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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 4039431" data-attributes="member: 1757">I was referring to the d20 game systems rather than the underlying literature, but your post is just too genius to ignore. I think that AGoT and Black Company actually are probably the ideal settings to discuss that unique balance between the mundane and the fantastic.In Black Company, people know what a wizard is. They recognize the existence of other dimensions, strange monsters, and bizarre artifacts... *but* they're still, for the most part, ordinary Joes at heart. They inhabit a fantastical *environment*, but with an understandable culture.This is actually where I think that fantasy can go off the rails... by becoming too culturally alien rather than too visually or environmentally fantastical. Living in a city that features a six-thousand-foot-tall windowless black basalt tower, or in the midst of a seventeen-year dire winter, or in a ten-mile-long submersible vessel cruising infinite underwater depths, are all things that can be visually striking and a far cry from Tolkien, but if we start with a baseline of familiar human psychological and cultural motivation, and *then* alter it to fit the events of the world and underlying circumstances, it can still be familiar enough to maintain that tension between the everyday and the special that's so important to any adventure narrative. Starting with unfamiliar cultures and motivations, on the other hand, can take one off the rails quite quickly. Moorcock (one of the iconic literary inspirations for D&D, IMO) is interesting in this regard; in at least two cases (Corum and Elric), he starts with characters who come from cultures and mindsets that aren't easily cognizable to the reader. The only humans who show up in the entire first book of the Elric saga are the poor wretches being tortured to death by Doctor Jest. Working with that kind of world (which is sort of suggested as the tiefling default for 4e) can, IMO, be quite tricky.</blockquote>

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