Tuesday 13 March 2018

Retrieving High Fantasy; or, the Haughty Fantasy Project


What is High Fantasy?
High fantasy is a type of fantasy setting. It is not, in tabletop RPG terms (and that is what I will be discussing here), a playstyle or type of campaign; rather, it relates to the sorts of fictional sources the setting draws heavily upon. “Sword and sorcery fantasy”, as a setting, is often a low-magic, baffling, dangerous world. What little magic there is is often in the hands of tyrannical rulers or madmen. It may be that amazing technology rots away in the background of a crumbled civilization (and here we most obviously cross over with “weird fantasy”). Typical touchstones for sword and sorcery fantasy are the Dying Earth novels of Jack Vance or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales. In D&D, Athas – the world of Dark Sun – is the archetypal “sword and sorcery” setting. So what is high fantasy? What does it draw upon?

Most obviously, it draws upon J.R.R. Tolkien (though, so far as the sad fall of civilisation and loss of knowledge goes, he influences modern sword and sorcery too – perhaps more than some would realize). From Tolkien we get the savage orcs and goblins, the noble, wise, and tragic elves, the mail-armoured dwarven craftsmen, the world-shaping magical items. The idea that there are wise elders and ancient evils and high matters all going on in the background comes from Tolkien. The film trilogy by Peter Jackson cannot be discounted in the re-dissemination of this theme.

The second chief source for high fantasy is Dungeons & Dragons itself. Our modern aesthetic of the high fantastical world is heavily shaped by the concept of bands of monsters in their lairs, brave adventurers setting out to right wrongs, and the rest. Significantly, the monsters of the high fantastic world – often tribal, generally greedy, sometimes comical – are the result of the Gygaxian robbery of mythological dictionaries as much as or more than they are the creation of Tolkien.

The third place to look is the vast array of bastard offspring of these two sources in wider fantasy media. In book terms, we could look at Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, or Stephen King's Dark Tower, or Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant Chronicles. More recently, Brandon Sanderson broadly speaking writes high fantasy novels. In other media, Star Wars (the Western + Tolkienian magic + fantastic space), the Warhammer universe (the first great high fantasy product after D&D), and World of Warcraft are good exemplars. Not all of these are perfect fits for the “genre definition” I'm about to give (the Dark Tower particularly is as Vancean as it is Tolkienian), but they are a good basis.

High Fantasy is often “high magic” - magic users are common and have potential access to incredible power – though not always definitively. The world is inhabited by monsters drawing on the iconic Tolkien-Gygax tradition. Gods are real and engaged in the world. There are functional civilisations (which often are a pastiche of medieval Europe), though they may be in dire need of help. The fantastic is, broadly speaking, normal at least to adventurers (the Hobbits and Covenant and the Ka-Tet start as newcomers but become old hands in time) – its relative normality does not mean it is any safer to villagers, nor that villagers understand what it is. People believe in heroes, and sometimes their belief is rewarded.

In terms of D&D settings, the two most famous ones – Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms – are High Fantasy. Wizards teleport across continents, gods live on an accessible plane in palaces, cowardly-but-cruel goblins ravage the land in service of a greedy chromatic dragon. Orders of paladins swear oaths of service against chaos. One can see “Law vs Chaos”, the great D&D dichotomy, quite clearly laid out in these settings. Other “high fantasy” D&D settings include Mystara, Dragonlance, Birthright, and to a degree even Eberron (which is a really a sort of hybrid)

What is the Problem with High Fantasy? Should it be Saved?
The criticism goes like this: the old tropes are stale, static, dead. No-one is excited by goblins anymore, who at any rate only exist to be killed by low-level chumps who are only slightly less incompetent than the moronic goblins who started a fight at poor odds. The old magic of the genre has gone, and must be refreshed.

There is something to be said for this. We are at the point where rats in basements are a running gag in video game RPGs, and goblins are understood to be low-level enemies waiting to be butchered. It is also undoubtedly true that a local lord giving you a quest with the summary “Goblins have begun marauding against outlying villages” or a farmer complaining about wolf problems gives one little sense of wonder – of fantasy.

We can see – broadly – two lines of response to this problem: genre exploration and retrocloning. The former camp looks to other subgenres of fantasy to refresh the experience, the latter looks to recapture what made D&D specifically so good (for some players) back in the beginning.

Subgenre Exploration: Amongst computer RPGs, Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity touch on dark fantasy, and invent entire worlds and ecosystems brimming and brooding to go with them. Dark Souls looks to fantasy horror, and turns it to 11+schlock. (Part of the popularity of the Games of Thrones TV series, on a related note, is I think to do with its sword & sorcery feel – it's part of what people mean by “gritty.) In tabletop RPGs, Blue Rose rests on romantic fantasy, Starfinder science fantasy. Of course, the creators of these games are not necessarily thinking “hey, how can I refresh the experience of a game like D&D?”, but they all obviously live in a tradition far more strongly influenced by the D&D lineage than by – say – World of Darkness, Shadowrun, or Call of Cthulhu. Materially, they do not offer new spins on any of those other traditions. They allow a player to enjoy a game like D&D, with sword-wielding or spell-slinging protagonists exploring dungeons and fighting monsters.

Retrocloning: For some players and DMs, what they enjoyed about D&D can't be found in the dense tomes of the last few editions. Slim rules, simple character sheets, and a world of weird possibility. Walk in any direction and find something strange that could kill you or could be convinced to give you a bizarre alchemical reagent. B2 Keep on the Borderlands is archetypal here. Often, in this mode, life is cheap and adventurers die regularly. Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Labyrinth Lord are two obvious B/X D&D hacks to offer as examples here, as is the thriving “OSR” (Old School Revival or Renaissance) blogosphere. There is subgenre exploration here – often of weird fantasy – but it most often interacts with a desire to recapture the experience of 1981 D&D.

Back to high fantasy. There are excellent and exciting alternatives to it, filling a vacuum left by the staleness of high fantasy. Why worry about the dead, one might ask, when we have better things to be getting on with. But is high fantasy finished? Can it be saved? Should it be saved? Before answering that, we should untangle two separate issues, and question one myth.

First: The clichés of high fantasy storyline are not in fact the same thing as the elements of high fantasy worlds. Lumpen questgivers mumbling lines in CRPGs to get you to go and do something doesn't serve the world well, but it also doesn't invalidate the monsters or plot elements involved – nor do dull, flat, lazy dungeon designs in a module. Another stale tale of a young farmboy saving the world doesn't make functional city-states threatened by encroaching supernatural danger uninteresting.

Second: “It wasn't really like that in 1981.” It is simply not the case that everyone who enjoyed D&D in 1981 enjoyed low-combat, explicitly weird settings – it's not even true, I'd wager, of all those who enjoyed Moldvay B/X D&D. Tactical miniature combat was how D&D started, and it seems to have been perfectly common as a form of play during the era of the Basic boxes and 1st Edition AD&D. Many of those who found their games weird but wonderful were enjoying their brother's weird descriptions and the social atmosphere in the basement as much as the inherent freshness of goblins. Of course, I don't doubt that many of the retrocloners are well aware that their picture of “OD&D” is semi-fictive, and I'm not seeking to patronize them. My point is really that their work is often better than both OD&D itself and in fact their brother or dad or roomie's campaign. They may have rediscovered part of what they enjoyed, but they have simultaneously made a new and separate thing, and not salvaged every gem.

There definitely have been recent, or relatively recent, attempts to refresh High Fantasy proper. Numenera by Monte Cook is science fantasy set in a medieval-seeming setting, whilst Pillars of Eternity is a dark fantasy with hints of high fantasy clarity. I can't get so many images from Morrowind out of my head – finding strange Dwemer ruins, a race I barely understood and could never meet except through their artefacts; great mushroom forests; factions with ambivalent morality – and it was still, definitively, high fantasy.

There are also definitely things worth saving in the genre. Is it bad for players to enjoy recognizing monsters? Are tropes inherently bad things unless utterly subverted? I don't think so. I think it's okay for players to want to travel to Great Trading City, capital of the Empire of Generica. I think intelligent dragons, greedy or power-hungry, mocking foolish heroes who enter their lairs, are a great foe. When you're introducing new players to the hobby, you could do worse than having a clichéd five-room dungeon delve of Just Another Farmer-Kidnapping Cult. Familiarity has purpose, and we enjoy tradition because we live inside it and are children of it.

So what I might do a little of here – via setting writing and theory discussion – is try to reclaim Generica for DMs and players. Let's call it, until we get a better phrase, Haughty Fantasy.

Excursus: Setting vs Playstyle
Setting does not equate to playstyle. Playstyle includes a lot of things – the interests of the players, the social atmosphere of the game, wider story ideas the DM might have – but it is not the case that “sword and sorcery” as a setting equates to “adventurers are dangerous, amoral thieves, out to rob everyone and live like princes” nor “adventurers are ants upon the dying flesh of a world which dwarfs their comprehension”. Indeed, Dark Sun (mentioned above) is a setting whose first adventure involves a (canonically successful!) rebellion against an evil Sorcerer-King, led by mostly heroic characters. This is heroic or perhaps epic fantasy, thematically. Equally, a “high fantasy” setting may seem to equate to game about great quests or heroic deeds, but why ought it? The roots of the sub-genre are broad, and Greyhawk was hardly a heroic fantasy campaign in its earliest days.

The Principles of Haughty Fantasy
The World is Familiar
Players will recognize many elements of the world of Haughty Fantasy if they have some grounding in the broad fantasy tradition. There will be (may be?) thrills of recognition as they realize they are fighting their first ever Goblin, or when they meet a grumpy Dwarven smith. The Haughty Fantasy world exists in continuity with the Forgotten Realms, Warhammer's Old World, and Middle Earth.

The World is Strange
Despite the familiar touchstones, the Haughty Fantasy world is also strange and will surprise players. Some of this comes from simple DMing techniques which layer a little mystery onto proceedings – questgivers don't tell adventurers “please go and kill 8 Goblins”, they report on the savage yellow men who have taken up residence in the ruined gatehouse and are stealing cattle. Some of it, however, will come from more surprising elements of the world (surprising to someone whose context is Peter Jackson and World of Warcraft), which cohere with high fantasy tropes but are distinct from them. In the ruined gatehouse the adventurers find a talking sword whose only other magical property is the ability to identify other magical weapons. They also find wall paintings, heavily damaged, of humanoid beaverpeople who apparently live at the lake nearby.

The World is Magical
Magic is real and powerful in the world of Haughty Fantasy, and is not solely in the hands of the wicked. It is not ubiquitous outside of the great metropoli – in rural areas most peasants might know OF the druid of the wood, but they haven't met him. Lucky market towns might have a Cleric, but most such places will just have a priest or healer-woman who might, in extremis, be able to produce a Healing Potion they bought from a passing trader. Of course, in a large city, there will be guilds of wizards, magic elevators, and powerful High Priests casting Raise Dead on (likely-paying) adventurers. The world being magical does mean that magic should feel magical, not de rigeur – though there is more magic in most Haughty Fantasy worlds than in Tolkien's work, there should still be a sense of grandeur and mystery to the magic.

The World is Unpredictable
Though the world is magical, and there is apparently great capacity for control over it, it is also unpredictable. This works in all sorts of ways – “monsters” have desires and beliefs that seems adequate to them, and may sometimes be reasoned with; magic does not always work as you expect, and can be a master as well as a servant; dungeons and wilderness are dangerous places with surprises aplenty even for the apparently powerful (sure, you have 40HP, but a rockslide whilst you're sleeping could still do for you). At one level this is again just good DM technique – the world should be interactive, interesting, full of possibility rather than overprescribed linearity. However, it is also intentionally a beat those running Haughty Fantasy games ought to hit – a contrast to the flying carpets and apparently casual healing of fatal diseases.

Conclusion
I intend to use this blog to post some some examples of Haughty Fantasy settings and adventures, as well as write essays on RPGs and worldbuilding. I'll probably have two concurrent “series” of Haughty Fantasy world material – the campaign sandbox of Talon's Height, my “generic Haughty Fantasy” setting, and my hack of the adventure book Out of the Abyss (from Wizards of the Coast) utilising the OSR product Veins of the Earth (by Patrick Stuart). If you're playing in either of those, don't read those posts!

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