it or the moral kind of lesson, whatever you want to call, moral examination of whatever it is it saying, fantasy can make all kinds of things.

statements about society and can analyze social issues and can be used to satirize our society, just like science fiction does. But science fiction does it in a way that is less, that is not as centrally concerned. I don't want to necessarily say less, but that is less centrally concerned with ideas of good and evil, if that makes sense. Yeah. In fantasy, there is always a very profound distinction between good and evil.

Yeah. That dichotomy is always there somehow to some degree. Right. Low fantasy will tend to smear the gray in the middle out toward the edges an awful lot. Sure. Or there's still, I mean,

or focus on the range of the spectrum that's down toward charcoal, you know, in the case of the tail of the black company. I was going to say it's much more like if you took noir and rubbed it over fantasy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So whereas sci-fi doesn't seem to concern itself with that stuff, those things are bunting or window dressing to a greater critique. Sci-fi feels a little bit more niche-y because it's beyond good and evil. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I don't think science fiction. Huh? I don't think you do. Fuck.

You know, I said last episode that we recorded that you are an asshole, right? Yes. Yeah. That one, that one right there. Good day, sir. I haven't actually said that in a while on here. And good day. Sir, I say good day.

Oh, God damn it. That was bad. That's a point to you. Thank you. You win that one. Now that being said, we do still need to address the concept that I did bring up. Yeah, yeah. It does seem to be post-morality.

Still ethics. There's still ethics. Yeah, there's still ethics. But it doesn't define good and evil in the same way. Right. Yeah. In fantasy stories, good and evil, like moral good and evil are, what's what's what I'm looking for, metaphysical forces. There is a metaphysical force behind good and there is a metaphysical force behind evil. And they are palpable in the world, whereas science fiction is like, well, you know, you can label it good or evil, but, you know, that's a label. That's not why we're here. That's not why we're here.

Yeah. You know, we're here to look at, you know, if we actually had robots that were indistinguishable from humans, how would that, what would happen? Right. You know, and yes, there are people who would use that for shitty things, but like, you know, overall, what is this? Yeah. Overall, what is this? Again, I go back to any episode of Next Generation. None of them are fantasy.

Well, except for the Cupid one. But. And Subrosa, where she fucks the Irish ghost. But beyond that, none of the hell are. Aside from those two. Yeah. Yeah. None of them are fantasy.

Yeah. Yeah. Even I'm thinking like Deep Space Nine, none of those are fantasy either, even though it deals with mythical shit. Like the Pa Raids and, you know, the Coast Imogen and all that kind of stuff. Even the very final showdown is just like swirly demon things, fighting swirly angel things. And by the way, Cisco punches them in the nose. But more importantly, it's still science.

It's still sci-fi. Even though they go deep into the religion, it's still sci-fi. The trappings of it move very, very far toward the squishy end of the science fiction hardness scale. Yeah. And I would put forward that the episode in, was it? Season one or two where Yard dies. Oh, she dies in season one. Season one, the episode, because that was literally, they took all of the, that race had taken all of their negative dark side.

Yeah. Impulses and turned them into a physical manifestation of all of their evil. Right. So that one, like, they were, the writers were still finding their feet. Oh, absolutely. You know, is what I'm going to say there. You know, and that's that's very clearly concerned with some very metaphysical kind of ideas like that. Or it takes those metaphysical ideas and makes them concrete in order to make them work in a science fiction setting would be another way of putting that.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I think there's something to that. And yeah, I think I'm going to stand by my thesis there. that there is a very central concern in fantasy with the metaphysical value of morality. Yeah. Okay. And authors who have tried to get away from it have essentially responded to it.

Right. And it's still, the shadow of it is still there. Right. So that's that's I think how I'm going to say what it is that that fantasy does that science fiction does not do. Yeah, no, that works. That works. And I welcome anybody who wants to argue with me on that. Feel free to, you know, try to find me in the warp.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And so, yeah, by the way, that just proves that Warhammer 40,000 is not science fiction either. Right. No. It's a thousand percent space fantasy. So, yeah. All right. Well, what are you going to recommend to people?

I'm fascinated by this. I am very, very, very strongly going to recommend that everybody go out and find either Tales of the Dying Earth. Any omnibus of it that you can find. Often you'll find Tales of the Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld in the same volume. very strongly recommend you go out and get those. I also recommend the Leoness trilogy by Jack Vance, which is kind of more traditional semi-arthurian kind of fantasy that he wrote.

That's very, very good. And if you can find it anywhere, Big Planet is, I think, a really good artifact of the late 40s into the 50s pulp kind of subgenre. in science fiction it is a great adventure story beyond that

it's very entertaining and again it is very much a time capsule into what the genre or whatever what what this aspect of the genre looked like in that time period so those are my recommendations

what about you I'm going to recommend a movie from 1983 that is very much an example of a party going and doing an adventure called Kroll. Oh, I didn't even think about Kroll when I was thinking to that.

Oh, as soon as you're like, it sets up this trope, I'm like, oh, like in Kroll. Yeah, holy shit, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you've got, you know, the main character, of course, Michael Eddington from Deep Space Nine, which, by the way, he played that guy. the Machete trader but you've got him chasing after his girl who's been taken by knights that

shoot lasers for one shot and then they turn into like halberds I'm not going to say glaves because they use the word glaive to talk about a throwing star that's weird anyway the movie is shit

speaking of Gary Geagach's and pole arm nomenclature yeah boy howdy the movie is total shit but it's still really good too. It is a really fun, bad movie. But it shows magic in a way that I always really enjoyed. I like the, his name is Ergo, I think.

And he fucks up the magic all the time. But like the way that he does the magic actually is quick and chaotic. But then you've also got Cyclops. and you've got several of several man-humitted bandits and stuff like that. So it's just you have a party congealing around the character. And anyway, it's worth watching, I think. Nice. And then you should go watch something that's good.

So, yeah. You can actually buy the Blu-ray of it for like six bucks, or you can probably catch it on Tubi or Roku, right? now. So, but by the time that this releases, I have no fucking clue. We're going to find it. Look it up.

Find where it streams or just by the physical medium. So anyway, where can we be found? We can be found on the Apple podcast app, on the Amazon podcast app, and on Spotify. Anywhere that you have found us, please take the time to subscribe and

give us the, we'll call it a four and a half star review for, my work this evening. And where you can also find this, of course, on our website at www. www.gehistorytime.com. And where can you be found, sir? Let's see. By the time this drops February 6th, March 6th, April 3rd, May 1st, first Friday of every

month at Capital Punishment. We, at 9 o'clock, there's too many words ats there. But Capital Punishment at 9 o'clock at the comedy spot in Sacramento. first Friday of each month, come on down, get your tickets in advance. You know you owe it to yourself to see our show at least once. And quite honestly, after you've seen it once, you'll probably should go see it again. The cast is always changing and the chief crew is reliable as the mountains. So, cool.

Yeah, that's about it for me. So for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, keep running. rolling 20s.