Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Yes again. Butcher is in some ways remarkably unsentimental about his world, and to the degree there's a trend it's going more that way.
Most of the DF stories are told from the first-person perspective of Wizard Harry Dresden, White Council member and major player. Now Harry gets into some harrowing situations, but he does have the advantage of wielding some pretty potent magic himself, and has access to extensive useful knowledge from his training by Justin, Ebenezar, and his allies.
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Arguably, Dresden Files, especially in the later books (unless my memory is
way off) is a horror series from the perspective of a monster that is mostly not hostile to humanity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Is it worth it? An honest judge would look at it and probably say 'only if you have a LOT of potential and a reliable trustworthy mentor too'.
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If you're talented in an aspect of magic that puts your ability to defend yourself from the monsters ahead of how tasty you are to them, the answer to that is a bit different. A large part of that is skill and creativity, though, and in any case, your mentor is important.
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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth
Are you asserting that because it's possible to turn a Brownie hostile you should pick a fight with the currently non-hostile Brownie? That sounds like the kind of thing that invites becoming a cautionary tale...
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Yes, yes it does. Of course, if you have brownies in your house, you are already involved with the supernatural to a degree. The only question is whether you can avoid getting further involved, and if you can't, what you're getting further involved
with.
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Originally Posted by Inky
Humans, with sufficient weaponry and ill-will, can be pretty darn dangerous to other humans too. That doesn't mean that it makes sense to summarise other humans as "bad guys".
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True.
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Originally Posted by Dalillama
The salient difference is that humans usually behave in a way that's predictable or at least comprehensible to other humans of a similar cultural background.
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Well, brownies and many other spirits seem to have a different cultural background than the humans they meet, so perhaps 'like summarising all foreign humans as bad guys' is a closer metaphor. People in the past did that, too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky
But anyway - I notice that this thread may have wandered off the original topic. It wasn't actually supposed to be "horror and fantasy based on pre-Enlightenment legends", but "horror and fantasy set in pre-Enlightenment times, based on whatever". It could be both, but, for instance, it could be something like Vampire: the Masquerade Dark Ages Edition, which is very much modern-style "alpha-predator" vampire fiction but showing what they were doing in mediaeval times.
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Yes. In fact, Vampire: the Dark Ages is a good example for this thread, since one of the things I was thinking about was discussing the past histories of modern horror and urban fantasy settings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky
As for how to justify the "actual facts" in your game being different from what was generally believed at the time - why, for instance, if "elves" and "fairies" are separate and unrelated in your game, nobody at the time knew the difference between them - well, don't underestimate how inaccurate mediaeval ideas of natural history could be. I'm sure that in a world where elves were commonplace the bestiaries could manage to be at least as wrong about them as they were about weasels ("It conceives at the mouth and gives birth through the ear (though some say it is the other way around)").
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Also true. GMs would have a lot of leeway here, if developing a new setting rather than looking into the history of an existing one.
For example, in the spirit-based setting mentioned earlier (mostly on page one), the fae are a broad category of nature spirits, with the elves being among the most human, or the most in line with human nature. Some related beings, like
dwarves, are likewise human-like spirits, while others (still called elves or dwarves, because most people don't know the difference, as long as they have a similar appearance and abilities) are members of heavily spirit-touched human bloodlines.