Tolkien didn't invent the fantasy genre. Stories like Conan the Barbarian came decades earlier than The Lord of the Rings, and of course there have always been tales of magic and adventure. I'd argue that fantasy is actually one of if not the oldest of all fiction genres, though I'll also concede that the earliest examples - myth and legend - existed in this sort of ambiguous space between fiction and history.
One could argue that Tolkien was the first to craft a fantasy world utterly disconnected from our reality - though the initial concept of Arda (and the continent of Middle-Earth) was of a prehistoric era of our world. (Conan took place in the Hyperborean Age, a sort of post-Atlantis but pre- known history period, and C. S. Lewis' Narnia has characters from not only our world but more or less contemporary times traveling there).
What I think is hard to argue against is that Tolkien's opus, The Lord of the Rings, is the quintessential fantasy story - the first example most people would think of. Peter Jackson's film trilogy (the first of which came out nearly 20 years ago, which makes me feel ancient!) solidified it in the public consciousness, and I think that a ton of fantasy is written as a response to what he established - with deconstructions like The Witcher or A Song of Ice and Fire (and its TV show Game of Thrones) or more straightforward iterations on the genre conventions like what I'm led to understand The Wheel of Time is.
D&D is a foundational game for the RPG - it established a lot of the conventions of the genre in an attempt to allow players to feel like they were living through a fantasy story.
But I think it's interesting, and also telling, that the inspirations were more of the pre-Tolkien pulp novel adventures like Conan the Barbarian. My understanding is that Gary Gygax built the game around delving into mysterious dungeons and looting treasure because the intention was to build a game that focused more on self-interested adventurers looking for personal power more than any larger struggle of good versus evil.
Greyhawk, the first official setting (I believe) for D&D, is a morally grey world where players are likely to be that sort of self-serving adventurer. Now, an individual character might serve a greater good, but as I understand it, adventures were still built more around the fancy treasure that the players could get their hands on than resolving some imminent crisis.
But I think that many players (including DMs) find that kind of epic struggle to be a fairly compelling thrust to a narrative. Indeed, many of 5th Edition's published adventures are built around the premise that the adventurers are there to solve a really big problem. The fact that these adventures still tend to start you off at level 1 has always felt a bit like the way that the Doom games (at least the old ones) start you off with a simple pistol, and just expect you to gather a vast arsenal.
One of the things that makes Epic Fantasy like Lord of the Rings so epic is the scale of it - we have massive battles like Helm's Deep or the Pelennor Fields. D&D was in part built on a framework of older "war games" that were more about armies clashing than individual heroes, but I think that the game has gotten much more specialized around the actions of individual heroes.
In a weird way, this actually makes D&D a bit more like the superhero genre - a group like the Avengers is a fairly high-level D&D party, and I could imagine running a battle like the Battle of New York at the climax of the original Avengers movie would be way more feasible than running the battle of the Pelennor Fields.
Still, thanks to genre, D&D can borrow the (imagined, unless you have some very high-quality miniatures and terrain) aesthetics of Lord of the Rings.
One thing I was thinking about earlier (and started another post that I never finished) was the use of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. I started that earlier post with this rhetorical question: What statblock would you use the depict Sauron in a D&D campaign?
My answer: a Ring of Invisibility.
Sauron manages to be a very memorable and scary villain, and yet not once in the entire novel trilogy do we actually see him. Pippin's palantir conversation with him (and Aragorn's later threat) are only described after the fact. Jackson's films made the Eye of Sauron literal - the massive fiery eye that arced between the two horn-like spires of Barad-dur - which was a departure from the novels (in which the eye was more of a metaphor for Sauron's far-reaching gaze) but one that worked quite well visually.
Apparently there was a plan originally to have Sauron appear at the battle at the Black Gate to fight Aragorn, appearing in a beautiful form (it was going to be Kate Winslet, with whom Jackson had worked before on Heavenly Creatures) in an attempt to sow doubt and confusion in the forces of the Free People. (This would also have been a departure from the lore, in which Sauron lost the ability to appear in any appealing form after his first death.)
But I think that Tolkien understood something that it takes DMs a while to learn: as soon as you give something a statblock, it becomes less of a threat. Sauron manages to be this ominous presence of darkness and evil, casting a shadow over the entire saga, and at no point can that sense of how dark and terrible he is be undermined.
Notably, this is not the way to make a grounded and human villain - I think that modern audiences usually like to see nuance in their bad guys, getting a sense that they are flawed and maybe even a bit likable, but for their methods or the premise of their philosophies. Now, in fact, Sauron is actually somewhat nuanced in Tolkien's deeper lore - he's someone who believes so strongly in order that he actually thinks he's doing the world a favor by enslaving it under his rule.
But by the time we come onto the scene in Lord of the Rings, Sauron is too far gone. There's nothing redeemable about him left, and thus, his function in the story is to represent all that is terrible and evil.
He can be defeated - but Sauron's ultimate defeat is unconventional - the heroes don't confront him in battle as a big final boss. It is the destruction of his artifact that renders him permanently defeated. (And, in fact, it's only through divine intervention that the last person holding the ring falls into the volcanic fires to destroy the ring - no mortal has had the strength of will to let it be destroyed).
This post is rambling, and I don't have much of a thesis - more just observations.
It seems likely that the Lich in D&D took inspiration in part from Sauron - though Sauron would probably be classified as a Fiend, the idea that the existence of this artifact allows him to come back from bodily destruction certainly feeds into the Lich mechanics (there are other folklore examples like that that pre-date Tolkien, like Koschei the Deathless from Russian folklore).
The Lich stat block, as it stands, is honestly not all that scary. With a standard HP pool of 135, even a mid-level party could, with some lucky initiative rolls and good attacks, potentially take one down in a single round. Its rejuvenation feature means the Lich can keep coming back as long as the DM keeps the phylactery hidden from the party, but that, I think, gives the Lich more of a recurring supervillain vibe, necessarily, than an ancient evil.
In fact, if we want to look at Sauron for inspiration here, a Lich regenerates after 1d10 days - basically less than a week, usually. Sauron, by contrast, was killed the second time by Isildur at the end of the Second Age, and it's about three thousand years before he returns in earnest. One of the things that makes him such a scary threat is that while he's been building up his power in all that time, the rest of the world has grown complacent. Indeed, the Witch-King of Angmar, the most powerful of the Ringwraiths (who, for those keeping score at home, would be Death Knights,) actually got to play the part of the most scary evil dude by creating his own evil kingdom meant to destroy the good guys' kingdom of Arnor (which was the northern counterpart to Gondor, and... I think it's their kings that Aragorn is directly descended from?) The Witch-King is, himself, this evil from the distant past (both Arnor and Angmar ultimately fell, which is why the north-western areas of Middle-Earth are pretty much a bunch of independent towns and villages with no real sovereign authority over them).
I think if you wanted a Lich to play that Dark Lord vibe, you might change the interval of their regeneration to be much longer - it means you don't get to just bring them back again and again against the party, but it would allow you to, narratively, make a story more about the calamity that is the return of this ancient evil.
And if you want to go full-Tolkien, consider never even letting the party meet them directly - they only ever encounter their minions, the most powerful of which can be full-on campaign-boss-level monsters.
Sometimes, less is more.
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