There's a strong association in the public consciousness between Dungeons & Dragons, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Indeed, Tolkien's Middle Earth has come to be seen as the 'template' for a fantasy setting; the starting point from which other fantasy settings are birthed, the black hole at the centre of a galaxy of medieval fanatasy. The late Sir Terry Pratchett sums this up far better than I could hope to: "J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji." In some aspects, Tolkien's influence cannot be denied. Take elves, for example. While elves have a long history in Germanic folklore, stretching ...