Genies of the lamp

In Arabic folklore, genies were incredibly powerful beings. They had incredible riches and magical powers. King Solomon bound a number of them into objects like rings and lamps. If the binding was permanent, then the genie would be forced to serve whoever held the prison. This was typically phrased as granting their master's wishes, i.e. orders.

At some point, popular culture forgot that genies were powerful in their own right and started depicting them as being given arbitrary wish granting by their imprisonment itself. It became a common convention for a master to be limited to three wishes before the genie's lamp magically whisks itself away to find a new master (or, less commonly, releases the genie). In many cases the genies were no longer depicted as a race but as human beings who were magically imprisoned and empowered.

Even D&D fell prey to this, as it employs a bizarre compromise between these two diametric opposed approaches. D&D genies are powerful magical beings in their own right, but they also have the limited ability to cast the wish spell on behalf of mortals. The part about being imprisoned in lamps, rings or other small objects is completely ignored for whatever reason, because D&D always warps its inspirations like that. Tradition!

This is ultimately a re-skinning of the Grimms' fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife." In that tale, a prince was inexplicably cursed into the form of a talking fish with the ability to arbitrarily grant wishes. People bound into lamps and thereby granted arbitrary wish granting are the same formula. So many stories have put their own variations on this formula so I can't make too many generalizations. The "wish granted by demon in exchange for your soul" is a common variation, for example.

While the tropes of "powerful being forced into servitude" and "arbitrary wish granting" are sufficient on their own, I feel that combining them waters down the whole concept. It raises the question of why these powerful D&D genies can arbitrarily grant wishes in the first place and why they don't seem to exploit that for their own benefit. Arbitrary wish granting only makes sense if you want a monster to be much weaker than it would be if it could arbitrarily warp reality, or if the source of the wish isn't important to the story. If the monster is already a high level monster and some kind of absurdly rich sovereign, like the noble class genies who grant wishes in the rules, then the wish granting becomes a bit superfluous.

Anyhow, I'm surprised that the "human cursed into wish-granting genie trapped in lamp" trope doesn't seem to show up in fantasy gaming. It sounds like a really good plot hook. What about having both in the same story? On one hand you have powerful genies who are imprisoned and forced to serve whoever holds their prison. On the other you have wish-granting lamps that enslave some hapless mortal as a glorified user interface. How do you suppose they would feel about one another?