theme for a fantasy campaign

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

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.

That is a real danger. One of the ways to be careful is to hide your working, erase all the construction lines, and present only the bizarre conclusions that you have reached without explaining how you got them. Extrapolating from an odd thought to an otherworldly conclusion, and then sticking rigorously to the position that no-one in the world knows why, say, stranden women don't go to sea and trolls prefer their meat raw, can give you a wondrous otherworld. It's explaining the joke that kills the humour.

In SF, particularly in the "hard SF" subgenre, the working is treasured by the writer and the fans: the scientific points are the main attraction, and the story is often little but a vehicle for them. This is often very bad for the story, as too much of it reads like my ramblings about the stranden upthread, as opposed to anything exciting or moving actually happening.