Magic Ampersand

• Main
• Laconic
• Playing With
• All Subpages
• Create New

Ampersand Law #1. Early RPGs always had names in this format: [Something] & [Something Else That Usually Begins With The Same Letter]. (Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Villains & Vigilantes, Chivalry & Sorcery, etc.) —RPG Cliche List

Any fictional roleplaying game can be recognized as such, because it will have a title consisting of two alliterative plural nouns suggestive of its genre separated by an ampersand. A writer in need of a fictitious parallel to Vampire: The Masquerade, for instance, would probably dub it something like "Cloaks & Coffins". Bonus points if the two nouns are a place name and a monster name.

The Magic Ampersand form serves the same instant-identification purpose for ad hoc roleplaying games that the Chest Insignia does for ad hoc superheroes. It's also frequently used to make jokes about fictional creatures playing a roleplaying game based on our own mundane lives.

Of course, sometimes there is Truth in Television: Bunnies and Burrows, Castles and Crusades, Mutants and Masterminds, Villains and Vigilantes, Tunnels and Trolls... all paying homage to the mother of them all, Dungeons and Dragons.

(Note: Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are aversions of this trope, being Jane Austen novels.)

Compare The Noun and the Noun.

---

Examples of Magic Ampersand include:

• Rona Jaffe's Mazes & Monsters.
• An early issue of The Dragon (the official Dungeons & Dragons magazine) actually parodied itself, with an insert cartoon showing several fantasy characters playing a "mundane life" RPG titled Papers & Paychecks.

"We're pretending we are workers and students in an industrialized and technological society."

• • Robot Chicken had a similar parody in one of its small in-between scenes.
  • One college comedy magazine in the US had another "mundane life" RPG called Driveways and Desk Jobs.
  • Kingdom of Loathing has "Cubicles and Conference Calls".
• A fictional roleplaying game/laser tag hybrid called "Aliens & Asteroids" appeared in an episode of War of the Worlds
• "Grottos and Gremlins" from the video game Bully.
• Literary example: Neal Stephenson's The Big U explicitly compares the LARP Sewers and Serpents, played by characters in the novel, to Dungeons and Dragons.
• The Web Comic Darths & Droids.
  • Due to the Celebrity Paradox, in the Darths & Droids universe, the makers of Darths and Droids are working on a similar comic about an RPG version of Harry Potter: Wands & Warts. Every 50 episodes, they add a new burrow to this little rabbit hole.
  • In the Wands & Warts universe, the makers are working on a screencap comic about The Sound of Music: Notes & Nazis
  • In that universe universe, the Irregulars are making Mutants & Miscreants. (X-Men)
  • In THAT universe, they're writing Enlisted Men & Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (Aliens).
  • Then Magicians & Munchkins? (The Wizard of Oz)
  • Sandals & Spartans (300, for the 300th strip).
  • Avatars & Avi-Fauna (Avatar)
  • Terminators & Temporal Paradoxes (Terminator).
  • Carcasses & Carcharadons Jaws.
  • Trenchcoats & Turncoats, Casablanca.
  • Amphibians & Anthropomorphisms, The Muppet Movie.
  • Heists & Hypnagogic Hallucinations, based on Inception.
  • Barnacles & Bilgewater, based on Pirates of the Caribbean.
  • Docs & Deloreans based on Back to The Future
• The real-life Tabletop Games Villains and Vigilantes, by Fantasy Games Unlimited. They also made Starships & Spacemen.
• Wizards & Warriors in both DC Comics' Robin and an episode of Quantum Leap.
  • Wizards & Warriors was also the name of a summer replacement TV series in the early 80s. It parodied many themes and tropes from fantasy stories and FRP games. One episode even featured the hero gathering a "Dungeons and Dragons"-style party of specialists to go on a quest.
  • There's yet another Wizards and Warriors series out there...a trilogy of video games developed by Rareware for the NES.
• The webcomic Dungeon Damage had a group of Dragons playing "Humans and Houses".
• The (unnecessarily complex, at least for this first-edition AD&D veteran) Powers & Perils fantasy role-playing game, published by Avalon Hill, if you can believe it.
• The superhero RPG Mutants and Masterminds.
  • And the supplements for different comic book genres: Wizards & Warlocks (sword'n'sorcery comics) and Mecha & Manga (guess).
• An episode of Dexter's Laboratory, (Itself called D & DD) features the titular character running a game of "Monsters & Mazes". Dee-Dee replaces him as the Game Master, with amusing consequences.
• A sketch in The Onion Movie featured the game "Wizards & Warbeasts."
• In Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls, a group of students at Sorcerer University is always playing "Malls & Muggers".
  • And they're still playing - with no evidence of having stopped at any point in the year between games - in the next game. One of the tasks that your would-be fratmates have to accomplish in order to get through hazing week (which you can watch) is to make them stop.
• From the web series, "Gold": "Goblins & Gold"
• The computer RPG Might and Magic
• FoxTrot had a series of strips where Jason and Marcus were playing "Houses & Humans", which is pretty much what it sounds like.
• Esther Friesner's fantasy novel Majyk by Hook or Crook has a brief mention of a game called "Palaces & Puppies."
• Firesign Theatre: Ah, I don't wanna play Dungeons & Vikings!
• Simon the Sorcerer II features a group of characters interested in a game called "Apartments and Accountants". Since Simon the Sorcerer is a fantasy series, A&A simulates real life.
• Something Positive of course, has its own take on it.
• In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, one rival to Black Dog Games' Talespinner system and World of Shadow setting (a Self-Parody of The World of Darkness) was the venerable Labyrinths & Lamiae, formerly owned by LSD Inc, and later by Magicians of the Bay.
  • Black Dog themselves produced Axes & Arcana, parodying White Wolf's Swords & Sorcery.
• Two unrelated video games titled Swords & Serpents: one by Imagic for the Intellivision, another by Interplay for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
• D and DS 9 is a fairly standard example.