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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9723839" data-attributes="member: 7052563">That initial quote about “superior racial stock” probably attracted little attention at the time, but is of course exactly the kind of thing that the Coastal Wizards, Paizo, and others have been trying to replace with new approaches, with attendant controversy. I must have read all of this back in the day, because I read those books cover to cover, but it was far beyond the understanding of our teenage gaming groups.  We mostly ran TSR modules and took a D&D-flavored background world as a given.  When I tried to build my own world I got hopelessly bogged down trying to cram in everything but the kitchen sink: prehistoric creatures from geologic time, Lovecraftian horrors, sword & sorcery serpentfolk, Tolkien races, outer planes, etc.  It became overwhelming.  This Gygax quote stands out to me: “The game is not merely a meaningless dungeon and an urban base around which is plopped the dreaded wilderness”.  Some OSR games and play styles seem to edge close to this in their eagerness to bring back the dungeon crawl and the hex crawl, while eschewing high fantasy save-the-world metaplots (something I actually dislike myself).I do think it is interesting that Gygax himself later started to add more and more monster races, complete with the sort of power creep that seems inevitable in gaming supplements (it even shows up in something as different as the Civilization series of 4X PC strategy games).  UA featured Underdark races with spell-like powers and other goodies “balanced” by easily forgotten daylight weaknesses.  His own Half-Ogre article in Dragon magazine introduced the possibility of PCs with 19 STR, and the Dragonlance book had Minotaur PCs with 20 STR!  One of the guys I played with back in the day would only ever play dual-wielding Dark Elf Rangers (gee, I wonder where that came from...<img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😉" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" title="Winking face    :wink:" data-shortname=":wink:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />), Half-Ogres, or Krynn Minotaurs.I was just reading an EN World thread from back in April of this year which asked “How Fantastical Do You Like Your Fantasy World?”.  Gygax’s discussion of what it takes to create a convincing fantasy world, and his opinion that DMs need to make things easier for themselves by using a human baseline, reminds me of some of the issues that came up in that thread.  Many people wanted to start with a standard society of medieval European peasants, and then ramp up the fantasy weirdness as the PCs head out to the Borderlands and level up.  But there was a notable minority who wanted to start weird and go from there, because they figure that is what fantasy games are for and they get enough “regular” already from real life.  And some people wanted to square the circle with (an example I remember) a floating sky fortress of wyvern riders, where some poor churl has to shovel the turds and dump them far below*.  I think I probably like that last approach best of all.*In real life, nations fought wars over desolate rocky islets just barely poking up out of the ocean, because they were encrusted with mineral-rich seabird guano that had built up over centuries.  Alchemists would probably pay handsomely for a steady supply of wyvern dung.  Don’t throw that stuff away - no, I don’t care how bad it smells!</blockquote>

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