Playing games in the 1980s, we were largely left to our own devices. Sure, AD&D was out, and TSR was publishing official AD&D modules, and Judges Guild was publishing “approved for use with” modules, and other small press and independent game publishers were putting out unapproved but still very cool adventures and other content, if you knew where to seek them out. There was even a small press publisher in Abilene, Texas called Dragon Tree Press that produced several digest-sized booklets that were full of their weird house rules additions and also some Arduin supplements (I grew up with those books integrated into my AD&D game!) Dragon Magazine was on a monthly publishing schedule, and each issue was good for something interesting, whether it was a new set of monsters or a small one-shot adventure or just a great article discussing how many gold coins could fit in a standard coffer.

And, for the most part, that was pretty much it. New releases were few and far between, but the need to play D&D was a daily occurrence. Thus, we were on our own when it came to creating stuff in the game for the players to bash. I’m using the royal “We” here because as soon as I was able to wrap my head around the game, I took up the DM’s mantle and never looked back. Playing weekly, like we all did, we ran through the published material quickly and ended up on our own for creating new challenges for our players.

What did we use for inspiration? A better question is, what didn’t we use? Thundarr’s Sun Sword? Yep. In Barrier Peaks. The Kaepa from Beastmaster? Of course. The Wood Beast from the terrible Flash Gordon movie? Done and done. The entirety of popular culture was grist for our particular gaming mill. I drew the line at ‘porting over a snowspeeder from The Empire Strikes Back, but I know a guy who did put them in his D&D game. Any book we read, any movie we saw, comic books, rock and rolls songs…it was all fair game. And why not?

We were told to make D&D our own, in their own books, in print, tacitly and implicitly. There was no league play, no central source for new gaming material. Modules weren’t published with any kind of reliable frequency, and even then, you weren’t guaranteed to have it be an adventure you wanted to run. We were gaming way more than they could produce content for, so we had to make do with what we had. I know that’s what led to the Monty Haul problem, which was so widespread that it was discussed at length in Dragon for several months and then periodically thereafter. Dragon was as close to a common ground space we could all utilize as an “official” source.

Conan’s Atlantean sword. That stupid three-bladed thing from The Sword and the Sorcerer. Creepy bat-bird-men that dissolved people when they hugged them. Vermithrax from Dragonslayer. A mass of bouncing and chittering skulls from the Dragon’s Lair video game. We had no shame. Also, we had no boundaries. We swiped whatever caught our fancy and shoe-horned it into our games. No one told us we were doing it wrong, because we weren’t. It was all one big pastiche as we tried to create something with tabletop gaming that was supposed to feel like how a good book reads.

There was a list of books published with D&D, designed to be a point of reference for running the game. In addition to Appendix N, there was a slew of fantasy fiction being published from 1977-1984; not quite a renaissance but certainly a trend, borne out by the uptick in fantasy films such as Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Heavy Metal, and The Beastmaster, just to name a handful. Dragon Magazine used to include book reviews which were ideal for finding out about new and interesting novels to swipe things from. And it was in the early issues of Dragon that we were treated to stats for Conan, Jirel of Joiry, Shadowjack, even the Elfquest characters. Side note: I don’t think a historical view of the role-playing game industry is possible without considering the first 100+ issues of Dragon Magazine (and by extension, early White Wolf, Different Worlds, and Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as they were the glue that helped bind the nascent industry together).

The notion of pastichery extends to the game itself. People love to talk about “the story” of the adventure, the “narrative” of the game, but it’s not that, not really. As much as we want to call role-playing games “storytelling,” what we’re really trying to do when we sit down is give the feeling of storytelling, and if it’s a style of storytelling we all like and agree on (like sword and sorcery, for instance), then everything we say and do in-game ideally should be in support of that. We want our games to have that epic feel of a cool TV show, a movie spectacular, an epic book series.

Conversely, a game doesn’t have to resolve itself, doesn’t have to answer every question, account for every hanging plot thread. Mind you, neither does anything else, but the vast majority of books and movies make the effort to tie themselves up in that manner, so we’ll take that as a given. If you read a novel and it swung focus around like a typical D&D game, you’d throw the book across the room within a few chapters.

It’s a shame that we use so many extant terms from places like creative writing and theatrical improvisation in order to describe the act of table-top role-playing games. We do have our own jargon, but most of it is fun, whimsical, and more than somewhat esoteric. Or, to my chagrin, it’s borrowed from the video game industry—which wouldn’t exist in its current form without D&D in the first place. I still chafe at the idea of calling Skyrim and Fallout “role-playing games.”

What we do at the gaming table is neither fish nor fowl. There’s a call and response, some elements of oral storytelling and narration, and an arbitrary decision-making element (the dice) that all combine to create a kind of shared scene that is both liminal and ethereal at the same time. I can describe a dragon in a ruined temple, and even with some very precise language, the four players would mentally envision very different scenes. We create, amongst all of us, a shared or communal scene or situation, and then we use our characters to interact within that created, imaginary space. If we’re doing it right, where everyone is embracing the tone of the game, and we’re all on the same page in terms of creating a group narrative that feels like a Robert E. Howard Conan story, that act itself is a pastiche.

From the DM’s side of the table, when gaming works best, I’m using my brain, thrown wide open to better access all of my stored files of movie scenes, great dialogue, celebrity impressions, and more, to quickly react to the player’s reactions and hopefully combine all of my pieces and parts into something that is in no way new, but feels new within the confines of our shared scene. Having a sense of tone, of common storytelling beats, and reading my interest level from the players on the fly all combine to create a kind of ephemeral construct that feels a lot like a story, but really, it isn’t. There are too many cooks in the kitchen for that. At best, I’m trying to get you, the players, to a play where you all agree that the scenario has come to a satisfying conclusion and yeah, it can generate the same feeling as having seen and even participated in this communal, shared experience that is completely unique, but also incredibly familiar. I have more thoughts about this. More later. Back to pastiche.

I don’t think you can consider it creative writing, not when you sit down at the table with other players. Here’s how I know this; over the years, I’ve written a lot of adventures with beginnings, middles and ends, none of which ever played out like I thought they would. Even writing an adventure to suit the needs of my players, I still was left feeling frustrated that they didn’t get to all of my “good stuff,” which often amounted to little more than the crux of the idea, or the grain of sand that became the pearl—but then, my players could have cared less about the pearl, right? They opened the oyster and shucked it, and swallowed it whole. No thought was given to the pearl, no matter how cool a pearl it might have been.

I think it was Professor Dungeon Master who remarked on one of his YouTube videos that he’s not a creative writer; rather, he’s a conflict designer (I’m paraphrasing, here). His job as a game master is to design puzzles, invent challenges, and float hypothetical scenarios that the players will then try to overcome. Getting tied into a single, preferable ending to the adventure always results in you, the GM, being vaguely dissatisfied with the game, even if the players loved it.

That used to be how we all played the game (I’m talking thirty-five years ago). If you came up in the 1990s, your gaming experience was very different, especially if you were one of the zillions of folks who played any of White Wolf’s World of Darkness Storyteller games. In fact, I think TTRPGs have continually evolved to the point that they have come full circle, back to using prompts and random tables to quickly generate content, and come on, it never really left, did it? No, it was just relegated to OSR spaces. The popularity and success of Mork Borg, et.al., has helped bring that style of play back out into the mainstream of the industry, even if it’s still mostly at its edges.

Appendix N and the rest of the fantasy and science fiction section at B.Dalton’s made it tacitly acceptable to swipe whatever we could from books in order to make our games more enjoyable. Not more original, mind you; more enjoyable. Frank Frazetta’s Kane was an NPC in my D&D game.

GM: “You see him-” *points to poster hanging on the bedroom wall* “-walking into the campsite.”

Players: (together) Oh, shit.

You damn right, “oh shit.” That guy? In anyone’s game? He’s pulling all of the focus right away. That’s what Kane does in his stories. Why wouldn’t I try to impart that to my players? Dungeons & Dragons was built out of a burning need to replay the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and of course, it quickly pivoted away from that, but the Lord of the Rings novels, the lore, the monsters, and the tone or aesthetic, that remained, well into AD&D second edition. Everything was fair game; the whole of the world’s mythologies, every fantasy movie ever (up to 1974), some comic books, even knock-off Chinese dinosaur/kaiju toys. There was no wrong answer. If we could stat it, we could game it.

We were on the hook to make our own fun, supplying the raw material for our conflict prompts, and here’s the funny part: what most people remember as my best games ever, all of them were built out of my sandbox style of game play, which is where I let the players tell me what they want to do, and I come up with challenges and obstacles along the way. All of the planned stuff, no one remembers so much. And how weird is it that, after all these years, they can still recall things that happened in games we played twenty or thirty years ago?

The tradition of pastiche is alive and well today, what with all of the licensed intellectual properties that have their own ttrpg now. What’s compelling about those games is that they embrace their oeuvre, and use tone and mechanics to better simulate the thing you’re trying to pastiche at the table. Alien’s stress mechanic comes to mind, as does the sanity rules and Cthulhu Mythos skill in the redoubtable Call of Cthulhu, arguably the first game to fully embrace its pastiche mission. Whether it’s simulation or imitation, the games we create in our head are just as real to us as the books we read and the movies we watch. Sometimes, the games are way better.