on the disappearance of quaint prose

One of the books I brought along on this trip is, believe it or not, The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. I agreed to write a chapter for Cogburn’s D & D anthology, and thought “The Monster Manual” would make for a good article. You know the theories about how Homer created the Greek pantheon by unifying various local deities into a single mythos? In a sense The Monster Manual did a similar thing, in a homelier, pop culture way.

The list of monsters is a strange mix of real humans (pirates), real animals (dogs, buffalo), past humans (cavemen), past animals (dinosaurs), fictional European monsters (unicorns, centaurs, basilisks), fictional Arabic monsters (genies), fictional Asian monsters (Japanese ogres), a few that look vaguely Aztec to me though I’ll have to research them, quite a number that seem to have been invented by Gygax & Co. themselves (gelatinous cubes, beholders, etc.) and a few derived from 20th century fictional works (halflings are basically Tolkien’s hobbits, and the mind flayer looks to me like the M.R. James monster in “Count Magnus.”) Instead of being unified on Mt. Olympus, they are unified by a system of alignments, armor classes, hit points, and the like. It’ll be an interesting essay to write.

In any case, I think I last opened this book in 1983. (I have the 4th edition here, 1979, bought from some used dealer via Amazon.) And I’m most struck by a couple of things.

1. The illustrations are really necessary. Sometimes from the prose alone, the very nature of the monster would be completely opaque. The picture sums up the nature of the threat much better than any prose description and even better than the numerical statistics for each monster.

2. The prose is often quaint, and I suspect this is not so much a consequence of its having been written by gamers (Gygax was quite intelligent, if occasionally pretentious in his evident scouring of the Oxford English Dictionary). No, I think the 1970’s were still part of a stylistic continuum stretching back to the 1930’s and beyond. For example, no one would ever write sentences like this now…

Mike Carr: “As for value, let [our competitors] be measured against the standard of quality we have striven for– a hardbound encyclopedia of monsters, for instance, as opposed to a low quality collection which is poorly assembled and bound.”

E. Gary Gygax: “Except as noted, all new monsters are strictly of this author’s creation… and I take the burden of full responsibility for them.”

And then here’s the first sentence of the ad on the final page for Gen Con (a big gamers’ convention held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin):

“If you’re a gamer of any type, there’s an annual event you should know about no matter what your particular area of interest is.”

This sort of prosy recruitment language doesn’t really exist anymore, no matter what we’re being recruited for, though it was still the standard in my grandfathers’ era. If you’re writing an ad for Gen Con (or anything else) in 2010, it’s bound to be flashier, more aphoristic, and more filled with indeterminate fragments of signification.

As for the monsters themselves, there were obviously lots of them I had forgotten about in the past 27 years, but the two I liked best were the blink dog (which can simply teleport out of harmful situations) and its mortal enemy the displacer beast (a kind of tentacled puma that always appears 3 feet away from its true position, in a random direction).

In any case, I never imagined that at some point in my life I would be reading the D & D Monster Manual in Nicosia, Cyprus. I love it when weird little conjunctions like that are forced upon us by circumstance.