theme for a fantasy campaign

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Not that hard. It will be more that each race is better able to survive in its natural terrain with less technology. For example, trolls, with huge bodies, can endure an arctic environment where a man would freeze.



If you mean reshaping one terrain to be like another, it will not be too easily doable with technology. But the threat of its being done with magic will be one of the themes. Men might burn down the great forests, or trolls might cover all the land with snow and ice.

Bill Stoddard

Scientizing fantasy is problematic and I suspect poses a problem for materialist authors using speculative genres analogical to what Christian authors have dealt from Tolkien on. Fantasy is a genre that is naturally pagan-friendly, just as Sci-fi is naturally materialist friendly. The favorite tropes of each can't be used without giving an uneasy feeling of being on another tribe's territory. That does not forbid it, it just forces the author to squeeze his mind a bit. As Germanic lore is a familiar part of Western Civilization it did not require to much squeezing in Tolkien.

The point I am trying to make is that if you are not careful with your scientizing you endanger the sense of eerieness, wonder, or numinousness that is desirable for fantasy. You can create the same effect in space opera with pseudoscience of course; the B5 idea of two godlike races fighting a war through the ages was a very powerful one. As was the barren desert of Dune filled with hydrocannibalistic barbarians. And so on. But somehow it doesn't work quite the same in fantasy.