BETTER Worldbuilding : Embrace The Strange
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- Опубліковано 17 вер 2024
- Why has worldbuilding become so rigid and focused on realism? I discuss why I think Embracing the Strange or The Mythic Underworld can have huge benefits for your tabletop games & settings.
Big shout out to @TheBasicExpert whose videos on The Mythic Underworld has influenced this video as well as the many responses he received. I'm aware a large portion of the conversation is based around Random Encounter Tables and such but there were plenty of people who disagreed with the concept entirely, which I think is hugely false.
Fuck you, you people are so goddamn annoying, I"m never watching another video on worldbuilding again.
Why so mad man it's just a video
LMFAO. Medicated?
I take it you the homebrew creation isn't going too well
Hey... What do you mean 'you people'?
You need more than salt for foundation.
It doesn't need an explanation, but it needs purpose. As long as the weird is made to feel like it has a reason for being there, it can be made to fit. The "why" of context is always the keystone of good storytelling.
It's always interesting to see so many people immediately jump to saying things "not making sense" while no amount of logical explanation would make the inclusion of something feel reasonable if it doesn't serve a good function in the story.
Play Fear and Hunger.
You start in a dungeon, place where prisoners were held and tortured. Enemies are mostly human, some are kinda mutated. Only after you uncover secrets of the dungeon and get deeper it becomes more mystical, more magical and more bizarre. It's not "weird stuff happens out of nothing" it is in a way logical that when you get closer to gods things become more unreal.
I would agree to have a river Styx in my setting. But it's not that you randomly stumble upon it. Maybe there is a place where you can go to visit underworld. Maybe it is a state of mind. It should offer versimilitude and not be taken out of GMs sleeve.
@@marcink9169 just because you can come up with an explanation that doesn't mean that explanation needs to be given to an audience. They only need to understand it as far as it is relevant for this particular story.
Just like I don't need to understand how photons can affect solid materials to know that I can get a sunburn.
Any time I watch a Ghibli movie, I am reminded that not everything in my fantasy worlds needs an explanation.
Hell yeah....
Often imitated never duplicated
It doesn't necessarily need an explanation in the story, but YOU should know why it's there. I don't think Miyazaki throws in weird things for no reason.
YES exactly :)
I though I'm the only one with this brilliant perspective.
Yes stories like Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away do not need explanation. Let your mind enjoy the world beyond wonders.
Arthurian legends are king at depicting random, mysterious magic.
In one story, Gareth gets ready to fight the Knight of the Red Keep, and his companion, Lisbet, tells him not to blow a horn that will summon the knight from his castle until afternoon. This is because the knight always has the strength of 7 men until noon each day, after which he becomes a normal man. No reason or explanation, just a random super power for the boss. Gareth says "I'll fight him as he is or not at all" and blows the horn immediately lol
There is also Gawain and the Green Knight whom he beheads and then locks himself in a pact to have the headless knight return the favor in a year; Gawain marrying Ragnelle the bride who is cursed to be ugly by day and gorgeous at night; Morgan le Fay at one point hiding her soldiers by turning them into stone blocks; the Dolorous Blade which can shatter the world if someone uses it; a cloak given as a gift from Morgan to Arthur that would've incinerated anyone who put it on; a magic ring Gareth wore that prevented him from bleeding and made his armor constantly change colors like he picked up a star from Super Mario. It's all so creative and unique without needing to explain itself...the magic was allowed to just exist.
Absolutely. Some of my favorite examples come from the Arthurian legends. Even though I consistently referenced the Mythical Underworld in the video I'm absolutely talking about all this stuff. Unexplained, interesting and evocative magic or fantastical places/beings etc.
It's always amazing to me how wild all the myths and legends are.
I feel a lot of modern fantasy enthusiasts really get convinced that solid logical world-building is the way to go but I think it completely misses the mark.
Tolkien is often pointed out as a detailed world-builder and while he may have created an world with an extensive history and its own languages…
…I truly believe he just doesn't care much. Just reading his stories it's pretty clear he just pulls out wild ideas from nowhere that aren't based on pre-established "lore" simply because that serves the story at that moment.
Fae and Fairyland stuff is great at being absolutely off the wall and still having dark appeal. The rules just work differently in the mystical otherland of fairy lords and ladies who petrify peoples eyes for fun.
It's a shame people are hesitant to mix the weird and the mundane. One of the main upsides of mostly "normal" setting is the strange bits you add REALLY stand out.
Referencing philosophy will fix that perception.
When the surreal and isoteric is based in philosophical understanding and the seeking of answers, suddenly you can have entities, locations and even characters have embody the various and often wildly different perspectives on the same ideas that philosophical framework has.
This is part of what I love about ASOIAF. It's clear that magical forces exist, but how magic actually works, where it comes from, which gods are real if any, are all left very vague from the POV of our characters. There seem to be people in the world who have these answers, but our characters don't, and that makes a reader desperate to pick up any hints they can.
Ooh yeah i love it when that happens. Some wizard has all the awnsers but refuses to share them
@respectfulevil9022 That's not what OP said but go off
AO Huh now?
@@ViviBuchlaw Game of Thrones book series.
Yes, the main war feels like a proxy war waged by Lovecraftian gods with some characters
Trying to have an explanation for everything is like answering every why question of a 4 year old
"A wizard did it"
That's what they did in antiquity. They just had a more limited ability to describe the world around them and came up with some non-sensical fantastic stuff.
It's why it annoys me to no end why people keep going on about extensive lore.
…I don't care, it's not going to make a story any better. The result is also probably counter to its goal anyway, you might technically be expanding the world but without mysteries and questions we don't have room where our mind can wonder which can really make a world feel big.
...uhh, fun? I don't think this is a good comparison
Hah! So true!
I dream of a day when I finally get to sit down and work on my fantasy novel. One of the big twists will be the fact the characters and reader think they are in a world full of magic, but it's actually thousands of years in the future from now and information about technology has been hoarded and kept secret from nearly everyone by a single organization. All the technology they witness will be real existing technology, but since the descriptions are coming from characters ignorant of science, they assume it's magic and the scientists are wizards.
Really well said. The trend of "everything in this fictional world must be perfectly logical and adhere to our naturalistic world" just BUGS me. It's such a massive restriction that limits evocative/imaginative storytelling and I think obsessing over that kind of approach can seriously take away from the fiction of it. Time and place for everything and I'll defend any form of creative writing on artistic merit alone but as far as I'm concerned "meaning" triumphs over believability/realism/logic etc.
I blame the Game of Thrones TV show for the "fantasy worlds have to be realistic to be worth a damn" worldbuilding trend.
@@CthulhuianBunny I agree on a level yeah. It definitely set some expectations and had an influence in the tabletop space for sure. I've seen more games advertising grey morality, "political intrigue" and gritty realism than ever before.
@@TrillTheDM I feel like we might have had a little too much of the realistic, grimdark trend and the pendulum, at least in part, is starting to swing the other way, with a rise of "cozy fantasy" popularity.
@@sanddanglotka Completely agree, there's definitely been an over saturation of the more gritty realistic low medieval fantasy stuff. I think people are ready to finally move away from that. At least I hope.
@@TrillTheDMdare I say that one of the reasons we see a push for more grey morality is atheism?
With religion taking a step back in the lives of people, more and more find themselves having no real reference point for an absolute good and an absolute evil, and thus everything becomes shades of gray.
It's more that people are no longer used to believing in something that is absolutely good, and thus it's much harder to do so in stories. It would take a strong will and great self awareness to be able to say "This is good, and this is bad", which may very well sprout controversy due to the prevalence of accepting different perspectives, even when one doesn't agree with them.
This is valid only in societies that write in English though, and I really don't know about other societies. There is also the influence of fake religious people, who misuse religious to bolster their morals (and generally contradict themselves through it).
And that is an incredibly stupid take. GoT and Asoiaf explains not how its magic works!!
My biggest reason for using naturalism in my worldbuilding is to make the players be more immersed in the idea of this being a real place, so that when I do get weird the juxtopposition is that much greater. I've been doing this for years but it can still be difficult to balance the immersively naturalistic and immersively weird.
Definitely! If everything is strange then nothing is strange. You need the mundane for the strange to be that much stranger.
I think it relates best down to tone and balance. If everything is fantastical all the time everywhere, then, in my opinion, the fantastic becomes mundane. It's when we establish a baseline, and the players travel from a place of comfort and predictability into a mythical underworld that a sense of wonder can truly be experienced in full.
This is why i love Numenera as a setting.
You have humans living in communities that behave in logical and understandable grounded reality.
Then you have the backdrop of the inexplicable. There ARE reasons for what the weird things are, but the there are always far more questions than answers, and every answer opens up new questions.
I think this phenomenon is largely about insecurity in one's own work. I realized that I could suspend my disbelief for the work of other people, and other people could suspend their disbelief for my work, but I couldn’t give myself that same grace. Since I've been letting go of that perfectionism, I've felt like I could actually create again instead of just give the real world a different coat of paint.
I think creators should ask themselves if they actually enjoy being so realistic and thorough; are those the kind of settings they actually engage with as a player/reader/etc.? I imagine a lot do, but I also think there are many like myself that are creating like this because of self-doubt and a kind of egotism.
I really like this idea. Even as someone who loves building worlds for my novels based on realism, I am finding lately that my worlds are starting to feel too rigid and almost stale. I end up stalling out on them because, while they may be scientifically sound, they don't feel like they'd be fun to explore. The reason I love fantasy so much is *because of the fantastical*. I need to remember that and allow room for the strange and magical and whimsical in my worldbuilding. Great video!
Appreciate the kind words.
Yeah regardless of your intent for worldbuilding I find that this has a place in everything. Some of my favorite fantasy books are ones that start mundane (as far as fantasy goes) and then slowly slide into the more fantastical.
This is why I really love so many Clark Ashton Smith stories, the descriptions of landscapes and creatures were so weird and surreal. They created such a mood without getting bogged down in the details and minutia of trying to be realistic or fully fleshed out.
People often forget that Fantasy RPGs are typically not intended to simulate a realistic medieval world, they're supposed to simulate a believable enough Fantasy world.
Sometimes, not everything needs an explanation. Sometimes, you need to remember that it's art; follow not the order of reality defined by a physicist, but by the poet or the philosopher. When asking why two nations are at war, making it a hidden allusion to romeo and juliet is often much more meaningful - and much more feasible - than writing 5 extra war books of history.
But where do the goblins go poop?
LMAO nice.
Wherever they feel like it
Everywhere, son. They go poop everywhere.
Its so bizarre that people worry if their FANTASY story is realistic enough to the point they make it mundane
Great video! Tangentially, this is why I usually find fantasy novels with "hard" magic systems to be less enjoyable than fantasy with mysterious magic.
Any sufficiently defined magic is indistinguishable from an arbitrary made-up technology.
Hard magic systems really takes the magic out of magic. At that point it just serves the same role as tech in sci-fi. It just becomes a tool and it just becomes oddly dull.
Gandalf is THE wizard because his powers are mysterious and strange and we don't really understand what he can do. It's not flashy fighting skills or handy tools, it can often seem like something beyond our understanding and that's what makes it appealing.
I find I enjoy seeing what characters can do with hard systems, but I agree that a magic "system" isn't really magic. It's more like fantasy science.
I've got a worldbuilding project for a novel, in which most of the weird fantasy stuff that happens is due to a god-like supercomputer that believes itself to be the gamemaster of an rpg. It takes aspects of mortals' mythologies and makes them real.
That's why Magnagothica has the potential to be something amazing. Here is a Table Top that takes place in a city falling towards hell, that has skeletons dressed like PMC soldiers, angels that fight like anime swordfighters, Biomechanical tanks, medical monstrosities horrendously grafted together, and clerics with rapid fire crossbows. This game absolutely embraces the weird and wild, and each faction is just surreal to look at.
Wow. You put into words something I've been bothered by for years but couldn't quite describe: [paraphrasing] "if the game is built on strict realism and you have elite level players the game becomes completely procedural at a certain point and then you lose tension and excitement." TRUE! Keeping that "discovery phase" going is essential.
one of the tid bits of D&D lore that I enjoyed so much I want to include on a campain is the fact that death knights would sing hauntingly beautifull songs about their past in specific times, it's part of the mytic quality a fantasy settting should have.
This video literally described my journey through the world of character creation over the years
I fully agree, currently I'm creating a kingdom that due to a supernatural threat has resorted to extreame eugenics and class separation to have more magically capable population, treating the unskilled like kattle. Miserable and dark fantasy. Also their current emperor's name is Ragnarokark Super Gandhi and sushi is an actual type of fish.
One thing we've found useful at my table (we take turns running and playing, keeps burnout low) is making use of other planes in limited ways. A gate that leads to a dungeon that is in the Feydark means you're not going to playing by mortal world rules. In a recent game, players found themselves in a homebrewed planet called Jotunheim and ended up having to quest through the ruins of a city that was thrown into Jotunheim by an angry angel (long story, much in game lore) to find an enchanted bell they could use to save a girl from 3 evil giant witches.
It was purposely surreal and played by different rules (in character rules not game mechanics as such) than the physical dungeons of the characters homeworld and honestly? The players loved it. It felt like they were legendary heroes going where mortals dare not to do strange, great and sometimes terrible things beyond the bounds of their normal experience.
It works great when you make a kind of real-strange-real sandwich to make the experience stand out more in my experence.
Came here courtesy of Black Lodge! Wondeful video. I'm running a game of Tales from the Loop tomorrow and this advice was encouraging, thanks!
I’ve had no problem running mythical stuff in the otherwise grounded world, make everything human explainable sure, like why is there a city, who is the king, why they are at war etc, but explaining dungeon, it’s creatures and other stuff is pointless in my opinion, the more bizzare set pieces there are the more memorable the world is, i just find that first you need to “ground” players in the world, run them through reasonable encounters that have logistics behind them, for your mythical stuff to feel impactful
I fully agree. So long as the expectations are set and you don't do it in a jumping the shark sort of way, players absolutely LOVE these crazy realizations.
Appreciate the thoughts!
i dislike when people go extreamly on the opposite route from realism and handwave away plotholes for the sake of the fantasy.
Like for example a world having trains but not guns and not explianing why that is so [even just a "gunpowder is a magical element thats very expensive" would work]
But ofc having a floating city in the skies doesnt need an explanation cuz its clearly magic. Whereas the lack of any religion would require some explanation as its a thing thats not clearly just magic and might break immersion.
The taste for grounded vs fantastical swings back and forth because too much in either direction can get boring (in the context of the fantasy genre). When everything is strange, weird and fantastical then nothing is. If everyone can cast fireballs and slay dragons then it becomes mundane. When every dungeon defies all reason and logic then it's not a novel experience any more. You need something grounded and real to contrast the strangeness with. This is why I find "Low Fantasy" and some Sword & Sorcery settings more interesting because when the fantastical is introduced it actually means something.
@@timwest2322 Completely agree! I love the same settings for the same reasons.
I've always felt that Morrowind was very good about this. It's a crackpot setting, and to counteract that there's a surprising focus on the mundane realities of everyday life. Get your papers from the local census office. The tax collector's dead. A legal notice at the tavern so everyone knows what to snitch about. Oh, you're the new guy? Go do what the last new person tells you. She just wants you to do her work for her.
I think fantastical elements should serve a purpose in a story that can't just be replaced by realistic elements, because then they do start to feel mundane.
I understand that wizards are cool but if two characters end up fighting using magic powers instead of swords you're ultimately just forcing people to suspend their disbelief for absolutely no reason.
@@PauLtus_B That's my issue with standard DnD magic. Is it magic or just a type of technology where you mash buttons to get a particular effect.
@@timwest2322 I think that for D&D, or any game system, using some rules is a bit inevitable, although those rules of course don't have to dominate the entire setting and there can still be things that don't play by hard rules.
I do think this game-y attitude has a bad effect on actual stories though.
One of the reasons dungeon meshi is so good is its mostly well thought out fantasy then near the end the rug is pulled out from under you and everything changes
I belive it is less important to ask the whys of something when it is intended to be permanently shrouded in mistery from the pov of the story: using the same example of this video i could say that an underworld that works in different ways than the overworld and can be reached by digging doesen't need a naturalistic explanation, or one at all (even if there is one), what it needs is for you to see how it interacts and is understood by humans.
Ironically what usually people that go for big supernatural stuff get wrong is not the explanation, but that the supernatural and unexplainable thing they added needs to impact society in some credible way: if anyone reading a book can become a living flamethrower, most armys would be composed by scholars and that is the place where complexity and some form of realism lies, 'cause you can't just suspension of disbelief your way out of basic human logic in a human society,whan you try, you'd see your readers/players get as frustrated at the game/book as someone who's waching a horror movie where all the character lack any sense of self preservation or generally intelligence.
I have this island where the tides come up and down in phases of the moon, so one day every four weeks the whole island is there but another day there is no island at all. For a long time I tried to figure out how or why it worked so I could explain it to my players. Then, I realized it doesn’t have to. It’s just a weird place, it’s not well understood. It’s that easy
if their characters could never figure it out, they never have to know! it's easy for something so magical to simply be too complicated for the inhabitants of your world to understand past their observations.
I'd really recommend MrBtongue's video on magic.
I think it makes a really good case for not explaining everything.
Into The Odd does a good job of telling this to GMs, upper dungeon levels are kinda normal, but the deeper underground you go, the more reality breaks down.
Yeah, I lean into this in my TTRPG setting. Although I don't use a "mythic underworld" per se. Instead, my setting is very heavy on Faeries (the old spooky kind). So the players can often stumble onto weird Faerie shenanigans, or a portal to their realm, where all kinds of unusual things can happen. :P
Exactly, a couple of sessions ago i had the players visit a frog men society where they lived in the sewers and it was like victorian london. The party had to get some info and steal a staff, they were caught and had to run from the frog guards that were trying to catch them with man sized fishing nets on spears. It was a very funny chase sequence to play out
They're new. They've gotta get past their low fantasy arc before they can get onto their riding a cosmic sandworm through a white hole arc.
@@KnjazNazrath Kinda think there is something to this tbh. For me personally it kinda came in waves. Super young I was full into the weird side of fantasy, then I got into low fantasy and now I'm trending back to the wild.
I would think the more realistic it can be, the more immersive it is, even if only subconsciously
You make a bunch of great points and you are entertaining while doing so.
You deserve way more views friend. You have my sub!
I feel like a lot of his hesitance to include weirder things in games comes from the current cultural climate. People don't want to be seen as weird or "cringe." The idea of making something that might be "embarrassing" scares people, so they completely reject even the notion of trying. It's so sterile and politically-correct, and so, so boring.
Fantasy is meant to be bizarre and strange. Yeah, there were a lot of bad worldbuilding scenarios in the past, which included morally questionable or uncouth things. It's natural to be worried of doing that with your own worldbuilding. But something overlysanitized is almost just as bad as something morally reprehensible. Once you sand away all the edge off something, it becomes boring. Edge can be good.
You just gotta put yourself out there. Not everybody is going to love everything you create or do but who gives a fuck about them. There are going to be people out there that vibe with the stuff that you make, those are the people that matter. Just make shit that you love and you think is cool and there will be an audience for it.
I would like to know the origin of the image of the knight looking up to an alien ship in the thumbnail, thank you.
And yet you rejected the Wang Owl which was actually a species of vulture.
Sacrifices must be made on occasion unfortunately.
Things can be alien and based on reason, they just have to be in a different realm of cause and effect, or made by irrational agents
I grew up with another kind of fantasy, even if I was born in 1992 and Lord of the Rings was a big part of my teen years... BUT I never found myself enjoying it that much, not more than H.P. Lovecraft and his group of friends: Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian is my type of fantasy (Sword and Sorcery), the weird in those stories are what drives my insane and makes me love it. The old D&D had many of those weird tropes in it that were lost for a higher fantasy setting that I don't like much. Keep it weird folks!
Heck, the ttrpg Call of Cthulhu is a great example of mundanety and weird together. I love it when there is a realistic world, but then things start to get strange and weird!
If you want a story that includes the strange and the uncanny in its world building that offers no logical explanation check out the animated series Over the Garden Wall. It's a wonderful tale that is also perfect to watch for the Halloween season
Summon minecraft steve!! (metaphorically)
Aka: reject boring realism embrace whats fun.
Maybe not something as silly as steve-
but -if it adds fun and improves the work- you should add anything in that persuit.
I don't feel realism and strangeness are incompatible. For me realism is how people in the world react to thing and how it all tied together. My favorite settings in all fiction. Blame! Is highly insane but the people who live it live in it reastically. Its my inspiration when i DM in strange settings like planescape. Yeah there is a Sigil the evergrowing in center of the plane where death is even buyable out of it. But if you take into account of people will react to it the strange is still strange... but real and believable
@@csam9167 Certainly, they're definitely not incompatible!
This speaks to my soul
Hell yeah..
@@TrillTheDM Ive been thinking about this a lot, too. I am a perfectionist, and it gets in the way of just doing things, so I have to be careful.
But lately, when I create something, I go through an extra step at the end when all is done: "How could I make this truly fun and special? What completely unexpected element could I introduce that complicates this?"
Its like the advice: "If you have good ideas, use them NOW." or "XY storytelling"
My compromise is basically that Im working with a solid base structure to keep a coherent world and a random element on top. It must feed into the established rules and never break them, but if I can pull it off well the random element is just pseudorandom and shows that the audience or players just do not understand the underlying rules fully (and might never do).
Bit rambly, but I think you get the point.
Great content, I completely agree these are some great takes.
Looking to your channel for inspiration, extremely surprised that you only have (in reality is a lot) 500 subs which is crazy this vid is so good
@@sopeylive Appreciate it!
Another thing is thay i think the GM should not be afraid of saying "nobody knows".
Perhaps there are ecological reasons why particular creatires exist down in the ubderworld, perhaps there are logical underpinnings to the magic system...
But why should your characters know this? Its perfecly okay to fill your world woth forgotten things and mysteries that even the gods havent figures out.
Written well this isnt a cop-out, but can add a deeper richness to your world.
If i wanted realism id play depressed dmv employee the rpg.
Didn't know this was happening with in the table top gaming space. kinda reminds me of what the enlightenment did to art. we went from beautiful depictions of saints, angels, heaven, and the divine, to every one and their mom,rejecting it for slice of life paintings and landscapes. these works of art created with great skill were objectively beautiful in their own right, but compared to the subject matter of so many works of art during the renaissance, feels like a bit of down grade.
It's really necessary to set up some kind of balance if we want to make any typical setting make even the least sense. I've always been struck by the overwhelming number of adventure hooks that involve this or that monster slaughtering a farmstead or encroaching humanoid hordes raiding or a dragon or other such massive powerful monster terrorizing the countryside or - and this is always a favorite- whoda thunk that the old, neglected cemetery outside town would eventually start spilling out undead? I mean it only happens to *every single one* .
Yet somehow, amongst all this, humanity goes on living as some caricature of ignorant, superstitious, dark-age/medieval rubes who are amazed and bamboozled by every cantrip and who for the most part don't even believe in the monsters and spirits hanging about *literally right outside their doors and gates* . Either there's a "normal" world, separate and distinct from the mythic world, where society can carry on more or less as "normal" for the setting, or things are going to be *drastically* different from the typical medieval-ish vision presented in many settings. So on one hand you can have rational, functional "dungeons" like castles, keeps, and caves, while still having entrances to the mythic underworld hidden and waiting for the brave and foolish alike.
Exactly!
Variety is the spice of life. My own homebrew and favorite setting (Sanctuary post fall of Babylon) is a world of the bizarre and inexplicable, where myth and folklore exist in great diverity; my cosmology explains this as the expression of boundless creativity from the all mighty creator deity. However, sometimes I just gotta enjoy some simulationist stuff.
Absolutely, I feel like you need both to appreciate the other. Go heavy on some simulationist stuff for a bit and when you get back to the stranger side of fantasy it's like a breath of fresh air every time. Same goes the other way.
So far the weirdest things in the homebrew world I’m working on are pretty much ripped off historical events or at least allegedly historical.
My take is, if you dont like or want fantasy in your games. Dont play or read Fantasy ttrpgs or books.
The whimsy, the terror of the unknown, the mystical and the fantastic all needs to be there otherwise just go play one of a bajillion Medieval European OSR games.
Good video man. I didn't know you had a channel. Subbed!
Appreciate it dude! Your videos on the Mythic Underworld are great and definitely inspirational.
There is an approach in sci fi, that is called reality if. What you do it take reality and add one crazy element and see how everything else would morph and twist around this crazy element. So yes I think things should be strange when it comes to world building, but that strange thing is only fun when put in constrast to reality.
Wait till they learn what lies at the centre of Mystara, the default setting of BX DnD
Love B/X imo the best D&D system to introduce new players in a quick and easy way.
@@TrillTheDM I'd personally say BECMI's basic set is the best, but it's a close competition, and both leagues better than anything 5e
Better Worldbuilding : Enstrage the Brace
I blame the proliferation of online content creators dissecting everything to show how the things they don’t like are “objectively” bad. I’m thinking of things like cinemasins, Shadiversity, and older Skalgrim content. Like yeah, it’s fun to sometimes point at silly things like overly large swords and do the math of how someone would be able to actually use it or point out props in games and movies that wouldn’t be very practical in real life, but just because something has something silly or unrealistic or that makes you have to think for two seconds about why it happens, doesn’t mean it’s bad and does t make you a super genius for noticing that the fake world isn’t real.
I miss when the answer to “how does Superman fly?” Was just “because he’s Superman, isn’t it cool?”
Idk maybe I’m just projecting some of my general media gripes onto table top stuff and it’s not related but I feel like there’s some overlap there. Like no one wants to be labeled as one of the “terrible corporate Disney writers who don’t think things through” so everything winds up just being kind of blah.
No I think you're definitely onto something. It's not only the tabletop hobby that is getting this treatment. There's definitely been a push lately for more grounded content. I don't mind it like you said at times but damn not everything needs to be looked at like that. Sometimes cool shit is just cool shit
This is something that I relate to deeply.
Like, do I seriously have to get a Diploma for THEORETICAL FUCKING PHYSICS just to give a reason why having a Spider tank or hybrid mechanic-shift weapons to exist?
Do I have to make every meta-human a Homelander clone because it’s realistic?!
Do I have to make my fictional animals follow the same rules as that of our reality?
I see people saying that “realism doesn’t mean better”, but why do every billboard that I see says otherwise?!
Sorry for this rant, it’s something that has been bugging me for quite sometime and I have to get it out of my chest. I feel like people are treating Realism as the Bible of world-building and it’s not fun seeing people just being very dismissive and go “Oh this wouldn’t work/exist on real life!” on things just because it doesn’t answer their big list of questions.
agreed
I'm a Science Fiction guy, generally. So, I'm used to needing some relatively buyable reason for things to happen. I still have to embrace some Fantasy, like faster than light travel, just to make things fun. But, generally, I try to be pretty "grounded."
When I run Fantasy, I don't want that to be true. The very reason I would choose to run Fantasy is for the "fantastical." In a world where magic and the supernatural are a part of life, things should be super strange. Maybe you have pockets of "normalcy" around where people live. Towns or cities may impart a degree of rationality on things. But if demons and fairies and world-shaking wizards are real, the world should not look like Kent circa 1590. At least, not all of it. Of course, it depends on the game and the table. Pendragon is meant to mirror the specific fantastical nature of Arthurian legend. Ars Magica is supposed to create a semi-historic Europe with a somewhat hidden world of magic permeating things. But if I'm playing in a world untethered from historic Earth, I want really want it untethered. As a reader of old genre fiction, I'm also fairly used to genre being ill defined, if defined at all. Like a lot of the Appendix N authors that get name-dropped so much but not actually read, I don't need there to be an unbreakable border between my genres. At least, not all the time. I have zero issue with putting a crashed spaceship with some robots in my Fantasy Land adventure.
One of the many reasons I like Dungeon Crawl Classics is that they're not so stuck on medieval simulation. It feels like D&D, especially after Dragonlane and Forgotten Realms came along, is way too stuck on Tolkien and European (really British, French & German) Middle Ages. That became a sort of creative prison for generations who became obsessed with genre being strictly defined and categorized. I don't think a lot of authors before about 1985 put all that much thought into genre while writing. I think they told the story they wanted to tell and left the genre identification to the people stocking shelves at the book stores. These days, it feels like someone sets out to tell an "epic Fantasy," and then just puts together all the expected tropes that have been sort of codified over the last 40 years. Maybe they do so in a new way, but it all feels very repetitive. And doubly so in the tabletop RPG scene (though the indie scene has a lot of creativity in it).
I fully agree with basically everything you said. It admittedly took me awhile (time not lack of interest) to find and get into the more "Science Fantasy" that we could probably call Appendix N and AD&D. After that though it's like the veil has been lifted.
Great DCC shoutout. I love that system and how fucked up the wizards can get after awhile lmao.
I dont get the idea that "You can never have both"
I say most often you have exactly that in most everything. I think people who enjoy realism do so to create realistic worlds within fantasy to make them more believeable and immersive. People dont make realistic fantasy worlds without magic that's not a thing. And If it is a thing it's not exactly what people mean by realism. Realism within this context has always meant something like internal consistency and applying realism where nothing else can fit(If you drop an object it follows gravity etc). Within the mindset of a realism writer there does not have to be a compromise between realism and fantasy. Because they're not mutually exclusive in their application. The Elderscrolls, The Witcher, Dragon's Dogma, A lot of dnd really, all have aspects of realism within them which work in tandem with fantasy. People just like to violently misuse the term realism and say it means some like incredibly hyper specific dedication to historical accuracy???
I think people often give the idea of realism a bad wrap and say it's creatively limmiting as a kind of reaction to the idea of realism. Rather than as a reaction to what realism is actually used for within settings. Which in my experience realism only really means that things follow certain principles of realism. Like armor design. Or magic is a more hard thing to come by because magic irl is hard to come by (Impossible even).
One thing I always strive to include more of is mundane magic. Things like liberal use of the prestidigitation cantrip in the world and carnivorous potted plants as garbage disposals.
I once heard someone describe the scorpion bits I’d a manticore as “unrealistic” and found that too baffling to comment on. It’s a MANTICORE, the whole premise is unrealistic! That’s kinda the point! It’s fantasy! 😅
"I can accept a lion's body, the head of a man and even the wings of a dragon... But I cannot accept the scorpion tail... This has gone too far" Wtf LMAO
Dare I say that the reason as to why fantasy became more grounded is thanks to the rise of atheism?
From Prag and Goethe to Tolkien and Lewis, fantasy and fiction was always (almost fundamentaly) religious. It is only the last couple decades that fiction started to become less and less fantastical.
While I do enjoy fantasy settings like those of Brando Sando, with complicated rules and so on, I have to say that rarely bother to actually memorize or apply my brain deeply to the system. I just see where the book takes me. I do like mystery in my magic systems and world building. Of course, Lost-type endings piss the hell out of me, I do like a setting that is not random and has some structure and rules, but I don't really need an explanation for every single thing in that world, why it works the way it does and why everything happens.
@@aliaatreides707 Absolutely! Even books with hard magic that have a ton of technical detail put into it, so long as it doesn't feel like I'm reading some technical manuscript they're still great.
I have to admit I haven't watched Lost but knowing J.J. Abrams he tends to write on the basis of some cool mysteries but with absolutely no sense of how these things could pay off. He's sort of known to be "bad at endings" but the issue is that a story was never written to actually conclude.
Can I get a list of the movies used? These all look rad as hell but I only recognize Lord of the Rings
Orpheus, Legend, The Black Cauldron, LOTR, and Clash of the Titans.
i understand where your coming from and can agree that as of late the sentiment around general world building has been creeping towards the more realistic early European fantasy.
however i fundamentally disagree with your points: personally i think good story allows for the wildly fantastical to have a logical reason to exist! and that (almost) blindly implementing fantastical elements is not the way to make world building more interesting, i feel that the solution is allowing the fantastical elements to exist in a way that is not unreasonable.
i think shows like dungeon meshi demonstrate my point rather well, to avoid spoilers they have a great way of implementing the wildly fantastical, please watch the show if you haven't but the subtle details about mimics, dragons, and so many other creatures really helps make the world interesting, and it is due to a mix of very logical/realistic, and also incredibly fantastical!
Not sure what I said that would make you think that I believe blindly implementing fantastical elements is the way to go. I just think they have a place.
The good faith assumption is that of course you'll give it some thought and implement it appropriately.
You kinda explained why people reject the Mythic Underworld and why it sucks.
The simple answer is that settings that were made for P&P games in the last decades don't accommodate the concept of a mythic underworld. You're engaging in an uphill battle against the system and setting and that's the least of your worries.
Traveling from the surface to Hades is like traveling from the Material Plane to another plane of existence. There are other mythologies that have such a concept, but the truth is that people barely know about Hades.
The Mythic Underworld sucks because people suck. More frequently than not, they don't do research about history, anthropology, mythology and don't read fantasy books beyond Harry Potter and if one's lucky, Lord of the Rings. It requires a certain type of person with a certain mix of passions to pull a mythic underworld. That's in a hobby were most people treat fantasy races as cosmetics and were they're played as humans, but with a quirk that doesn't come up more than once or twice in a middle length campaign. Do to this and the dissonance between the concept and the setting, you actually end up with an actual "LoL so random" dungeon.
I have the opposite problem. I've been trying to make this setting full of weirdness happen for a while, but I keep putting it on the backburner because I keep coming back to this problem of wondering how to go about creating a baseline "normal" so that these things still stand out. Like it's a world where concepts such as anger or curiosity can become living things because a spirit takes that concept and slamjams parts of its environment together to embody it. Furthermore, gods interact with the mortal world more often but in subtler ways to prevent interference from competing gods. When there's so much potential for weirdness, how do you convey what is routine or natural? What is off the table?
@@TheMightyBattleSquid It depends on your purpose. TTRPG or writing for a novel. I think you just need to be explicit about the mundane portion of life for these people. Yes lots of weird things happen, but how they respond is what sets the expectations.
Their reaction or lack of reaction is the measure to determine what is strange in the setting. Even if I as a reader or player think something is strange, if the locals don't? Then it's not strange.
I understand that this video is addressing tabletop RPG storytelling/worldbuilding in particular but I feel like this notion of “realism” or “emulated naturalism” (I’m not really sure what to call it) being some kind of objective good in storytelling is a problem for pretty much every medium.
I don’t really understand where the idea of “GOOD storytelling is predicated on logic” comes from. Maybe it’s just because I’m an experienced fiction writer but the premise is pretty inherently flawed, even conceptually speaking. FICTION of all things has to be REALISTIC? I’m really curious where this trend comes from and why people feel so vehemently about it.
I think it’s partially due to two factors: Media elitism and the artist/consumer disconnect.
There’s a pretty obvious pipeline from “The more logical the storytelling is, the better” to “Anything which doesn’t adhere to our real world is objectively bad”. It’s just bog-standard ego fulfillment. People with media elitist mindsets aren’t trying to understand/engage with media on fair and equal terms, they’re trying to “beat” media, to think they’re always smarter/better than the work and the person who made because they assert their easy to nitpick and ultimately arbitrary standards carry some kind of objective weight behind them. It’s really sad to me how much media elitism has permeated this realm of discussion, mainly because it’s patently incorrect and the people who believe in it have disingenuous ulterior motives and won’t listen to reason and their very presence RUINS the discussion. There’s no room for nuance or alternative views, it’s just LOGICAL or BAD.
But ultimately it’s storytelling. It’s inherently subjective, every and anything is valid. It’s ok for a story to not make sense, it’s ok to have magic that is inconsistent and poorly defined, it’s ok to have a river that connects two shores or a mountain range that’s no on a fault line. There’s a freedom to just doing whatever you please. My TTRPG world will just have a mountain sized skeleton of a dead dragon god. No, I won’t explain why it’s there or any ecological impact it should have etc. It’s there because I thought it was cool and wanted it there. Not every question needs to be answered and it’s a fruitless endeavor to try and it’s even more fruitless to demand it.
Meanwhile, The Book of the New Sun is sitting there proving that pretty "gonzo" fiction can be "literature" if it wants to be. It's like the ultimate form of Cow Tools.
So that thumbnail was a lie
Fantasy has always been strange as a speculative genre. Why not embrace the strangeness of the fantasy genre?🙂
Had this come up in some of my own fantasy writing. Two characters, one explaining a magic phenomenon to the other....and something about it just felt too technical and far from enigmatic like elsewhere in the story. Will need to agonize on how to revise it.
@@jjhh320 It can be real tough, Best of luck! My preference is usually when it is being described as if I witnessed it myself. I enjoy technical breakdowns of magic and stuff like that on occasion but it's usually more the kinda thing I'd look into outside of the book itself. But my opinion is just one of many.
I had a lot of fun improvising some technobabble when a player asked a gnome NPC about his outlandish inventions. It doesn't have to make sense and it doesn't even need to be correct. It just needs to be entertaining. Since I also knew the real reason behind those inventions, I was also able to drop some hints amid the rambling. I think therein lies the keys: 1/ characters are flawed and nobody knows the full truth even if they possess a part of it 2/ don't reveal everything at once - especially in exposition - show, don't tell.
I know.
LMFAO such a good comment.
What's the show/movie in the clips early video? The one with the shifting labyrinth? Minute 0:55
@@neonnsteel Wrath of the Titans. Not a great film but some cool scenes imo.
I'm going to have to politely disagree in using your balrog example in Lord of the Rings. The majority of the setting is low magic with high fantasy elements. However, you won't find a balrog working in his pie shop selling devils food cake. There's just a limit to what I would consider fun or interesting.
Perhaps the problem is when people begin to take the fantastical and make it the mundane. Sure, the hobbits could have just flown to the top of mountain dew using Giant eagles but that would be a really s***** story lol
Not sure what about the Balrog example would make you think that I'd think the pie shop example is reasonable lmfao.
I get what you mean somewhat, with a trend towards making something strange really just meaning more absurd and funny (to what degree of success I couldn't tell), but I think that's people mistaking what bizarre is - I would argue making the fantastical mundane is quite literally opposite of what is bizarre; it's an extension of overly explaining the unexplained
You got me thinking, after a abit I wanted to ask if I can share my world basics to see how much of a mix it is betweeen the strange and geounded?
Feel free to share bud.
@@TrillTheDM
Thanks, it might be abit long but I'll work on it tomorow to make it alot easier and far more entertaining to read. It's only a draft for now from an older version that no longer applies due to alot of additions for a TTRPG.
Quick synopsys:
A word of change, in flux between many forces that want to guide it's change for their favour. The Victorian/Renaissance inspired world, with hints of the revolutionary era, with a once abundant amount of mana, now minimal and requiring pattern circuit tattoos to direct and release the channeled power on top of the channels in their skin. Forbidden practices such as bone engraving, skin engraving and blood constructs where patter circuits become deadly or permanent are not far behind though, often practiced by those who skirt the law for more magical power. Since the great division though, there has been another development much more recently even if progress can be slow. While castles and stone fortresses/homes may still rule, for now, industrial towns and cities are beginning rival and making them obsolete ever so slowly even if some still heavily cling to them.
Great machines of technological wonder powered by a steamling engine (Mix of a steam and sterling engine), radios and gramophones that allow for a never before seen spread of information. Transportation hubs where trains carry and intermingle all people regardless of class, often featuring the spread does mean that propaganda, general information and state-of-the-art entertainment hard to get anywhere else. However, where there is state propaganda there are also dissenters and rebels who use pirate radios to spread their truth. Whedre it's true or not is often questioned by the masses there when heard.
Steam machines such as boats, zeppelins and trains are often themselves segregates as per the natural law of the world, the opulent traveling in luxury while those who have less have to make due with less. Wealthy cabins containing small bars and kitchens as well as expert decor, the burging middle class cabins making due with comfortable segregated seating so that they may have privacy as they travel and the poor cabins making due with utilitarian if comfortable seating and some minor refreshments they are able to buy. The ones that often have it the worste are the destite, given little more then a simple blanket, pillow and a small canteen to eat and drink from, in cramped "cabins" often used for transporting goods for a very cheap price. All though ending up at transportation hubs at the same time, nobody able to tell them to keep in their lanes should they be determined.
More supernatural forces hide from the public eye, though are known by them. Lycans (werewolfs) and vampires, once sentient beings that bonded with a wolf and bat spirit respectively. Though they gain great benefits and power, they are also shunned should they take their manwolf or manbat forms and risk death just to become as they were before the bonding. The military tending to make use of them even if they are required to wear shock collars should they ever lose control to the beast spirits bonded to them during transformations.
Militaries have benefited as well in this great age, making wonders that crackle like lightning as they slay their enemies. The heart of this being the magic powered exo-skeletons and percussion cap system that allowed for experimental army units outfitted with these wonders. Often only given to the elite who prove their loyalty and prowess with traditional weapons of war, whedre a simple sword or a point on the end of an arrowhead. Great siege works being the last are where these innovations have not reached just yet but not for a lack of trying as there is constant change leading to arms race amongst those who can afford the expense.
Mana lore:
Mana is a force of nature in a sense, highly reactive and all directionally expanding. Legend says many eons ago, spirits and sentient beings lived together in relative harmony. Magic spells and artifacts were common place. Easy to use but at a great cost, the destructive power of these was immense and devastating.
Sentient beings and spirits began to fight each other too often almost destroying all living life. Cursed weapons as well as their creation and potentially the primordials being the remnants or tap into the long gone maddening and potential destructive era according to some. The spirits themselves, against and without consulting the sentient beings wishes, separated mana from the world into two when they realized where the world was heading.
A spirit world, a endless void even according to some who say they saw it but proof of it is naturally hard to find, and one where it's limited in power. Sentient beings developed their innate insignificant amount inner mana before that happened though by chance and luck, not wanting to lose mana they ended up slowly evolving it into the main and much more bountiful mana source used by magicians today. Alchemical symbols and pattern circuits came sometime after to control this great force after the great division, as otherwise it won't even breach the skin.
He don't misssss!!!
@@sanddanglotka LMAO appreciate it!
Where is this black and white sideways gravity scene from?
Orpheus. It's a French film from the 1950s. A few really cool practical effects.
Unrelated to the topic of the (great!) video: does anybody know what movie the scenes in black and white are from? It looks real nice
In case you haven't seen from other comments the film is Orpheus, 1950s French film. Same premise as the Greek myth just modern for it's time
Thank you very much! I'll give it a go as soon as i find it
I haven't seen any push back in games. Is there something specific?
Not sure what you're asking. I state it in the very beginning where I've seen this pushback lately.
y'know?
Brandon Sanderson wannabes like Shad have done serious damage to the fantasy genre.
Careful, if Shad sees this comment, then he'll make a 40 min video explaining why you're wrong.
I think that people should go for realism more, though not for a all ready fantasy world. We should go look at our own world and it’s history but the mainstream TTRPG community seems opposed to that for some reason, when you deal with anything set in reality it must become fantastical with magic or monsters and crap. Why is realism saved for fantasy and fantasy saved for the real?
I do not agree. I personally feel the opposite, that hobbyists have overly embraced realism lately. Not that realism is a bad thing but it is pretty strange to me that for a hobby mostly built on science fiction, fantasy and the mixing of both things have turned out this way.
Uh, no.
But only use humans?
If that's your preference!
the point about the river of forgetfulness isn't really accurate, just to get the Greek mythology right, but there was no widespread concept of reincarnation in Ancient Greece. I'm sure people have extrapolated the river might be a sign of previously believing in reincarnation but as it stands we have evidence of that, and most of that sorta stuff tends to be people misapplying Hindu beliefs
I'm not actually sure what your point was. I feel like you talked in such a vague way, I don't know what's good about a 'mythic underworld' or bad about an incredibly grounded one. It was too vague for me to learn anything.