Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8448861"><p>One observation for me with Ravenloft discussions is they often reduce this topic to a binary: all surreal and fake versus super detailed and the counting the grains. My sense from the period where I was most invested in the line, is it was more of a balance. In most of the books, supplements, novels, the people lived in a world that to them was real, it just had a different cosmology and was subject to the whims of the dark powers and the lords (so a certain unreality and dreaminess could creep in; we didn't tend to squint to hard at the logic of whether the homesteads and villages in Tepest had a sustainable ecosystem, but we did expect the people there to act and feel like real people. There was always this argument on the edges, or maybe just a question, of how real it all  was (given the premise of the setting). Reading Tapestry of Dark Souls those characters all felt like they inhabited a real place (even if it wasn't a place that attempted to explain population sizes, food sources with anything more than a broad stroke). But I feel like people not being real, or less real than in other worlds is something that worked better in specific domains where that might be a theme (for example a domain with a mad lord).</p></blockquote><p></p>