Here are short summaries of each world, including what I particularly like about each. Please reply with more details and other literature suggestions if they come to mind.
Anne McCaffery's Pern[SBLOCK]The world is wild and unsettled an dcircled by a red mon that drops mysterious devouring "thread." Dragons and their riders fly up and burn away threadfalls. Dragons can teleport out of danger with their riders, and are telepathic. There are tiny wild dragons too, and music is very important to Pern's culture. Some stories focus on the lives of the "little people," some on the larger-than-life dragonriders; there is always attention paid to character's "mundane lives," which helps to transport you there.
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Michael Moorcock's Melnibone[SBLOCK]
Dragons and their humanoid kin once ruled a ruthless chaos empire that spanned the globe. Elric is their last king and greatest sorceror, and he wanders the planet in search of the mythical city of Tanelorn, which exists everywhere in the multiverse as a place of rest and refuge. He also travels to other dimensions with the aid of his dragon mount. Amoral anti-hero action; all magic is vile and maddening and the forces of order represent only decadence and stagnation. Eventually, Elric takes the souls of those he kills and uses their energy to fuel artifacts that utterly destroy the world, paving the way for our own reality.[/SBLOCK]
H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands[SBLOCK]A master dreamer with visions of a ghrand city receives no answers to his prayers and embarks on a long quest to find the gods and ask them directly. He has many bizarre adventures along the way, but at the end, he finds the dark god of chaos, who puts him on a dragonlike like creature and then sends him to find the city. I mostly like the way Lovecraft does dialogue; the only quotations in the whole story are the words of the god of chaos, everything else is simply evocative description of what is said and how. This is how I prefer to roleplay; I find most fantasy dialogue relentlessly hammy.[/SBLOCK]
Michael Swanwick's Avalon / Babylon[SBLOCK]Faeries and elves toil to build dragons; sentient war machines that determine the outcome of wars and history. It's hard to tell if this world is a hallucination atop a modern world like our own or just a fantasy world with malls, factories, drug culture, bicycles, etc. The author himself thinks of it as a comic hybrid between the "then" of myths and folklore and the "now" of modern life. Dark and cynical, but also very funny.[/SBLOCK]
Frank Herbert's Arrakis[SBLOCK]Space travel is only possible through the use of magic spice found on only one planet, which is totally inhospitable to human life. The spice is the root of all sorts of other psionic/magic powers, and slowly transforms its users into the great wyrms of the desert planet (and all sorts of strange psychic aliens along the way). An excellent hybrid of science and fantasy with lots of good stuff about religion, politics, war, empires, and momentous environmental and social changes (and the ties between them).[/SBLOCK]
To join in, build two characters (using the 25-point standard point buy) and post them here. We'll start at low level, so don't worry about class for now. Both Janni and half-dragon pseudodragons have a bunch of racial levels before they can take classes, and the classes available will depend on where the story takes us The only race you need to worry about is the draconic heritage of the pseudodragon character, and don't sweat alignment; everyone is neutral. As for equipment and skills and stuff, just get a general idea of the sort of things you'd like to have; I'm mostly concerned with characters personalities and interactions.
