Joshua Dyal said:
OK, I see. Frankly, I'm a little tired to basing fantasy off of transparently well-known Earth cultures anyway. Even if they're not fantasy English, we have the fantasy Romans, the fantasy Arabs, the fantasy Chinese, the fantasy Japanese, the fantasy Mongols, fantasy Plains Indians, etc. ad infinitum... all with new names, of course.
Sovereign Stone was particularly bad at this; they even advertised on the back of their setting book! Mongol dwarves! Samurai Elves! Ehh, give me something a little more original.
Well, but a lot of this problem is going to be on the part of the readers as much as anything else.
In my experience, people are much better at seeing variety in social systems they are familiar with, but when they encounter horse-riding nomads with iron age technology then their first reaction is to lump it up as a cypher for the one or two iron age tech nomad cultures they might be familiar with.
Mind you, that doesn't excuse the sovereign stuff or a gnomes are Scotts mentality, but still...
...I do hate that the only acceptable alternative to variations on the knights and villages model, the past it's easy to imagine, is the massive urban dystopia, the present we love to hate.
Particularly when the focus of urban dystopia campaigns is generally to work the PCs up through city politics and management, an odd thing only in that such campaigns rarely leave the city.
And that just breaks verisimilitude for me since the general nature of city politics is that you have to leave the city to get power within it. Julius would have gotten nowhere in Rome without being a governor in Spain and a conqueror in Gaul.
I mean sure, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser leave Lankhmar all the time, but Lankhmar itself makes no sense. Any city-state or metropolis of merit is going to have a number of functions and systems that spread out across a huge and diverse network. Rome's food supply stretched out to the Nile, which is why Julius as an ambitious city worker had to go to Egypt, and even in New York, the most insular city in history, you have a labor system that stretches across three states.
And it is an odd convention in that the best stuff does a great job avoiding this, the Three Musketeers are more or less urban adventurers yet the scenery for that moves between country inns, garden palaces, apartments, and alleys with the grace and ease that the life of Paris and the court does. Conan does this equally well, though from the opposite perspective, in that cities are just really nice stops on the epic journey and working for a city all too often means heading out to a hidden mountain fortress.
It's when you get the metropolis and blade runner feel to things that my head hurts because it feels like a really easy sort of creative. Not to knock on Metropolis and Blade Runner, because they were awesome, but they were awesome in a specific niche and because they worked really hard at justifying their awesomeness in a particular context. Later imitations don't feel like they have to do that work because they can just point to Metropolis and Blade Runner. It's exactly the same phenomena that occurs with Dark Lords post-Tolkien, but that doesn't make it any better. Often it's worse because the impression is that the dystopian is cleverly avoiding the Tolkien mess.
Though I should say that, as with the post-Tolkien dark lord, done right it often still has a lot of merit. For me, it's just a prejuidice and an annoyance not a conviction.
