The Fact of Fiction - Sneak Peek

 Another sneak peek, this time from "The Fact of Fiction" article on The Keep of the Lich-Lord.

6

The hero prepares to do battle with a pirate Ogre and Orc.

n In the Foreword to the Fabled Lands edition Dave Morris notes that the:

   “setting took its cue from 1970s Dungeons & Dragons, with elves and dwarves and ‘halflings’ in every town and tavern, and orcs as the axiomatic bad eggs … there are cultish alignments with Good or Evil - and Chaos too, though it’s Gygax’s reductive, mankind-behaving-badly take on Chaos rather than the primal pitiless force of mind-gnawing existential dissolution evoked by Mike Moorcock.”

   All of which is a roundabout why of explaining why the Chaos Pirate Ogre and Chaos Pirate Orc here become two generic pirates in the Fables Lands edition to avoid the alignment and race biases. Other instances of this tweak can be found at paragraphs 11 (no mention the pirate alignment with Chaos), 15 (the Chaos Knights are now the Knights of Nagil), 22 (the Chaos fleet is the Reaver fleet now), 36 (the bald man, Orc, and Goblin pirates become a bald man, a man with jaundice, and a southern tribesman), 37 (the pirates again change from a mixture of men, Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, and Ogres to nomads of the steps, Akatsurese, Sokarans, and tribes-men from Smogmaw and unmapped southern hinterlands), 38 (Chaos Gods become Old Gods), 58 (Chaos Shaman is now just a Shaman), 97 (where Grom the Ogre is now Grom the Gutcrusher), 151 where the man and Hobgoblin Chaos Pirates become a man called Yahoo and woman from the Innis Shoals called Termagant, 201 where the buccaneers or Chaos pirates become ordinary pirates, and 381 where again Chaos pirates become ordinary pirates.