Not sure how the OSR/ Zero Edition Dungeons & Dragons fans and Tumblr crossover, but here goes.
There is an infectious misunderstanding regarding how OD&D deserts work, and I believe it’s because Gygax and Arneson were terrible at communicating their creative intentions without editors.
As you can see, there are twelve entries in the Random Encounter table for Deserts, 1-6 being the sort of encounters you might expect, with nomads, wizards, and even Islamic Dervishes, apparently. It’s where the (Martian) encounters come in that people get confused.
Because Zero Edition’s flavor tastes the most of Sword and Sorcery, and even Sword and Planet, out of all (“official”) D&D editions, and the foreword insists you must be familiar with Conan, John Carter of Mars, etc., and these encounters include Tharks and other Martians of Barsoom, the common assumption I’ve seen among Zero Edition scholars is that this is meant to be an optional rule where you can basically turn your deserts into Mars!
This is not the case. RAW in Zero Edition, your deserts are not Mars.
Let’s scroll down a page to other random encounters:
As we can see here, we are provided with random encounter tables that are explicitly optional- it is optional to turn your swamps and mountains into Lost World type havens of prehistoric life, and your forests into fae realms of Greek myth.
What you may also notice is that the Martian-Desert encounter tables are not listed as optional at all. They are mandatory. And yet, the Mars part of the table is in parenthesis. Why?
I do not claim to have access to Gygax and Arnesons’ ghosts (and forced them to get along for an interview together), but I think I have an idea.
This bad boy was published by TSR in 1974, the same year as the Brown Books. You probably don’t hear about it as much because of how tragically low the number of Barsoom fans are, and because the Burroughs estate hammered down hard on TSR, harder than Tolkien’s. Any future references to Barsoom in D&D were eliminated.
Here are the random encounter tables from this book:
Something we notice is that these tables are ALL d6 tables, and that they lack the most common environment in Barsoom- deserts! What gives?!
Wait a minute…
There are only 6 (Mars) encounters provided in Zero Edition! Could it have been TSR’s intention that you cross reference this encounter table with their Barsoom setting book?
It wouldn’t be the first time early TSR would do something like this. Recall that in the Brown Books, they constantly reference the combat system of Chainmail, but never reexplain it in case 13 year old Timmy who never played that game in his life picked up the cool dragon book. Of course, they go into more detail explaining the alternative combat system based on d20 rolls, and that since has become the favorite core combat system of Dungeons & Dragons.
So that’s it? My deserts aren’t Barsoom and Gygax and Arneson couldn’t just tell me that themselves? Yes, but don’t weep yet my friend, because I’ve made an inference from the fact we have the Barsoom supplements at all, and because of the optional Arid Plains table.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series is about a man named John Carter, a veteran of the American Civil War, who is magically transported to Mars, referred to by the natives as Barsoom, its lower gravity granting him superior strength and dexterity, including very high jumps. He randomly encounters monsters, makes allies with the big green men he encounters, and marries a princess after helping her city state win a war with its rival. Classic sword and planet/ sorcery stuff.
This series is highly important to the genre of fantasy and science fiction. Superman was directly inspired by John Carter’s physical feats, Star Wars’s plot of rescuing a princess from an evil space empire is ripped right from A Princess of Mars, and Avatar is literally just a knock off of John Carter of Mars. It’s no wonder Gygax and Arneson wanted to pay it homage in their game.
I think it’s more than homage though. Gygax NEVER wanted to introduce an official setting for D&D, only ever alluding to his home Greyhawk campaign early on; he figured people would be more interested in making their own worlds. But he provided maps for Barsoom.
If we look back at the optional Arid Plains, it’s full of Barsoomian animals, even Tharks, those angry Green men who love John Carter, whom they call “Virginia”. As John Carter himself was first teleported to Barsoom from a cave in a plain, we have to ask ourselves: does this imply that this arid plain is in fact a gateway to and from Barsoom?
So don’t cry because your desert isn’t the realm of Dejah Thoris and Tara Tarkas. Gygax and Arneson had a really shitty way of explaining it, but you have the option of making an arid plain in your world a connection to John Carter’s world, just like how you have the option of making your forests something out of Homer, or your mountains like Journey To The Center of The Earth. And that’s magical.
