There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic.
But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. I still love all that-I collect fantastic bestiaries, and one of the main spurs to write a secondary-world fantasy was to invent a bunch of monsters, half of which I’m sure I’ll never be able to fit into any books. One was the mania for cataloguing the fantastic: if you play them for any length of time, you get to know pretty much all the mythological beasts of all pantheons out there, along with a fair bit of the theology. There were two things about them that particularly influenced me.
#Dragon magazine 352 manuals#
I’ve not played for sixteen years and have absolutely no intention of starting again, but I still buy and read the manuals occasionally.
Probably one of the most enduring influences on me was a childhood playing RPGs: Dungeons and Dragons and others.
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