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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd
Subject: Re: Land of the Lost and DnD
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2024 13:41:58 -0400
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On Sun, 25 Aug 2024 22:20:01 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

>My son got really into Land of the Lost (1974) despite it's atrocious 
>greenscreen effects. At least the claymation is actually decent.
>Funnily enough the series shapes up to be much more well-written than I 
>remember from my childhood. I think the German dub I watched it with 
>might have had something to do with that.
>
>I wonder how much it shaped fantasy roleplaying as a hobby, because it 
>came out at exactly the right time, just around the time Dungeons and 
>Dragons came out, and it has all the proper tropes of a weird 
>scifi-fantasy game: There's a weird pocket dimension of lizard people, 
>apemen, dinosaurs, and aliens. There's a lost city with an eldritch god 
>lurking in the tunnels below. There's a psionic lizard 
>sorcerer/scientist, weird artifacts, yetis, unicorns, and confederate 
>soldiers hiding in caves.
>
>There's a subgame of figuring out useful combinations of crystals to 
>create effects. (although the way they keep forgetting combinations they 
>already used until the next episode is a bit stupid)
>
>It feels like someone just threw everything at the wall and looked what 
>stuck, which likely is exactly like the series came to be. One just has 
>to look at who actually wrote the series and the conclusion they just 
>raided a local science fiction convention for writers: Walter Koenig, 
>Larry Niven, Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad,... There was some A-list science 
>fiction talent involved in writing this, and the worldbuilding of the 
>first two seasons is quite amazing. Less so for the third one where one 
>of the main actors got replaced and they forgot how some of the 
>established laws of the world actually worked.
>
>It occurs to me that this is one of those series that definitely shaped 
>the way people played the game, but which wouldn't have taken into 
>account for e.g. Appendix N because it was out of Gygax' own experience. 
>But Arneson said the whole idea of the first fantasy campaign came about 
>with a bunch of old horror movies, and the whole idea of the monk as a 
>class was due to the success of the Carradine Kung Fu series.
>
>It might be interesting to see what stuff did actually shape the hobby 
>back then

The old D&D module "X1 Isle of Dread" always seemed to owe a lot of
its tone and ideas to the "Land of the Lost" show, even if the module
was set on an island (obviously, X1 also takes from old monster movies
too; Monster Island, anyone?). But both early D&D and Land of the Lost
stole liberally from pulp adventures, even if it often didn't make for
a cohesive whole. Both often felt very experimental, filled with a lot
of 'wouldn't it be neat if...' moments that were fun to play (or
watch) so long as you didn't think too much about it.

Later D&D (and fantasy in general) stepped away from this style,
focusing on stronger world-building, better characters and generally a
more epic feel overall. Like television shows, there was a growing
interest in longer, better structured stories over stand-alone
episodes. The silliness of the old modules (and shows like "Land of
the Lost") was seen as too childlike; something for young kids. 

Overall, I prefer the later adventures over the adventure-pulp that
was mainstream D&D in the 70s and early 80s. Still, I recognize that's
a personal preference, and I'm not condemning anyone who likes the
'classic' style (I mean, that's pretty much what "Dungeon Crawl
Classic" has built its brand around, so obviously there's still an
audience). Nor am I entirely opposed to playing that sort of game
(with moderation). It's almost tongue-in-cheek lightness adds a
certain verve to the game that is too often missing in more epic
quests.