You can't see all the detail, and this definitely isn't the best album by Blues Traveler ... but I love this cover picture from the Travelers and Thieves album. It screams old school D&D to me, not just the image but the title of the album, too.
This view of adventurers is sometimes derided with the term "murder hobo," but in many cases that term is wrongly applied -- particularly in fantasy games. There is a whole type of fantasy game in which the attraction is the idea of crossing the border of civilization into an area that's entirely wild ... and fighting that wildness. (And, yes, taking its stuff). It's not murder in this idiom, it is defense of the helpless civilians that are back behind the lines.
In the zombie apocalypse, when a beat-up VW van skids into the parking lot with some guys leaning out the door blazing away with all kinds of weaponry, and you dash into the safety of the van just ahead of the zombies that the guys are blowing away ... that's these guys. They aren't murder hobos, they are force-recon hobos.
The whole concept of this sort of fantasy is that everything outside the hedges and fields is basically "Here be Dragons." It's zombie apocalypse from one horizon to the next, with the exception of the few enclaves where the endangered species of humanity depends upon the tough sons-of-bitches that are better at killing than the worgs and the ogres.
It's not the only kind of fantasy, but if the camera were to be following Aragorn in the year prior to his arrival at the Prancing Pony in Bree, I think you'd be seeing Middle Earth through an entirely different, and considerably grittier, lens.
Great post, Matt! I personally don't really see anything wrong with "murder hobos", but I guess it might get stale if that's all there is.
ReplyDeleteI was listening to Postcards from the Dungeon, an episode from last year, I believe. They were talking about how the notion of groups of heavily armed adventurers roaming the land actually had a historical precedent in the aftermath of events such as the Thirty Years War and other similar periods in history.
Those people had "agency" that most people will never experience, certainly beyond the extent that we do in our normal lives.
Those periods of history at the edge of exploration or cataclysmic events are the backdrops for larger than life characters. Denigrating something as a game of "murder hobos" is a stunted look at our motivations as players. Do you want to play a character who leaves no mark upon the world? Or would you rather play some guys with swords, spells and the will to do something that other people are afraid of.
Anyway, to those who think that "murder hobos" is a silly way to play a game I say, "Go read some history." I mean, you could play a game of Borgian intrigues, but how is that really any different than "murder hobos" if you strip off the paint?
Something that really hit me, reading a history of the Thirty Years War, was that when those armies were disbanded, the soldiers were lost in a world with no maps. They couldn't go home because they didn't know where home was. Some almost-nameless little village in the countryside wasn't marked on any maps. Result: armed gangs of wanderers.
ReplyDeleteTo put this idea into context of the Hundred Years War, there was also the additional specter of the black plague. It cerated a reality where every stranger was a potential threat. In a way, it was a zombie apocalypse...
ReplyDelete". . . [I]f the camera were to be following Aragorn in the year prior to his arrival at the Prancing Pony in Bree, I think you'd be seeing Middle Earth through an entirely different, and considerably grittier, lens."
ReplyDeleteYes indeed.