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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9071688">I don't doubt that. Like I said, this isn't something where any one group can claim he soley speaks to them.  I am not particularly hung up on having things like the details of the math of a fantasy culture be part of the thought experiment. I totally can see how this would appeal to you and have resonance. I never said it was only resonant with guys like Rob and me. My point was simply that we do find it resonates, and it resonates for some of the reasons we talked about. It is something people from many schools of thought in RPGs will find helpful, for different reasons and for the same reasons. I also don't think he was purely building something based only on the logic of the world and its laws. With Tolkien what I always found interesting about his worldbulding was how he probed things like etymology to uncover ideas. I also agree there are anachronism. But I don't think that is a world building problem. Also one thing I would say is I probably agree more with you on aspects of Tolkien that you may realize. It has been a long time since I read him, so I really don't feel like am in a position to respond to the question. But clearly he had literary concerns that mattered too and this wasn't just a pure world building exercise. I think people go back to Tolkien to get ideas about world building because Middle Earth feels so real. One reason it always felt real to me was that doesn't have that artificial feel that many overly engineered fantasy worlds can get (where there is nothing in them that is relatable because all the components are either soley a product of the thought experiment, or a slave to the laws of the setting). Sometimes you need to just have things in there that are interesting, relatable, connect to themes, etc. Also one pet peeve of mine in discussions in OSR groups and old school sandbox groups talking about world building, is there often is this idea that there are broad principles we can extract from anthropology or history and anything outside that isn't believable. I often push back on that because history itself is filled with exceptions and I think adhering strictly to history is just as boring as vanilla fantasy (I remember seeing an argument about a particular city not being believable but it wasn't any stranger than the city of Petra). Again, the thing that intrigued me about Tolkien when I was younger and reading his ideas about world building in the introductions to books like LoTR and the Hobbit (probably encountered stuff in magazines and other books too), was his interest in language and etymology. When I made a fantasy setting for my own system, I ended up doing that with arabic. I would come up with the names for places or people, then look up the closest three word root and try to sculpt something from that meaning. Also I clearly subscribe to ideas similar to some of the ones Rob has expressed. You can find that in Tolkien too, but you can also find other things as well that would fit different schools of thought. Tolkien definitely isn't a zero sum game in this respect.</blockquote>

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