Boilerplate medieval European high fantasy almost waddles these days, doesn’t it? It’s so stuffed with preconceptions about the world, preconceptions that don’t really mesh with how a lot of people (read: me) see the world these days. It’s not just that it hyperfocuses on a very tiny piece of history and glamorizes it into some eternal idyll. The kind of high fantasy found in Brandon Sanderson books and Blizzard games plant our own ideas about the world directly on a setting with fantasy trappings, so we end up journeying through some electrified mess of parts where dwarves from Scandinavia speak with Irish accents and invest in the stock market for dragon eggs.
On the one hand, we could simply get away from this kind of fantasy, and in my own stories that’s what I attempt to do. There is a big reason that I felt like going straight into this type of setting, however: Dungeons and Dragons.
In most of my sporadic D&D playing I have been the dungeon master and I always create homebrew settings. Crafting a world that fits together well and provides thrilling moments is something I’ve always enjoyed doing. The issue I personally ran into in the past is that my ideas of what made a fantasy setting hang together were at odds with the majority of D&D material. That meant that I always had to devise my own adventures. In my younger years, when I had more time to work with and a sliver more patience, this wasn’t so much a problem. Nowadays, I’d really like to have something where I could drop other adventures in and take a bit of load off of myself.
That means I’m not doing a low magic setting, I’m not even pushing magic to the background. We’ve got to have wizards, knights, dragon slaying has got to be a major goal, and so on. It has to fit neatly with any adventure that would be released for the Forgotten Realms or any Wizards of the Coast produced setting. That’s what has made this project of mine such a challenge. It’s one that I’ve been unconsciously working on for a long time, but only as I’m putting my mind to it now am I realizing what issues I was having with the majority of fantasy settings.
I’ll be uploading bits and pieces of this setting just for fun as I finish them, but what I wanted to talk about now is what my goals have been in crafting this setting. Beyond my own aesthetic choices, these are the elements that I’m focusing on. I believe these elements are largely missing from the high fantasy settings I’ve read, played through, and otherwise experienced, and I want to give attention to them. My focus here is on 3rd edition (including Pathfinder) but, due both to D&D’s influence and general cross-pollination, I think these points resonate with a wide array of high fantasy work.
1. I wanted magic, in all of its wonder and its power, that made sense with how the world worked. Given what I said above, I’m not getting into changing the magic system (this is a “yet”, but stay with me). When I say “make sense” I mean that it makes sense socially. Going through the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms campaign book, there are phrases like “[t]he great river of history is directed and redirected by magically powerful people” and “[m]ages are regarded with suspicion, fear, and respect wherever they go”, but one question is never answered: why don’t mages rule every country in the world?
Going simply on the 3rd edition game mechanics, it’s well known that in comparison, a 20th level wizard is far more potent an opponent than a 20th level fighter. Most ways of equalizing this — whether giving the fighting class more abilities or loading the spellcasters with more restrictions — don’t take away from the essential fact that someone with access to impressive magic can achieve more for the same amount of effort than someone who can only swing swords and shoot arrows. It may be that most mages don’t want to rule places, but rulership is as much about protecting oneself from one’s subjects as it is about exercising power over them. In addition, experimenting mages tend to need the kind of resources that can best be gained by having political power. Mages ruling the world makes so much natural sense that if they don’t rule everything there should be a specific reason for it.
We might point to occasions from real life such as the Salem witch trials or their European predecessors to say that wizards are in danger of being mobbed by people. Yes, that may be true, but if a mage knew they were going to be set upon, they could prepare magic that would deal with their assailants. The only way that non-mages can realistically expect to overcome mages, without using magic themselves, is if every person in a country devoted themselves to taking out all mages. This is really a far fetched scenario, even for fantasy. In the Forgotten Realms, almost every land has mages allied to them, but usually the mages are subservient to non-mage rulers.
Why is this important? Because it shows that people who create these settings don’t understand the roots of social power. They’ve simply transplanted ideas from old stories such as King Arthur and Merlin without dealing with the fact that magic in D&D and magic in Arthurian romance are fundamentally different things. No one acted as if Merlin could have, in a single second, flattened the entirety of Camelot. That is not only possible in most modern high fantasies, it is an ever-present danger. Yet despite that tangible fear, for some reason mages never feel get around acting upon it, except the evil ones who are invariably defeated.
The concept of “magerule” is very important to how I’ve conceived of my setting. Monarchies, and monarchic ideas about absolute primogeniture and divine right, are not just obsolete but nonexistent. Mages here tend not to institutionalize for the simple reason that magic is a totally consuming occupation; those that practice it have little time for the minutiae of bureaucracy. Mages hold the supreme authority but frequently let the people run their own affairs, which they are perfectly capable of doing. People don’t just fear and respect mages, they treat them in many instances as a separate class of being. This doesn’t mean that mages always hold explicit power, only that even if a land is nominally ruled by some landed aristocrat, that acknowledges some mage as belonging to their court. This mage is, without exception, so well understood to be a superior voice to that of the non-mage ruler that saying such is not even considered an insult.
Another thing that the superiority of magic implies is the lack of standing armies. If the greatest power in the world is magic, it makes sense that the weapons of warfare would be spells and acts of magic, not the marching of armies. Warriors would still be trained, of course, as bodyguards, special agents, and beast battlers, but no one would think to raise a force of many thousands to occupy their neighbors. Any tyranny and oppression would be enforced through magic first, coin second, and actual martial threats a distant third.
Adventurers in this setting are the sort of people who might actually go up against a mage, and often find themselves as pieces in the great game that mages play against one another. The vast majority of adventurers, the normal ones, will travel from place to place taking duty as wagon guards and garrisoning towns against rampaging beasts. Few of these need magical companions, or any companions at all, finding their workmates as they take their jobs. There are some, however, who specialize in delving into ruins and dark caverns for great treasures: the standard D&D fare. Mages, usually the restless and patron-less, find themselves in these sorts of groups more than any other, both for the expedition’s protection and for the secrets the mages might find.
Like the statistical average D&D player, I’ve never gotten above 10th level, but the idea of high level play in the game has always bothered me. As I said earlier, at a certain point in the game mages gain the ability to waste entire duchies with a few words, something that seems difficult to square with the fact that this rarely, if ever, happens due to one single wizard’s actions. However, there are many very high-level denizens of the Forgotten Realms, people whose affairs seem to do almost entirely with the common populaces they rule. The fact that so many such people exist has always bugged me, especially because there seems to be no accounting for it. They are, for whatever reason, much like all the rest of the citizens despite the incredible scale of their personal power.
I decided to assume that as people gain more power and achieve greater things, they will invariably come to the notice of extraplanar powers such as the servants of deities. In fact, these outsiders have a noticeable and continuing effect on the world itself. While many settings do involve gods and great powers holding court over the world, I am more interested in making the players into direct agents. More than that, I want them to be part of a tradition of such agents, some of whom go to live and even die in the Outer Planes. This isn’t something that is unlocked once people reach 10th or 20th level. Even children in this world have heard stories of people who went to other planes and did great things; not only fictions, but true stories, ones that lead children to aspire to be such and afford a relatively reasonable chance of achieving that goal.
2. I wanted to move past extermination gameplay. This is the sort of scenario that D&D adventures, video game levels, and news broadcasts seem to boil down in the end: We are Good, They are Evil, EXTERMINATE THEM. Entire libraries have been written about the idea of nuance in storytelling and in games particularly. Usually, those who even choose to tackle this issue do so only by trying to make Them sympathetic. They are shown smiling at a photo of a grandchild, or we find out that They have actually enacted universal healthcare in Their society. Does that change how we, or We, interact with Them? It does not. We have still calculated that they are Them and therefore must be exterminated.
The early Fallout games offer a template that many have followed since: give more options. This is valid and a necessary component of losing our extermination gameplay focus. What I think is more important, however, is changing the goals. We’re too often presented with situations where we are encouraged to seek the bloodiest path and given consolation prizes when we don’t take it. The victims of the violence, the infamous They, are ultimately shown as not being worth the trouble of holding back. Tender moments serve to make the scenario creator look like a caring person while never changing the fundamental narrative that They deserve to be killed and can be killed with impunity.
There are two main elements that are needed to combat this. The first is getting rid of mindlessness; not on the part of the players, on the part of their opposition. “Genocideable” species which, for no reason but apparently their own twistedness, live in filth and only get enjoyment from bloodshed and carnage, need to be treated like actual people instead of being built around slurs shouted from the “civilized” to the “uncivilized”. The idea of unwashed barbarians is one that has no currency in actual history and only exists to provide justification for violence, a pattern that stretched from before Rome and the Gauls and continues on through the US victimizing Native peoples.
This isn’t to say that orcs and goblins can’t ever be fought, but the fact that orcs can be treated as a generic monster despite having a definite society and intellectual capacity shows that there is an idea among a lot of game creators that certain peoples who may have their own societies and beliefs can nevertheless be scourges on “civilized society”. The existence of species which are characterized like this makes it much more likely that players will not see them as even worthy of listening to. Plus, the fact that dwarves, humans, elves, etc. figure in as enemies so comparatively infrequently shows that there’s a recognition of this idea that some people are okay to kill and others are not. At the very base, I wish to combat this with a very simple rule for my setting: any race which advances by player class levels in the Monster Manual cannot be thought of as a mix-and-match enemy.
Mindlessness does not just extend to social & speaking species, it should also be removed from how animals and other creatures are treated by the game. We are, as a human species, for some reason driven to exterminate other species on our planet. This has a great to deal to do, I believe, with the idea that animals do not have true needs that should be respected. In games, this results in scenarios set up where you fight hordes of randomly appearing, randomly aggressive animals which exist for no reason but to menace people and encourage you to kill them. Because of this, there is almost nothing else to do but to kill them.
If, on the other hand, we assume that there is some reason that a horde of hostile animals is charging out of the forest, we can also imagine that we could do something to coax them back. Some might feel killing them is the only answer, yes, and I don’t want to stop the groups from fighting monsters or thwarting villains in blade-swinging, spell-blasting combat. What I want is to change the “why”. I don’t want good-hearted heroes to go in and kill orcs “because they were there and the heroes are getting paid for it”. I want them to fight to defend themselves, or fight to protect others, or fight for revenge, and if they do simply take money to slaughter animals or goblins, I want the players to understand that they’ve done something dastardly. If it doesn’t matter that the orc is killed because the orc is so vile anyway, there’s no weight to the action. I understand that’s the reason why they are so dehumanized — so the game can have interesting conflicts — but I don’t find it justifiable. There are better ways to go about making conflict meaningful.
The second part of moving past extermination gameplay involves the goals themselves. There need to be fewer goals whose points is “They are There, go There and EXTERMINATE THEM.” Less clearing out of ruins, less hacking through forests full of monsters. Goals should be worded constructively: protect the village, retrieve this object, investigate a strange event. Goals that allow imagining a solution that doesn’t involve lethal combat while still having the adventurers exercise their abilities. Goals should also involve some sort of backstory, possibly not communicated to the players but explicit enough that those enemies being confronted have a reason to be where they are and, perhaps, a reason not to stand and allow themselves to be carved up by explorers.
Adventure hooks often provide great ways to reel the characters and player into the story, but they have far less to say about what drives the opposition. That’s why focusing on creating “any backstory at all” is not quite enough. There has to be a specific focus on creating a backstory for the opponents so that their reasons don’t simply boil down to being spell-fodder. I’m not saying that orcs should never be fought, but perhaps when orcs menace a town they are doing it to steal food, or there is some sort of dispute between an orc band and a town that has escalated. There should always be another side because that makes every conflict and scenario that much fuller. And definitely more enemies should be of the player races, whether bandits or devotees of evil or simply enemies in war.
3. I wanted to get away from rigid political ideas, especially that of the nation state. For anyone who has spoken to me about fantasy, the fact that “fantasy house politics” is a huge bugbear for me is not new. This idea that medieval families, even those like the Hapsburgs and the Welfs or even the Ottomans, were static institutions where multiple such “noble companies” could exist and challenge the power of the crown — which was, for most of medieval history, also not a static institution — is absolutely ludicrous. Moreover, it’s completely ahistorical. The reason that fantasy stories have realms with defined borders is because we have them now, in our real present, and because we tend to view history as it is shown in Wikipedia, with nice neat lines of succession, official titles, and dates marked with certainty.
Nationalism is an idea and an ideology and, as such, it has a beginning; it does not extend far past 1790. Concerted state institutions became popular in Europe with absolutist monarchies and were always operated in such a way that they did not prop up other institutions. The idea that the Medici bank’s organization, for instance, can be directly compared to the organization of Bank of America in 2019 is simply incorrect. So when we see that the houses in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos setting have existed for ages and have very distinct and immutable characters, what is being shown is a projection of our current system of competing oligarchic businesses and ranked-order political parties, not what things were like in any medieval past. When we see established churches for each member in an innumerable pantheon, that is a reflection of our own current ways of monotheistic worship badly planted on the idea of having many gods, not a true polytheistic way of thinking.
For me to buy into the idea of the nation state in a fantasy world, there has to be the birth of the national idea. Other ideas, such as corporate personhood and limited liability, are also critical to the permanence of institutions. There has to be a trend of nation forming where specific peoples agitate to be separated from other specific peoples for their own intrinsic qualities, and to govern themselves and not be governed by others. This idea is, in world historical terms, quite recently developed. The fact that there is a tension in the United States between obviously transplanted white settlers and other denizens, especially Native peoples, over who is “truly American” shows that this tension in the idea of the nation-state still has currency. Tribalism, in the sense of being almost violently defensive of one’s chosen group, is a great word to describe this phenomenon, because though tribal societies are documented as being generally welcoming of change and strangers, it is our prejudices that have turned “tribalism” into a word meaning exclusion.
When we strip away the nation-state, what we are left with are interpersonal relationships. That is how societies were organized in the past. A “noble house” was not like a Fortune 500 company, it was literally the family of a nobleperson and their family’s household staff, and perhaps some of their other longtime associates. One doesn’t have a rank within a noble house, just as you and your siblings are not ranked to show who is officially the top child. People have more or less authority as they are more or less trusted by those who control the money and other resources. Very rare were the organizations that had any sort of staying power. In medieval Europe, most such organizations were tied to the church or were quickly suppressed. The Hanseatic League forms an exception only in that they succeeded in their efforts at some sort of autonomy, something that likely would never have happened in absolutist France or even in parliamentarian England but could succeed because of the fractious nature of the Holy Roman Empire. I bring these up to show how unique the idea of a standing institution that carried on past its founders is. Can I see such institutions in fantasy? Yes. But they should be rare, whereas most fantasy is full of these influential organizations and the intrinsic idea of protecting the nation-state, rather than the personal allegiances to crown and lesser lords that were common in every European country before the French Revolution.
Historical accuracy is only part of why moving past the nation state idea is important. The other part, the larger part, is so that we can focus on those interpersonal relationships. When we only interact with an ATM, or with a bank teller, we lose sight of the fact that there is someone actually making the rules of the bank, there is a person or a group of people who decided that they wanted to charge more money for an overdraft and so on. Institutions allow harmful decisions, or merely unpopular decisions, to be hidden away so that everyone involved can deny responsibility. This is not the way the world was oriented in the past and, more critically, it is not the way the world has to be. By deciding not to assume the nation-state as so much high fantasy does, I want to push the idea that people can in fact live in a society that doesn’t have the legalistic ideas we cherish so much now. If people could live tolerably in a society that does not have a nation-state’s resources, where there are no police on the streets (patrolling city guards were not a thing that the majority of city-dwellers would have experienced) and no dedicated fire service, it should be possible for us to imagine other ways of living as well.
I won’t claim that I’ve hit all these goals in the things I’m working on, but these are definitely my targets. My goal is to create a setting that I can drop even the older, exterminate-y adventures into and, with some recontextualizing, make them leave a little brighter taste in my mouth this time.
