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Sword and sorcery as a literary subgenre, until fairly recently taboo with major publishers and shunned by professional magazines, is now enjoying a resurgence unparalleled since the paperback boom of the 1960s. All of the critical elements for the renaissance are in place:
1. The canonical Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian stories are back in print in a strong-selling and critically acclaimed trilogy of trade paperbacks from Del Rey. As a bonus, Howard's Kull the Conqueror, Bran Mak Morn stories, and assorted other weird fantasy tales fill out the continuing series.
2. Del Rey is also engaged in a similar project with Elric of Melniboné, republishing author-approved editions of Michael Moorcock's classic tales of the White Wolf in a series of trade paperbacks.
3. Dark Horse maintains the entire catalog of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in print in affordable paperback editions.
4. After decades in which his stories were almost impossible to find in bookstores, Orb currently maintains Jack Vance's Dying Earth omnibus in print and in most major bookstores.
5. Night Shade Books maintains the collected fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith in print as part of an ongoing series.
6. Planet Stories has reprinted the foundational works of C. L. Moore (Black God's Kiss) and Henry Kuttner (Elak of Atlantis and The Dark World), introducing classic tales to a generation that has never seen them in print.
7. The phenomenal Black Gate magazine resurrects the adventurous spirit of the pulps with a special focus on sword and sorcery. The magazine establishes the first reliable, professional newsstand outlet for modern sword and sorcery writers working outside of the work-for-hire media tie-in novel racket for years. Independent anthologies such as Return of the Sword give further voice to these modern torchbearers of Howard's legacy.
8. Internet resources such as Abe Books and Alibris.com make tracking down classic stories easier than ever before in the course of human history. Amazon makes it a snap to track down the new stuff. Technologies such as WikiPedia allow us to learn more about the authors and traditions of the craft.
My friends list alone contains a few dozen professional RPG writers, editors, and publishers, several novelists from across the spectrum of success, artists who doodle monsters and swords all day long, and a huge number of plain old fans of sword and sorcery.
There are hundreds of us on Livejournal alone, all with a shared interest in reading, writing, publishing, or drawing sword and sorcery.
We talk about it, individually on our blogs, catching snippets of conversation by happenstance before it gets pushed off the friends list by the girlfriend's cat memes, the latest Bush atrocity, or comments on the last episode of Doctor Who.
A significant number of sword and sorcery enthusiasts and practitioners dwell on Livejournal. Some post a note when their latest story appears in a magazine or anthology. Some post with a review of a book they quite enjoyed, a brief essay on a favorite author, or a note of some new discovery at the book store (used or otherwise).
Over on his journal, Black Gate managing editor Howard Andrew Jones is trying to formulate a working definition of sword and sorcery as a genre. It's a lively discussion about a topic vital to the cause, and it's getting decent commentary. But it deserves an additional soapbox aimed at the wider community of sword and sorcery fans who (god forbid) might not know Howard Andrew Jones and might not have friended him on Livejournal.
It seems like there should be a Livejournal community dedicated to the sword and sorcery revival, and it seems like many of the people on my friends list should be posting to it regularly.
As it turns out, Livejournal already has a Sword and Sorcery community. It's a cavernous wasteland of 1-reply posts, devoid-of-content questions tossed out only to keep the vultures away ("C'mon, guys! What's your favorite Elric story?!") and silence.
Mostly silence.
Lemuria Press f'listers ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aaronaceangelinehawkes, bluetyson, brother_d73, brainstormfront, ebonstone, dqg_neal, jamesenge, joecrow, jordan179, philreed, the_gneech, and lemuriapress are all members of the community. So I know I'm not the only one who's heard of it.
I posted a snippet of my Vision Quest post to the community this afternoon, hoping to spark some discussion. It's gotten exactly one reply, 11 fewer than when Howard Andrew Jones tried to stir up discussion back in February by asking "What do you think makes a good serial character in sword-and-sorcery (or heroic, or sword-and-planet) fiction?"
The community has featured 20 posts since September 8, 2007.
Am I wrong in thinking that a vibrant sword and sorcery community on Livejournal would be to the mutual benefit of readers, writers, and publishers of sword and sorcery?
Is there something about the current sword and sorcery community on Livejournal that keeps it from being a more useful resource for the, well, sword and sorcery community on Livejournal?
Why don't you guys crosspost your sword and sorcery-related posts to the community? Do you think it would make a difference if all of us tried to be more active in remembering to do this?
Am I crazy in thinking we all might benefit from some more centralized discussions of the things many of us are posting about already on our own journals?
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| philreed |
| 2008-07-23 11:23 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I just noticed the group this last week and, so far, haven't done more than read old posts. And my experience with S&S is fairly recent -- just the last four or five years -- so, for me, it's pretty much all new.
I'm hoping to find some more books while I'm in Baltimore/DC over the next week. One thing Austin is missing is a great bookstore. And for some reason, I'm finding that I love paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, most of which turn out to be packed with stories from the 30s and 40s.
I must have been born at the wrong time or something.
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| blizack |
| 2008-07-23 11:47 (UTC) |
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Not to derail your post, but why isn't there a good sword & sorcery RPG available right now? I mean one that was built from the ground up to "do" S&S.
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| dqg_neal |
| 2008-07-23 13:10 (UTC) |
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That is a good question. I know I wouldn't mind being involved in the design staff for that. (My own company is too small, and I wouldn't want to publish it, expecting it to die on the vine.)
One problem off my head is that a sword & sorcery rpg would probably do best in the style of Ars Magica where you only had one main player with really useful abilties and the rest play as backup characters with Players knowing that in each adventure the particular main character could be rotated out.
The concept of downtime between adventures is rare in the rpg world, and I visualize if you tried to give the real grim and gritty feel with Players doing things the way they are used to in other RPGS, they'd be rolling up new characters regularly. (changing the Player mindset is a difficult trick.)
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| blizack |
| 2008-07-23 13:18 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| buggin |
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You have a good point there... most S&S seems to be focused on "loner badass" characters, though you could argue that Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser provide a counterpoint to that argument. You definitely don't see a lot of four- or five-man teams armed for bear and ready to cause mayhem, though.
Typical modern D&D-style play wouldn't work too well, you're right, but there are plenty of other games that encourage different behavior from the players, even if it's just a function of self-preservation (see Call of Cthulhu, et al).
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| jcfiala |
| 2008-07-23 17:27 (UTC) |
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Hm. How is the Conan RPG not suitable for Sword and Sorcery? I used it briefly in a playtest for a friend who does reviews, but I don't remember too much in detail.
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| blizack |
| 2008-07-23 17:54 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| thief |
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I haven't played it, and from what I've heard it does a good job of adapting d20 to the genre, but I'd still like something that was built to run S&S from the ground up. d20 combat is too fiddly for me, personally.
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| dqg_neal |
| 2008-07-23 20:58 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I know the whole...every adventure you start you are broke is a useful technique. Thats definitely Conan... but not necessarily Sword & Sorcery. (Although it does occur rather often.)
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| blizack |
| 2008-07-23 22:21 (UTC) |
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| tanq |
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Right, but while you can certainly do S&S with OD&D (I'm playing in a Wilderlands-based OD&D campaign right now and having a ball), it's not really what I was talking about. I'm talking about the lack of a currently available, modern RPG designed to emulate S&S tropes.
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Let's take this a bit further down the road.
In most sword and sorcery stories I've read, even the most complicated, treacherous fights seldom involve more than a few sword thrusts.
I have never in my life read a sword and sorcery story in which spellcasters were able to fire off dozens of spells "once per round" or the like. Spellcasting is often a complicated affair or it comes in short, spectacular bursts.
The classic D&D spell system is known as the "Vancian System" for the way in which spells must be memorized and are forgotten once cast, and in the way that some of them are evocatively named for famous wizards. In no Vance story that I've read could a character spend nine or ten consecutive "actions" firing through a spell list the way even a low-level D&D wizard could. It seems to me, in fact, that spells featuring wizards' names generally were hard to come by and significant. The pace and quantity of spellcasting in D&D is much higher than any nearly any "classic" sword and sorcery story of significance.
That suggests to me that the ideal combat in a sword and sorcery game would last only a few rounds, usually end in death for one or more parties, and maybe includes some flashy magic.
This points, to me, toward a more narrative approach and less fixation on pushing miniatures around, maximizing bonuses, and hit point churn.
I suspect the "game" of combat in a sword and sorcery game would involve taking advantage of the scenery, attempts to dredge up a hidden reserve of energy or power, lowering an enemy's morale via insults, and the like.
Is this what you are talking about?
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| blizack |
| 2008-07-24 02:40 (UTC) |
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| twizzlers |
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I can't say that I had articulated it to myself quite so artfully, but yes, now that you mention it, that is exactly what I'm talking about.
Come on, Paizo totally needs to make this game!
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Mind you, Conan had some pretty epic fights in which R.E.H. describes him as gradually being worn down, losing blood from lots of little cuts etc (e.g. pick any of his fights with demons, or the one where he fights off about twenty swordsmen with an axe he grabs off the wall). That was the point I was making in my brief exchange with Gary (see linkage above) - reading Conan put me totally in mind of some guy with a huge wad of h.p., the archetypal high-level barbarian taking part in a D&D combat. Though 3e didn't do a very good job of depicting a Conan-like barbarian (1e+ did it better), but you could say Conan was a multiclass character anyhow.
You might also say that Conan wasn't actually your typical S&S hero, I guess. I must dig out my old Fafhrd & Grey Mouser paperbacks and revisit them to compare.
In total agreement on the spellcasting. Mind you even in the high fantasy genre spellcasting was never as free and easy as it is in D&D (particularly later editions). I guess that the evolution towards spellcasting-on-tap is driven by the desire to put magic in the hands of the players and keep those same players in the spotlight of action rather than having them wait on the sidelines before and after their big stunt.
The ideas you describe would be a way of differentiating an S&S style game from D&D, of course. And while R.E.H. can describe Conan as having a fight that wears on and on in a few paragraphs, it can actually be a bit tiresome for some folks to run one that drags on and on. (especially if every combat is like that...!)
By the way Erik, have you ever read Gil Kane's Blackmark? An interesting S&S/SciFi crossover, and a proto-graphic novel to boot, which I forgot about for ages and recently rediscovered. I first read it when I was about 11 or 12 I think, then later on in my teens I ran a D&D campaign loosely based on the same theme. If you haven't read it already then I think you'd enjoy it.
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| salient73 |
| 2008-08-26 02:00 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Have you tried the "Sorcerer & Sword" supplement for Ron Edwards' "Sorcerer."
I've also heard good things about "Riddle of Steel" that suggest it could be used to create a good S&S game. "Shadows of Yesterday", in its specific setting, might work as well.
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| dqg_neal |
| 2008-07-23 11:50 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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By the way, and interesting one for your lists.
Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy
by Fantasist Enterprises
http://www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
I just got a copy of this. (The publisher was at my local writer's group meeting.) It is relatively new anthology with sword & sorcery stories but with a humorous spin on them.
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| varianor |
| 2008-07-23 12:17 (UTC) |
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IMO, LiveJournal's structure itself is counterproductive to good discussion. You don't come into easily searched threaded discussions. Instead you have to hunt backward by calendar date. If you don't see it, you might forget it. It's good for putting a personal post out there for lots of people to look at, where it won't get lost in a sea of other posts. The discussion itself is hard to follow, lacks good topic tools, and can't easily reference other aspects of the "message board."
If you're talking about the extremely long post of yesterday (LJ cuts dude!) with many books discussed, I read about half, took down a few names to look for, got called away by my kids and never came back. So, I'll go look again and see if I can answer your question. If it was something after that, that's easier!
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| varianor |
| 2008-07-23 12:26 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Umm, nope, didn't miss it. I thought the reviews you gave were good. There must be an MRI brain study out there on this, but nobody ever comments on reviews. Your Vision Quest post basically fell into the mental frame of "LJ reviews". Not to mention which, it was really, really long.
I think if you took a topic or two out of there and put it up, you might get discussion. Like a book club might discuss. Better to do it on a message board. Crothian over on ENWorld has been doing the RPG Book Club and talking about one product a month.
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I'm more than satisfied with the 30+ posts of discussion my Vision Quest post generated. I want to reiterate that the point of my post was not to troll for more comments on my own posts, but to posit whether or not a LJ community focused on sword and sorcery topics by a variety of posters--not all reviews, mind you--would be of interest to the actual community of LJ sword and sorcery fans.
In many ways I agree that a message board community is preferable to LJ, but in my experience that aren't any good sword and sorcery message board communities on the net, either.
About a year ago I asked where everyone talks about fantasy online, and the best we could muster is places like EN World or Xengia (game sites where SF is rarely discussed) or genuinely dedicated SF sites with almost no traffic or an overwhelming amount of posts about "light" SF topics (see Amazon.com).
I'm wondering if there might be a more pro-active solution.
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| dqg_neal |
| 2008-07-23 13:00 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Aye. I know I tried doing an LJ for my company instead of a message board and it didn't work out. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to set up a message board again.
It is spur of the moment discussions... or stirred up again by folks posting in other blogs about a topic.
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| mattbayne |
| 2008-07-29 17:48 (UTC) |
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Lj posts allow tags to be used, to help categorize the content of a thread. I've seen this used to great effect, particularly on the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) wow_ladies community. Click to the community and they've got a huge list of tags down the rights side, so if you want to read every thread about rogues or enchanting or skills or whatever, you can just click that tag, and you're all set. No reason that same approach couldn't be used effectively in a sword and sorcery fan community.
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| mordicai |
| 2008-07-23 14:35 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| big face |
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I've always found-- & I don't say this to be a nay sayer, I'm just telling it as it is-- Livejournal communities to be less-than-awesome. I don't exactly know what? Maybe it is the narcissism of bloggers? I tend to just post whatever I want to post into my own journal, rather than want to spread it out. Maybe it is the inability to regulate content? Every community attracts a person who spams it, constantly, with sub-par material. I don't know, but they haven't worked for me. I'll give it a go, though!
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| (Anonymous) |
| 2008-07-23 15:03 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
There is also the new literary adventure fantasy online magazine _Beneath Ceaseless Skies_ at beneath-ceaseless-skies.com . We open for submissions on Aug. 1.
Scott H. Andrews, Editor-in-Chief
_Beneath Ceaseless Skies_
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I have heard about this. Announcements of new magazines, open calls for anthologies, and appearances of stories in said anthologies and magazines when they come out would seem to be ideal posts for the community I envision.
Good luck with the magazine.
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| xjenavivex |
| 2008-07-23 15:19 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| Lobo Luna Mod |
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I added you. I hope you don't mind. I saw on your website that you are trying to get readership up as well. You are welcome to join my writing community, lobo_luna, and promote over there as well. Please consider adding me to your friends list.
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Cool. I'm looking it over.
Also: What is the obsession everyone has with LJ cuts? What difference does a long post make, exactly?
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It is a part of the LJ culture I guess. There is some merit to their use. It can make a heavily populated friends list even longer to read over when you are scrolling through when cuts aren't used in long posts. Also, some people post pictures. Some of those pictures either have content that shouldn't be viewed at work or the pictures are so heavy that it takes a person with slow internet access forever to load the page. Cuts in that case allow the user to pick and choose what pictures are accessed.
Because we are a writing community, cuts were something we wanted others to use. If someone posts their work outright and it goes on for pages, well...it might take more than my lunch hour for sure.
I like cuts. I also use them to organize posts. When I return to them in the future, I can gain quicker access to the section of a very long post I was looking for.
However, as one of the mods, I will say that unless it was just a rediculously long post, I wouldn't make a fuss over it.
Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking a look at the community. I would be thrilled to have you.
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Also, Dark Shade Books put out a two volume compilation of the Kane novels and stories by Karl Edward Wagner in 2002 and 2003.
I snatched them up, they're expensive now.
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| jamesenge |
| 2008-07-23 18:35 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Thanks for this wake-up call. I guess I've been avoiding cross-posting to the LJ sword and sorcery community because many of my S&S-related posts are about Black Gate and Flashing Swords, with which I am (or have been, in the case of FS) associated, and I didn't want to look as if I was beating my drum all the time. (Though I am, of course.)
Still, a little noise is better than the silence of death. I'll try to be more communal-minded.
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| nihawkins |
| 2008-07-23 19:36 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
I see a lot of discussion of S&S going on in a lot of places. SFReader.com, SFF.net, the Yahoo Sword and Sorcery Writing Group, an Amazon.com forum (though I think a lot of folks there tend to conflate S&S and fantasy as a whole), a whole mess of readers' and writers' and editors' blogs, among others.
I've seen some interesting conversations spark up, fizzle, and die. I think the problem is focus. What about targeting these places and drawing their attention to the LiveJournal Sword and Sorcery community? I do think there would be value in having one place in which the majority of these conversations take place, even if it's not where they're initiated.
My personal preference would be for swordandsorcery.org to go active again, including a blog feature for discussions. But its founder is busy with a lot, so I'm not sure if that will happen anytime soon. Meanwhile, I'll help spread the word about this place best I can.
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| zonemind |
| 2008-07-24 19:08 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| Morningstar |
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If it weren't members-only to post, I'd have posted by now.
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| (Anonymous) |
| 2008-07-28 18:29 (UTC) |
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Erik,
Why not just add a Sword & Sorcery area to the Paizo boards? Thanks to Planet Stories, I'd imagine many S&S fans would turn to Paizo among the first places they'd look.
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