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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 3475287" data-attributes="member: 41584">Yup.  The Forgotten Realms would not exist, nor would Eberron (or Greyhawk, or Kara-Tur, or Zakhara, or Krynn, or Sigil, or the Diamond Throne), if we weren't all pretty much great clomping nerds.  Harrison can bite me.I love all of these settings, and Ed Greenwood and Keith Baker's 'clomping nerdism' keeps me coming back with their details about newspaper events in the City of Towers, or inns of the Realms that my players adventurers might curl up in after a hard day of killing orcs.So, I've seen some lists of sci-fi / fantasy authors who do extensive world-building;J.R.R. TolkeinPeter HamiltonRaymond Feist (& Janny Wurts, his occasional co-conspirator)Isaac AsimovR.A. SalvatoreTracy Hickman & Margaret WeisLarry NivenTimothy ZahnRobert Jordan (who, IMO, is a rare example of Harrison being right, and author who overuses world-building to the detriment of the story)I'd love to hear more world-builders that I may have missed in my collection.And I'd like to see a similar list of sci-fi / fantasy authors who fit Harrison's minimalist story-driven mold.I wonder if Vernor Vinge might count as such an author?  His stories always sit in some fuzzily-defined area and seen to make no sense, with stuff happening pretty much randomly and characters having no apparent background traits or cultural ties.  I had considered it to be some sort of trippy drug thing, but it's possible that this is what Harrison would consider a 'triumph of pure storytelling' without any sort of meaningful setting or coherent design.For gaming purposes, I've heard good things about a Magical Medieval Society, but, frankly, I didn't care for it in the slightest<a href="http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=711" target="_blank">http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=711</a>The 2e AD&D World-Builders Guidebook by Richard Baker was pretty neat, and had some great campaign-inspiring ideas.Stephen Gilletts World-Building is pretty thorough, but not useful, IMO, for a gamer.  It's for sci-fi writers who want to get the science right, mostly.  Robert L Forward had something of the sort, IIRC, but I really didn't care for it at all.Sure, you *could* do this.  But does that make it wrong *not* to do this?Does it make the GM who simply doesn't improvise on the fly that well, and prefers to have the questions answered *before* they are asked than 'make stuff up' an inadequate GM?Should he not play D&D, for not being able to meet your standards of instantaneous creativity under pressure?Who gets to decide who is 'good enough' to GM?  Certainly not Harrison.  I'd likely hate to game with the man, since I enjoy having characters who are connected to the world that they are playing in.  I don't want to play, 'Uh, Bob, the elf.  I guess there are elfs somewhere.  You have a bow?  Okay, elfs like bows.  No, I don't know where elfs come from, if they have cities, if you have a family, and it doesn't matter.  Just make crap up, like from that Complete Elves Book.  Decide that you don't sleep, and you can telepathically bond with life-mates, and that your singing makes human bards weep.  I don't care, why should you?  Fine, say that elves ride dragons and have space ships and come from the planet Vulcan.'Looking at the successes of settings with lots of detail (Realms, Eberron), as compared to those which have gone undeveloped (Greyhawk), or of fantasy novelists who engage in world-building (Jordan, Tolkein, Hamilton) versus those who don't (Harrison?), it seems that the market has spoken.Harrison may be a sad panda that his methodology doesn't seem to be as profitable, but that's one of the problems with fiction.  If the reader can't envision and *connect* to the characters, scenes and environment that you are portraying, they aren't going to be affected by your writing.  Unlike a GM, a writer can't go back and explain something.  If I find all of the characters to be faceless non-entities who seem to have appeared from whole cloth at the beginning of the tale, I'm really not gonna shed any tears for them throughout the story, since the writer himself didn't think they were that interesting.  Why should I fill in the blanks he was not interested in writing?  I'm not being paid to make the story interesting or the setting rich or the characters compellingly fleshed-out.  I'm paying to read it, it should already be interesting!</blockquote>

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