Jedi and Sith as sword & sorcery sorcerers rather than heroic warrior monks?

This is going to be a little bit roundabout, but let me set some context for an idea I've had that would alter a major guiding principle of Space Opera X and change a lot about how I see the setting, and therefore how it gets presented. Before I get to the punchline, though, I'll need to spend some time winding the thing up. Also, here's a video of Tim Kask, the first employee of TSR back in the 70s, talking about life at TSR and in D&D in the first few years of its existence. Not only is this an interesting little video in its own right, but it'll become relevant down below. Watch it, and log away what Tim says.

It's no secret that George Lucas was a big fan of Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, and that in his earliest drafts, the Jedi order resembled the samurai of movies like Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Seven Samurai much more than they eventually later did. Although echoes of this samurai past still stick with them. Originally Jedi weren't superheroes at all, and there isn't much—if any—hint of mystical super powers that they had, at least in the earliest versions of the scripts. They were just honor-bound warrior clans or organizations, and the Jedi and Sith were rivals here. The original Sith warrior was actually not Darth Vader in these early drafts, but Valorum, a Sith Knight who is demoted for some failure and eventually joins the rebels. Valorum is later renamed Dodona, and Espaa Valorum is later the head of the Empire, or at least the Sith clan. In the Star Wars graphic novel by Dark Horse based on these early versions of the script, Valorum is certainly a villain, but he's a relatively honorable one, who's more interested in dueling honorably with Starkiller (the early version of Luke Skywalker) then he is on advancing what he sees as grasping and puerile goals of the Imperial bureaucracy.

It's also worth noting that there was a lot less difference between the Jedi, the Sith and everyone else. There's concept art by MacQuarrie showing stormtroopers with lightsabers (and shields!), as well as the original concept painting for Darth Vader which shows him sporting a blaster pistol on his leg; as much like a black hat gunfighter from a Western movie as like a samurai or mystic warrior.

By the time we get to the novelization and the movie as presented in theaters, both the Jedi and the Sith had undergone a major change. The lightsaber becomes their signature weapon, that nobody else uses. Belief in the Force is an "ancient religion" that most people are skeptical of, even when they know what Darth Vader can do, for instance. Obiwan becomes, by necessity of George Lucas' idea to modify his plot to conform to his interpretation of Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey*" plot arc, a wizardly mentor figure, so he has to have some magical powers. It's worth noting that in the first movie especially, but in the original trilogy overall, these magical powers are much more subtle and modest then they later end up being.

But this was a major change to the setting, to the nature of both the Jedi and the Sith, and to the idea that it faithfully represents the samurai ethos at all anymore. The Jedi and Sith as rival samurai clans idea never really recovers, they neither really resemble samurai all that much anymore. For that matter, the plot doesn't resemble the samurai movies much anymore either. When people tell you that Star Wars is basically a remake of The Hidden Fortress, that's now a reliable tell that they're midwits (at best) parroting something that they've heard in an attempt to sound smart and name-drop, but that they don't actually understand what they're claiming at all. Star Wars has very little resemblance to The Hidden Fortress; it's more like after a lengthy introduction, a remake of Where Eagles Dare spliced to a remake of 633 Squadron. But that's stretching it. It's not a remake of anything, just because it borrows some sequences and plot points.

While we're treated to an escalation of Force superpowers in the next two movies, that's in an attempt to raise the stakes. Darth Vader throwing things at Luke with the Force while swordfighting is supposed to be impressive because we didn't imagine that that could be done. Same with Yoda pulling up an X-wing out of the pond. Later, when the Emperor shows remarkable precognitive powers (although fallible ones, obviously) as well as shooting lightning out of his hands, that's supposed to shock us (no pun intended) because, again, we had no idea that something like that could be done. The Force superpowers remain relatively modest throughout the original trilogy, and those we see using the force in these remarkable ways are (other than Luke himself) presented as true prodigies of force power anyway; much greater than the run-of-the-mill Jedi or Sith would have been. Although that presentation is a bit implicit rather than explicit.

Unfortunately, then George Lucas made another major change to Jedi between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel trilogy, and turned them overtly into superheroes. It's not just the Force, but the lightsabers are escalated immediately. Right off the bat, we're told that lightsabers can now cut through thick blast doors. Funny; I don't remember Darth Vader thinking of doing that when Luke and Co. were escaping the Death Star and he was cut off from them by a blast door. Dooku throws around lightning like its throwing a football in the backyard, Yoda doesn't just strain, struggle and pull an X-wing out of the swamp, he rather casually catches a falling cavern ceiling and throws it aside to save Obiwan and Anakin's life. Even within the prequels we see this escalation; when Obiwan and Qui-Gonn are stopped by destroyer droids in the first sequence of Phantom Menace, we later see Jedi and even clone troopers treating destroyers as if—in the immortal words of Ryan George's Pitch Meetings—they're super easy; barely an inconvenience. If the prequels weren't bad enough—and they were—then other media from this same era is even worse. The Starkiller character from the Force Unleashed video games raises his hands, uses the force, and pulls a freakin' Star Destroyer out of space and crashes it to the surface of the planet he's on. 

Somewhere around here, it occurred to me that Star Wars had become an overtly superhero story, even though people like Dave Filoni and others in featurettes and interviews explicitly denied it. The Jedi and the Sith were like the X-men or the Avengers; completely disconnected from normal people altogether. They also developed a bit of the Superman problem, i.e., the only kinds of stories you can tell about Superman are ones where his dedication to his ideals are tested, because those ideals conflict with him using his deus ex machina powers to easily and handily solve literally every problem that ever comes his way. Watching some of the episodes of The Clone Wars which was the follow-up media to the prequel movies themselves, it occurred to me that most of them were really boring, because the Jedi never even struggled to overcome all of the challenges thrown at them. There were no real stakes anymore; they were just going through the motions of making action sequences. Using your lightsaber to fight off enemies is supposed to be cool, but they had all of the excitement of the Jedi using a lightbroom to clean up their rooms. 

When I created my own Star Wars Revisited stuff for homebrew RPG use, which later lost the Star Wars IP connotation specifically and became Ad Astra and then Space Opera X, my analogs to the Jedi and Sith were always supposed to be more like the original trilogy version, and I actually made that explicitly clearly stated. The rest of the characters were equally competent swashbuckling heroes; if the Jedi had modest magical powers, the others were still Batman and Captain America or whatever and could stand toe to toe with them even without magical powers. I wanted to seriously de-escalate the power creep of the Jedi. Which wasn't really so much of a creep as it was an abrupt shift during the prequel era.

But now comes the time to think about what Tim Kask said about Gary Gygax and what he thought. Remember that from the little video up above? Star Wars as a high concept world-buildling episode could be seen as a three-legged stool. One leg was space opera, one leg was superhero stories, and the other leg was high fantasy. The setting superficially resembled space opera and takes place in space, but once you get rid of the superficial trappings, it's a combination of Old West American frontier and Medievalism, the plots are very high fantasy, and the characters have superpowers like the Justice League or the Avengers. Well, maybe Justice League is a bit much, but like the X-men at least.

But what if Space Opera X were more like a three-legged stool of space opera, the Old West, and sword & sorcery of the kind that Gary Gygax claimed he was modeling D&D on? Specifically the Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber kind, who are the two most iconic authors in the genre? And like with Gary Gygax, who failed to really understand why anyone would want to play a wizard or an elf when you could play a more down-to-earth heroic figure, what if the Jedi and Sith were treated much more like the sorcerers of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber than like actual protagonists? In Howard, they're almost always villainous. Leiber has friendlier sorcerers; the Gray Mouser actually apprentices under one briefly and has a few modest magical tricks up his sleeve from time to time, and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes tend to be sponsors and patrons of the two main characters. Although they're weird. They're inhuman, and bizarre, and inscrutable. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never really trust them, because they can never understand them. 

I don't know that that changes the way the game would work, at all. In fact, I don't see any reason why it should. But it is a major change to the worldbuilding side, if my Knights and Warlocks are much more rare, and much more inscrutable, and are usually played more like plot devices than like characters. Heck, there may well be something about them that specifically makes them go insane over time, or at least become trans-human creeps. While Star Wars has gradually become the story of Jedi and Sith, with everyone else kind of falling into the background (even The Mandalorian and its sad Boba Fett spin-off are not immune from this, although they should be from a structural standpoint. I think the writers just can't help making it all about the Jedi and Sith) Space Opera X, on the other hand, would specifically be about swashbuckling "normal" people, with the magic-users being relegated to more of a plot-devicey role most of the time. 

* I'm not really very impressed with Campbell's "The Hero's Journey" and I see the name-dropping of it as a red flag that I'm dealing with a midwit who greatly overestimates his own intelligence. The plot arc and the archetypal characters are not actually nearly as ubiquitous as its adherents claim, and they often struggle to name anything other than Star Wars itself that really fits it very well. They're certainly common, but that's a far cry from universal, and they often appear without the rest of the "Hero's Journey" package, which defeats the purpose of the the model. I also think that the plot outline of "The Hero's Journey" is so reduced to banality that it says very little to point out obvious similarities that it posits. Mostly, Joseph Campbell is a tool for the self-important to flatter themselves that they are intelligent and academic without them actually having to be intelligent or academic, or even to know very much about what they're talking about. If you want to work in this same space but actually read someone who's said something more interesting, then check out the work of Georges Dumezil. It's still a just-so story, but it's fundamentally a much more serious and interesting just-so story than the one Campbell has pushed on us.

It's also interesting that those very interested in showing how academic they are by referring to Campbell and the monomyth are completely unaware that the monomyth is very much out of favor and has been for decades in the field of comparative mythology.

Guiding principles

I created some guiding principles when I started my Eberron Remixed expansion project a year or so ago. Some of those were specific to Eberron as a setting, but as I looked over them again recently, the more I thought that fewer of them were specific to the setting than I had thought. Most of them actually are just about my own particular tastes, or apply to my own use of (and changes to) the Microlite 20 system, so they would apply here as well. On my older game blog, I was posting about gaming stuff way back when I was using d20, and for many years I was talking about d20 specific house rules and stuff like that. None of that is relevant anymore as my guiding principles have evolved in the years since to disallow systems as complex or complicated as d20 anyway. The other thing that has come up in the years since is that hints of proto-wokeness that products of that era had, although lacking that particular label, have metastasized into full blown wokeness in the hobby overall. It's so ridiculous that the concept of race now offends or triggers the mentally and emotionally unwell, and they've been replaced with ancestries. Of course, an ancestry is the same thing as a race, just with a different label, but some other concepts are less facile, like the idea that orcs = Negroes, so therefore we can no longer assume that going out and killing some orcs is a good thing. (Seriously; what?!) Ten years ago I never would have suspected that my guiding principles would have to address socio-political issues, but part of the obnoxious toxicity of the SJW is that everything is socio-political to them, so socio-political issues are a hot button in RPGs right now, as they are in every other form of entertainment. But proto-wokeness was already an issue ten years ago. Reading through campaign settings from back then, it is a little odd to notice in retrospect how many NPCs are Fake Men; women who are clearly in a man's role and who are treated as if they are completely interchangeable widgets with men. This incredibly tone deaf disrespect towards femininity and female roles would be shocking to me if I weren't sadly used to it, and the dishonest critique that it's sexist to not treat women like Fake Men reeks of female entitlement and bratty little princess syndrome. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here...

These guiding principles are not just design principles for the game and setting, though. It also includes an awful lot of discussion about my preferred playstyle, which the game and setting both are designed to facilitate, so some of these talk more about how I'd run the game and how I'd hope the players approached the game as much as they do how I designed the rules or the setting.

Guiding Principles for Dark Fantasy X (and related games like Hack Fantasy X and Space Opera X)

In no particular order, although I'll try and keep the more system-specific principles at the front, and the more setting specific principles at the back.

• The foremost priority of the system is that it's short, quick to read, and plays very quickly without bogging down in mechanical complexity in play. This has a few sub-points, or consequences that are worth being discussed briefly:
• It was never the intention of this kind of system to provide rules for every situation. However, because the rules are simple and consistent, it provides a very convenient tool for GMs to use to adjudicate any situation in a way that makes perfect sense, is predictable, and feels natural. One of the (two) mottos for Third Edition was "tools, not rules." That promise didn't end up being true, but it certainly is for the X family of m20 games.
• Because of this tools first approach and rules lightness, it is expected that players simply describe what they are doing in naturalistic language and the GM interprets them using the tools of the game. This facilitates a narrativist approach where players don't have to "get out of character" to interact with mechanics.
• Combat, barring unusually complicated and rare exceptions, requires no graphical representation and can all be done via "theatre of the mind." Again, this enables players to stay in character and not have to "stop" the game to play a completely separate tactical miniatures game.
• This brings up the question of stance. When I started playing RPGs, it was the very early 80s. I liked to read. I liked movies and TV. I had no wargaming background at all. I still don't really care much for wargaming, except in an academic sense. To me, the promise of RPGs was collaborating with a group in an authorial stance to come up with an impromptu story as a result of the players interactions through their characters with the environment and setting presented by the GM. The "stance" of the players is like that of a team of authors writing an ensemble cast TV show, although of course the focus of the players is on "authoring" their character only. Aspects of the game that are specifically "gamist" are minimized in an attempt to instead focus on the characters and the impromptu narrative and the tension around what's happening to them. Not only does the system facilitate this, but I will overtly take this tack during play as well.
• It also brings up the question of collaboration and trust. The GM does not compete in any way with the players, and the players are not trying to win against or outdo the GM. The players and the GM are expected to cooperate together to create a fun experience for each other. The only thing to "win" is the satisfaction of the experience itself. This requires a bit of trust between the players and the GM, as well as a little bit of emotional distance from your character. Bad things happening to your character does not equate to bad things happening to you, and if a character is experiencing hardships or even really bad hardships or death, that should still be entertaining to the players and the group overall. Conflict, adversity and risk is at the heart of any drama that's at all interesting, so embrace those things rather than shy away from them, and you'll have a better, more entertaining and satisfying time playing the game.
• In concert with that particular stance and approach, it's worth pointing out that any story is about the characters. I dislike the idea--common though it may be--that the setting, or even the scenario, exists independent of the characters. It is impossible, therefore, to know too much about any given game, or how it will play out, or what beats it will hit in the future, without even knowing who the characters are. In general, I'm not a fan of pre-prepared or pre-written campaign material anyway, but it's specifically rejected here; I won't be doing anything like adapting modules, adventure paths or anything like that except in a very loose sense, because the game will be optimized and tailored to the characters that I get, what kinds of attributes they have, which impact how they approach the problems that come up, or even what they're interested in doing in the first place. My approach is to have a short, 1-page campaign brief proposal, or better yet, two or three for the players to choose from in terms of what the campaign is going to be about, let them build their characters without any expectation that they create a "well-rounded" or balanced party based on the proposal that they choose, and then allow the game to play out as it plays out, but with an approach where the GM specifically is working with those characters the same way an author works with the characters he has instead of "punishing" them for not being different characters.
• That said, there's no plot immunity, and while I think campaigns based on characters are the most compelling, real risk to the characters is also a major part of what makes it compelling. I'd actually prefer to have all players make a character and then also make a back-up character. If the main character dies, the backup character will be slotted in place shortly, and a new spare will be made later to be in storage if needed. If the backup characters aren't used for a long time, and the main characters level up, then the backup characters will level up too to match.
• All games set in the X series of games will focus to varying degrees on a few common themes: 1) swashbuckling action, 2) intrigue and skullduggery, 3) wilderness exploration/survival, and 4) supernatural horror. The last one will probably be lowest in Space Opera X (but not nonexistent. Check out the Leigh Brackett story "People of the Talisman" for an example) and highest in Dark Fantasy X, with Hack Fantasy X being, in general, a middle ground. But any given game (or for that matter, even any given session) may toggle back and forth on each of those items in terms of how prominent they are. For people with more gaming experience, note that dungeon-crawling is not on that list. I don't really like dungeon-crawls and never run them.
• While both fantasy and space opera tend to use a lot of non-human races as part of their oeuvre, and these games are no exception, I've also come to see the wisdom of the early 20th century humano-centrist approach of fantasy and space opera. Aliens and fantasy races will exist, and will be PC selectable (as well as "monstrous" foes) but their prominence in the settings overall will be minimized, and their "alien-ness" will often be played down; most of them will act like people with a funny make-up job or good rubber mask. I've had less interest in exploring fictional anthropological studies of culture and behavioral biology and more interest in exploring the range of the human experience. Even the non-humans are meant to explore a narrower aspect of being human, when they're not there simply to be gratuitous color. And frankly, if gratuitous color is all that they are, I'm perfectly fine with that too. If I'm adapting (or remixing) an existing setting from some other game to be used in these games, this will be a major shift; most modern fantasy and space opera games are less humano-centric than the earlier ones, and I'll go back probably even further to the source material from the first half of the 20th century and the assumptions that they used, quite frequently.
• I especially do not see these games as avenues for the deconstruction of American culture, Western civilization, religion, "the patriarchy", etc. Take your issues elsewhere. Fantasy in particular is heavily rooted on a Medievalist approach that romanticizes earlier periods of Western Civilization, and space opera romanticizes an earlier, gung-ho approach to American civilization. All of my games, to some degree, will do the same. I'm really not interested in cosplaying any other civilizations or cultural traditions either; I'm a product of Western Civilization and I consider myself an ethnic American. I have absolutely no interest in "critique" of either, because it's insulting to me, my heritage and my culture. Besides, and this is beyond the scope of this topic right now, most of those critiques are based on dishonest narratives anyway. But even if they weren't, I'm still not interested in them.
• I know that this is fantasy (or science fiction, if talking about Space Opera X) and you give a fig leaf explanation for things that are not realistic, and you can accept it within the context of the game. That said, some things are harder to accept. For me personally, stuff that is contrary to human nature is hard to accept. People of different races and population groups acting like they are all interchangeable widgets with each other instead of having actual culture, behavior and biology that's as diverse as their physical appearance is contrary to human nature, and when I see it, it is a major cause of dissonance and distraction from what I'm doing. (It's also insulting and disrespectful of those differences, for that matter. Not everyone in the world runs around acting like virtue-signaling white liberals.) Another example is the assumption that women are the same as men, so settings are created in which women stand in men's roles as Fake Men. I find this equally distracting and off-putting. This will have little to do with player characters, and I'd never suggest anything like "If you're going to play a big, jock, warrior type, then you can't be a woman, because women aren't really like that, and even Rhonda Roussy is no match for her male counterparts." The statement is true, but I have no problem with people wanting to play action-grrls if they want to. I've even liked some such characters over the years, although I'm a little less keen on them now than I was years ago when I was younger. However, this will certainly impact the way I populate NPCs in the setting. If that bothers you, I highly suggest that you avoid playing with me. Like I said, I'm not interested in hashing out your politic-social ideas at the table, and I am specifically interested in replicating real human nature as well as the nature of early sword & sorcery and space opera fiction (mingled with some horror and thriller vibes.)
• Finally, and along those same lines, I'm also not interested in running charity outreach to gamers who may be emotionally dysfunctional, mentally unstable or ill, or who otherwise are incapable of normal human interaction. I want to game because I want to have fun doing the game. This is partly addressing the faddish Consent in Gaming document. I've written about it in the past in more detail, but let me just tl;dr summarize it here by suggesting that the only use that pamphlet has to me is that I use it as a filter. Anyone who proposes that it be taken seriously is automatically disqualified from being invited to game with me.

These guiding principles affect the design of the game rules, the design of the setting, and the design of how the game will actually be managed at the table. Nice to start with the very original building blocks as a foundation before I dive too much into the next part, where I'll start examining the rules.