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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8077710" data-attributes="member: 5142">If you are strapped for time, you could spend a little time to familiarize yourself with the genre on the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SwordAndSorcery" target="_blank">Sword & Sorcery</a> page of TV Tropes. But I think that if you at least understand the concept of Conan the Barbarian, you have a pretty good starting point for Sword & Sorcery. This is a bit rude, Chaosmancer. A person's reasons for liking Ruin Explorer's post are not so absurdly limited to either bashing Butcher and/or Sanderson and accusing you of being too ignorant to like Greyhawk. That's an unnecessary false dichotomy. Look, I don't think that Sword & Sorcery is necessary to understand Greyhawk, though having a little knowledge of the popular fiction of Gygax's day certainly creates an enriching understanding of the influences of the early D&D and its associated settings: e.g., Mystara, Wilderlands, Greyhawk, etc. When it comes to Sword & Sorcery, Dark Sun probably leans far more into Sword & Sorcery than Greyhawk, not to mention the 3rd party setting Primeval Thule. Greyhawk has clear Sword & Sorcery influences, but I would say that it is more the sort of setting you would expect created from someone who loved Medieval European miniature wargaming. IMHO, the attitudes, tones, and assumptions of Greyhawk run more cynical and pessimistic than what one would typically find in the Forgotten Realms. Protagonists in Greyhawk are typically motivated by self-interest (e.g., gold, power, land, etc.) whereas I have found that a lot of Forgotten Realms play is more oriented around playing the hero who saves the day. In terms of literary fiction, Greyhawk is more Black Company and Game of Thrones at the macro-level and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser at the micro-level. The closest analogous piece of pop fiction would probably be The Witcher. If your friends of ignorant of The Witcher, then that's a pretty large level of disconnect from contemporaneous pop culture fantasy. I have never read the books, played the games, or watched the mini-series, and even I know a fair bit about the setting from secondhand sources.</blockquote>

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