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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5295644" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is almost going to be funny.  My ill regard of the setting is a matter of public record and doesn't need comment here except to reference anyone to the other thread if they are interested.  The irony here is that my list of reasons for liking the setting is almost an exact copy of the list the many of people in the other thread had for disliking it.1) It's extremely detailed and there is a large amount of published resources available on the setting.  Basic and important chores like a calendar, broad sweep of history, city maps, political systems and so forth are largely done.  Peices of the system can be cut out and pasted into other settings or settings inspired by but not adhering to the cannon at will, and you can safely discard large amounts of the setting while still having something useful to work with if only the richly detailed city maps and long lists of NPC names and short descriptions.2) It doesn't have any single one clear schtick.  One thing that really annoys me in fantasy and sci-fi is when a whole world or entire race is given a culture which represents only a fraction of the culture and variaty found in our own world.  You end up with whole races supposedly spanning entire star systems with a mono-culture roughly equivalent to (for example) extremely simplified, sterotypical, 16th century Japan.  Or you end up with whole worlds that are 'The Desert Planet' or 'The Ice Planet', as if it was realistic that the full range of climates and geological zones on a planet would be equivalent to the range found in only the Sahara Desert or Antartica of the real world.  A fantasy world with a single schtick strikes me as a decent place to set a novel, but not a particularly great place to set any thing more than a single adventure path.  IMO, you do _a_ campaign of Dragon Lance, or _a_ campaign of Dark Sun.  It's not a place you would want to continually revist because its a country or small continent masquerading as a whole world.  Give me worlds that look like someone threw the kitchen sink at them because the real world looks like that.3) It's got ambition.  As badly executed as many of those ambitions might be and as bland and unconvincing as they may be on execution, I love that the FR's think big.  I love for example that there is a desert wasteland which the product of magic, not climate, that god slaying is a regular feature of the world and there are actual divine kings.   As long as you are doing big fantasy, in my opinion, go big.  The potential is there.  There is an honest if failing attempt at bringing the 'oh wow' factor, and I think there is alot to learn from its ambition.  I loath the FR, but I'll freely admit that it informed my style quite abit because it made me question whether small ambitions had to go hand in hand with grit, mud, and versimilitude.  Granted, FR didn't bring the grid, mud, and versimilitude but it did make me question my former small scale assumptions realize that you could go big and still be 'grim and gritty'.  Ed's work was so extremely different than what I thought then was the 'one true way', that it shocked me and made me question my basic assumptions about what was realistic.  Now, when people ask me if I do 'high fantasy' or 'grim and gritty', I say 'both' because I recognized that many of the assumptions on both ends were false and the two weren't as incompatible as I thought.</blockquote>

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