Lately, we’ve seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming “race” into “species” and “ancestry,” and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).
Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines – If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god’s decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.
Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?
I am once again asking people to read the Commonweal for a materialist depiction of what this sort of fantasy world would actually be like. (most sub-species designed by mages of varying degrees of insanity, many for battle or servitude, the entire biome permanently hostile from weaponised species unless a god-king is physically suppressing it, history so fucked from time travel that if you dig too far into time you get a sea of pure evil where humanity was probably wiped out) and how to solve it (Revolutionary Socialist Republic with a commitment to agency that readers will find unsettling (they’re prison abolitionists, if someone can’t live in their society they just kill them straight up)
scraps years of fantasy worldbuilding and attempts at short stories because somebody already did it better
i guess i better check this series out, cry a bit, then maybe do a full reboot
I mean, do it anyway
If my book about deconstructing superhero stuff by turning the empowered into unknowable cosmic horrors turned out to be following a similar route to something else, I’d still write it
After all, what makes a story good isn’t just the premise, it’s the talent and drive of the author
And I’m sure you have both in spades
thank you for saying this but my creative writing skills are super rusty. partly because i don’t read enough.
i have a habit of absorbing the writing style of the last author i read, so i started using that as an excuse not to dive into new fiction. that and ADHD
i have a few genre “worlds” i keep adapting and updating over time.
but who knows maybe there can be an entire genre of “proletarian based materialist epic fantasy” and Grayson Saunders will be cited as the origin author
Well, I haven’t read a work of fiction that wasn’t a comic book in… counts on fingers about a year-ish?
It’s more about writing something I want to see in the world than anything else
And Prole fantasy sounds awesome, maybe I’ll get to something along those lines in the future
You are in absolutely no danger of writing like Saunders. His prose has been described as “making a heroic attempt to seem like English” and he likes it that way.
i did some research and someone said he writes like an attempt at translating the language of his fantasy world. yeah might be tough
still i was working on something for years that is similiar enough to his basic premise that i might try to check out how he went about it. right down to the “military fantasy” because there’s tons of focus in my works on revolutionary small unit tactics and adapting what are essentially arcane “waste products” into useful materials, technologies, and weapons by the mostly mundane radical human faction
He’s more about large unit operations, logistics, and large scale civil engineering.
aww man i love those things. mostly the civil engineering part.
I may have to check this out. Is commonweal a series name or a book name
Series name by Graydon Saunders. The first book is a deconstruction of military fantasy. The second and third a deconstruction of Magic School. After that it sort of merges as the Big(er) Bad becomes less of a threat on the horizon.
Be warned in that the writing is deliberately opaque and obtuse, as if it was a direct translation from the Commonweal language (for example, there is gender in the language/society (broadly matriarchal in the local area), but it very, very rarely comes up, to the point that we still don’t know the gender of some main characters, if they have a gender.) There are almost no info dumps unless a local citizen needs to be infodumped.
Real mirror universe Brandon Sanderson type shit, here, lol.
Hopefully that means the books are good instead of slop as well
People created by mages for battle fucking off to form their own little villages and stuff is one of my favorite tropes.
Star Wars dipped into this with a clone that went AWOL and started a family. Later on, a group set up their own littlw found family on what amounted to a war machine turned into a walking house that they walked around to different fishin’ holes
Clones in Star Wars is absolutely random and incoherent from top to bottom. Every way you can look at it, it’s trying to retrofit new stories around a really poorly chosen set of throwaway lines with a very poorly chosen scifi technobabble from the original trilogy.
It would have been so much better if they retconned those lines or found a different interpretation of “clone” to backfill content for a recent war.
The number of ways new star wars continues to eternally double down on clones is just embarrassing.
Star wars is so expansive that some incoherency is just bound to be there. That said I think there is underexplored potential in storytelling around clones and how fucked up it would be to make a race of genetic supersoldiers bred specifically to kill. How can you call Jedi the good guys when they’re so ready to exploit them?
Droids occupy a similar space, IMO
Wut
This sounds very libertarian but isn’t.
They live in a world where a sufficiently powerful mage can mind control an entire continent without actually being conscious of the fact they’re doing it. Or if they are being able to stop.
When they finally got free, the former slaves vowed they’d never compel anyone ever again. In practice they still have a state and judges and punishments, but most punishments are fines.
Additionally, none of the mage autocracies around them know how their secret socialist cumbstomp magic works so once you join, you can’t leave, ever.
Their whole civilisation is held together by a massive social hive mind geas that requires voluntary committment to it’s rules (which is both a good countermeasure against subversion by outside mages and also prevents them going all War of the First Coalition.)
If you’re a sufficiently powerful mage, you need to bind your soul to it and physically show the geas that you can live in society all the time, or it will delete you (or at least part of you). A main character sacrifices themself to defend the republic at one point because of this.
They do keep one person in prison. A mad mage they can’t kill. This is considered to be a massive civilisational failure.
Okay it’s going on the list