Michael Moorcock

It's not Sword and Planet per se, but separating out the components is useful to me in order to plan scenarios.

But also, I think you can argue a lot of Moorcock's Sword and Sorcery fiction kind of fits the Sword and Planet template for these reasons.

Number one, the protagonists, Elric, Coram, etc., are aware and accepting of other worlds, and those worlds have their own distinct personalities.

Number two, they have cosmic forces which dictate the rules of engagement.

And that list is obviously a progressive deviation from adventure fiction, but the template still works.

I guess in my closing argument, it's to stop viewing sword and planet as subordinate to planetary romance.

Instead, it complements it and we should take it a bit more seriously and give it the same enthusiasm we do as we do to the original Conan stories and Moorcock and other sword and sorcery.

Now, Adding on to that, I want to sort of take a bit of a tangent here and talk about world building and emergent mapping.

I mean, it takes us back to Bowling in the Ruins.

Michael Moorcock was a great enthusiast for that kind of like, you know, invasion literature of the kind of late Victorian, Edwardian period.

And you have these, you know, in the UK, you have the same paranoid kind of fantasies about subversion.

You have groups in the 70s, GB75, NAF.

Yeah, and I think because the players got the input initially, I suppose you don't really know which direction it's going to go, but we were creating antagonists.

It's an opera we didn't particularly respect or like, was part of it.

And we had Michael Moorcock because it was a Moorcock-themed event.

Yes, yes.

wow.

Land That Time Forgot was written by Michael Moorcock.

I had no idea.

What? The movie.

The fact.

Do you know there's only one movie adaptation ever of a Michael Moorcock novel?

Is it The Land That Time Forgot? Oh, no, it's not.

No.

No, I'm going to take this from a different angle, actually.

When I was in Bugman's Bar with Bea Sherry, who was my assistant producer of Modern Fantasy Roleplay, and Gav Thorpe, whom you may be aware of from a bajillion Warhammer projects, and we were discussing the High Elves, and... be positive their theory that the high elves were basically a stand-in for british colonialism and the high elves and everything they become was a stand-in for that and uh while i was inside the licensing department having a big long discussion about the next set of books that i wanted to build the uh bee and gav went to town in that um and be convinced about it gav thought it was an interesting um angle and i came back and i went look it's it's very obviously is and there's a reason it is it's because the high elves are very strongly influenced by the melibonians from michael moorcock And the melancholies from Michael Moorcock are directly a metaphor for British colonialism and what had happened, the dreaming empire and how it all collapsed in itself while the rest of the world had risen up.

The young kingdoms, as they referred to it, were the old kingdom that stood at the centre and used to run the empire over the entire world and still had the arrogance to believe that a lot of it was still in place.

And that's loosely what the high elves were based on.

Play it out, get the most out of those combats you can, so then when they come in for their Grand Royal Test combat, you can give them advice as to how to best to play it.

You know, a

Michael Moore coach stream would be a good one for Boot Club, but I'm not entirely sure that either Lindsay or Vera know enough about it.

Yeah, I could come in for that one, possibly.