waxing philosophical on "low magic" versus "high fantasy"

[MoogleEmpMog]

It's not only the D&D magic system that takes the fantastic out of lots of standard games. Why do you think we see always new races and subraces filling in the positions of "boring" elves, dwarves and gnomes? D&D demographics and pc-ness take the fantastic out of these races. They are just neighbours with a few peculiar habits. Your baker is a half-orc, so what?

I don't think D&D demographics and pc-ness take the fantastic out of these races; rather, I think the fact that two generations of we mere Earthling humans have grown up with elves, dwarves and gnomes as part of our culture has done so.

The Lord of the Rings was voted the world's best book (or series of books, anyway). Was it favorite? Greatest? I don't recall, but something along those lines. Millions of people not only know about elves, dwarves and gnomes, they find them familiar. Comforting. As normal and natural a part of any fantasy world as their human comrades. Conventional, even - which is no bad thing.

Our culture at large embraces the classic fantasy races: garden gnomes are a cultural phenomena, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies make millions, every other bestselling electronic game features one or more of them. Dwarf, elf, gnome... ask virtually any average person, non-gamer, non-fantasy enthusiast, and they'll know what you're getting at. They'll probably have at least a vague idea of those races' stereotypical personalities.

Ask your typical, fantasy-enjoying gamer what a faen or illumian or gobber or warforged's society is like, and chances are he won't know the answer. He'll think about it (assuming he's interested), and maybe come up with an interesting answer. Interesting or no, it will be an answer he imagined for himself, or at the least one he didn't know when he was a young child.

Faen (AU), Illumians (RoD), Gobbers (IK) and Warforged (Eberron) all have societies pre-made in their sources, but these aren't as readily recognizable. They seem, in fact, quite fantastic. But if they, and not the elves, dwarves and gnomes of classic fantasy, were made the bread and butter of the cultural imagination for a few decades, they'd be as stale and as lacking in fantasy to the players of the future.

Eberron elves feel fresher (or scandalously different) because they're really nothing like other elves; physically, they're similar, but everything about them is strange, alien, fantastic - they're as different from classic fantasy races as the warforged or the mojh.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

I think when I say low magic, I do mean "rare magic". That's a good distinction to make. I don't want to make magic available to only a select few - that's just artificially limiting. I want to make it available to anyone who is smart enough, and lucky enough to acquire and learn such things. But, in a world of mostly illiterate peasants, having those requirements won't be an easy task.

My reasoning for restricting magic to those with The Gift is this:
If you don't do it, magic becomes technology. Given human nature, one or more kings will set up a school, train wizards, and conquer neighboring lands. Even at the expense of a few palaces. Now, if you have a very young or poor land, you can say nobody has yet acquired the resources and knowledge to try this. And if you have a very small land, you can say nobody has yet succeeded at it (there are only three baronies, and one was destroyed by civil war when the wizard brigade revolted; or, the number of wizards is small enough that a single guild controls them all as in Dragonlance).

But, given a large and/or ancient world, you will have Glantri and Alphatia if you say that wizard schools are workable. Magic absolutely everywhere, as a logical consequence of how humanity and societies would use this tool. The only way around this is to say that the gods of magic intervene in some way, which brings you back to The Gift (or other non-egalitarian devices).

People are very very good at killing each other. An invention that allows people to kill each other more effectively WILL be adopted in nearly every case, and cultural taboos will be discarded. The real reason medieval Japan held off from firearms for 300 years is that they were at peace for 300 years; if they had to fight European powers in the Napoleonic Era, they'd have picked up firearms right away, samurai code be damned. If you want to say you have a large, ancient, and occasionally warring world where nobody has yet "commercialized" the most efficient means of slaughter, you are considerably changing human nature. (and, once it is perfected on the battlefield, it spills over into other aspects of life)

Want magic != technology? Make it erratic, unpredictable, inherently dangerous, or not necessarily learnable. Most of these penalize the PCs and so are not very popular with players; I was just tossing out the one idea that hurts PCs the least.