D&D is built on the tropes of the fantasy genre. From Tolkien to Howard, Lewis to Vance, the game is built to allow you to inhabit a world of magic, monsters, and various humanoid races with invented histories and cultures.
While I played Magic the Gathering starting when I was an elementary school kid and I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings when I was 14, the fantasy series that I'd say influenced me the most is Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
And it's a weird one.
King is primarily known for his horror novels, perhaps none so iconic as IT, which came out the year I was born. But if you've read King, you'll find that he infuses his horror with a lot of humanism, and even if a lot of terrible things happen, there's generally some sense that we can fight against the monsters, and that the good guys (perhaps fewer than where we started) prevail in the end.
I believe that supernatural horror and fantasy are almost the same genre. Fantasy is just when the protagonists have some means to fight against the great evil that threatens them. Whereas a demon menaces the mundane heroes of a horror story, in fantasy, the hero might learn magic or some ancient sword technique to fight back. It's the shift that when the big scary monster corners our hero, the result of the ensuing violence is not a foregone conclusion.
So, while I'll confess that my knowledge of King's ouevre is skewed toward his seven-book fantasy epic, I tend to think of him more as a fantasy author than a horror one.
Which brings me to TTRPGs. I've played a Song of Ice and Fire-based TTRPG (of the same name,) which emphasizes careful plotting, even having an "intrigue" mode that works a bit like combat.
The Dark Tower, though, is a very different kind of fantasy epic. Here's the basic premise:
Roland Deschain is the last Gunslinger, living in a post-apocalyptic world that has "moved on," where the environment is breaking down along with all of reality. Roland is on a quest to travel to the Dark Tower, a cosmic lynchpin that more or less hold the universe together (and is in danger of collapsing.) As a Gunslinger, Roland was a member of a knight-like organization in the Kingdom of Gilead, where his father was the king (note: the first of these books came out before A Handmaid's Tale, so I wouldn't read anything into the name of the kingdom other than its biblical implications.) He is a 100% certified grade-A badass with the revolvers he wields, which were created by reforging the steel of the sword Excalibur by his world's version of King Arthur, known as Arthur Eld.
Along the way, Roland gathers a group of individuals from our world (or a version of our world) from different decades, eventually forming a sort of ersatz family as they travel along on this quest.
Stylistisically, the world is a mix of Wild West and Post-Apocaylpic wasteland, not to mention demonic monsters and evil sorcerers. It's a world in which a cowboy with a magic gun faces off against a psychotically homicidal AI-driven train. Journeys between Roland's All-World and the other heroes' New York City link the modern world to this fantastical one (which may or may not be our own future, or could just be a totally different universe.)
The books are a convoluted mess, don't get me wrong, but I love them like a family member. The question, then, is whether you could build a game out of them.
All-World does not lack for monsters and other like concepts. But worldbuilding is also, I think, less of a concern for King. The path of the novels is pretty linear - indeed, there's an actual metaphysical line somewhat analogous to a leyline (called The Beam) that guides the characters to their destination over the course of the series. It's implied that if one strayed from this path, one would eventually find a kind of broken down void, a bit like The Nothing from The Neverending Story.
There is, perhaps, something to be mined from Roland's youth - we never really get an accurate gauge of his age; he could be 40 or 4,000. But there is an extensive flashback (it actually takes up 500 of the 4th book's 700 pages) in which we get a bit more of a sense of that world. In the post-apocalyptic landscape, a western-like civilization has grown back, though there are witches and human sacrifice and a whole lot of mutants.
I suspect it would be easier to build a setting inspired by, rather than based directly on the Dark Tower.
Still, I think it was Jim Davis of Web DM who pointed out that D&D is really a western, and I think that the logical conclusion is to embrace that whole-heartedly.
I'm sure that Deadlands probably fits this fairly well, but I think what I love about the Dark Tower is just how utterly weird it is.
For me, I've been using it as an inspiration for a lot of D&D homebrew - an area of my homebrew world is very Western-inspired, and I've homebrewed stat blocks for Taheen (the animal-headed creatures that are like if Egyptian gods were banal office workers) and just today a Speaking Demon (a creature encountered in the first book.)
Still, I wanted to share my love of this series and recommend that anyone who wants to get out of the stuffy medievalism of a lot of fantasy to check this out.
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