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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9643772" data-attributes="member: 18">Earthdawn gets it right for me.It actually integrates that fantastical elements into the setting. Like, it understood that if you have common-place magic, people will want to use that in the home - so they have fairly common magical self-heating cookpots, for example (something that would be incredibly useful).That's what I'm looking for. I have absolutely no time for settings where it's basically "faux-medieval Europe with a disconnected layer of fantasy elements dropped on top and barely integrated at all" (worse, Mystara's "Oh here's faux-India but we replaced Indian people with cat men!" or the like - I don't know if that's an actual Mystara country but I'd buy it as one if you told me it was!).Yet that "disconnected layers" deal is perhaps most fantasy settings. Albeit I am talking very expansively, including all the really bad ones no-one discusses.It's not really the "degree of fantastical-ness" that matters to me, it's the degree of integration of the fantastical elements into the actual setting.You can get problems going the opposite direction too - you can have a very fantastical setting, with a lot of wild elements, but everyone in the setting is depicted as just acting like 21st century Americans would, essentially (I'm not even talking re: sexism/homophobia/racism, that's fine to avoid, to be clear, I'm talking in even broader attitudes, like how they value education or justice), for no apparent reason, and going against the general (often desperate or wild) tone of the setting. Or Numenera, which has this amazing overall setting, and then the example city is basically a collection of cheap and lazy medieval fantasy and steampunk tropes which seems completely at-odds with this "insanely far future tech is magic" setting!I want a unified whole. I want a thought-through setting where stuff makes sense. I'm willing to accept a significant degree of contrivance, and some elision, to make things work, but like, give me something! Make the setting feel like a single piece, not just some junk lazily layered on top of each other. I'd much rather something aggressively weird, but which worked, tonally/conceptually than something which was easy to understand but was also just a bunch of junk in a pile (looking at you, Greyhawk, Mystara, a lot of the Forgotten Realms albeit not all of it, etc).</blockquote>

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