The ghosts of Jack Chick, Gary Gygax, J.R.R Tolkien, and C...

>your game

Oh I didn't say mine, Tolkien is still left.

No one other than you and Gygax have experience running a game, you could try to teach Tolkien how to GM, Gygax would probably help you as he would be thrilled to play in a game run by Tolkien

Gygax would be a better DM than Tolkien IMO.

>Gygax would probably help you as he would be thrilled to play in a game run by Tolkien
THIS ISN'T GYGAX'S GHOST AT ALL! I'VE BEEN TRICKED! THESE SPIRITS ARE IMPERSONATORS!

I thought Gygax liked Tolkien?

grognardia.blogspot.co.nz/2010/01/gygax-on-tolkien-again.html

I feel we need a fifth person, since in my opinion the ideal is 1 DM and 4-5 PCs.

I nominate Robert E Howard. And if there's room for a fifth person, H.P. Lovecraft.

In fact Howard and Lovecraft should both definitely be in this, because the two are best friends and bro'ing it up the whole time.

I mean, Lewis and Tolkien were friends too, but the difference I think is that Lewis and Tolkien will spend a lot of time on their characters and worldbuilding and philosophizing and getting really into the world...while meanwhile Howard and Lovecraft are cracking open still more beer.

The mysterious forces hear your plea, and the ghosts of Rober E Howard and H.P. Love craft join you at the table

>playing with Gary Gygax, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Jack Chick, HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard
>not playing with Dave Arneson, MAR Barker, TH White, Charles Chiniquy, CL Moore and Henry Kuttner
lol get fucked u fuckin plebs

I stand corrected, Lewis would support Tolkien as GM, Gary would be more agreeable if he has a larger hand in teaching Tolkien to GM though

I picked these people because I find the idea of everyone arguing over religion interesting

How triggered would he be if I asked to play in Forgotten Realms?

I mean personally speaking I prefer Greyhawk, but I feel like Tolkien and Lewis would prefer FR because they would like High Fantasy better than Swords and Sorcerey.

Maybe of we got Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft in this game then we'd have a real party going.

>Not playing a solo game with Max Stirner
>Not realizing you were the spook all along

Have you ever played an IRL game where everyone was arguing over religion?

Crackin open a boy with the cold ones.

They both play vampires.

If my goal was fun, why is jack chick involved? I am more interested with how everyone interacts and what different people would do in the situation

Don't make Stirner jokes if you can't be bothered to read him. How did this meme even spread outside of Veeky Forums

Gygax runs AD&D or OD&D Greyhawk.
Tolkien plays a fighter.
Chick plays a cleric.
Lewis plays a paladin.

Tolkien gets frustrated that the game is just lethal dungeon crawling and is offended that hobbits and orcs are in the game.

Lewis brings up alignment and gods too often, but enjoys the crazy monsters.

Chick eventually learns to enjoy the game, as long as he gets to destroy undead and heretics.

I assume via /pol/

Tolkien and Lewis probably prefer high fantasy as in epic conflict and good vs evil but last I checked most of there stuff was fairly low magic, I don't think they would like forgotten realms

Most people think it's something to do with fascism and degeneracy now.

>Gary is DMing unless you can persuade him otherwise
good, as long as it isn't Tolkien

god his setting is shit

This. Tolkien could build one Hell of a setting but a game run by him world be too slow.

...

>"I say Gary, I'm sure this Iuz fellow you wrote was just ripped directly from my Sauron."

I try to convince Jack Chick to DM a game of Dark Heresy.

Pretty sure Iuz is the offspring of the individual who can literally be abbreviated as BBEG BBC Big Bad Evil Graz'zt's Big Black Cock and is the literal inbred spawn of fucking Nyralathotep fucking a proxy of his own mother to boot, which is why he has the extra digits, and whose birth alongside other horrifying siblings made Psuedonatural creatures possible in the cosmology

>>not playing with literally who, literally who, literally who, literally who, literally who, and literally who

>BBEG
ugh

> ugh
BBEG

Those are all parallels to the first ones though ;^)

>blaming Graz'zt when Iggwilv essentially raped him in the first place

Okay, so having established that I can play with Howard and Lovecraft as well upthread, I get to work.

I'll be DM'ing - Gygax is too damn lethal and arbitrary for me to want to let run the game. And besides, he spent so much time DM'ing in life I'm sure he'd love to play (the original Forever DM)

The game is going to be 5e D&D with Renaissance firearms and technology available, and in a Renaissance/Age of Exploration type world, as I believe that removes everyone from their nominal comfort zones, which is good. I will additionally allow the Death domain cleric and Oathbreaker paladin from the DMG, as well as the subclasses from the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. Core races are the classic seven: Human, Elf, Half-elf, Halfling, Dwarf, Gnome, Half-orc, as well as all subraces of those.

The game will start in not!Spain. The New World has been discovered but is still overwhelmingly unexplored (and a sizable number of people still think it's not!India). Not!Spain has settled some islands but has yet to do any serious exploration of the interior - but there's rumors of mountains of gold, horrifying monsters, rare herbs and spices, pagan natives, etc.

As for class predictions...
- Jack Chick: Fighter (champion) and grumbles the entire time about being forced into this. Starts getting into it when the raw damage output of being a champion starts kicking in.
- Gygax: Wizard (not sure what school), of course. Probably a new iteration of Mordenkainen.
- Tolkien: Cleric (light domain)
- Lewis: Paladin (devotion). Between Tolkien and Lewis there's a lot of world-building about not!Europe done.
- Howard: Rogue (swashbuckler), to everyone's surprise but his own. However with the swashbuckler kit available, he couldn't say no. He plays a piratical sort of character
- Lovecraft: No force on this or any other Earth could prevent him from rolling up a Warlock (Great Old One). He revels in every single stereotype about his own work that he can think of.

>implying first thing I would do woudln't be asking tolkien to be the GM and the game to be The One Ring
gygax can suck my balls, dungeon crawling is fucking boring and games where combat takes more than 10% of session time are shit.

Also seeing Tolkien arguing with Gygax over concepts of mercy and justice would be amusing I wonder how fast would gary's character acumulate Shadow Points in TOR. I guess very fast.

Tolkien would most likely play a martial character who actually hates war and killing, but there are people to protect so someone must take the burden.

If Tolkien's game would be "slower" than Gary's would entirely depend on wheter you consider time spent on wandering through dungeons and killing shit as progressing the game forward in any way. I personally do not.

>dungeon crawling is fucking boring and games where combat takes more than 10% of session time are shit.
kill yourself my man

>you could teach Tolkien how to GM
Gygax himself said that the secret was that the playgroup didn't need any rules. It's important to have an impartial party as GM. The problem is that Jack Chick and The Gary will duel (and Gary will clobber him) unless each doesn't know who the other is. If you're trusting Gary to be fair after Tomb Of Horrors, then get your head checked, friendo.

Gotta agree that a game that's nothing more than a dungeon crawl is boring; on the other hand, that's as simple to fix as making the dungeon crawl have a point or purpose in the overall story - the Mines of Moria serve as an excellent example in this case.

It's not rape if it's Stockholm syndrome.

She literally summoned and bound him for the express purpose of fucking him. It's rape.

Tolkien would play a LG that drops down to LE over his views of mercy and justice, since D&D has "kinda metaphysical" forces that don't actually mean good or evil.

Lewis, Gary, and Tolkien are opposed to this while Lovecraft is interested in the setting but wary of Jack Chick

I didn't say he was good at it, but since everyone else has no prior experience with TTRPG, anyone other than you or Gary will have to be tought how to run a game

Would you watch this as a stream?

Lewis would make for a more interesting DM if only because his stuff is divorced from traditional Tolkienesque fantasy

I agree that Tolkien would think of LG first, because of the fact that law and chaos have different traditional connotations that gamers use, but I tkink that upon learning how alignment system works in D&D and what exactly those represent he'd go with NG instead. I mean, most of his protags are this alignment.

Except unless you mean some MeRp module or something, not actual book chapters Moria is nothing like dungeon crawl. While describing journey thtough it, Tolkienn doesn't delve into describing every single room or how do they explore tyeir way. He just takes a long skips between points of dramatic interest, only describing the general feel of traveling, and fight only breaks out when it is narratively appropiate to build tension and sense of danger, not just as a filler like in typical dungeon crawl.

I think Tolkien would play either a NE valor bard or a ranger
Howard definitely WOULD play Conan. I mean, not only it is widely accepted that he was his idealized self-insert, but he did also THREE almost identicl characters as well Njord, Kull, Bran
I agree about Gygax, and I think Lovecraft could go two ways - either this, or some investigator type.
IDK about Lewis or Chick though.

>I bring out the old shop vac and B me some Gs
>makes me feel good
>seal them in a consecrated tomb at the bottom of a well
>fill the well in with holy concrete

Lewis would either be a religious class or a bard,
he was both a professor of literature and a casual theologian

I tell the unknown force to only let us play 4e D&D. Humans banned.

Fuck I meant NG of course not NE

What people call "Tolkienesque" fantasy is only actually skin-deep "tolkienesque". Seriously playing in Middle Earth is nothing like playing in D&D or other kitchen sink fantasy game already.

It's okay because she's a sexy witch.

frig off ya hipster

At what point would you say the generic fantasy tropes set in?

They're mostly spawned by D&D itself, which can be divided into original ideas (quite a lot of them actually), material from source fiction (largely misinterpreted, misunderstood or taken by face-valure by D&D creators. Also Tolkien is only a very minor part of those, despite his influence being most striking, even if superficial) and D&D's creators understandings of medieval history (also rather por usually).

Before D&D what is today considered "generic fantasy" never existed. Or rather, "generic fantasy" existed but was quite different.

>having more fun is being a hipster

It's kinda sad to think how much Tolkien and Lewis would hate every single character I've ever made, but I have no intention to change

>since D&D has "kinda metaphysical" forces that don't actually mean good or evil.
Only if your GM is shit.

>putting in obscure folks nobody has ever heard of isn't hipster

Have you really not heard of any of those people?

I'd rather play a game with Lovecraft and Robert Howard. I dunno who the other players would be, but I want those two guys.

Out, hipster. You aren't welcome.

What's wrong with your characters?

What, are they not proper god-fearing Christians?

Dave Arneson was the co-creator of D&D m8. M.A.R. Barker invented Tekumel and was essentially another Tolkien. T.H. White is the author of The Once and Future King. Charles Chiniquy is the French-Canadian nutjob Jack Chick stole his conspiracy theories from. C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner were husband & wife writers who were part of the later Lovecraft circle: Kuttner contributed a few gods to the mythos, Moore had her own Conan/Sonja figure in Jirel of Joiry.

I was just deliberately choosing people who were like but not quite the same as the proposed figures, and my original post was a joke, but if you really don't know any of these people they're worth knowing a little bit about. I don't know how you know Gygax but don't know Arneson, at least.

Chick is important because of his hatred of table tops but everything else works

I try to convince Tolkien to run DSA. If there's anyone that can make Hiking in the Woods Simulator into the best damn game I've ever played, it's JRR.

They're all going to gang up and murder me by the end of this.

Proper Christian doesn't need to fear God. For God is kind unless you spite him and Christians know how to not spite the God so they have nothing to fear.

I can be impartial, but there's no way I'm running the game if those two know each other. This shit can happen over Roll20 using assumed names.

>You can't ask Howard any question or both he and Lovecraft answer as a practical joke
>Later you realize they were answering the same way at the same time without any hesitation or foreplanning
>Roll SAN

>Ask Lovecraft where he's getting his beer in this extra-dimensional space
>He just stares at you while casually holding a hand out to the left, palm up, as if expecting something
>A weird slurping pop noise happens and the universe goes blorange, he suddenly has two beers
>Everyone else stares, Robert doesn't even react except to grab one of them

Terry Pratchett, this group needs to have someone that isn't a downer

How's mount stupid this time of year?
I hear amazons cut off one breast to shoot arrows better or whatever.

>Howard definitely WOULD play Conan.

Yeah, probably.

Still like the image of Gygax and Chick at each other's throats, Lewis and Tolkien building richly detailed characters and discussing the world...

...and Lovecraft and Howard cracking open STILL MORE beer.

You guys don't get it

>Game: The Warren/Bunnies & Burrows

>GM: Richard Adams, of couse

>Hazel: Lewis
>Fiver: HPL
>Bigwig: REH
>Blackberry: Verne (I mean, we do need a scifi one for him)
>Dandelion: Tolkien

>Woundwort: Chick

Tell me it wouldn't work.

>Gygax: Wizard

No.
youtube.com/watch?v=7UjXi1HKjms

When did wizards become broken then, 3.5?

3e. Even as late as 2e they were hands down the worst class.
You wanted one in your party, but you wouldn't want it to be you.

"D&D" by Wizards of the Coast only superficially resembles "D&D" by Tactical Studies Rules
they only bought TSR to get the rights to the name to leech sales through brand recognition

His personal character from D&D was Mordenkainen the wizard - and also the only one of the six that we know the personal character choice of for a fact.

What kind of character would Terry roll? At first thought i would have guessed magic user but going by his books and style of writing, he never really cared about high fantasy shit.

Bard, maybe?

I can see Terry rolling up the jankiest bard on the planet. Something that's total rules abuse, and then playing it lightheartedly and enjoyably enough that the DM doesn't make him stop.

He'd go full Soul Music and it would be great

Then I suggest a double DM: Tolkien does the worldbuilding and Howard narrates.

Jack Chick was actually a rather cool and nice person despite his comics.

I am unconvinced.

Prove me wrong, this is the perfect sci-fi group

>Game: Rogue Trader
>GM: Douglas Adams
>Players:
>Frank Herbert
>Robert A. Heinlen
>George Orwell
>Philip K. Dick

The players try to RP for a serious grimdark game and the GM throws at them the whackiest of adventures, perfect for 40k

Greg Stafford > M.A.R Barker

That sounds hilarious.

His personal beef with TTRPG would probably cause problems

>Chick will hate anything you play regardless of system or setting

So Jack Chick was really the patron saint of Veeky Forums this whole time & we never knew?

Wait, did you not know?