It is, to be blunt, the kind of world many gamers like for their RPG settings, preserving the "cool" aspects of the past while jettisoning those things that might make it unpleasant. “On the other hand,” he said, “you will learn that in lighting, shelter, agricultural techniques, and medicine, for example, the Mortals, or Men Below the Mountains, are relatively advanced.” In this way, Norman creates a world in which Earth men must fight as did their pre-modern ancestors, but without all the messy and difficult aspects of living in those times. Further, there is no mechanised transportation or communication equipment or detection devices such as the radar and sonar equipment so much in evidence in the military establishments of your world.” For example, incredibly enough, weapon technology is controlled to the point where the most powerful devices of war are the crossbow and lance. They limit, selectively, the technology available to us, the Men Below the Mountains.
“in which the Priest-Kings do take a most active interest in this world, and that is the area of technology. For the most part, the Priest-Kings take no interest in the affairs of humans, allowing them to behave as they wish. Upon his arrival on Gor, Cabot learns that the immortal Priest-Kings have taken men and women from Earth at various times throughout history and set them on this other world, for reasons that are inscrutable. Norman tells this story in the first-person, a stylistic debt he clearly owes to Burroughs, even if, as I said, the rest of the novel isn't particularly Burroughsian in its themes or tone. It tells the story of an Englishman named Tarl Cabot, who works as a history teacher in New Hampshire before he is whisked away to a planet occupying the same orbit as our Earth but on the other side of the Sun. Tarnsman of Gor could, I think, be reasonably described as a sword-and-planet tale in the Burroughsian mold, but shot through with a decidedly un-Burroughshian philosophy. Just why Norman's novel proved so successful is an interesting question, complicated by the fact that the Gor series enjoys a great deal of notoriety nowadays for themes implicit in its early novels that only come to the fore later on.
It was, however, quite successful and widely read, spawning seven sequels by the time OD&D was published in 1974, with many more appearing afterward.
Set on a counter-earth called Gor peopled by human beings kidnapped from our world by a race of insectoid aliens called the Priest-Kings, Tarnsman of Gor isn't what I'd call a great book, or even a particularly good one. If you want to get a good sense of just how big fantasy was becoming in the late '60s and early '70s, I can think of no better illustration than John Norman's 1966 novel, Tarnsman of Gor.
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