Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5006087" data-attributes="member: 54707">Rather than mentioning individual works I thought I'd just mention types.Roman, Greek, and Byzantine. Romance and Arthurian literature. Provencal. I also like Indian and Chinese literature. mainly Ancient or Medieval. I also very much enjoy the Eddas, and Beowulf, that kinda thing.It depends on the type of gaming though. Fantasy gaming, older stuff influences my games more.Modern games or futuristic games and the more modern literature influences me more.But fantasy per se has never influenced my gaming much, even fantasy gaming, with the exception of a few small group of authors. Otherwise things like myth, history, religion, science, exploration, literature, have all influenced my gaming far more than the fantasy genre. There's not a lot of modern fantasy I like at all, though some of the newer stuff (in the past five years or so) is pretty darn good, sometimes, I gotta admit.My personal and on-line libraries tend to be filled with works on architecture, science, art, religion, ancient and Medieval texts, foreign languages, poetry, history, psychology, philosophy, archaeology, stuff like that. Those are the kinds of things that tend to influence my games.No. Not to me. They tend to modernize and commoditize fantasy to make it much more about technology and science dresses in a thin veneer of fantasy motifs than being about fantasy, or to be more accurate the myths form which fantasy evolved or devolved, depending on your point of view. (I think in some ways fantasy evolved myths, and in other ways they devolved myths.)When it comes to modern fantasy I like the approaches of both the Harry Potter Books and the Harry Dresden books. Both are interesting takes on how "fantasy and myth" can be addressed when set in the modern world without debasing and devolving fantasy into a mere disguised form of technology, science, and industrialized societies (though I got nothing against any of those things, they are all supremely useful, they just bear no real, or at least very little, resemblance at all to the worlds out of which myth and fantasy developed - those worlds had almost entirely different concerns and ways of looking at life). That's why I don't think a lot of fantasy gaming is really about "fantasy" gaming at all, it's about how modern cultures imagine fantasy cultures would be if they just evolved a different technology than us (magic being the primary different technology). It's really more a fantasy of a fantasy. That is to say most fantasy gaming is not about cultures really different form our own, but just appearing different than our own because it is dressed in a different costume.It would be nice if there were more fantasy games that went into developing cultures radically different from our own, rather than just different at the margins, but that would require an emphasis on far different things than are usually used to develop fantasy games.That's a sort of tough one. Yes and no depending on the media form and how the work such as on TV or in film goes about portraying the subject matter. I might really like the subject matter and techniques used in a TV or film or game work (such as Lost), but not the pacing so much. It's just relative to the actual details of exactly what is being discussed I reckon.</blockquote>

Verification