Elements of Fantasy Literature

Except you can look to contemporary non-fantasy works and have a great deal of trouble finding anything comparable outside the works of Joyce. The "twilight of its day" is puerile stuff that attempts to mask it with some cheap characterization and a few references.

Furthermore, he wasn't writing "In old English". He was using a historical basis for language change to create an entirely internally consistent pseudo-grammar just to have one character use it for some stuff he either wrote or was quoted on, just to demonstrate that the forerunner to the sorts of languages spoken in Eriador millennia later had linguistic ancestry.

What distinguishes your statement from saying the epistolary novel genre was the Twilight of its day? Or the Romance (in the literary sense) being the Twilight of its day?

I am talking more about how it was received(popular among its target audience, with a lot vitrol from everyone else) rather the any similarity on the writing.

>I'm making a game for my group that is oriented towards telling all manner of stories in Fantasy literature.

Stories and games are fundamentally different mediums.

You probably want to check out story-games like Burning Wheel or Powered by the Apocalypse. The mechanics of story-games emerged out of similar attempts to structure the rules of RPGs to create an output that's more similar to stuff you would find in literary novels.

There's a focus on these rulesets on meta-mechanics like narrative control (who gets to dictate what happens while the thief is picking the lock) rather than explicit simulation of specific probabilities (ex. rolling the chance the thief picks the lock).

This shifts things more towards the "story" angle than the "game" angle.

True, but that's not really what I'm asking.

I'm trying to make a ruleset with a focus on the fantasy genre in general. I do want to understand how they are told in literature, so that I can figure out how to bring it into a game format myself.

Is it reinventing the wheel? Absolutely. The PbtA games go a different angle to what I'm looking for, and Burning Wheel, I'll be honest, I haven't gotten around to getting myself a copy of that game, so I can't really say much about it.

So right now, I'm learning about fantasy literature in order to farm for ideas and clues of what to look for. That's all this is.

>Tolkien
>mediocre

Butthurt Gurmfag detected

He was a mediocre writer, thought. Very dedicated to the point of autism and very well educated, but a mediocre writer nonetheless.

Then what you're asking is a pretty philosophical question. Where does fantasy literature begin and end? Would you consider Delazny's Lord of Light, which features a far-future human society re-enacting Hindu myth "fantasy", "science fiction", or "folklore"? There's barely any common content threads with something like G.R.R.M.'s Song of Ice and Fire aside from the fact bookstores and publishers find it convenient to put them on the same shelf.

>Mediocre writer
>Creates a corpus of myth that in and of itself has multiple levels of narration just from what you see in the story, nevermind the chain of transmission that goes on from the Red Book to Tolkien insofar as he's a fictional translator, with deliberate inaccuracies meant to show bias by its authors, which you need to work through if you want to determine "what really happened".

He still fails in terms of prose and characterization. Honestly, if wasn't for a bunch of hippies misinterpreting the book, thinking that it was some kind anti-war manifesto, back in the 60s, it wouldn't be half as popular as it today.

You got a point. Fantasy is a very broad category.

Perhaps fantasy as a whole is best defined by whether or not a number of elements in the story are impossible in real life.

I think what's been getting me in a twist was back when I was in college, and I had taken a fiction writing class. In that time, lil' ol' me thought Fiction was a catch-all term for all that didn't really happen, be it fantasy, or just fictive stories based in our world.

I was wrong apparently, because she told me that Fantasy was Genre fiction, and that I should just write Fiction. So for the sake of the class, I wrote Fiction.

At least, that's how I understood her.

So now we go back to my point, what's involved in the Fantasy genre that is different from Fiction as far as how it was written. Assume Fantasy as in the classical definition, as it would define LotR, or Narnia, or the Prydain Chronicles, etc.

Or have I been rused all along?

>doesn't like fantasy
Why are you here?

A storyteller's use of suspense, taken as far as it can go, is a mystery novel. A storyteller's development of fairytale setting description, taken as far as it can go, resembles a fantasy epic. His development of historical setting description would ultimately resemble a historical fiction, of futuristic settings, a sci-fi fiction, of modern settings, a modern comedy or tragedy, and so forth.

All settings have epics, comedies, tragedies. The distinction of fantasy is the fairytale setting, developed as deeply as can be done. It has to be relatable, something too hard to wrap the mind around will weird-out readers. And there must be some element of plausibility for dreamers to latch on to so they can accept the tale. In fairy tales, these were social conventions; in modern fantasy they sometimes show up as historical conventions we accept, such as swordfighting rather than unlimited fireball spellcasting. i hope this helps

I like fantasy, I am just sincere with myself about the general quality of it. There is nothing wrong about with enjoying something bad as long as you are conscious about its quality.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy
helps a lot with your first question.

You answered the second question for yourself, but see my answer to the third question.

Conan the Barbarian because among other things its not fantasy, its sword and sorcery, the central theme of which is that the story is about the character(s), not the supernatural threat to the setting (also something answering question 2).

Read the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Its amazing, and is high fantasy done right (IMO).

How are his prose and characterization shit? I'm curious.

It does help. Thanks for your input!

I think the term used is "Suspending disbelief" in terms of readers accepting the reality within the story, no matter how fantastical.

Now I have another question for you.

Going off of what you said, what would you say is the difference between fantasy, and sword & sorcery?

His prose was more purple than bizantine emperor regalia and his characters generally were bidimensional.

Fiction is just a broad catch all category for all types of stories that are intended to feature invented characters and plots. It is a label by which we signal - "this work is not intended to be a factual reference" - although even this distinction gets fuzzy once we start talking historical novels.

All genres are ultimately arbitrary assignments; their existence has more to do with the convenience and ease of marketing. A book that gets labeled "fantasy" by a publisher adopts a different marketing strategy. Back when Atwood wrote Oryx and Crake, there was an enormous hullaboo she made claiming in interviews that it wasn't "science fiction" and that it should be put in the science fiction sections (her idea was that since it didn't involve space travel and was about a "plausible" future, of course it couldn't be science fiction).

If you're a cynic this is because genre fiction isn't "respectable" and not something for everyone. The recent surge in the popularity of fantasy works has seen a reversal of this trend - now Harry Potter books get moved from the YA shelving to the fantasy shelving, and ASoIaF gets moved from the regular fiction shelves to the fantasy shelves.

So there isn't any specific way of writing fiction that is different from others aside from the content written within it in order for booksellers to better categorize the works.

That's what I originally thought, but I guess said writing professor didn't want me going off of the deep end in what I write about.

>(Since D&D is based around dungeoneering),

Is it really though?

"Dungeoneering" isn't really anything beyond what D&D tries to define it to be, and that's sort of where the definition has grown to be so broad as to be downright silly.

To try and clarify the point, what is a "dungeon"? According to D&D, it can be anything from an actual place you're supposed to hold prisoners, to a cave, to a castle, to an open forest, even just the basement of an inn. There are even "dungeons" that are literally just free-falling through air towards floating rock islands in a plane with subjective gravity.

The idea of "dungeoncrawling" in the basement of some wizard's tower is somewhat archaic, and hasn't really been the model for games for quite a few decades, if it ever really was. In fact, the literature that you're hoping to use for inspiration for your games are likely the exact books that Gygax recommended new players to read to get a sense for how adventures should unfold, which included both Tolkien and Howard among many others.

If you're looking for intrique, solving mysteries, and battles on an epic scale, those have been a part of D&D since Gygax's first campaign.

True, but in terms of the design of D&D, we can see where the game expanded its themes, and where (according to the RAW) it gives you the means to handwave it.

The Diplomacy skill has been written to cut the negotiation game down to a dice roll, the Survival skill as well is just a dice roll rather than taking the pains to run out in the woods and find food and other things you need.

On the other hand, combat is not something you get over with in one dice roll. You have weapon damage, hitpoints, crazy maneuvers, and of course using the environment to get an advantage.

Then of course we have the pivotal mechanic in D&D; Resource Management. The farther you go, the more it will cost you.

But you're right, all of those things have been part of D&D since the early days of its inception, but the way the game is designed is such that it expanded only on a few themes, all of which tie to dungeoneering.

What I'm getting at, is that I want to expand more upon intrigue than what was written in the official books. I want to do the same with mystery, horror, and others. You're right, there are official splats in 3.5 (Heroes of Horror off the top of my head) that expand on other themes, and the infamous Skill Challenge in 4E, but all of those things don't quite touch the other aspects of fantasy quite like they did with combat, and working within the classical dungeon crawl.

They aren't entirely different, sword and sorcery is a subcategory of fantasy.
I'll let someone more knowledgeable then my try to define it, though.

When GM'ing a pencil-and-paper roleplaying game, or another sort of interactive game, you can get a feel for what your group likes in a way that you cannot when writing a novel.

I have a player whose anxiety does not allow her to enjoy intrigue or suspense, she panics and derails the game. So if she's in, I tell a different story with the same ideas, and don't build suspense or intrigue. Instead, I'll try making it more of a puzzle, and give the players more opportunities to use their lateral thinking and character sheet skills. If that doesn't thrill them, I'll try something else, with winding up in a farcical situation being the last humorous resort.

So if you're writing for a game, you can explore many different avenues on the same premise. Just because the story is fantasy does not mean it has no suspense or other good elements, it should have something, because setting alone is boring.

I also want to add that if something has been done before, don't fret, because that's good for your writing. You just mention that thing as if it were a matter of everyday that the reader is familiar with, and build on it. This principle of "Yes, And" is best known as the basis for improv comedy storytelling. It's important because if you build too many unheard of elements into your setting then people will need a four year degree to understand what you're talking about.

>I have no idea what I'm talking about, the post.

Protip: It's spelled "Byzantine", with a y. And if you think say, Frodo is a bidimensional character, you haven't been reading the same book the rest of us have. A character who feels unreasoning guilt over a failing a task that he knew from the start was beyond him is more than just the simple caricature that you seem to draw of Tolkien's characters.

A character feeling guilty over his own weaknesses doesn't make him three dimensional and Tolkien characters being flat is widely accepted even among his fanboys. While it is reddit, reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/216lje/is_tolkiens_prose_bad/ have straight foward commentary on Tolkien issues, even if is apologetic about them.

*have some pretty straightforward

>The Diplomacy skill has been written to cut the negotiation game down to a dice roll,

But there's also bluff/deception, intimidation, sense motive, the various knowledges, and various spells and abilities that play important parts in negotiation. This is, of course, ignoring expanded rules that can be found outside of the corebooks, alongside DM fiat.

>the Survival skill as well is just a dice roll rather than taking the pains to run out in the woods and find food and other things you need.

Similarly, there's the climb/athletics, search/investigate, knowledge(nature), a vast array of spells and abilities, and so on and so forth. You can manage a run into the woods as complex or as simple as you feel is appropriate, in the same way where an author might devote an entire chapter to gathering herbs in a forest or a single throwaway sentence.

>Then of course we have the pivotal mechanic in D&D; Resource Management. The farther you go, the more it will cost you.

Likewise, resource management only matters if you want it to matter. The latest two editions of D&D in particular allow DM's to scale how much the players need to stretch their resources fairly well, between never worrying to endless dread.

It's also good that you mentioned Heroes of Horror, because another book in the that line was the Heroes of Battle, a direct answer to the last point about battles on an epic scale.

But, I do understand that you want to branch out and try out ideas not tied to D&D, and that's wonderful. But, I hope you can recognize that D&D has never really been tied to the dungeon crawl, even all the way back to when the original game was first published.

>A character feeling guilty over his own weaknesses doesn't make him three dimensional and Tolkien characters being flat is widely accepted even among his fanboys.

Next up, Achilles isn't a complicated figure, and the Iliad is just about Greek guys killing each other

>Reddit
>Literary authority.

I'll see your link and raise you a book. Meet a real Tolkien fanboy.

amazon.com/J-R-R-Tolkien-Century-Tom-Shippey/dp/0618257594

Who will happily spend hundreds of pages about how you don't get it.

>Who will happily spend hundreds of pages about how you don't get it.
I get it, though. Tolkien wanted to create a complex mythology, and he did it. It just doesn't make his books good, however, and yes, you just used "you don't get it" as a fucking argument. Also being influential doesn't make it good either and guilty over weakness doesn't make a character complex, because it is just that, a trait, and a simple trait doesn't make a character complex.

Forgot to, but Tolkien also this huge boner over language, and created a bunch of languages and then a world to shove them into.

And you're right that D&D is not a one trick pony. I myself find that I can do a lot more with the D&D editions than just run the classic dungeon crawl.

But even with as you say with the negotiations, and the wilderness exploration; I guess where I'm coming from is the lack of granularity that comes with that, as much as they did with Combat, and the expenditure of resources (For example, Hitpoints are a resource for how much punishment you can take. Spells are also a resource for how many spells you can cast in a day before resting, and so forth)

But at the same time, the beauty of the lack of granularity in moments like being social and exploring the wilderness are left to the interpretation of the game group.

But the fact remains that there is little to the official mechanics of those things aside from what the skill says you can do with it; such that by the rules as written, you can still resolve those challenges by the roll of the dice, rather than nick away the process of doing so like they did with Combat and dungeon design.

That's the only reason I say D&D is built around dungeoneering; despite a lot of people (including me) wanting to do something other than that a lot of the time.

Like you said, it gives lots of room for other things, but does little else than touch upon it, and tell you how to resolve it when it comes up.

*also had

>I get it, though.

Do you? Do you really? You've made an unsubstantiated claim that his characters are "bidimensional". You've yet to provide a criteria or an example of said bidimensional character, so of course I"m a bit stumbling around in the dark for stuff to disprove you, but the fact that you have a character named Frodo (you do recognize double-pun in that name, I trust?) who displays actually a fairly complicated set of guilt trips and half-motivations for something that he wants to do and yet doesn't feel capable of doing (with some justification) and then also feels bad for a failure of his home to recognize his heroism does not strike me as particularly simplistic.

In fact, you've yet to substantiate any of your arguments at all. You started off with , as far as I can tell, and made 3 claims, none of which you've backed up one iota except to site to a reddit argument:

1) He "fails in terms of prose" (whatever that means, some implication about purple prose, again, not really defined)
2) He fails in terms of characterization (implication of shallow characters)
3) It was only popular because of hippies misinterpreting his book as an anti-war manifesto, which is not relevant to discussions of literary merit and can therefore be discarded.

I will just flat out quote the reddit comment because I am lazy and him have alrealy said it all:
>2. Tolkien’s anachronistic, old-fashioned, outdated prose
So far, among the twenty-one comments found here, we repeatedly come across the argument that Tolkien’s prose is old-fashioned, anachronistic or outdated. This is true and easily observable even among casual readers. Like the other respondents, I also more or less like this aspect of Tolkien’s prose. However, the issue is not this simple.
It is not that Tolkien wrote in this way and that makes it well-suited for the setting of Middle Earth. Rather it’s a question of whether he succeeded at doing a good job of it. When people criticize Tolkien’s prose for being bad, it isn’t because it’s anachronistic, but because it’s often staid, dull and inefficiently worded.
Furthermore, the fact that his prose essentially imitates earlier models makes his work seem like a pastiche, which in higher literature is mostly reserved for comic effect as it’s perceived as being superficial and derivative—both of which are perceived as weaknesses.
Also, Tolkien could’ve written anachronistically while maintaining respect to the speed at which ideas are developed. He could also have used aspect, syntax, tense and voice that are considered inventive and strike modern readers as being not only anachronistic, but also inventive and fresh. However, Tolkien only manages to write prose that strikes us as anachronistic without seeming particularly inventive or fresh. Literary folks (academics, writers of literary fiction, critics at e.g. The New Yorker, The Paris Review or London Review of Books) expect that “good” prose is inventive and fresh.
(cont.)

3. Stencils, templates and romantic clichés
Tolkien’s story structures do include inventiveness, but overall he’s borrowed the structures from medieval literature, following them like stencils. This literature had already become cliché in the Middle Ages.
Academics, literary authors and people who read a lot are more or less tired of these templates. They want new structures.
“Good” writers, allegedly, create new structures or at least create a new twist on them. Tolkien more or less creates a new setting with constructed languages and inserts timeworn, cliché plots to make the characters do things.
Structurally let’s look at what is generally considered Tolkien’s greatest work: The Lord of the Rings. The book’s weaknesses include deficient character development, terrible pacing, a sagging middle and so on.
Side note: the popularity of Tolkien’s stories sometimes irritates literary types because although they are thanklessly straining to reinvent the norms of literature, Tolkien proves that people have a deep need of classic, timeworn stories.
Good vs. evil
One of the defining characteristics that “we” consider good writing today is moral ambiguity: all main characters’ actions are supposed to be psychologically complex. In Tolkien, the majority of the main characters are psychologically plain. Tolkien’s depiction of human agency is primitive.
Even Tolkien’s fans often notice this, at least dimly in respect to how Tolkien portrays good and evil. Typically, the evil forces have no psychological complexity and are simply foul beasts. Modern readers with more literary experience find this implausible as it provides very little character depth and little room for greater moral analysis. In the Iron Age this would be considered all right, but today this type of moral polarization is limited to children’s literature, genre fiction and theology.

5. Nothing’s at stake
Yes, entire civilizations disappear in Tolkien’s works (in particular in The Silmarillion), but the characters in focus are almost always essentially immortal.
Over and over we watch the immortal superman heroes defeat evil. More experienced readers may enjoy this kind of tale, but they also want something more than to read about white alpha males going around kicking ass and getting babes. More experienced readers find this cliché and feel that narrative tension is missing—because you know all the characters Tolkien depicts as being morally righteous are going to survive anything.
Moreover, things like recurrent supernatural intervention, illogical plot developments, illogical solutions to dilemmas, deus ex machina, and so on, are all examples of things commonly found in Tolkien’s prose. Critics with a more acute literary sensibility consider this weak writing.
That is, these things make it feel like nothing’s at stake, because the author can bail anyone out at any time. In Tolkien: whatever the reader at first thinks is at stake may be illogically solved if the writer realizes that the stakes are too high for the heroes.
More demanding readers want everything from beginning to end to be logical. They expect that the story and the plot (if there is one) are suited to the whole. They expect that the total structure of the work is integrated and is not tampered with by an author that was too lazy to find an appropriate solution to the story and rewrite when needed.

6. Character development
Generally Tolkien’s characters are psychologically primitive. Now, this is in part a byproduct of his anachronistic style, but modern readers demand characters with more psychological and emotional complexity than primitive barbarians from the Dark Ages who are just entering the basic stages of what we would consider subjectivity.
So, Tolkien all too often doesn’t follow the existential needs of the characters themselves, letting them develop freely. Instead he subordinates them to their fantastic environments and antiquated plot structures. For that reason, Tolkien doesn’t live up to the expectations of narrative integrity found in “good” literature.
tl;dr OP’s question is in part about aesthetics and in part about the expectations of expert readers. Beauty/great are based on subjectivity, but can be broadened with objective criticism. Expert readers likely find that Tolkien’s prose and characters are often dull and cliché, despite his inventive settings.

To further add to all of that, the redditor noted that basically everyone in the academy that actually promotes Tolkien are the ones that deal with medieval literature ie the one that Tolkien apes his style from.

* and which the guy that wrote the book hails from.

I think you're looking at the scale a little wrong.

You are doing something like putting D&D's negotiation rules on one side of the scale, and D&D's combat rules on the other. I think what you should be comparing is D&D's negotiation rules to the negotiation rules of other systems, which tend to be fairly comparable.

D&D has a lot of rules concerning combat and "dungeon" exploration, but that's in part because it is quite a large game, even in its lighter incarnations. Even if you threw out all those combat/exploration rules and decided to treat combat as something to be resolved in a single roll, or even entire dungeons reduced to a coin flip, you would still be left with an enormous amount of material to work with. It's no secret that D&D does have a heavy focus on combat as well as adventurous exploration, but we're also talking about a game that included tables and charts for things like what kind of harlot you might encounter.

I think part of your hangup may simply be that you don't recognize the design philosophy behind wanting to keep rules regarding things like negotiations as lean as can be feasibly done. It's largely in the spirit of keeping people within the scene, and intrusive mechanics tend to take away more than they add. It sounds like you seem to want more than what the D&D rules already provide, but even just using all that can be found in the core rulebooks may be somewhat overwhelming when you actually stop and consider them all. D&D does far more than simply touch upon what exists beyond the dungeon, including dedicating entire books to those ideas.

I'd think a main component of fantasy literature that's appealing to some people is the dumping into an unfamiliar place and time that makes you wonder what's happening where. Good fantasy maintains that sense of wonderment, that the world isn't fully explored or explained, and something's may be just downright legend from the protagonists point of view.

Take Tolkien for instance, we hear about Umbar and Rhûn and all these places that we never get to see. We see people from these places but the places themselves remain a mystery to us. That peaks our curiosity and leaves us wanting more.

>One of the defining characteristics that “we” consider good writing today is moral ambiguity: all main characters’ actions are supposed to be psychologically complex.

This is such a dishonest statement, I'm actually gagging slightly.

Everything from the projected "we" to the juvenile nature of putting moral ambiguity on a pedestal, it reeks of someone who is trying to claim intellectual depth while simply presenting their personal tastes as pretentiously as possible.

A fine argument. Alright, I'll ponder on that and we'll see what comes of it in the future.

Well, he is excusing Tolkien in every turn, however moral complexity(or at least the bad guys actually having a reason to be bad) are widely regarded as better than bad guy does bad things because he is bad.

>Tolkien’s story structures do include inventiveness, but overall he’s borrowed the structures from medieval literature, following them like stencils. This literature had already become cliché in the Middle Ages.

Is this nigga serious? The moral of the One Ring stands in stark subversion to medieval cliches about rulership while, of course, referencing the Ring of Gyges.

>Literary folks (academics, writers of literary fiction, critics at e.g. The New Yorker, The Paris Review or London Review of Books) expect that “good” prose is inventive and fresh.

The same people that think Scalzi is the equal of Herbert, mind you.

>Typically, the evil forces have no psychological complexity and are simply foul beasts. Modern readers with more literary experience find this implausible as it provides very little character depth and little room for greater moral analysis. In the Iron Age this would be considered all right, but today this type of moral polarization is limited to children’s literature, genre fiction and theology.

This is nigga is straight-up retarded because he ignores the theme of "evil as corrupted good" which permeates Tolkien's depictions, nor does it touch on Frodo's internal conflict, or Gollum as a character.

>Generally Tolkien’s characters are psychologically primitive. Now, this is in part a byproduct of his anachronistic style, but modern readers demand characters with more psychological and emotional complexity than primitive barbarians from the Dark Ages who are just entering the basic stages of what we would consider subjectivity.

Unsubstantiated, pretentiously-presented, and drearily mainstream opinions. As expected of reddit.

I think the failings come largely in failing to grasp the scope and scale of what is going on.

Being evil [because we are hungry] is hardly as exciting as being evil [because hatred and malice courses through our us and compels us to view the entire world as our rightful dominion]. The former can be solved with food. The latter represents an irreconcilable ideology that would force even those who love peace to war.

This is a gross simplification, but I'm just trying to illustrate a point, and that preferences do play a role.

So now you've shifted from your unsubstantiated argument to some redditor's unsubstantiated argument?

>Tolkien’s story structures do include inventiveness, but overall he’s borrowed the structures from medieval literature, following them like stencils. This literature had already become cliché in the Middle Ages.

I don't remember any Middle Ages literature which feature the shelled narrations that Tolkien is so fond of, such as how we get the entirety of Aragorn's trip through the White Mountains, the battle of Pelargir, and the race to Minas Tirith long after the fact and related to by seperate narrators. I don't recall a sliding scale of the supernatural involvement that is inversely proportional to the number of witnesses around, going from Gandalf's epic 8 day battle with the Balrog when there are no inconvienent witnesses and at stark contrast to how he had his contest in Moria observed by the rest of the fellowship, to how the number or orcs Sauron employs increases the further away you get from Minas Tirith. And I certainly don't know of any other work which would deliberately include "narrational errors" brought in by the drift of numerous authors writing this fictive mythology.

>Also, Tolkien could’ve written anachronistically while maintaining respect to the speed at which ideas are developed. He could also have used aspect, syntax, tense and voice that are considered inventive and strike modern readers as being not only anachronistic, but also inventive and fresh. However, Tolkien only manages to write prose that strikes us as anachronistic without seeming particularly inventive or fresh.

Except he does this. I'm not aware of a single other work of a contemporary period that would, for instance, include a poem written in a completely constructed language and then translate it back into English. Hell, he invented words out of the cloth and added them to the English language, I don't know how you can get much fresher than that.

(only going to quote this top one as I respond to the whole bunch, but this is a long string of posts)

>It is not that Tolkien wrote in this way and that makes it well-suited for the setting of Middle Earth. Rather it’s a question of whether he succeeded at doing a good job of it. When people criticize Tolkien’s prose for being bad, it isn’t because it’s anachronistic, but because it’s often staid, dull and inefficiently worded.

Let's take a line from Isildur to rebut that little claim.

>This I will have as weregild for my father, and my brother.

A dozen words, a mere fifteen syllables. But it tells us that Isildur speaks a very different language than the one Elrond is repeating his words in, given the AS style word order (This I will have as opposed to I will have this), it tells us that for all their material advancement, the Numenoreans in exile observe a pay for the private crimes you commit to others system as opposed to a notion of universal justice, and raises the possibility that they are NOT in fact as advanced as advertised, and are simply a different group of "barbarians", only these on the side of the people writing the "histories". It tells us that there is a value ascribed to rings and jewelry, and of course raises ambiguity about Isildur's role in that final fight, as you generally in most Germanic systems of private law, don't take weregilds for actions you yourself partook in.

This, to you, is inefficient use of words?

>I don't know how you can get much fresher than that.

Challenge accepted.
youtu.be/xv3vG-TVhaY

(Crud, I accidentally deleted the bulk of my long posts, a moment to reconstruct it)

>One of the defining characteristics that “we” consider good writing today is moral ambiguity: all main characters’ actions are supposed to be psychologically complex. In Tolkien, the majority of the main characters are psychologically plain. Tolkien’s depiction of human agency is primitive.

Most of Tolkien's characters ARE psychologically complex, I don't know how you get around that. Look at how you have the contrasting encounter of a split fellowship with Eomer and Faramir, who each have to deal with their duty on one hand to detain strangers, and their conscience and perceptions on the other to do what is right in this individual instance, even if it would get them in trouble. You've got Sam's rejection of universal morality, instead substituting a quid pro quo arrangement as to how people deal with Frodo, leading to some minor ills with the aforementioned Faramir, and some major ones where Gollum is concerned. You have Boromir's conflicted attitude towards Aragorn as his rightful king but also his deposer and all around more skilled fighter and outdoorsman.

These are not "primitive" depictions of human agency. And that's before you get to the really weird psychology of someone like Galadriel, whose comments about giving the ring back, remaining galadriel, and diminishing, should pretty clearly prove that something significant is going on, even if you don't get the full story without more background material not included in LoTR itself.

>Typically, the evil forces have no psychological complexity and are simply foul beasts

This is simply wrong. Most of Tolkien's evil forces aren't characterized; we never come face to face with Sauron, and we never have a conversation with a ringwraith, but the ones we do see do have psychological complexity.

Hell, the Orcs, the quintessential "evil race", have enough psychological complexity to form a moral condemnation of the supposed cowardly trick of abandoning a comrade to Shelob, even if they either don't appreciate or don't care about the hypocrisy as to how they do the same to poor Ufthak.

Saruman's fall comes out of moral expedience, and he certainly has motivations outside the animal, caring quite a bit as to how he's perceived by those around him, even rejecting his chance at redemption because it would mean admitting that Gandalf was right and he was wrong, something that he clearly can't stomach. Does that sound like an unthinking beast to you?

Gollum's an addict, to be sure, but he can recognize a kindred spirit in Frodo who has and is going through the same temptations that he did, as opposed to Sam who didn't, which is why he reacts so negatively to Sam's suspicions. Sam never had the Ring, he Doesn't Get it.

Hell the primary story structure isn't even the War of the Ring, it's the development of the hobbits as personages of importance, and that would make the closest villain to home Ted Sandyman, the greedy lazy miller. Is he a mindless beast?

>Yes, entire civilizations disappear in Tolkien’s works (in particular in The Silmarillion), but the characters in focus are almost always essentially immortal.

7 of the 9 fellowship members are mortal.

>Over and over we watch the immortal superman heroes defeat evil.

And over and over again we see them becoming wrecks in the process, especially the chief hero Frodo. And even the lesser heroes who do go on to more conventional acclaim and accord often seem to can't actually talk about their experiences, especially the 4 central hobbits.

>because you know all the characters Tolkien depicts as being morally righteous are going to survive anything.

Like Theoden!

>Moreover, things like recurrent supernatural intervention, illogical plot developments, illogical solutions to dilemmas, deus ex machina, and so on, are all examples of things commonly found in Tolkien’s prose.

I can't think of a single example of any of them; with the caveat that I'm defining supernatural intervention as outside the established rules of magical stuff that the fantasy setting itself constructed. I wouldn't consider, for instance, Gandalf's lighting of the wood at Caradhras "supernatural intervention" by this standard, even though it would be if it were a more "realistic" fictional work. Can you think of any?

>Generally Tolkien’s characters are psychologically primitive.

Again, I'm not actually seeing an example.

>So, Tolkien all too often doesn’t follow the existential needs of the characters themselves, letting them develop freely.

When does this happen?

tl;dr, he makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims. Citing to him just repeats unsubstantiated claims, except now out of the pen of an anonymous redditor.

I'm bumping this once

Fantasy RPGs must be adventurer friendly

This means the world is crawling with seemingly never ending monster spawn, ruins even in places where they don't make sense yet with freshly delivered treasures and creatures which somehow haven't starved or suffocated, sprawling underground dungeons built everywhere because fuck you instead of a shitty little hole meant for ransoming enemy knights, multiple actively malevolent deities, magic existing as casually as gravity without changing the entire course of history, mighty kingdoms and empires that apparently allow bandits & pirates to block trade routes for months in spite of the fact that bandits & pirates NEED busy trade routes to make money, dynasties which last thousands of years, blatantly real gods, actual adventurer guilds, thieves guilds, assasin guilds, ethnic nation states, full biological gender equality, and non human races walking about

Because if you were tossed into a fantasy novel as anyone but the MCs it would be hella boring

Fantasy literature can afford to be more nuanced

Well, Tolkien work was pretty desliked when it first hit the shelfs, and even friends from his own circle, such as Hugo Dyson, deslike it.