Spellbinder wrote:
There is room for variation within the genre I guess.
I agree! And thank you for the interesting video link. I admire his passion for the subject.
Still, in the final analysis, it's a series of bald statements by Some Random Guy. "Sword and sorcery is this." "Sword and sorcery is that." According to whom? Based on what? Some Random Guy namechecks Conan at the beginning of the video (as well he might, since Howard is widely credited with creating the genre) but it's clear to me that he's never read a Conan story in his life*; he probably thinks watching pitiful garbage like the "Ahnuld" movies while smoking a skull-shaped bong is an adequate substitute. Really, I could refute pretty much everything he says in the video using Howard's stories to find counterexamples (now that Some Random Guy has been so kind as to reference - if not actually read - them as an example of S&S), but that would be a little like sandblasting a soup cracker.
I'll just briefly touch on what he says at the point you highlighted: that all magic in S&S is dark and dangerous, and all of its practitioners are evil. This is not borne out by the Conan stories. In the very first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword", Conan encounters the sage Epemitreus, a long-dead priest of Mitra who has continued to fight the cult of Set from beyond the grave. (For those who haven't read Howard's stories - such as Some Random Guy - Mitra as described is roughly as Lawful Good as Pelor, which is somewhat of a blow to another standard canard that all S&S gods are evil.) Though clearly very powerful, there is no indication Epemitreus is anything but benevolent. In the only Conan novel written by Howard, The Hour of the Dragon, Conan receives magical aid from the apparently benign witch Zelata and the priests of the god Asura. Though some of Conan's subjects believe the Asura-worshippers are evil, nothing in the story actually suggests this and Conan explicitly doesn't believe it himself. Now, are most of the sorcerers in the Conan stories in fact evil? Yes. But Conan has a very bad attitude toward magic and the stories are told from his viewpoint, so it's questionable how much his experience can or should be generalized to all magic in his milieu. In fact, even given his strong hatred of magic, Conan still encounters such benevolent sorcerers as I have mentioned above, so clearly all practitioners of magic aren't evil in S&S.
Does this mean that Some Random Guy is wrong in this assertion, as in others I could dissect in detail, or that he isn't entitled to his opinion? He is wrong to the extent that he believes (as I suspect he does) that he is correctly describing Conan's world with his series of cliches and canards, but he is certainly entitled to his opinion about S&S in any event. One does wonder where, if not in the literature he rather carelessly mentions at the beginning of the video, he actually got these ideas? But the answer to that is obvious enough: from Some Other Random Guy. And Some Other Random Guy got the ideas from Some Third Random Guy, and so on back - not to the foundational literature of our hobby - but to the howling emptiness where all idle rumors and baseless canards are born.
Some Random Guy could be wrong about the vague ideas he inherited from countless other Random Guys, or the founder of the genre could be wrong about the actual ideas in his stories. I know where I'm inclined to place my support. This probably also answers your original question - i.e., how can this game claim it is a sword and sorcery setting, when it doesn't meet the strict requirements set forth by the learned Some Random Guy? It's probably because the author of the game has actually read and understood S&S literature, while Some Random Guy... clearly hasn't.
* - For example, early in the video he repeats the standard uninformed canard that an S&S setting is more like the ancient world than the medieval period. This is amusing to anyone who's actually read Howard's stories (i.e., someone who is not Some Random Guy) because the Hyborian kingdoms in Conan's world are as medieval as anything in Greyhawk - right down to knights in plate pinning tokens from ladies to their arms. Likewise, other portions of Conan's world resemble the ancient world, the American frontier, the milieu of early modern piracy, the steppes, and so forth. This is because Howard didn't set out with the object of circumscribing his imagination as narrowly as possible; he left that exercise in the hands of such wise gentlemen as Some Random Guy.
