wow wait okay the full title of the book was
"Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books"
bruh now it's less adorable c'mon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Wa
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ok now pulp fiction. this bit seems important: "During the economic hardships of the Great Depression, pulps provided affordable content to the masses, and were one of the primary forms of entertainment, along with film and radio."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_maga
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this is starting to feel like a huge topic. here's an incomplete diagram of the influences we've traced so far. i am still mostly drawn to understanding the D&D bottleneck, as the place where pop magic switches tracks from stories to games
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there's something you kill about the nature of magic by forcing it to fit mechanically into a game, tabletop or video or otherwise. the way it's usually done magic becomes something dead you control, rather than something alive you have a relationship to
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One way to get at the distinction: is magic something you use (LH), or is it something you relate to (RH)? In Young Wizards (RH), magic often uses the heroes. It has intentionality, and also a moral component. Compare to e.g. Harry Potter, esp. HPMoR (very LH).
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surprisingly rowling's conception of magic in harry potter is also mostly "dead," with the exception of whatever harry's mom did to protect him from voldemort, despite the fact that rowling's influences were very literary / mythological; no games, no pulp
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Pot
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in harry potter a spell is a lever you pull to make a fixed thing happen in the world. you don't have to talk to any spirits or gods. spells can't backfire due to a lack of faith or weakness of heart. where did this come from? did magic work this way in narnia? i'm not familiar
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i'm not sure how to track influences for harry potter b/c rowling has apparently said "I haven't got the faintest idea where my ideas come from" so these are guesses even on her part. but sword in the stone makes sense: harry = arthur pendragon, dumbledore = merlin
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narnia also makes sense - king's cross and platform 9 3/4 and the wardrobe, yes, yes, naturally. all of rowling's influences seem very like... prim and proper, it's an interesting contrast to the pulpy stuff we were looking at earlier. extremely british
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tracing narnia's influences feels like a big project so i'm gonna stop here for now. here's the updated influence diagram, still leaving out a bunch of stuff for readability
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I haven't read any of the stories, but I've heard that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were a bigger influence on D&D than Tolkein was
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hmm yeah i wouldn't be surprised if gygax just read all the sword & sorcery stuff he could get his hands on. seems like there were several important figures here
example - the memorization-based D&D magic system is taken from Jack Vance's Dying Earth books.
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