Quote:
Originally Posted by khorboth
I think what's distinctive about it is how unformed it is. It's a great study in soft world building. If you're interested in world building, I strongly recommend the videos by Hello Future Me on this (and every other) subject.
Here's the one on hard and soft world building.
In quick examples, though, Middle Earth is a product of hard world building, where studio Ghibli does soft world building. Much is left unknown, unformed, unexplored. It's deliberate and is better that way. Harry Potter used to be this way too, and was better for it. |
I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think that lack of detail puts an emphasis on soft world building. That’s just an open field for the GM to exploit as he sees fit.
I’d argue that with dungeon fantasy you could just as easily end up with middle earth as hogwarts. In fact, I’d even suggest that groups with mostly power gamers, as is likely for dungeon fantasy, tend to
favor hard worlds, because that encourages preparation and planning based on the details and rules established, as opposed to finding out your entire build was rendered useless when you got back to school after summer because the GM decided to change the mood/tone/atmosphere of the campaign (disclaimer: it was more than a decade since I read HP). Bear in mind, also, that the analysis in the video is for writing (where the author has absolute control and readers/viewers are passive) – not gaming (which is an actively cooperative pastime).
Of course, that’s not to say there are
no unanswered questions in dungeon fantasy. “Who built this dungeon again, why are there a handful of seemingly incoherent monsters and traps here, and how long have they been surviving on the pure hope that a band of moro-, ahem, adventurers would stumble on their lair wile leaving the rooms intact (not to mention unspoiled...)?”
However, I’d say that these questions might have “logical answers”, but according to
dungeon fantasy logic (if, say, making advances in dark magic requires a pact with the devil, among other things, leaving visual markings shunned by the larger society, I’d say a plethora of random dungeons is to be
expected). That’s why there’s such a thing as a dungeon crawl genre.
Sometimes details may be left up to the players’ imagination. Sometimes they may be conveniently ignored (monster remains is usually not a commonly occurring feature, unless it’s part of a “creative” solution to the problem at hand). On the other hand, I have no idea how hygiene is handled in minas tirith (sewers carved into the, and while it likely has a detailed answer
somewhere in Tolkien’s works, I don’t think that’s the dotted i that pushes it into “hard territory”.
As for the dungeon fantasy world in general, as mentioned by a previous poster, there’s a mysterious east, a frozen north, etc, all centered around a focal kingdom. From there, I might easily improvise that pixies and trolls generally come from a local enchanted forest, dwarves and goblins from the tall mountains, and any of the locations I choose to include may be fleshed out in detail, including pixie society, goblin customs, etc. It may not make sense
from a TL8 human perspective, but that may even be the point (it’s not just foreign but another race, sometimes even alien or weirder).
There’s a difference between having unanswered questions on one hand and having
unanswerable questions or
choosing not to answer them (even when players beg for it) on the other. The later would be more in the spirit of Spirited Away (unintended...).