If you have met me in the last…twenty years or so…and got me talking about fantasy RPGs, I may have brought up Lord Fang.

As I say often, RPGs weren’t designed in any particular coherent manner, and are more a kind of congealing of different ideas into a misshapen blob of poorly connected things. Probably lots of things are like this, and we only think there is some design brain behind them, years later. I think we’re in an interesting inflection point right now with D&D and RPGs, and more and more people are coming into them and seeing them in situ, and taking a lot of it as it comes. That is inevitable! But history matters. It helps us understand and be literate about where we are now. And it particularly matters when D&D is being robbed of its context, especially because D&D is really, really weird. And nothing more clearly illustrates that D&D is weird than the Lord Fang Problem.

In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Gary’s Chainmail rules system, heavily inspired by other wargames and particularly Kriegspiel, into what we would now call a “skirmish-level” wargame for miniature figures. You moved around on a dungeon map and the point of the game was to get better at fighting the things in the dungeon. Exploration borrowed from the Kriegspiel model where the wargame simulated the fog of war and the need for troops to survive in the wilderness, usually modelled in wargames with random tables. A forest might be thicker than you imagined, or supply some wild boar; a village might be full of fifth columnists or saucy French peasant girls. But since the fantasy setting of D&D never actually worked out or written down, Gygax and Arneson accidentally created a system where the only way to figure out what the world was like was to buy their books and use their tables. Early TTRPGs were not so much big changes in systems but gigantic hexmaps and tables to roll on, just as different wargames of the time focussed less on the core mechanics and more on what is the most accurate map and random tables to simulate the reality of a certain battle.

People talk about things like Vancian magic and the alignment system from Elric as if the designers used those things as inspiration and tried to mimic those worlds. In fact, they came up with the rules in advance and then looked around for things that justify them. Magic in wargames disappeared at the end of each match, and the way Jack Vance described magic being nearly impossible for the human brain to contain fit that mechanic. Certainly there is mimicry in the D&D setting. But it’s mimicking so many things. I argue in my recent book that its biggest inspiration was the television westerns that Gygax grew up with, most of which were set in the far west, so that the ever-present Comanche tribes were a threat and source of action and drama. That’s why there’s always a small village on the edge of the wilderness in D&D, plagued by orc savages. Vikings were of course the other inspiration for orcs. Tolkien invented the word orc because he found the word goblin to be insufficiently epic, but because he invented them and because his books are very much written from a point of view inside the world itself, he never describes them. Gygax and friends had to invent all the rest. Early orcs had pig-like noses. During the first half of the 20th century, travelling fairs would capture bears and keep them intoxicated, then shave them and show them as if they were mutated humans. These kind of orcs were common enough that one of them ended up in Return of the Jedi.

The horns, tusks and pig-snouts eventually disappeared, but the green colour stayed, and that’s Gygax. A cultural commentator I read back in the 90s said that in the list of people who had the most effect on popular culture of the day, most people thought of Elvis and The Beatles, but there was also Gene Roddenberry, and Gary Gygax. Because although Gygax was drawing on a random bunch of things, we’ve let a lot of these things become standards…and then are surprised when they don’t make sense.

More examples of the random design: early on, the system did not have “hit poitns” but having watched the Errol Flynn Robin Hood on TV one week, where the hero and villain trade blows back and forth in the climactic battle, Gygax added them in. The ettin, the naga and the hydra and the undead are mostly borrowed from the Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor and Jason of the Argonauts. These movies are also why there are actual dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures. Again, this is what Gygax grew up watching on TV. (For the younger audience, television in the 1960s created a system called syndication where smaller, subsidiary networks or companies like Disney, would buy up the rights to popular films cheap, and then run them over and over again, particularly in times children would be watching, such as weekends. The popularity of Its a Wonderful Life was due to it being snatched up for nearly nothing and run over and over and over.) Gygax’s childhood and adolecensce lives large; the rustmonster, the owlbear, the bullette and others were designed because they resembled poorly-made plastic dinosaurs. The gelatinous cube was invented because Jim Ward (who also invented Melf the wizard because his character sheet listed his Gender and Race as M-Elf, and Dwarmij the wizard, his name backwards) put a jello shot on the map one night. In they went into the rules. Not that there’s anything wrong with gonzo design! That’s part of what makes D&D what it is. But its important to remember that it has no real referent to anything that came before and the only things that have these things afterwards are direct descendants of D&D. And the best example of this is Lord Fang.

A lot of early D&D design, besides being haphazard and silly, was also antagonistic. As soon as the players worked out how a monster worked, the GM would change things to surprise them. There is a monster that looks exactly like the Beholder (another Harryhausen inspiration) but if you attack it it bursts into poisonous gas. Treasures chests are disguised mimics, and so on and so forth. During one early campaign (an “evil” game where players are just murdering everything and fighting each other), a player created Lord Fang, a vampire.

The 1970s was a big time for vampires, with Blacula straddling blacksploitation, horror and critical acclaim, Dracula showing on Broadway and Jack Palance starring in a big budget movie. Anne Rice’s best-seller, Interview with the Vampire came out in 1974. By 1979 there were so many vampire films that parodies appeared like Love at First Bite, and Christopher Lee was so bored of playing the character he took one role on the promise he would never have to record any dialogue (his character simply growls and hisses). Culture was now creating a sense of evolved subcreation: there were so many vampire movies, each movie had to establish which rules it would follow and which it would not. This is also where RPGs were born: as places where subcreation was turned into rules and tables, so that you would know what to expect but not exactly. Just as forests in Napoleonic France might hide wild boars to eat or bears to fight, you could codify fictional concepts down to table entries. And in this spirit, a player made a vampire, and because everyone knows vampires can turn into wolves, and bats, and fog, and can mesmerize people, and so on, the player’s character was able to dominate the game. The other players couldn’t stand against him.

Gygax, ever the antagonistic game “balancer” looked around to find the natural enemy of the vampire, and it was obvious: it was Van Helsing. This was also the era of Hammer Horror. Hammer Studios was a relatively-small budget film studio in England started in the 1930s. In the 1950s they found a way to make money from the new popularity of horror films, which also allowed them to reuse sets and costumes and locations. From 1949 to 1979 they made 156 films, more than three a year. They too enjoyed syndication and wide distribution. In the 50s and 60s, even young children would go to the movies to see four or five films at a time, some short ones or serials, and then a family film, and then usually a hammer horror at the end. That’s why D&D has mummies in it. Hammer also made their fair share of creature features beyond straight horror. I imagine every single week Gygax and friends saw a movie about going to a strange place and fighting bizarre monsters.

Hammer Horror loved vampires and the vampires always lost because they faced down someone who could make them fear sunlight and/or the cross. 1970s horror was transgressive in the blood and guts and nudity, but rooted in a kind of desperate fear of losing religious tradition, and the cross played a big part (even being a major factor in the 1980s’ Fright Night). So naturally the easiest way to defeat Lord Fang was to bring in a character class that wielded the cross. Enter the Cleric.

Before D&D, religion is almost entirely absent in fantasy. Conan specifically hates formalized religion, seeing it as a sign of corruption: their are no religions at all in his world, only cults, or his untrammeled noble-savage beliefs. Elric has crusades that have no gods to drive them. Lord of the Rings has no religion whatsoever, and it’s absent from the Fahfrd stories as well, and Jack Vance’s books, and the Earthsea books. Where it does exist it is sort of a homage to Friar Tuck: someone might refuse to shed blood and say a prayer before battle, but there’s no organisation. Or it is an actual crusade story, and the only God is one of slaughter. Arthurian legend is the exception, of course, but there there is only religion, and nothing else. The idea of a wandering cleric joining a team of wandering heroes pops up first in movies, primarily in Japanese wushu films, because it makes for an easy character note. There the character is a monk, which is also why D&D has monks, another thing that was glued on without making any sense in the world. There is a wandering monk in Beastmaster, which is also where the ranger class comes from – because again, Tolkien doesn’t say what a ranger is, so people guessed random shit.

And so the cleric doesn’t really make any sense. It exists only to combat Lord Fang and doesn’t actually fit into the setting. And it certainly doesn’t fit into fantasy. But nothing fits into D&D, and that’s part of the problem, because more and more there’s a culture around D&D and it pulls everything into it, and needs to justify all this madness, but never quite does. You now have to have clerics in fantasy, because fantasy is being morphed to fit around D&D, which is just a really bad idea, and makes more and more cracks form.

Last week I gushed about the genius if Kirs Newtown and MegaDumbCast, and how nearly every episode expresses some perfect truth about game design. Sunday’s episode did it again where Kris said that a fun part of D&D is trying to take the things that they IMPLY about the world and make up why things are like that in your game. (I’ve also argued that the popularity of early RPGs was in part because people were frustrated by how the Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books would screw you over, and how early text computer games were too hard – people created via frustration!) But he is right to call it annoying that D&D doesn’t actually commit to any of this. It doesn’t lean all the way out and say “elves are just a few vague ideas, so you can fill in the page” or lean all the way in and go “yes, it makes sense that everyone hates elves because they are better than everyone” (aka the Warhammer Exception) or “if Sense Alignment exists then cities would install detectors at every city gate”. It never wants to commit to anything; it is a game designed on vibes, and so a lot of it is utterly impenetrable or useless to anyone reading the rules. Which means it is a game so often taught as an oral tradition, which means the game never has to get better at any of this, because it can always count on the community to keep filling in the blanks and pretending the game works.

But it doesn’t work. It keeps falling over. I have a saying that it is always 1978 in RPGs because every day someone realizes D&D sucks and starts iterating from that point, instead of the field actually progressing and adapting. And D&D isn’t going to fix this. Orcs are now trying to be reborn as Mexicans in a way to try to stuff a shaved pig-man Comanche stereotype into a suit that teens want to fuck. That might be a good solution, but I think it is also a Van Helsing solution. Which is to say, they are trying to respond antagonistically to fix something their fanbase hates, without fixing the problem that led here in the first place. And each new reaction only adds more to the problem, and creates even more problems. So it only gets more goofy with each passing year, and more incoherent and more unable to actually do what it promises.

The more popular and important D&D becomes – and it has become a media juggernaut in the last ten years, something beyond all our wildest expectations in the 1980s – the more it needs critical engagement with its tropes and foundations. But D&D cannot and will not do that, because it has always been a nostalgia product. The one time it tried to reinvent itself, in 4th edition, fans reacted as if the game had spit on their mother’s grave. So it remains what it always is: behind the times, clumsy, witless, cloying and driven by a singular goal to to catch the unwary, seduce them into believing that clerics are a sensible, well established fantasy trope and that D&D is more than it appears. That it’s not just a bunch of goofy TV movies, Hammer Horror and freakshows pretending to be cool. And once it has them, D&D can bleed them dry, first of their money, then of their ability to move beyond it. At best we can only react to D&D, which means its shadow still deforms everything. D&D is a vampire, and it’s time we staked it in the heart.