In Defense of Gor, Part 2: Gor in Gaming

This is actually the
most SFW cover I can find.

I'm pleasantly surprised by the reception my last post received, arguing that the infamous Gor novels are worth a look as a source of inspiration for pulpy, sword-and-sorcery-flavored gaming. But I'm not the first person to make such an argument. The influence of the Gor series goes back almost as far as the TRPG hobby itself. It's often been buried, and given the reputation the series has accrued, that may be a deliberate effort on the parts of various rights-holders - but a look into the history of tabletop gaming reveals that there is a Gorean connection behind some surprisingly influential developments, not just in the world of gaming but pop culture as a whole.

There are many seminal works of fantasy literature in the first edition Dungeon Masters' Guide Appendix N, and the ways in which these works influenced the game, its tropes, and its elements have been studied time and time again by people far more qualified to speak on the subject than I. The Gor novels are not a listed influence in any version of Appendix N. Given how they are directly referenced in other works from the same period, as I will discuss later, I don't think this was an omission based on the content of the series or its reputation. Gor did not accrue the image of something taboo among mainstream discussions of fantasy and science fiction until later. It seems more likely to me that Gygax simply didn't read or wasn't a fan of the novels, and thus they don't appear on a list curated by him.

What is known, however, is that the other co-creator, Dave Arneson, was a fan of Gor and did reference it in his work. Quite a bit, actually. To see the Gorean influence on early D&D, we need to start with materials that were written by him - most famously, Blackmoor, the second supplement to the original 1974 edition of D&D. If we really want to get to the source, though, we should look in particular at The First Fantasy Campaign, a collection of rules Arneson used at his table that was published by Judges' Guild in 1977. This is unfiltered Arneson; it reads like the ramblings of a madman, with no real regard to layout or organization, and shoves you right into the material without a proper introduction or preface. It's a bunch of lists, tables, and house rules in no particular order. It seems that editing Arneson's rules was not a priority. So we can assume that the elements he includes do in fact capture his influences in as pure a form as we can get.

It's worth noting, then, that The First Fantasy Campaign has a lot of rocs in it. They're listed as purchasable, they appear in encounter tables, and many cities are listed as using roc cavalry in their armies. One note, in particular, describes a larger variant of rocs called tarns. In the Gor novels, tarns are large birds used as beasts of burden and are ridden into battle; the series' most recurring protagonist, Tarl Cabot, is a tarnsman, ie. one who rides a tarn. What's more, Arneson's rocs occupy much the same role that tarns do on Gor; stats are listed for "war tarns," "cargo tarns," and "racing tarns," all of which exist on Gor. Furthermore, in "The Temple of the Frog," a dungeon Arneson includes in the Blackmoor supplement, mention is made to "landing points for rocs" on the building's edge - many Gorean buildings include ledges on higher floors for tarns to perch on.

Despite a singular reference to tarns being "same as rocs but larger in some cases," the text seems to use the terms "roc," "tarn" and "eagle" interchangeably, listing "tarn trainer" and "eagle rider" on the same list when listing upkeep of hirelings. The ways in which Arneson uses rocs as rideable animals also implies he isn't thinking of the elephant-eating monsters of Arabian mythology. We can assume any time Arneson refers to a large rideable bird, he has tarns in mind. Since The First Fantasy Campaign still uses the terms "hobbit" and "balrog" instead of "halfling" and "balor," it seems unlikely that rights issues were behind this terminology. Most likely, this is the result of The First Fantasy Campaign being generally unedited; there is little stylistic consistency with the book as a whole.

What's more, on the same list of hirelings and their upkeep requirements, Arneson lists separate rates for "male slave," "female (Red)," female (White)," and "female (Special)". While the color-coding of female slaves is not explained in the text, the terminology is taken directly from Gor. There, a "white silk slave" is a virgin, and a "red silk slave" is not. I'm not sure what "female (Special)" refers to here, and frustratingly, Arneson doesn't give any explanation. It might be a reference to Gor's "exotics;" slaves bred to have inhuman traits such as venom (also a woefully underexplored concept in the series), but in the books this phenomenon is not limited to female slaves, and I would think that there would be more game mechanics for something like that. Seems like a good excuse for a random table.

This is a bit of theorizing on my part, but one idea that seems to have originated with Arneson was oozes as a class of monsters, which cemented slimes, jellies, puddings, and the like as a staple of fantasy bestiaries. It's attested to by Gygax himself that Arneson was the first DM to use a black pudding, and many commentators have traced this back to 1958's The Blob, which is certainly plausible, given Arneson's stated love of monster movies. However, I think it's worth noting that 1969's Nomads of Gor includes a delightfully pulpy interlude where Tarl is fed to a living corrosive ooze, kept in a pit in the palace of a corrupt merchant, and must fight his way out. Given we have hard evidence that Arneson read the Gor books, it's quite possible that this creature influenced his creation.

But if I had to pick the one instance Gor was arguably at its most influential, not only on D&D but on gaming and the fantasy genre as a whole, that traces back to Supplement II.

Let me ask you a question. What comes to your mind when I say the word "assassin?" If you read this blog, probably a guy in a dark cloak, probably with a hood, holding a dagger and sneaking up on someone to stab them. Maybe, if you're younger, a white-clad figure doing parkour up the wall of a Gothic cathedral, or Keanu Reeves in a slick suit dispatching a horde of henchmen with cinematic gunplay. If you ask an older person, or someone who knows nothing about fantasy, they'd probably think of someone with a sniper rifle shooting the President from a book depository. Before the 70s, that's what most people would say. The idea of the assassin as a class, with a distinct set of skills, equipment, and associated tropes, owes itself to two things: the meteoric rise in popularity of the pop-culture ninja (specifically the pop-cultural stock character, which has little in common with the historical ninja of feudal Japan), and the D&D assassin class, first introduced in Blackmoor.

Many, citing Arneson's established precedent of drawing from Gor, have posited that this class was inspired by the Gorean Assassin Caste. If this is true, this means that Gor directly inspired an entire character archetype, and that Pa-Kur the Master Assassin has as much of a valid claim to fame as being such a model as Aragorn does for rangers. However, I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. The primary class features of the original assassin class are the use of disguises, which we do not have much textual evidence of Gorean assassins using, and the use of poisons, which Gorean assassins explicitly do not use, as they view it as impersonal and cowardly. There are some links, however. Blackmoor's assassins work in guilds, with temples and a defined structure, much like how Gorean assassins, though termed a caste, are not born into it and instead join such an order, pledging their lives to its service. Also, Blackmoor's assassins gain the right to challenge their guildmaster in a duel at 12th level, and take over the position if they kill them. This could be related to how Gorean assassins are always trained in pairs, with their final task being for one of them to hunt and kill the other in order to be inducted into the caste. Gor may have influenced the assassin class, but I do not think it was the only source.

All in all, looking at both textual and contextual evidence, it is undeniable that Gor was an influence on Dave Arneson in particular, and by extension D&D. However, its influence on the gaming scene didn't stop there, and Gor references continued to crop up in gaming materials.

In terms of official material, Dragon Magazine used to run a feature called "Giants in the Earth," listing game stats for characters from existing works of fiction. Issue #61, from 1982, stats Tarl Cabot, courtesy of Glenn Rahman. What's interesting is that he is listed as Lawful Evil and his misogyny is described as a character trait, but the text explicitly connects this to his upbringing with an abusive aunt, an in-universe explanation for his outlook. This might indicate that at this time, at least with this one author, Cabot was viewed as a flawed anti-hero, not as a mouthpiece for Norman's alleged views, and his outlook on women was viewed as just a character trait, not something assumed to be "natural" in a man. One could argue that Rahman may have portrayed Cabot this way as a means to criticize the novels, but the text makes several allusions to the events of the books as late as Raiders of Gor from 1971, which most people online will tell you is well after the series took on a BDSM tint. If Rahman truly disliked the series, I doubt he would know as much about the plot as he alludes to. Most people bail out by that point. If true, this would support the evidence that it was relatively socially acceptable to read and enjoy Gor novels, even later Gor novels, in the gaming community at this time.

There's something charming in
the naive earnestness of early
third-party gaming mag covers.

Also, Judges' Guild's magazine, Pegasus, published Gor-related gaming content. While I was unable to find any scans, the sixth issue (also from 1982) boasts on the cover that it features an article by Paul Elkmann with rules for kaissa, a chess-like game described in the series. Of note to me is that kaissa would not feature into the plot of any of the novels until Players of Gor two years later - remember that title, we'll come back to it - and even then, the full canonical rules have never been established. It would be interesting to compare this interpretation of kaissa to what we know now. But it also confirms what we know - there were people in the tabletop RPG community in the late 70s and early 80s who openly read the Gor books and used them as a source of inspiration at the table. If the kaissa from the Pegasus article is intended as a minigame as part of an existing campaign, it may indicate that people then were even using D&D or other RPGs to play campaigns in the world of Gor.

What about across the pond? I've long posited the existence of a British old school tradition, linked to but possessing distinct qualities from its American counterpart. There, too, Gor was known and accepted in the gaming sphere. Both Rick Priestly
and Tony Ackland note Gor among the books they read in developing Warhammer in this interview; Ackland in particular allegedly designed Warhammer's war eagles after the tarns, but I was unable to find a source to back up this anecdote. To me, though, the clearest sign of Gorean DNA in Warhammer isn't the war eagles, but something else entirely: the Skaven.

This book walked so
Vermintide could run.

Yes! Numerous people have written on the various sources that came together to form the Skaven over the years. And, while I don't think anyone involved in their development confirmed this one way or another, I would not be surprised if Gor was one of those sources.

You see, in 1984's Players of Gor, one minor character is Nim Nim, a slave who belongs to a race known as "the Urt People." Nim Nim is a fairly minor character, all things considered. He only appears in one book, and we never meet any other Urt People before or since. However, from his example, we do know that such a race exists in the setting, and are described as having hairy bodies, large eyes, narrow faces, a hunched stance, and a habit of travelling in large packs. It should be noted that in Gor's ecology of made-up animals, an urt is a small rodent pest that takes the role a rat would on Earth. Thus, the Urt People are essentially rat people (I should now clarify, for the sanity of my readers, that although Nim Nim is a slave, there is no indication he is a pleasure slave; as I said before, that is not all slavery on Gor is about). They debuted in a book that came out two years before the Skaven first debuted in "Vengeance of the Lichemaster," a Warhammer scenario published in the Citadel Spring Journal.

None of this means anything on its own - there have been many examples of rat people popping up in fantasy. However, the Urt People speak in a particular dialect that includes repeating most things they say twice, much like Skaven are known for doing.

"What do they call you here?" I asked.

"Nim, Nim," it said.

"I am called Bosk," I said.

"Bosk, Bosk," it said. "Nice Bosk. Pretty Bosk. More larma! More larma!"

I gave the creature more of the hard larma.

"Good Bosk, nice Bosk," it said.

I handed it another bit of larma.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Bad men want do terrible thing to Bosk," it said.

"What?" I asked.

"Nim Nim afraid talk," it said.

I did not press the creature.

"Few cells have table," it said, fearfully. "Bosk not chained."

I nodded. "I think I understand," I said. Not being chained, and because of the table, I had been able to witness the cruel spectacle in the courtyard. That I supposed now, given the hints of the small creature, was perhaps intended to give me something to think about. I shuddered. Much hatred must I be borne in this place.

"More larma!" said the creature. "More larma!"

I gave it some more larma. There was not much left. "They intend to use me in the baiting pit," I speculated.

"No," said the creature. "Worse. Far worse. Nim Nim help."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"More larma," it said. "More larma!"

I gave it the last of the larma.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Nim Nim help," it said.

(I brought this up to Gideon in the comments of a now-deleted post on the history of the Skaven at Awesome Lies, one of the best blogs out there for Warhammer history, and he actually went back and edited his post to mention the Urt People. Alas, he's dealing with technical issues that prevent me from linking that one. So you get the full quote to see what I'm talking about.)

Now, Skaven would not develop these particular speech patterns until later, with the Kaleb Daark comics. But knowing the time frame, and the fact that people at Games Workshop did read Gor novels and considered them an influence, it seems reasonable to theorize that Nim Nim was on the writers' minds when they needed to come up with a distinct speech pattern for a rat-like humanoid. In all other regards, Urt People are nothing like Skaven - they certainly don't seem to be a threat to any Gorean city, and don't appear particularly warlike - but the similarities cannot be denied.

Whether one likes the series or not, it is inarguable that Gor was one of the many sources that informed the early development of tabletop gaming as a community, and the tropes, stories, and settings that grew during this era. At this time, it was not particularly regarded as anything to be ashamed of or to reject, and was mined for inspiration just as much as other works of the genre. Regardless of whether or not we feel this source material is offensive, obscene, or objectionable, we shouldn't bury the truth. I think it's important to recognize that Gor did play a role in the perfect storm that allowed tabletop RPGs to flourish, and that it is a part of the canon of inspirational material that underpinned D&D and beyond, for better or for worse.

But why Gor? Was it simply the fact that the people behind the scene would read any fantasy literature they could get there hands on?

I think there's more to it than that. Gor, in my opinion, is actually a very gameable setting. I don't doubt that in those days, more than a few would-be DMs looked at the books as a source of inspiration, either in terms of the ideas contained within themselves or how they were presented. With its focus on worldbuilding, I can easily see how it would appeal to the same sorts of people interested in the lore of TRPG settings. Even I have a hard time reading Gor lore and not thinking of ways it could drive scenarios at the table. And in my next few posts, I'm going to shed light on why. See you next time!