I'd say I was a traditionalist, but I have no problem with flying ships in my fantasy, either of the Mystaran Alphatian "magic sail boat that flies" type or Moorcockian gas-ballon dirigibles (non-magical). Railways, hmm, that's a bit too industrially mechanised for me, at least for my 'home' setting, ok for a more explicitly sci-fantasy world.
A stick in the mud, a dinosaur?
- Thread starter Vonlok The Bold
- Start date
You got peanut butter in my chocolate...no you got chocolate in my peanut butter!
It comes dow to feel and flavor that you want in your games and there is nothing wrong with that. Eberron harkens to the days of the pulp novel, Iron Kingdoms to an alternate world of the industral revolution, they have their pluses and minuses but they are only a small section of fantasy.
You play what you enjoy
It comes dow to feel and flavor that you want in your games and there is nothing wrong with that. Eberron harkens to the days of the pulp novel, Iron Kingdoms to an alternate world of the industral revolution, they have their pluses and minuses but they are only a small section of fantasy.
You play what you enjoy
Nazerel
First Post
The magitech, steam punk, airship, floating islands/cities, plane-hopping, "pulp" settings do seem to be all the rage these days. It boils down to a matter of taste. Now I'll admit that I've used these very same themes in my campaign setting, but I tend to give it a slight twist. My main problem with these "hip" settings is not that they're hackneyed or derivative, but because these very same themes are assumed to already be the norm in these settings. For example, in Eberron, flying ships, floating cities, and Warforged are accepted more or less, and are generally innovations that have been progressing in the long time coming (yes, Warforged are debatable since they're more recent but the fact remains they are not so uncommon a sight). That is, these ideas already assumed to have already been developed and explored. I say that about kills half the fun for the PCs right there.
In my game, I tend to reserve the technological and steam punk bent (airships, crude firearms, magical manipulation and splicing of creatures to create perfect soldiers, the very first Warforged being brought into existence, an underground railway, machines and vehicles of the magical construct variety, etc.) for a very strong and lawful evil empire that is threatening the rest of the continent with conquest. This empire is also very humanocentric and despises both "lesser" humanoid races (elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc. and forcing gnomes to help create more technology) and arcane magic (Imperial mage slayers with the Occult Slayer PrC are common), so they rely on this new technology to further their power. This effectively keeps the technology side of things limited to the PCs' enemies (the PCs have destroyed an Imperial airship, an underground railway, and ran into a few of their experimental monsters over the past 150+ sessions) and does help preserve the "mystique" of these themes to a greater degree (unlike if all nations had access to such things and were commonplace enough to be accessible to PCs as well). Make things too accessible and it becomes old hat.
Another thing is floating cities or towers, where they are already assumed to have been created and are a common sight in Eberron. For my game, there is a kingdom (an enemy to the empire) that has just woken up one morning to find that a nearby mountain range has been left decimated and that huge land masses of earth and rock have been thrown up into the sky and suspended by raw magical energies unleashed therein (the PCs had a hand in this after having failed to stop the BBEG - the mountain was also home to a hidden civilization of avariel - though they aren't elves - which was destroyed too). These floating islands are a source of great concern and panic for the local populace, but of greater concern and interest to their military and those in power. The PCs can now help to explore and even pave the way for colonization of these newfound territories (the kingdom reveres dragons and relies on lesser dragons for defense and transport - felldrakes for ground cavalry, wyverns and dragonnels for aerial support - so getting up to and around these islands isn't too much of a problem). This way, the PCs can take a more active role in helping to shape history and their world if they so wish, rather than just be spectators or mere "consumers" of these ideas and themes as they would otherwise have been.
Despite all this, I try to keep the world as believable as possible and make sure things, including magic level and character level, make sense in relation to everything else. Characters in the teen levels are rare (the current party level is 12 so the PCs are already people of some renown and influence), and those of epic levels are virtually unheard of unless they're legends. In that sense, I try to keep the power level between Greyhawk/Eberron (low-mid) and Forgotten Realms (ridiculously high). But to each his own.
In my game, I tend to reserve the technological and steam punk bent (airships, crude firearms, magical manipulation and splicing of creatures to create perfect soldiers, the very first Warforged being brought into existence, an underground railway, machines and vehicles of the magical construct variety, etc.) for a very strong and lawful evil empire that is threatening the rest of the continent with conquest. This empire is also very humanocentric and despises both "lesser" humanoid races (elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc. and forcing gnomes to help create more technology) and arcane magic (Imperial mage slayers with the Occult Slayer PrC are common), so they rely on this new technology to further their power. This effectively keeps the technology side of things limited to the PCs' enemies (the PCs have destroyed an Imperial airship, an underground railway, and ran into a few of their experimental monsters over the past 150+ sessions) and does help preserve the "mystique" of these themes to a greater degree (unlike if all nations had access to such things and were commonplace enough to be accessible to PCs as well). Make things too accessible and it becomes old hat.
Another thing is floating cities or towers, where they are already assumed to have been created and are a common sight in Eberron. For my game, there is a kingdom (an enemy to the empire) that has just woken up one morning to find that a nearby mountain range has been left decimated and that huge land masses of earth and rock have been thrown up into the sky and suspended by raw magical energies unleashed therein (the PCs had a hand in this after having failed to stop the BBEG - the mountain was also home to a hidden civilization of avariel - though they aren't elves - which was destroyed too). These floating islands are a source of great concern and panic for the local populace, but of greater concern and interest to their military and those in power. The PCs can now help to explore and even pave the way for colonization of these newfound territories (the kingdom reveres dragons and relies on lesser dragons for defense and transport - felldrakes for ground cavalry, wyverns and dragonnels for aerial support - so getting up to and around these islands isn't too much of a problem). This way, the PCs can take a more active role in helping to shape history and their world if they so wish, rather than just be spectators or mere "consumers" of these ideas and themes as they would otherwise have been.
Despite all this, I try to keep the world as believable as possible and make sure things, including magic level and character level, make sense in relation to everything else. Characters in the teen levels are rare (the current party level is 12 so the PCs are already people of some renown and influence), and those of epic levels are virtually unheard of unless they're legends. In that sense, I try to keep the power level between Greyhawk/Eberron (low-mid) and Forgotten Realms (ridiculously high). But to each his own.
Desdichado
Hero
Well, by the time I see the thread, a lot of what I would have said has been done already, of course.
- Right, Tolkienesque and Greyhawk in the same sentence is something I'm not so sure about. I'd greatly prefer Tolkienesque to Greyhawk. I'm not that strong (or interested) in the specifically D&D fantasy tradition, though. Of course, that could also be because I've actually read the Rose Estes Greyhawk novels...
- Eberron isn't really all that Final Fantasy esque as a lot of folks make it out to be. Granted, the look is a bit "dungeonpulp", but the setting itself is more traditional than a lot of folks give it credit for.
- What does traditional mean? My homebrew that I'm running is a far cry from D&D per se, featuring a lot of horror, Cthulhu-like elements, as well as a lot of swashbuckling weirdo-ness. All things considered, I wouldn't really consider my setting "avant-garde" by any means, though -- with the exception of a bit of steampunk elements, it's pretty firmly rooted in the Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Howard Phillips Lovecraft school of fantasy, which predates Tolkien anyway.
Nellisir
Hero
Vonlok The Bold said:
I think it's more of a Dark Ages vs Steam Ages thing than high fantasy vs low fantasy, or high magic vs low magic. Blame it on that article in Dragon decades back, but I think of high vs low fantasy as more symbolic of the campaign than the setting -- if you're saving the world, it's high fantasy; if you're saving your skins, it's low fantasy.
And as we've already seen, there's considerable room for disagreement on high vs low magic within just one setting, let alone across multiple settings.
All that said, I'm not a Steam Ages kind of guy myself, or even Renaissance. I could do a Frontier America setting (and I'm looking forward to Northern Crown), but anything to do with mechs is right out.
(As an aside, I think the debate over how technological a magical society would become is too limited. If magic was sufficiently widespread, I have my doubts that steel would ever have been created, let alone locomotives. Why go to all the trouble of mining & smelting when you can use a few cantrips to make armor out of stones?)
Cheers
Nell.
Henry
Autoexreginated
Times change; cultural interests change with it. I'm a "stick in the mud" with regards to anime-style animation - I can't wrap my head around people who fire repeating crossbows like submachine guns, and who carry swords the size of Volvos. (Tried "Berserk" just the other day on a recommendation. 
) However, that's fantasy, too - just not the brand I grew up with in the late 70's-early 80's. Just like Gary Gygax's vision was Anderson, Leiber, Howard, and Vance, and mine was Weis, Hickman, Greenwood, and Schwartzenegger.
) However, that's fantasy, too - just not the brand I grew up with in the late 70's-early 80's. Just like Gary Gygax's vision was Anderson, Leiber, Howard, and Vance, and mine was Weis, Hickman, Greenwood, and Schwartzenegger.What makes you think my argument is purely tech-based here? The alignment system is the part of D&D physics that I see as the most modernist aspect of the game. It imposes an essentially modern value system on D&D societies and individuals and ties it directly to the physics of the world.Turjan said:
Also, the decisions cultures make about the use of tech do not proceed wholly independently of the tech itself. There is a dialectic between social and material conditions and tech that determines use.
Also, don't get me wrong here. I'm saying that what matters about these systems ultimately is their appeal. Whether rationally or not, people who want fidelity to physics respond positively to Eberron because those promoting it perceive the tensions between D&D's physics and its genre and state that they are seeking to address this. Could it be done better? Quite possibly. But that's not a question in which I am very interested because I don't enjoy Eberron-style settings.
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