Find Familiar

Today I'll start with a tautology: a story which takes place in a fantasy world will take place in that fantasy world. Now, let me amend it slightly: a story which takes place in a fantasy world does not take place in some other world. The point I'm so clumsily shambling toward (with an improbable overuse of colons) is this: why would a story — especially a fantasy story where the author already got to tailor-make the setting — need more than one world? If you've never stumbled into the tiny handful of fantasy stories that involve more than one world, you might not even know what I'm talking about. Usually, "the world" is a big enough setting to handle a story. Even in the works of Tolkien, in which the world of "Middle Earth" has that name for a reason, the additional realities are mostly unseen history that you don't even need to know about in order to understand what's going on in the primary narratives (four whole books' worth...

As I continue to try and put together an original fantasy world for my RPG campaigns, I keep running into problems with languages. I don't mean the terminology of the game, I mean the in-universe languages spoken by the characters, and what they imply about the game's assumptions toward the world in which our stories will take place. Let's take a look at the current setup (using D&D 5th Edition as an example, though other fantasy games have similar issues), go over the problems it creates, and then talk about possible solutions. Okay, so in D&D, the overwhelming majority of characters speak approximately two languages: "Common," and a racial language corresponding to the character's race. Certain backgrounds will give you additional languages, but those will basically be selected from among other racial languages. In other words, every language that isn't Common is a racial language. Elves speak Common and Elvish, dwarves speak Common and Dwarvi...

Something I've got on my back burner right now is an attempt to develop a fantasy setting. Unsurprisingly, one of the main ideas is for the setting to be usable in homebrew D&D games, but other fantasy games could be played there, or I could write a book, etc. Whatever the eventual usage, the point is that I want to create a new fantasy world that would be familiar to gamers while offering something of value beyond being "generic fantasy land". To be a familiar fantasy world, there are some key tropes that need to be present: prevalent magic, low tech level, and fantastic creatures — including various flavors of humanoids. That last bit is what I'm getting into today, as fantasy gaming has a bit of a history with playable races. I'm not doing a deep dive right now into the racism and sexual violence built into "classic" notions of fantasy races, as mine is not the best voice to listen to on those fronts. Suffice it to say that fantasy races need at...

Hello very first reader(s), and welcome to the first post of my new blog. My name is Jacob, and I wanted a place to "think out loud," as that helps me sort my thoughts. Also venting is a thing sometimes. Okay, so what's going to be on this blog? Probably a lot of it will be gaming-related; in fact, my first "real" post will be an example of me thinking out loud as I work on developing a fantasy setting for roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons . I might sometimes comment on other games I play or otherwise have thoughts about. I'll probably also sometimes have thoughts to share on game-adjacent topics, like gaming community issues or topics of similar geeky-ness (like sci-fi movies or anime). Don't be surprised if I also occasionally sprinkle in personal topics, thoughts on society at large, or plugs for the creations of people I care about. Basically, I don't have a long-term plan for the content, I just know I need an outlet for the stuf...