What is Cardiel?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

According to my proposed classification system here.

I read your note and agree about Herioc Fantasy, not so much High or Low.
Never really thought about it but lets see.
High Fantasy to me is like Space Opera, so maybe call it Fantasy Opera?
Typically there are vast powers in the story, they may be higher beings like gods or just the whole world i ful of powerful magic and the magic or other powers tend to over shadow everything. Say Lords of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny.
Low fantasy means there is a background of magic or supernatural powers but it is mostly background and does not take over the story. Also the protganists can get along without supernatural aid for the most part. Conan would be Low Fantasy in this case.

Heroic Fantasy is larger then life heroes that persevere despite overwhelming odds. Lord of The Rings, Conan, etc. In fact it might be so common that the definition is meaningless and we go with something else.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But that does not correlate with created world versus earth. You can have a novel set in a created world with no fantasy elements at all. Virtually all alternate history is a case in point; there is also a lot of fiction set in invented countries, from Ruritania to Islandia to Malafrena. I believe there are some novels traditionally viewed as "fantasy" solely because they are set in invented worlds, despite their having no magic, no gods, no monsters, and in general none of the standard fantasy elements.

David Friedmand, whom I know slightly from a Usenet group, claims that his novel "Harald" is fantasy, despite it containing no magic or other supernatural.

Me, I'd say something arrogantly elitist about lowering the extrapolative burden, but I haven't written that blog entry yet, so all I can point to is that the delta-W of such a world is likely to be extremley low.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

edit: To elaborate, I've never come across any definition of low fantasy, implicit or explicit, that says that "low fantasy" takes place on Earth. This is a first for me.

It's my understanding that is how some literary critics and publishers use the term. I could be wrong.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

It's my understanding that is how some literary critics and publishers use the term. I could be wrong.

I've never come across that, and I'd use the term historical fantasy for fantasy that takes place on Earth.

And note that historical fantasy can be high magic or low magic, and can involve high-competence cynical protagonists, or low-competence idealistic protagonists (or in theory high-competence idealistic protagonists, or low-competence cynical protagonists, but I bevelieve those combinations are quite rare).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

It's my understanding that is how some literary critics and publishers use the term. I could be wrong.

No, you're quite correct. I view this as a stipulative rather than a reportive definition, at least in that there are works called "high fantasy" that are not set in invented worlds—both C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams furnish examples.

Bill Stoddard

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

lowering the extrapolative burden

By that do you mean the amount of thinking the reader has to put into understanding the setting? Because I can imagine people coming up with some awfully strange stuff that's not magical at all. Look at the ancient civilizations here on earth. There's no reason at all an invented place has to be less exciting than ancient Mesoamerica, or Peru, or the Polynesians, or anywhere else. But those places have strict rules as to what events can happen there. Sometimes you can't get an alternate history that's alternate enough, and you need to make things up. That's what the non-magical fantasy looks like to me. Just another what if? If the extrapolative burden is too low, and the author's goal was for it to be high, then it's his fault, not the premise's.


But that might not even be his goal. There's an opportunity cost in setting.

It could provide you with an opportunity to do something like Neal Stephenson does in Quicksilver, where the extrapolative burden is all in the plot, and the author needs something easy (setting-wise, I mean) to hang it on. That's what happens in alternate history, isn't it? And I can easily enough imagine an author having a plot that doesn't fit into any historical time or place, but that still has no need of magic.

Or maybe the author just wants to write some pretty prose. Not a whole lot of extrapolative burden going on in Raymond Chandler's version of California. About as much of it as there is to do is figuring out which names match to which places.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I've never come across that, and I'd use the term historical fantasy for fantasy that takes place on Earth.

"Historical fantasy" tends to be used for fantasy that is set in the historical past of earth, or in things that are close to it, such as the alternate timeline of The Dragon Waiting. Fantasy set in the historical present of earth is called "urban fantasy" or "modern fantasy." There is even a small genre of fantasy set in the more or less sfnal future—see for example Melissa Scott's Silence Leigh trilogy, which is, by my definition, pretty high fantasy, but is also sf.

Bill Stoddard

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I've never come across that, and I'd use the term historical fantasy for fantasy that takes place on Earth.

And note that historical fantasy can be high magic or low magic, and can involve high-competence cynical protagonists, or low-competence idealistic protagonists (or in theory high-competence idealistic protagonists, or low-competence cynical protagonists, but I bevelieve those combinations are quite rare).

Parts of the wikipedia entry make the definition hinge entirely on whether the story is set in the "primary" world or a "secondary" world, where "primary" either means exclusively the real world, or possibly "a rational and familiar fictional world", in a remarkable save against actually drawing any useful distinction.

It really seems a remarkably poor article.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Well, see, I figured since we're talking GURPS, then we should use GURPS's definitions for things (or be very explicit about the definitions you are using instead) ... and GURPS has a published definition for Low Fantasy (that a number of people appear to disagree with, but, eh, it is what it is).

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

By that do you mean the amount of thinking the reader has to put into understanding the setting?

No, that's a different issue, having to do with delta-W and genre protocol familiarity (or non-usage). Delta-W can, as you say, be about things other than magic, such as social structures and customs. Even then, though, the author must still convey the information about how the world is to the reader, in some way, and this can be done in a blunt and clumsy and direct fashion, or in an elegant and non-intrusive way.



The extrapolative burden is something else, something done earlier: The mass of the intellectual work that the author or other worldbuilder (such as a GM) must perform, based on the novums he has introduced in the world.

The novums are the premises, for instance definitions of what magic can do and how it is used. A magic system, or several magic systems in the same world.

After having defined the premises, the author must then extrapolate the world from them, derive logically how the world is, taking principles of psychological realism and economic realism into account. How would real realistic people, populations of hundreds of thousands, or tens of millions, exploit the possibilities of the magic of this particular world (in the same way that we and our ancestors have exploited the laws of physics to improve food security, and creature comforts, and military might)? How does the fact that magic exists, and that it can do these things with these degrees of ease, make the world different from our TL3 past, in terms of customs, economy, social hierarcies, religion, and so forth?

The result, the conclusion which follows from the premises, is the product of the extrapolative process: How the world is.

Some worldbuilders opt, often (I suspect) due to being of distinctly limited ability, for very light novums, and very few ones, perhaps only a single one. For instance a kind of magic that works only under very rare circumstances, or which very few can use. Perhaps only one in a million boys, and one in seven million boys, are born with the gift for magic at all, spell use and other magic then being flat out impossible to learn for anyone else.

Other worldbuilders prefer a more colourful and varied world, more colourful in terms of novums and consequences anyway, and so burden themselves with a heavier load of extrapolation.

But of course it is a linear process for few. I don't believe it is common to just posit some premises, and then extrapolate from those, and then be done. Rather it is a back-and-forth worldbuilding process, where the author has some conclusions he wants, and so he looks for premises that will logically lead to those conclusions, and so he tries out some premises, as a thought experiment, and sees how they go, and he goes back and changes them, so they come closer to the conclusion he wants.

Which is fine, as long as it is done prior to publication of the first story, or prior to the beginning of the first campaign.

As a simple examle, spellcasters in my Ärth setting can and do use so-called Focus items, Enchanted items that give the equivalent of Gadget-Limited Magery in GURPS terms. This enhances their ability to cast spells, often only a subset of the available spells but the breadth is chosen by the Enahcnter, and spellcasting is intrisincally difficult enough, and dangerous enough, that you basically need a Focus to do any serious spellcasting (the exception is Cantrip Casters, who can only cast the weakest kinds of spells. Slowly).

Initially, the Focus Enchantments had the same Essence cost, regardless of what kind and size of item they were put into; only bread and bonus size mattered. So that was the original premise.

The conclusion, according to principles of psychological realism, is that almost all spellcasters would want Focus items that are small and easy to conceal, and hard to loose (hard to steal, since Essence is very valuable). Finger rings, or better yet toe rings. Most spellcasters Endow (a method of Enchanting, that is learnable) their own Focus items, and so get to choose the kind and size of item.

I wanted a high prevalance of wizards and druids carrying magic staves, however. Magic finger rings are cool as a possible item, but the iconic wizard carries a staff - a magical one.

So that which I wanted did not emerge logically from the premises I had posited.

My solution was to change the Essence cost for Focus Enchantments, based on the gross size of the item. For normal-sized items, wands, torcs and amulets, the cost was unchanged. For tiny items such as finger rings (and toe rings) the Essence cost is higher. For large items, such as staves and longbows and two-handed swords (and cloaks), the cost is lowered. The modifier is not large, on the order of -20% or +25%, but it still has a large effect on the world that emerges (the world that I extrapolate logically) from the premises. Now spellcasters almost always go for staves, because Essence is a precious and very personal resource, and it is desirable (and psychologically realistic) for most Endowers to maximize its usage.

Normal-sized focus items do exist, and the occasional finger ring, and even toe rings (often being Foci for Illusion Magic, or other "Colleges" useful to spies and infiltrators, and other types who might favour discretion), but I managed to modify the premises in such a way that that which I desire emerges logically. The thousands of Endowers in my setting (many tens of thousands, if you look back over the centuries in which learnable magic became more and more common) tend to make the same kind of psychologically realistic choices that player characters will.

So, with me, it's definitely back-and-forth until I get it right. I imagine many fantasy worldbuilders are similar, in that they have something they want. Science fiction authors, I imagine, may be a different breed who are more interested in just doing the extrapolation, although even those who do that will probably have a waste paper basket full of discarded worlds, because their premises (assuming they've refused to go back and change them) were such that they did not lead to worlds (conclusions) that were good for writing science fiction stories in.