Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

When they say they’re pro-life, they don’t mean yours.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Cancel the cowardly WaPo and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / Gamer Dork / Late Night Light Snark Open Thread: J.R.R. Tolkien, Dungeon Master

Late Night Light Snark Open Thread: J.R.R. Tolkien, Dungeon Master

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All due respect to the learned Professor Tolkien, for the great joy he has given us and the myriad tales he inspired, but rereading Lord of the Rings after forty years *does* make it obvious how lightly his original worldbuilding was edited.

Showed this thread to the Spousal Unit, who was a locally renowned DM back in the hex-paper days, and he LOL’d too, so…

Click on any tweet above to read the rest of the thread.

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  2. 2.

    Mike J

    I remember playing a one shot game at a convention. All the characters meet in the tavern, five players immediately yell that they have to sit with their backs to the wall.

  3. 3.

    Mo MacArbie

    Riding out to meet Faramir and the other survivors of the fall of Osgiliath, it’s clear in the movie that Galdalf only brings Pippen with him because he needs about 25 x.p. to level.

  6. 6.

    Mnemosyne

    We had to put all of the cat food away tonight because the oldest one is getting his teeth deep-cleaned under anesthesia tomorrow, and they are NOT HAPPY!

  7. 7.

    cthulhu

    Well, I guess it is not surprising LOTR could play like a DnD adventure since Gary Gygax got much of his inspiration from Tolkien. Hobbits were an original race you could play and that’s not something that Gygax came up with. So it’s a bit of a circular joke.

  9. 9.

    Sab

    @Mnemosyne: I feel for you.

    2 a.m. here and my irradiated cat (hyperthyroid survivor) is sitting on his little chair downstairs yowling for more food.

    He doesn’t need to eat a pound of lunchmeat daily since his treatment, so I am going to roll over and go back to sleep.

    He got spoiled during his illness, when he needed feeding every couple of hours to keep from wasting away.

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    Speaking of games, ran through the first chapter (free to play!) of King’s Quest last night. Lotta fun, pretty to look at and the absolutely barest minimum of shooting at anything living (a solid plus in the book of NotMax). Puzzles within ranged from okay to both ludicrous and frustrating.

    Although Wallace Shawn, even when just doing voice over, has kind of worn out his welcome for me by now.

  16. 16.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Amir Khalid: Only if you feel the need to backup your extensions and options, sync your tabs between multiple devices, or use Pocket.

  18. 18.

    JGabriel

    @cthulhu:

    Well, I guess it is not surprising LOTR could play like a DnD adventure since Gary Gygax got much of his inspiration from Tolkien.

    I was thinking much the same thing: LotR reads like a D&D session because D&D was modelled on LotR.

  20. 20.

    p.a.

    You can also look at it as a road trip novel, or a travel novel. JRRT was introducing us to his world at the same time as he was ending it because he couldn’t get his other tales published.

  24. 24.

    Sebastian

    @clay:

    This is most excellent. Started it and those two sound EXACTLY like the folks I used to DM. I now finally understand so much more about my younger self.

  25. 25.

    clay

    @Sebastian: Darths & Droids is very interesting, because it starts as a very funny gag strip — a parody of both Star Wars and RPGs. But somewhere along the way, it turns into an actual story that is compelling on it’s own right.

    (A lot like Order of the Stick in that regard.)

  26. 26.

    batguano

    This is awesome! That’s exactly how I RP for that exact reason and that’s usually the response.

  27. 27.

    JML

    D&D wasn’t modeled on LotR, though. Sure they lifted a couple of elements from it (hobbits, most notably but certainly other things like the Ranger character class), but the pulp works of Robert E. Howard (Conan, in particular) and Jack Vance were more influential, especially in the early days. As the game evolved from Gygax & Arneson’s early designs, more “high fantasy” elements started showing up, but foundationally LotR plays a smaller role than most people would believe.

  29. 29.

    Bostondreams

    @NotMax:

    Speaking of games, ran through the first chapter (free to play!) of King’s Quest last night. Lotta fun, pretty to look at and the absolutely barest minimum of shooting at anything living (a solid plus in the book of NotMax). Puzzles within ranged from okay to both ludicrous and frustrating.

    Man, memories. The original iteration of this game was the first one I ever played on my Tandy 1000 back in the early ’80’s. Trying to figure out the right combination of words to get Graham to do stuff was half the fun. :)

    ‘use bowl’
    ‘fill bowl’
    ‘eat from bowl’
    ‘f**k bowl’

  30. 30.

    SoupCatcher

    @NotMax:

    Although Wallace Shawn, even when just doing voice over, has kind of worn out his welcome for me by now.

    Inconceivable!

    (I can’t believe no one hit that pitch you set up so perfectly out over the middle of the plate)

  31. 31.

    Hob

    @Dupe1970: That’s getting a bit circular again though, because all of the early creators of “sword and sorcery” as a subgenre were pulling heavily from both Tolkien and Howard.

    I still think it’s fair to say that regardless of what Gygax was reading, D&D as it was actually played owed more to Tolkien than to anyone else, just because Tolkien had 1000 times more cultural visibility. Howard was certainly influential, but lots of non-fans knew what a hobbit was and the same wasn’t really true of Conan or Fafhrd and definitely not Vance.

  32. 32.

    Lit3Bolt

    I just read “The Silmarillion” finally and I’m just now starting to realize Tolkien is probably the most ripped off author on the planet. And not just “hehe, we’re just paying tribute to the great fantasy author.” It was direct and literal, cut out of context names and places lifted from Tolkien maps and added to D&D campaigns and books and video games.

    The thing that shocked me was hearing about a river or cleft in Tolkien’s First Age map called Crissaegram. “Huh, that sounds familiar…where is that from?” Oh yeah, Castlevania, where one of the swords you wield is called that.

    I mean, is making up fantasy names that hard for people? Or new plots, for that matter? If I was in the fantasy genre I’d want people to check out my homebrew campaign instead of retreading Tolkien for the 5000th time.

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