Old Fairy Tale Style

And an on-topic user, my thread lives.

And yes, that's true! Fantasy RPGs have seemingly taken up a standard, and very little successful deviation is found. Fairy tales in general (the original foundation of the idea of fantasy) provide an interesting place to flesh out. I especially enjoy old Russian hero stories and folktales, which bring in many interesting elements and ideas into a more classic heroic tale.

mandatory:

youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY

I do lots of fairy-tale inspired stuff. Talking animals, cruel witches, curses and faries. It's a bit darker then Disney stuff, but I don't try to go full Brother's Grim. You don't need to shock and horrify.

You know, the actual books were not too bad.
Absolutely true. And I'm referring to the point directly between modern fairy tales and the Brothers. Which you seem to have hit.

BTW, for those interested, this thread seems to have a similar theme, but more specific.

i remember an old book from France called The Lilac Garden....

that was creepy shit, and would make for a very goth fairy tale RPG....

shall i see if the net even has pictures?

Go ahead, user.

I, as OP, am trying to pull in as much various info as possible. There is a general theme of the time between the Grim Brothers and today, but the old horror tales are the root and deserve a place in this discussion.

All right, this is OP signing off for the night.

We're experiencing a lull in content, but in return there has been no bait.

Keep it up, folks. I like it when Veeky Forums relaxes and lets ideas flow smoothly.

Who knows, we might even get a mod or an admin to stop by, since this thread is so quiet.

to be honest, google makes me think it's not called Lilac Garden....

it was an old-ass book, likely 1920's or so.

it had INSANELY detailed and very dark landscapes, very surreal.

i remember a hero called 'Fair Mineau" or something.

it was best quality shit....

....

come to think of it
it was 1981-ish when i last saw that book.....

i think i was 4.

i know someone who has it.
it's some deep shit, have fun finding a record....

The are a few rpgs and tabletop games that go for such an art style. They're usually European, often get praised for their art, rarely sell well, and often don't get translated into English.

...You have issues man.

I can only think of two things that would fit:

Golden Sky Stories and Ryuutama

GSS is about forest animals who can take human forms and help people out. Watch the old MLP show to see how that can get real.dark, real fast.

Ryuutama is Oregon Trail, The RPG, but with a twist. The GM gets to self-insert with a dragon who changes the story to their whim. You could have one who keeps sending the players to the strange monster villages that range from the deadly Grimm ones where you shouldn't make a deal with them all the way to making a turn towards a Mouse village with plenty of decent folk.

nice thread. will monitor.

i'll see ya in the morning....

...

...

Read the brothers grimm books. They were the first who put german fairy tales into bookform. There should be an english translation somewhere. I think they should give good surplus material.

Also to contribute something. There is an fairy tale telling the story of an basilict stuck in a well. It kills the locals when they get water. Its my all time favorite because there are two variants how its end. First the hero climbs down with an mirror and drives the basilict to suicide because after it sees how ugly it is. In the other variant the hero gets mauled and locals just filling the well with stones up and calling it a day.

Russian fairy tales are stupid. Russian kids fairy tales are even worse. Can you imagine a whole fairy tail which theme is about "you can't run from your desteny forever"? Read fucking Kolobok.

I don't remember Snuffkin being this tall.

He just closer to the window, so to say.

>So before the age of Disney, fairy tales used to be more whimsical, and had a more different art style. These sorts of animated fairy tales were usually more close to the source material.

Which cartoons from the 1910s are you talking about, OP?

I got a big book of Grimm's Fairy Tales as a kid, and one thing I'm sort of surprised about is that there's no real sense of causation or morals as I had come to expect. again that might come from having watched the disnified versions when I was younger.

Basically shit gets mad arbitrary.

Example that springs to mind is Snow White and Rose Red.

Two sisters who lived with their mom, live the happiest life they ever could for 5 pages straight, in rediculous detail. A bear comes in, and instead of eating them, the mom invites him inside and the two girls make a new friend.

Seems like a set up for "Don't Judge a Book By It's Cover" kind of story right? It keeps going.

The girls meet a dwarf, who had his beard stuck in some bushes. He's a mean ornery bastard, and screams for help. They snip his beard a little to get him out, tells them to slag off, and then runs off. This happens again with his fishing line, and again with some boulder.

Each time he's a little shit, tells them to piss off. Is this meant to be "Help people out even if they're dicks?"

No. The bear shows up at the end, the dwarf is cleaved in half, and the bear turns out to be a prince covered in gold. And he and his equally handsome prince brother show up and marry the two girls. And they live happily ever after.

Again, weird arbitrary endings.

Theres other stories that get equally wierd. Such as the story about the man who wins magic "make people dance themselves to death" powers from a dwarf and torments a Jew, a Tavern, and eventually an entire court of law. And said guy, lives happily ever after.

Golden Sky Stories is comfy as fuck. Reminds me of that manga about the cute little spirits who live at a Shinto shrine and spend the summer playing with human children.

Also, take a look at this, this is a work by two scholars who attempted to analyze fairly tales down to indvidual, frequently used motifs and grouped and catalogized these by type, so it ca ne use as a sort of make-your-own-fairy-tale kit for a game. Also, it is very interesting reading by itself, I think. catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001276245

Jews, drunks, and oppressive courts denying a man with magic powers his right to make drunks and Jews kill themselves all get btfo by the hero
He got the good end he deserved.

>And we don't see that anymore. I'm not asking for those to come back (this would be on /co/ in that case). However, would such styles of stories work for RPGs?
Yes.

You do however need to prepare your players for "ROLL NOW OR DIE HORRIBLY!" endings, because that's something that's quite common in fairy tales.

Older fairytales have a morality built into the shit gets mad arbitrary.

This is typically preceded by the main character failing to do a certain duty which is expected from society.

The morality is based on the world punishing you for stepping out of line more or less.

It's on Amazon bro. I found it in both English and French.

I'm probably "that guy" in this regard, or a grognar or whatever, but as a kid I figured out that a lot of fairytales were very twisted (I remember one where a smart guy convinced a dumb guy to kill his own mother and go around town with her corpse yelling "old broad for sale!" in hopes of getting rich) and it kind of disgusted me. As I got older I could appreciate the brutality of those old fairy tales. They were cautionary tales, showing (usually younger) audiences what to or what not to do and what to be careful of, lest something horrible happens to you. Disney ruined quite a few of those fairytales by overshadowing with a sterile, 'family friendly' product.

The best example of this may be the Little Mermaid. In the Disney version a dumb teenage mermaid falls in love with a guy she doesn't even know and "true love" conquers all. In the Hans Christian Anderson version the mermaid gets the same deal as in the Disney version (you can walk on land to meet the man you love, but you lose your voice), she ends up saving the prince from certain death, can't speak up to tell him the truth and he falls in love with another woman. They get married and the heartbroken mermaid, now trapped away from the world she knew and in a foreign world without the one person she sacrificed everything for, killed herself.

What does the Disney version teach children: a blatant lie about how 'twue wuv' conquers all.
What does Anderson's version teach us? Don't blindly chase after a man (or a woman) you find attractive, lest you make a fatal mistake.

Which do you think is the more valuable lesson to teach a child?
>B-But children can't be confronted with the fact that people kill themselves!
How sheltered do we want to raise our children? We shouldn't be raising them on porn, South Park and gore videos, but let's not shelter them into a fantasy world where everything is alright. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that's something we must accept.

*grognard
It's late.