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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1280745" data-attributes="member: 6533">Well, you certainly won't hear me complaining about penicillin and vacinations, but the point still holds that you can't get a realistic setting without a lot of suck.  Looked at globally, and from a certain generalizing standpoint, not a lot has changed and those changes that do exist are related to a lot more than technology. I mean there's a lot to go off on here, seriously farmers got turned into bankers?, but the point is that their is a dangerous fiction to the whole magic=technology which forms society in its image trope.So though, that's a minor strike.  I'm here for the literary fiction not the fiction of history.  But I just don't know that I trust a high magic setting to create more problems for the pulp then it brings benefits.Partly because pulp already has a very set way of using magic, and if you change that a lot of 'memes' seem to become inaccessible. It's a problem and I'll be interested to see how the setting fixes it.  It may not in which case it will probably be a mostly 'punk' setting since indemic threat will have to come from the system of things instead of solely ranging from discrete elements.  Pulp, on some level, thinks that problems with the way things are are solvable or bearable and compensated for.  Voila technology solves the problems of the middle ages, what problems remain in common will be eliminated as the system perfects itself.  Henry V: Longbows will take of our martial woes.Mind you I don't know that pulp is really all that optimistic, it's simply recognizes discrete change and challenge rather than total.  Sometimes it's just that the system works with you or compensates for its flaws.  That's why you got Conan and Indiana Jones in this genre.  Indiana ain't totally happy within the system but he's got some faith in it, Conan's system isn't worthy of faith or optimism, but within it he is very optimisitic that he can work with it.Pulp needs magic as something outside of the system.  Something that is either a threat or a hidden support.  If everything is wrapped up in the system than pulps got nothing to vanquish or resolve.  The action then turns punk.For Punk, on the other hand, magic is just one more thing that people can do.  Another aspect of the churning, unending dynamic struggle of the systems and the problems.Punk ain't hopeless by the way, it just has less global hopes and more risks.  Also, although you can't win in punk like you can pulp, neither can you loose like you can in pulp or noir.  The system and problems constantly recreate things or cycle them around, there's no way it can beat you just like there's no way you can beat it.Noir is somewhere in between the two and the most hopeless.  It's really just pulp with punk sensibilities.Casablanca isn't noir.  The film has noir elements, but the fact is nearly everyone gets out alive.  And people become less corrupt rather than more.  It's just pulp with noir dressing.Now Chinatown, that's noir.</blockquote>

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