To begin, I must say that Fairy Tales and Dungeons & Dragons are something that has been shamefully kept as a dark secret, which we all have tried to get away from. We know Ogres are a race of vicious brutes that run in packs, not the solitary things we have seen in fairy tales that eat unfortunates. We also know that minotaurs are master sailors that have fairly large developed nations which cities do not comprise of massive labyrinths (though I might question that the designer of New York was a Minotaur). Medusas are also a race that somehow breed and not the lecherous woman of Greek Myth that was cursed by the Gods. And Trolls, trolls are a mangy regenerating race that live underground, and not the bridge seeking lot we heard of in the past.
Yes, the secret is in the reading of fairy tales, which will plainly show that Dungeons & Dragons has founding fathers that date back much farther than the organization of TSR. In fact, adventures with monsters, has been around since . . . cavemen? Yes, there were Woolly Mammoths and Saber Tooth tigers to dodge in the days of real humans fighting real monsters. A quick trip outside the village in the dead of night was a sure ticket to being a quick lunch. No doubt, in all this fear and heavy mortality, there arose legends and myths about the things that preyed on the weak and helpless. No longer was it a wolf that snapped up ole Peter, but a mighty inhuman creature that feasted on a strict diet of children. And of course, the more terror that went around, the more fantastical they became, for it was too gruesome to blame on a pack of pesky wolves. The more these stories were told, the more fanciful and changed they became as they were passed down from generation to generation till they became the thing of superstition, folklore, legend, myth, …fairy tale.
But, to get back to Dungeons & Dragons, I do feel that the creation of Draconomicon was a work that was long over due. A game that has the word Dragon in it should have some reference book for Dragons. But let’s face it; Dungeons & Dragons is actually fantasy gaming, first and foremost. And we all know that fantasy is based off of myths and fairy tales. So where is the beef?
I think now is the time to take a few steps back and point out, that the D&D staff has made many excellent books over the last 2 ½ years since 3.0 came out. The work is truly amazing. I might also add that I do appreciate the hard work that is clearly evident in the representation of races that are heavily fairy tale vested. It is obvious by the depth of description that everything that one would want to know about a particular race and perhaps the fairy tale angle it came from is clearly there to be found. And it is also transparent to see that the team has a pretty firm understanding of those legends and the races that they surround. The thing that I find lacking however is the complete picture; the actual fairy tale put together in Dungeons & Dragons terms. I would love to see how the real myth of Beowulf figures into a Dungeons & Dragons setting. It would be great to see the differences between the natures of the fairy tale ogres and the Dungeons & Dragons Ogres. For certain, fairy tale “things” appeared to have more prowess and brains then the Dungeons & dragons counterparts. Though I must say, the deaths of these fairy tale creatures are also less plausible (cooked in their own oven).
A Dungeons & Dragons: Myth and Fairy Tale Handbook would be perhaps the “Holy Grail” to creating those very first campaigns with beginning players. Can anyone imagine a 12 year old having no D&D experience, walking up to the plate for the first time, and having only fairy tales to help visualize what they are experiencing? And what an experience it would be to be chased by a giant! Fee Fii Foo Fum.
I think the best part however, will be the possibility of seeing it all clearly put forth in one book. As I said before, I very much appreciate the details that have been given to the many races that the D & D team has graced. I love the details that you can find such as in Races of Stone and even Libris Mortis. As a person that loves to read fantasy, I find the descriptions often more enjoyable then the game mechanics possibilities. Regardless though, if I want to know about Banshees I must have Libris, and if I want to know about dwarves, I have to have Races of Stone, and though I find these books in their own right outstanding, they cannot possibly fill the fairy tale gap that could be all encompassing. Dungeons & Dragons has always touched on the Myths when describing races, but one thing I have never seen from Dungeons & Dragons is have the races and their themes be subordinate to the actual Myths that they play upon. I do feel that such a book would be backward engineering of Dungeons & Dragons as we know it today, but I feel it would be a very rich return nonetheless. I also feel that the next generation of D&D players are fairy tale driven, and it would be nice to have those early players step around in familiar territory.
It's a trend I have noticed that rubs me the wrong way: most all of recently published books and articles focus on rules expansions and more crunch for the game, where fluff is invented on the spot to justify the new rules.
In my games I have tried (without much success, but that's a whole other story), to reduce the prominence of the rules and bring the game back to a form of shared storytelling, where the rules are simply a way of resolving the result of actions, and not a platform for combat-simulation. I love reading fantasy, legends and mythology, and I've noticed it's an atmosphere that's lacking from most D&D games I've experienced.
One piece of criticism I'd like to add though, is that the product you're hoping for seems so general-purpose that it would be nearly useless to everybody (instead of very useful to few people). I could see it containing an account of real-world myths and describing how they were translated to D&D, but once inside the D&D game, all races and monsters have undergone such a diversification that it's almost impossible to keep track of all different incarnations of certain creatures. Take goblins, for instance. You could write an article on real-world goblins, discussing the mythology from various cultures, and then account for the changes they made when they translated them to the vanilla Monster Manual Goblins. However, in most campaign settings, goblins are diverse, differ from the MM variant, and have undergone serious changes (well... maybe not goblins per se, but trolls for example, and orcs!), which can't all be discussed in this book if you want it to cover a good number of creatures, for the simple reason that there are so many campaign settings, and so many variations on the creatures.
Don't get me wrong though, I fully support your point of view of raising the fairytale-level of the game, but I just don't really understand what you would like to see published. Could you give more idea's on what you would like to see as content of such a book?
These may be short, but at least it wouldn't be a big mish-mash of ideas.
When I imagine D&D, I imagine my characters being highly skilled and constantly on their toes - where as many of the protagonists in fairy tales win their fights by flukes. If I was forced to fight the giant in jack in the beanstalk, I'd hope to kill him with swords and arrows, not climbing down the stalk and cutting it with an axe. And only because of the drama involved, the intensity and risk. Also, I apologize for overusing Jack and the Beanstalk, it just seemed to be the most juvenile among examples presented.
I'd say that a handbook dedicated to such a concept would be more appropriate in a low magic campaign, where the fantastic elements in many of those myths are not present - for example, why should i be scared of the creature cursed by gods living in the foul depths of a cave whose gaze can turn me to stone when if i bump a wizard walking down the street, he can turn me to stone or turn me into a newt?
All in all, I'd like to see a myths and legends source book detailing adventures involving actual myths and legends and some myths and legends the wizards make up on their own. I'd also like to say that this product could set some standards for low magic campaigns - something many DMs think is amazing, but usually fall flat on their face during execution.
With the possible exception of the references Beowulf, I'd like to point out that most fairy-tales only have a single protagonist. There may be only a single troll under the bridge or a single giant up in the clouds, but there is also only a single (usually average) person taking on these creatures. This doesn't exactly lend itself to the group mechanic that is D&D. D&D is very much a group game, both mechanically and socially. D&D is designed towards playing a group of heroes--multiple people with their own special abilities. The group isn't playing the simple farmer's son, or even a group of simple farmer’s sons. Thus, I would suggest that such a game is ill-suited for D&D in its current incarnation.
I must respectfully but unequivocally disagree with the foregoing statement. Yes, very often fables and fairy tales do feature a solitary protagonist, but there is a very well established subtype in which there is a hero with companions each possessing a single salient special ability or a disparate group of varied characters. Probably the most instantly recognizable example for most people would be the story of the Bremen Town Musicians, but there are many others. Two examples:
Long, Broad, and Sharpsight
The Flying Ship
There truly are innumerable fairy-tales of this type from all over the world.
One interesting thing about stories of this sort is that the characters in them are often actually more similar to "optimized" characters from D&D 3.5 than they are to characters created in earlier editions, in that there is no pretense at realism in their highly focused and exaggerated abilities. Despite the way that statement sounds, it isn't meant as criticism so much as a suggestion that groups of powergamers are better suited to fairy-tale type campaigns, rather than ones based on high or low fantasy.
I must respectfully but unequivocally disagree with the foregoing statement. Yes, very often fables and fairy tales do feature a solitary protagonist, but there is a very well established subtype in which there is a hero with companions each possessing a single salient special ability or a disparate group of varied characters. Probably the most instantly recognizable example for most people would be the story of the Bremen Town Musicians, but there are many others. Two examples:
Long, Broad, and Sharpsight
The Flying Ship
There truly are innumerable fairy-tales of this type from all over the world.
One interesting thing about stories of this sort is that the characters in them are often actually more similar to "optimized" characters from D&D 3.5 than they are to characters created in earlier editions, in that there is no pretense at realism in their highly focused and exaggerated abilities. Despite the way that statement sounds, it isn't meant as criticism so much as a suggestion that groups of powergamers are better suited to fairy-tale type campaigns, rather than ones based on high or low fantasy.
The original poster had suggested he had the Grimm's tales more in mind, and I maintain that the majority of Grimm's tales are centered around a single, ordinary protagonist rather than a group of epic heroes.
Though in planning out an argument I did just have a thought that a party made up of the 3 Little Pigs could be amusing. Briefly. I don't see much longevity built into a fairy-tale game (after all, I'd think the game was over when you hit "happily ever after").
While I like the idea and it's great to see people wanting to interest a younger generation into D&D, I don't see the need for this sourcebook.
I do. I'd like to see a sourcebook that brings together all the fairy tale creatures from other sourcebooks into one reference. Yes, it's redundant (compiling existing material into another book) but I think it would be great to have such a single-book reference for a fairy-tale quality game, and it would also make D&D more accessible to children.
Such a book should go into detail about other distinctions between traditional fairy tale creatures and their D&D counterparts. For example, it might explain why a D&D pixie is so large compared to a traditional pixie, where the concept of a Dryad first arose in literature and wax about their ambivalent relationships with lumberjacks, why trolls gave up lurking under bridges ages ago, that ogres and trolls don't like being mistaken for each other, that Jack was really the evil guy from the Giants' point of view, why certain creatures view children as a delicacy, and so on. Done correctly, these parts of the book could be readable for kids, or be something you could read aloud to them.
As a bridge to make D&D accessible, such a book should be light on introducing new classes, prestige classes, feats, spells, and items - restricting them to what's in fairy tales. It may not be something WOTC would produce, but I can see it coming from one of the 3rd-party D20 book publishers.
Fairy tales are often highly dangerous. Think of all the hundreds of princes or knights who were killed attempting to rescue Sleeping Beauty. Witches and enchanters are generally not pushovers either (Hansel and Gretel were lucky; their witch was obviously senile). And the tests involved in many fairy tales are near epic in difficulty. Not to mention the number of folk tales that bring in the Devil. Then there's giants... The real difficulty, though, is that the classic folk tale/fairy tale has a protagonist who may be deserving, but is generally not capable of facing the challenges in the fairy tale head-on. Instead, the protagonist either has helpers, is more far more clever than the bad guys, is so stupid that his idiocy is seen as inscrutable wisdom, or is just plain lucky. Players generally prefer to apply force to solve problems. Getting really good at that is what most of them have trained for. So when running a fairy tale adventure, there are a couple of tricks to making it feel like one.
First, try to put the players in situations where they can outthink their enemies to succeed, in fact have to outthink them. If the PCs can gain a tactical advantage through tricking their opponents somehow, they will fit more easily into the Clever Jack/cunning tailor archetype. Illusionists and bards are good at this sort of thing, especially against things like big dumb giants. If that doesn't seem very likely, given your players, see if they can use some skills other than fighting to prevail. Take a hard look at their skills and see if there are any that some of them are really good at, much better than the standard. Then use the classic fairy tale series of tests or challenges, and allow those skills to be relevant. E.g., a very challenging Heal check on the part of the party cleric reveals that the king's daughter will not recover from her illness/poisoning/curse unless she eats an apple from the Tree of Life. At this point, a Religion/Bardic Knowledge/Geography/Gather Information check might be made by any of the players with knowledge skills to discover that this tree was placed atop the proverbial "unclimbable" glass mountain, which requires several highly difficult Climbing checks to scale. Cue fighter or rogue. Once they reach the top, they discover that the Tree is inhabited by a phoenix disinclined to allow them to take an apple. A good Diplomacy skill check is required to avoid combat. Be sure to think beforehand of what you will do if the players fail any of these checks, no matter how unlikely that might be. Ideally, there should be an alternate route or method to achieve the same goal.
A slight variant on the challenge beaten by skill is the challenge overcome with the use of a magic item. A player who has a ring of invisibility is set to discover whatever useful info you wish the party to have, simply by seeing/overhearing something meant to be private. Non-combat magic items such as Quaal's feather tokens, bags of tricks, sovereign glue, and figurines of wondrous power are usually better at inducing a fairy tale feel than bucky swords or armor. If the party has some items like that which have been gathering dust at the bottoms of their packs, see if you can't design scenarios that will make some of those last-choice magic items shine like diamonds. If the party doesn't have anything like that in their possession because they have carefully chosen only the combat enhancers when acquiring magic items, then these items should be picked up as purely incidental rewards for fairy tale adventures, completely aside from the true reward. This true reward might be nothing more than the satisfaction of doing the right thing, or it could be a special cohort (although the Leadership feat guarantees a permanent cohort, there is nothing prohibiting a GM from providing one as a reward), a large bag of gold, or knighthoods for everybody. Of course, a princess' hand in marriage is traditional, but usually that is not an option you'll want to offer to PCs, at least at low level. It generally works better if the PCs were aiding an NPC to win through to some goal, although I did once have a romance-shy player whose character was being pursued by multiple princesses at once, all wanting him to settle down with them. That was highly amusing.
Combat should not be outright eliminated from the adventure. If you do that, then you run the risk of turning the adventure into a story in which the players feel like actors going through the motions in your script. After all, they have put in a lot of game time figuring out how to kill things and if you make that irrelevant, then they may be excused for wondering why they bothered. However, what combat there is should often be reserved for background menace threats and BBEGs. Except for the final battle, if there is one, the plot should not generally revolve around combat. If the party has to enter a haunted castle, they may fight some ghosts, but those combats should be tangential to the goal, which might be to stay an entire night to lay the curse or to retrieve a book of lore from the library that contains clues to a deeper problem. Eliminating the ghosts shouldn't be the goal in itself, although the party might take it upon itself to do so. Likewise, the party may fight an owlbear or a green dragon in the Black Woods as a random encounter. This helps to establish that the Black Woods are dangerous. But it shouldn't be why they are there.
When the party accomplishes something in a very prosaic fashion, have outsiders view it in a more romantic and exaggerated light. NPC bards are your friends here. Also commoners, "Seven o' them, there were. Bigger'n hooses, too, an' carryin' off mah whole herd o' kine unner their arums. Along comes that fella o'er there an', snicker snack, kilt 'em all wi' woon whack o' that bluidy great sword o' his." That description could apply to a minor encounter vs. ogres or a hard-fought, barely-won battle vs. giants. How likely is it that the farmer actually stuck around to view the fight and get an accurate impression, either way? He saw the end result and that was good enough for him. When the party sees their actions recast in this way, even though they know better than anyone else what really happened, they also feel plugged in to the whole genre of exaggerated fairy tale adventure, in which a tailor killing seven flies stuck to his jam on bread becomes Jack "Killed Seven with One Blow" Giantkiller. When the story is told by others later, let the story be the romantic distortion, not the bald truth. If the party attempts to clear things up, it can be amusing to have them accused of being over modest. Superlatives and poetic impossibilities are your friends: When the bards sing of the party's deeds, they have come from "East of the Sun and West of the Moon", the high charisma sorceress is "the fairest in the land," the halfling is "thumb-sized" and so on.
Naturally, if the players don't wish to go through with an adventure, don't force it. There is a maxim relevant to all sorts of adventures, not just fairy tales: don't railroad. Avoiding or abandoning an adventure can actually add to the fairy tale feel - the party hasn't necessarily failed in the usual sense; they are just one more group that has not succeeded in an impossible task that no one succeeds at. "Yeah, we tried our hand at retrieving the Scarlet Prince from the Wild Hunt, but it was a no go. At least we knew to stop before the Huntman dragged us in." "Huh - sounds like you lads had more sense than most o' them knight eejits that come by here to give it a go. Puir souls." Contrariwise, if a party thinks of an option that you hadn't thought of, don't reject it out of hand. You may, after a taking a moment to consider, decide that just because you didn't think of it doesn't mean that the genius-level enchanter villain didn't or that it would work the way the party thinks it would. That's fine. But remember, in fairy tales the protagonists are supposed to cheat their way to victory sometimes. Don't automatically punish the players because they thought of a different way to do it than you did.
A lot of this advice is at least somewhat applicable to running other adventures, too. It is important when running any non-action genre adventure, be it horror, mystery, romance, or fairy tale, to try to get the players to forget the numbers on the character sheets for a while and emphasize the story and that can be harder than running a "standard" adventure. But don't be dissuade by the challenge - a good fairy tale will likely be remembered by you and your players a good long time.
One 3rd Party Company, Dog Soul Publishing, has already put out a product-- Folkloric Gallia. It has a lot of fairy tale elements taken right from Andrew Lang and the Brothers Grimm. There are talking beasts such as Marquis de Carabas with his talking cat (aka Puss In Boots), mousquetaires (Muskateers), Blue Beard, Ella (as in Cinderella only this takes place after she has wedded her prince), Lancelot and my personal favorite, Melusine. Some of the information is laid out in two different places. For example, the myths and the stats for the individuals are separate which results in a lot of page turning for the DM but otherwise it seems well done. I cannot vouch for the balance but it certainly can be no worse than many other product. It is a pdf file available from RPGNow and probably elsewhere.
Dog Soul Publishing also has a product called Folkloric Baba Yaga: The First Setting in Rassiya. Again, I cannot vouch for the game balance but it's certainly nice to have stats for the old hag. And for the fans of Swan Lake -- there are stats for both Odette and Odile.
Debby
Using some of these fantasy stereotypes just sounds like so much FUN to me and having a book to base it all on would help a lot of DM's. Stumbling upon a mushroom ring, finding the secret button, Enid Blyton styles adventure, that is the sort of thing I'd love to play.
Don't get me wrong, I love hack and slash dungeon crawls too. But considering that D&D has such a wide variety of tales to draw inspiration from, the fact that the flavour of almost all fairy tales is missed saddens me.
