When Dice Were Made of Flint #15

In the 1970s and 1980s, music was a vital part of everyone’s social identity. The music you listened to was linked to how you dressed, who your friends were, and pretty much everything else – including the games you played. If you played D&D, or any other fantasy roleplaying game, the odds were that you listened to prog or heavy rock rather than punk, ska, New Romantic, or any of the other styles that were popular at the time.

The reasons for this were many. Led Zeppelin’s references to the Lord of the Rings had led to a resurgence of interest in Tolkien’s work, while the album-cover art of Roger Dean, Patrick Woodroffe, and Rodney Matthews had aligned fantasy very firmly with prog rock. Matthews also did a lot of paintings based on the work of Michael Moorcock, many of which were made into posters that adorned student bedrooms everywhere, including my own.

While Black Sabbath had been producing horror-inflected music since 1970, it was when Ronnie James Dio joined Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow in 1974 – the same year that D&D was first published – that fantasy and music converged in my life. Throughout his career with Rainbow, and then with Dio and Black Sabbath, Dio’s songs included fantasy themes on a regular basis, while swords, dragons, and other fantasy motifs made regular appearances in their stage shows.

Through the 70s and 80s, other rock bands incorporated fantasy and science fiction into their music. From prog bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer to space-rock acts like Hawkwind and Gong and one-off tracks like Van Der Graaf Generator’s “White Hammer,” gamers found much that resonated with their interests.

The growth of fantasy games and the expansion of fantasy fiction fed the music, which fed back into the other media in an ever-strengthening feedback loop. Michael Moorcock’s characters made guest appearances in the music of Hawkwind, for example, while his 1976 collaboration Time of the Hawklords casts the band as heroes in a post-apocalyptic London.

As a gamer in my teens and twenties, I absorbed it all. I even went as far as designing two whole dungeons inspired by music – one by Pink Floyd, and the other by Rainbow and its predecessor Deep Purple. They seemed like good ideas at the time, but my craft was not yet mature and they consisted mainly of disparate dungeon rooms, each themed around a particular song by way of contrived and tortured puns. Setting the controls for the heart of the sun sent the saucerful of secrets into interstellar overdrive – that sort of thing. And in the Deep Purple dungeon, of course, the Black Knight really was a long way from home.

It was fun, though. My players would groan when they got a reference, and I would smirk, and we would go on to the next room – or to the college bar, to lower our critical faculties even further before resuming play.

You couldn’t do that with Culture Club or Olivia Newton-John. Or maybe you could, but we didn’t.