How Fantastic?

[Tinker Gnome]

How fantastic do you like your fantasy games to be? Me? I love stuff like Floating Continents, or even a Palace located high in the mountains is cool. I like the strange and weird. A city which is floating in the middle of space as stellar winds buffet it and move it across space and where everything is made of crytsal and glows? Awesome!

 

[Rechan]

I like very fantastic or weird. Like a forest where the trees are crystal, inhabited by metallic bugs.

Problem is I never get around to using them.

But, this is one reason why I really dig the Feywild/Elemental Chaos/etc. They practically demand that you use fantastic elements.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I try to avoid two things:

1) Getting modern or sci-fi in my fantasy. Eberron's lightning rails were just too Age of Steam and Sharn's towers and flying taxis made one of my player's shout a falsetto "multi-pass!" uncontrollably. It was unique and cool, but it wasn't the fantasy gaming I prefer to shoot for.

2) Confusing my players. It's not a question of "too fantastic" but "too unpredictable." My players want to understand the world they're in to some extent, and if I keep introducing new elements it can be traumatizing.

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Of course, that makes it tough to be fantastic. Once you're used to something (even crystallized towers of frozen moonlight) it's no longer fantastic. So I usually just try to use fantastic descriptions (like "crystallized towers of frozen moonlight") without changing how they work too much (towers are still towers - doors, windows, etc).

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EDIT: Just saw Rechan's post.

But, this is one reason why I really dig the Feywild/Elemental Chaos/etc. They practically demand that you use fantastic elements.

QFT. I love the Feywild and Shadowfell in particular. I'm retconning them into my version of Dragonlance because I cannot bear to game without them.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I've got a very distinct preferance for low fantasy and sword and sorcery. Weird elements have their place within the setting but are not the whole setting. So the occasional tower of crystallised frozen moonlight (nice image by the way. ) is good because it gives the feeling of weird and wonderful much better than a landscape chock full of them.

One of the issues I have with a place like, for instance, Sigil is that by making whole other planes of existence that easy to get to and that similar to home detracts from the mystery and weirdness that another plane of existence should have. The last thing I want is to have a hero make the deadly perilous journey across the gore covered battlefields of the Blood War to to Iron City of Dis only to hear them say: 'Hey look, they've got a McDonalds here.' The weird and wonderful is weird and wonderful for its rarity.

 

[Cor Azer]

How fantastic do you like your fantasy games to be? Me? I love stuff like Floating Continents, or even a Palace located high in the mountains is cool. I like the strange and weird. A city which is floating in the middle of space as stellar winds buffet it and move it across space and where everything is made of crytsal and glows? Awesome!

In my opinion, fantastic is only good if used sparingly. Particularly if your players aren't the type to read pages and pages of your campaign setting. They need to be able to mostly predict how things are and work, but if you have too much fantastic, they can find that hard (or can't do it at all).

To this end, I mostly go for fantastic exaggeration of the "realistic" (ie, the impossibly high, but still brick and mortar, tower; the incredibly long, single span bridge, etc...). Beyond that, I go with stuff like the ever-shifting maze-like forest - still, fairly traditional fantastic tropes.

I have used the more far-out elements before (although not quite science fiction elements), but they don't work for most of my players.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I like the spectrum. Sometimes I want just a hint of the supernatural, sometimes I want Thor to be my paperboy and C'thulhu in my aquarium.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

One of the issues I have with a place like, for instance, Sigil is that by making whole other planes of existence that easy to get to and that similar to home detracts from the mystery and weirdness that another plane of existence should have. The last thing I want is to have a hero make the deadly perilous journey across the gore covered battlefields of the Blood War to to Iron City of Dis only to hear them say: 'Hey look, they've got a McDonalds here.' The weird and wonderful is weird and wonderful for its rarity.

Couldn't agree more. It irks me to no end to see layers of the Abyss with cities, streets, blacksmiths, feudal governments, even restaurants for Lolth's sake. Sheesh.

As for the OP, I like my settings medium fantasy. I don't want to play in a world with no magic (or a world where magic is irrationally and inconsistently not represented in the day-to-day life of the average person). But I don't want to play in an unidentifiable bizarro world either. If historic Europe is a 2 on the fantastic scale (we can't give it a 1, have you seen its cathedrals?) and Eberron is a 9, then I'd say I like my fantasy somewhere around a 5. Human-dominated, recognizable cultures, standard economies, but here and there there's just a little twist, and once in a while, there's an eye-popper. Of course, for adventurers, that "once in a while" is probably once or twice a game session.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Ycore Rixle wrote:
It irks me to no end to see layers of the Abyss with cities, streets, blacksmiths, feudal governments, even restaurants for Lolth's sake. Sheesh.

??? restaurants in the Abyss ??? Ick indeed. Please tell me that that is meant to evoke a general feeling and not a specific example from a published module and/or setting.

I suppose their cook book could be 'How to Serve Humanity.'

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

restaurants in the Abyss

A not so great album by Slayer, as I recall.

*ba-DUM-bum*

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Dannyalcatraz wrote:
A not so great album by Slayer, as I recall.

*ba-DUM-bum*

I just had to go check a Slayer discography to get that one.