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Message: <blockquote data-quote="willpax" data-source="post: 138000" data-attributes="member: 1602">These are wonderful, thought provoking posts, all. I am one of those DMs who takes myths very seriously--usually coming up with my own, but always aware that there is nothing new under the sun. I am usually trying to explore some theme or contradiction (a relic of structuralist upbringing: I tend to think of myths as efforts to deal with inherent contradictions in various cultural assumptions, a la Claude Levi-Strauss). My current campaign mythology is an attempt to explore the tension between the community and the individual, between selflessness and selfishness. I use an elf-style race (physically slight, mystically powerful, connected to the world and each other) as the source of one tradition, and dragons as the source of the other. All game world cultures derive from this basic distinction. Some cultures celebrate the hero (and tend to "worship" dragons), while others vaue some form of collective activity (and rely on a set of writings produced by the ancients). Within each goup there are tensions and disagreements. The current local plot is, not surprisingly, a religious war. All that said, I know that that is not the only, or even the best, way to run a campaign. Quite honestly, many people have different needs from their world--they may simply want a diverse palette for backgrounds, in wich case the world-that-is-impossibly-diverse serves a useful artistic function (namely, enabling a diversity of character concepts). Forgotten Realms, as a public setting, strives to be many things for many different gamers. Even within a smaller group of actual gamers, backgrounds and levels of understanding may differ, and so suggest that an inclusive mythos would be the best way to establish a game world. Another way to look at things would be to notice how much of modern culture is self-consciously a pastiche (from The Waste Land on down to MTV videos) of disparate elements. We moderns think of ourselves as the inheritors of all of world history, and take it as our burden to assemble coherence out of this chaos. So those of us who mix and match myths, characters, and themes are simply modeling the type of artistic/intellectual activity with which we are already famliar. I hope your all-nighter was productive, Ranger Wickett. Keep up the good posts.</blockquote>

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