Fantastic Fantasy – Some Thoughts
July 22, 2009Last night I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which was average) but it got me thinking about what I had liked about the Harry Potter series and fantasy in general. What I liked about Harry Potter was the fantastical nature of the Wizarding World. As an aside, here I am using fantastic in the following manner:
- fanciful and unrealistic; existing in fancy only; extravagantly fanciful in design, construction, appearance.
The strange ways of getting about, the bizarre candies, the absurd style of dress, all of these were great fun. Even though the world as a whole became increasingly incoherent as more was added to it.
That is the problem, how to have the fantastic but still have some semblance of a working setting. The Sea of Stars handles it by having the rules change from island to island, some places are very fantastic with floating castles, talking cows and oceans that pour off into space forever. Others are mostly like your traditional fantasy setting, wizards and magic swords of course, but mostly things that would not seem out place in our Earth’s history . . . at least until a sky ship arrives as part of its trade route.
Each campaign, and group, is likely to have a different tolerance for the fantastic in a game. What are your limits? What do you like to see?
