Magic Ampersand

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Revision as of 19:43, 24 October 2015 by Robkelk (talk | contribs) (updated the "Darths & Droids" spinoff list)
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.[1]

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 Dragon 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."

  • 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&DS9 is a fairly standard example.
  • It eventully came to the fans' atention that while Dungeons & Dragons had Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine, one niche remains glaringly empty. Here you go: & Magazine!
  1. ↑ Coffins & Cadavers
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Magic_Ampersand?oldid=1334088"