Creating the setting, part 1: The romance of the past

The generic European stone-and-sword  fantasy milieu, however imaginary, however insubstantial, has become cemented in the popular imaginations. This is what makes it work as an RPG, because an RPG relies on shared assumptions.  If the people playing the game cannot agree on a common vision of the setting, then it doesn't work.

Where does this come from? What do we expect out of a fantasy setting? What is it, really? I believe these questions are important and must be answered. Keep in mind that we, human beings, have a very limited cultural memory. If something is sufficiently old, old enough that our grandparents consider it old, we tend to assume it was that way forever.

Thus, the origin of the generic fantasy world does not stretch as far back in time as one might at first suppose. What we do know seems to be based on echoes of echoes, extrapolations from relatively recent times, probably no farther back than the late 1700's or early 1800's, when poets and writers became preoccupied with glorifying the pastoral, the homespun, the macabre, and the gothic.

A nostalgic sense of pan-Europeanism complemented the rise of romantic nationalism. There was a revival of national epics like Beowulf and the Faerie Queene (in England) or the Ring of the Niebelung and Faust (in what is now Germany). This was the time of steam-power, romantic poetry, clockwork, the agricultural revolution, and the machine-smashing Luddites.

Hello

Lost? This is a blog about tabletop RPG's, and my online name is Wisdom Infinite. I chose it a long time ago, back when I had a Netscape internet account, mainly because it didn't have any doofy numbers in it and it wasn't already taken (Infinite Wisdom, in the opposite order, was). You can call me Wisdom.

I have a real name, and you won't have to look very hard if absolutely want to find it and harass me about it, but for now, let's keep this professional. In the context of the internet, that means the illusion of anonymity.

Once upon a time, I tried very hard to create my own generic RPG system. It had exploding dice and logarithmic scales and all sorts of stuff that was really more interesting from a recreational mathematic perspective. It got needlessly complex and I focused too much on rules (which fascinate me) rather than fun. So I gave it up. Recently, I got fascinated with variant D20 rules and such again.

I wrote a little bit on these topic on my other blog, two or three just to test the water. Rather than that let those pile up there, I've decided to move them over here and continue them, so they that can be located and accessed better.

My philosophy has changed over time, now to focus on fun, useability, and rules-lightness. Rules should be, as Gauss put it, few but ripe. I'll talk more about that later. But this design philosophy informs this blog, too. I'll be setting and enforcing a limit of 20 lines (in my editor) per post, not including charts and images. That should suppress my natural tendency towards longwindedness.