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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9786754" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This gets toward the "dark vs bright" and "grim vs noble" dichotomies folks talk about online. No idea if those have any relation whatsoever to proper criticism, but they're widely discussed online.Almost everyone has their own individual definition, but mine would be...Grim: Society is what it is; the best you can do is protect your space.Noble: Society can be changed, even by just a few people ("heroes") doing the right thing.Dark: The world sucks, people suck, the arc of the world points down.Bright: The world has a lot of good in it, people are usually good, the arc of the world points up.You can combine these. Everyone knows grimdark ("In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.") Noblebright is its diametric opposite: a good world with good people, and heroes help keep it that way. But you can also have grimbright and nobledark! In a real sense, Tolkien was in the direction of a "nobledark" world. The arc of his world does point down, in the long scale, because the glories of past ages genuinely cannot be reclaimed. The beauty passes away. The Elves shall go into the West. Etc. But for a time--sometimes, a long time!--that beauty can be preserved, in some form, even if reduced, as long as good people stand and fight for it. The Last Alliance of Elves and Men was a desperate gamble, but it worked. The War of the Ring was a horror, but they won. The magic will fade, but until it does, we can enjoy its beauty. "Then leaf subsides to leaf./So Eden fell to grief,/So dawn comes down to day,/Nothing gold can stay."Conversely, a "grimbright" setting actually looks something like 4e's Points of Light setting. The apocalypse has already happened...more than once, even. The heavens are a shattered remnant, broken and unmoored. There's a spike of evil eating a hole in the bottom of the cosmos. Multiple great and beautiful empires have come and gone, and you get the pleasure of living in the wake of the most recent kinda-sorta-big-ish empire's collapse. But the titular points of light remain: towns, cities, maybe even regions, which can be protected and sustained, even in this dark time. You, a great hero, probably cannot un-do the fall of Nerath; you probably can't even forge a new nation out of the scattered city-states that all think you're a decent sort. But you can keep things going, just a little longer, in the hope that society can figure itself out in the next century or two and maybe get better.</blockquote>

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