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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