Building Bhakashal - Dungeons and Dragons on Film

Don’t be fooled by the title, this is really a post about AD&D 1e, but to get to there we are detouring through the filmed excursions into D&D for a moment.

Controversial claim - You can’t really make a good “D&D” filmed adaptation

Controversial Sub-claim - the “D&D” filmed adaptations that have been made were terrible

When I say “D&D filmed adaptation”, I mean a movie or TV series that is MEANT to be about D&D, not a Lord of the Rings movie, or an Elric movie, but a movie that is to be “about” Dungeons and Dragons in the way that a movie like LOTR was “about” the story in the books.

I can’t speak directly for past adaptations of D&D to film, as to be frank I haven’t seen them, and I have no desire to see the next iteration that is on the way. I’m taking my assessment from what I have found online, and for the most part the movies have not been well regarded.

So what’s the issue?

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about AD&D 1e that doesn’t necessarily apply to many other games. AD&D 1e was meant to be a pulp fantasy/sci-fi emulator. I think this is clear from both the Appendix in the 1e DMG where Gygax tells you that the game drew its inspiration from these sources, and from the modules/materials the game produced. 

I think this also fits with the “kitchen sink” approach to the game. AD&D borrows from vastly different source materials, from ray gun sci-fi sword and planet style sources (Burroughs), to high fantasy (Moorcock), to mythic fantasy (Tolkien), to Sword and Sorcery (Howard, Lieber) to baroque “Dying Earth” fantasy (Vance). 

So you will find magic items, spells, classes and gods drawn from all of these works in the game. You will find elemental summoning spells that recall Moorcock, a spell-casting system (and spells) that borrow from Vance and the Bible (many cleric spells), magic items that come straight out of Tolkien, or straight out of mythology. AD&D has rules for six-shooters and laser guns, time travel and reincarnation, planar travel and demon/devil summoning. 

AD&D is a pastiche, a bricolage, a creole of various different sources. Why would Gygax have done this, why would he have tried to forge together such disparate influences into one game?

I think this makes the most sense if Gygax intended for each and every DM to create a world that emulated the fiction/film sources that inspired them. Part of “making the game your own” was deciding what source material would inspire you in your campaign. Do you want a sword and sandals style game with Greek and Babylonian mythological monsters and gods? You can do that with AD&D. Do you want a sword and sorcery style game that emulates Leiber and Howard, you can do that with AD&D too, by making magic less abundant and increasing the proportion of various classes in the game. The “default” setting of AD&D was certainly very European/Tolkien influenced in some ways, but any game where a Treant (a fantasy monster - Tolkien Ent) can co-exist with a displacer beast (a sci-fi monster, Van Vogt Coerl) is not strictly high fantasy.

In short, AD&D allows you to pick from a wide variety of fantasy/sci-fi pulp sources and emulate that particular style by emphasizing or de-emphasizing various aspects of the game. Don’t like the idea of sci-fi in your fantasy? No problem, ignore the modules with spaceships, ignore the section of the DMG that discusses Boot Hill and Metamorphosis Alpha conversions, and ignore psionics. 

AD&D is remarkably modular that way.

So here is where I make the big claim, the reason why a “D&D” movie doesn’t work particularly well is that AD&D was not meant to include “everything” listed in the PHB and DMG, it’s all there to be used, but when running a campaign it is usually the case that individual groups will be selective about what they use to flavor the campaign the way they like.

That’s why, for example, some groups will do domain play and some just don’t, why some groups use multi / dual classing and others do not, why some groups use bards and others don’t, why some groups use a lot of humanoid monsters and 0-level bandits/mercenaries and others don’t, why some groups exclude mythological monsters from particular environments / mythos (say they run a “nordic” campaign, more dragons and fewer giant snakes). It’s one of the reasons why everyone’s table is different.

And it’s also the reason why “D&D movies” don’t work. Because, invariably, they don’t thematize the movie the way you would a campaign, instead they treat D&D like a consistent, realized world and try to emulate that, and that doesn’t work. AD&D isn’t a consistent, realized world UNTIL YOUR TABLE MAKES IT SO. 

And it’s why I don’t want a “D&D movie”, I want movies that create consistent, detailed and realized worlds based on the fantasy and sci-fi precursors in literature and film. For me a “D&D movie” isn’t a movie about D&D, its a fantasy or pulp sci-fi movie that you could EMULATE with AD&D. I don’t want an owlbear, a beholder and a Leomund’s Tiny Hut, I want, for example, a pulpy fantasy story with swashbucklers and sea faring sorcerers, or a high-fantasy tale of dragonriders and evil priests, or whatever. 

D&D shouldn’t inspire movies, movies should become fodder for AD&D. 

If I want to see a “D&D movie”, I can put on Ladyhawke, Excalibur, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, Conan the Barbarian, Lord of the Rings, Kull, the Sword and the Sorcerer, the 13th Warrior, etc, etc, etc. I don’t need to see fireballs, magic missiles and Rings of Shooting Stars to make it a “D&D movie”, I want the kinds of movies I could use as inspiration for my AD&D game, not movies that try to ape the IP of AD&D in telling the story.

I think this view of AD&D isn’t as popular because it conflicts with those who feel you should play “BTB”, that you should play the game “as it is”, and thus don’t think as much about the fact that most groups prune and select what aspects of the game they want to use, AD&D is a vastly modular and variegated game, filled with mini-systems that have some degree of independence, each group produces a unique blend of house-rules and selected BTB rules for their table.

It also flies in the face of those who are exasperated at people trying to do “everything” with D&D rather than playing other games. If AD&D was meant to be a flexible engine for creating campaigns that were inspired by pulp sci-fi/fantasy stories, then you don’t need to be creating new games to capture these stories, you can use AD&D to do that. This sort of thinking angers some people, as they believe it is based in laziness, or that it is harmful to “small creators”, why stick to the same game when you could be playing newer games by small creators? But this ignores the fact that AD&D is big enough and varied enough that you can use it for a remarkably wide range of fantasy/ pulp sci-fi purposes. 

I firmly believe that AD&D wasn’t meant to be “its own thing” as a fantasy/pulp sci-fi setting, it was meant to be a chameleon you could use to create worlds that were like your favorite fantasy and pulp sci-fi stories. TSR created several settings that were essentially examples of doing what I’m saying here. Taking the game and drilling down on particular aspects of it. You could make a Forgotten Realms movie as the Forgotten Realms were a consistent, fully realized fantasy setting that used aspects of the AD&D universe. 

Anything that requires that much cultivation doesn’t work well if you try to create a story that incorporates elements of the game without some sort of antecedent source behind it. That’s why the movies don't work.

Now, for a modern audience, who are used to 5e, things are different. By the time that the references from 1e AD&D made it to 5e they were thoroughly stripped of context, they became artifacts of the game, not artifacts of the cultures that inspired the game. There is no prima facie way to sort out those disparate elements to create some sort of cohesive whole, so any movie inspired by 5e will have a strange, generic feeling to it, and will ultimately feel thin on top. It will have signifiers that we recognize, iconic spells and monsters, but they will be free-floating game elements put on screen, they won’t have the lived in, cohesive feeling of say a movie like Ladyhawke, which has magic and swords and knights like D&D does but also has the feeling of being a consistent, realized world. 

At the end of the day a retroclone like Bhakashal is an attempt to take AD&D and drill down on aspects of the system to create a consistent, fully realized world setting. I believe that most if not all retroclones are really just examples of what Gygax intended for each individual table to do, emphasizing and selecting aspects of the game to create something that is specific and cohesive, rather than including everything.

I will wait and see where the D&D movie lands. Perhaps they will find a sweet spot and extract elements of D&D that fit well together and present a story that has a feeling of being part of a lived in world. 

Time will tell.

But the moral of the story here is that, for your own campaign, you need to decide what kind of campaign you want to be running, and you could do worse than to emulate the books and stories you like from outside of the game. Another good reason to READ, READ, and READ some more if you want to be a good referee for your AD&D games.