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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 4038218" data-attributes="member: 6533">You know it's interesting.I would never have thought of Game of Thrones or Black Company as being 'mundane' default.GoT - seasons last years, civilizations are tens of thousands of years old, there's a wall made out of glacier and castles built around geothermal features or insanely high cliffs and mountains.  There are alien creatures with shrieking swords who move with the cold.  The foundation of the next to last regime's political mandate? Dragons.Black Company - mages are military specialists, cities contain tombs in which horrible beasts are stored, insane ancient magic users pick you up from port with city ships, and you fight grim battles for mile high towers beneath skies turned into flowing arrays of colorful terror by the high level mage fights that surround you.  The main character of the first book ends the series as a magic dispensing demi-god construct designed to monitor and maintain a plain of interdimensional portals.Now thinking about there are certainly 'mundane defaults' common to both settings.  Humanity is the dominant PoV races in each.  Magic items are rare-ish to very rare.  Proficient magic users are slightly rarely than literacy itself.   People can get wounded and be out for a while.  People, even signficantly bad ass people, can die in combat and treat that as a real risk.  Monsters are pretty rare.The point of which, I suppose, is that it is perfectly possible to have both 'fantastic defaults' and 'mundane defaults' as co-existant themes or strains of the same setting.Heck, two of the underlying assumptions of Conan - which I would certainly peg as 'mundane default' - are explicitly 'A Wizard did it' and '...the answer is, CTHULU!  Roll for SAN, your world is DOOMED!'</blockquote>

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