Fantasy Fantasy Setting
We have fantasy football teams. How about a fantasy fantasy setting?
So there’s this publisher of roleplaying games, Lightspress Media. They produce a series of tabletop roleplaying games along three disparate strands - DoubleZero, a modern roleplaying setting relying heavily on realism; Foragers’ Guild, a fantasy game of creativity and magic and imagination; and the System Neutral strand of “Blue Books” which can be used for any genre of setting.
The Foragers’ Guild books have already released sourcebooks for Cozy Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and Heroic Fantasy. But it was the first of his Character sourcebooks, Troubadours, which really caught my attention.
In a lot of Fantasy roleplaying game settings, combat is not only the core activity - it seems to be the only activity. Starting with the first tabletop roleplaying game, which derived from wargaming, FRPGs are centered around the same kind of combat - deadly number-crunching, reducing the other guy’s Hit Points to zero before they eliminate your character’s Hit Points.
This is a tedious, soul-crushing activity, reducing what is supposed to be a visceral, thrilling scene to grotesque number-crunching.
The setting I was inspired to create draws its inspirations from Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin, and Ken Liu. The themes are Diplomacy, Balance, and Self-Acceptance. The tones are Light, Harmonious, and Joyous.
Antagonism comes from people - people driven by demons of cruelty, anharmony, selfishness, and an inability to let go of things which are damaging to themselves and to others. A mysterious force is darkening the world, turning friend against friend, breaking up relationships, destabilising peace between neighbours and nations.
The characters belong to an Order, whose agents train as Troubadours, travelling across the land under orders from their leadership, offering their magic to help rather than harm, and bringing wonders to dazzle and delight, while using their other magic to heal.
Magic, based on David Grove’s clean language, with some neurolinguistic programming - real tools to enact real change.
You can look at the following document to answer your questions about clean language:- https://reesmccann.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/CLQA-V1.3.pdf
Quote: We are the Order of The Sacred Song. We are a chorus of peace. Knowledge is power, words hold power, and our words hold the power to change everything.
This is the fantasy fantasy setting I have created. A world with no elves, orcs, dragons, Tolkien tropes. A world of illusion and mystery, whose heroes walk barefoot, their heads shaven bald, wearing ankle length shifts of muslin, taking the musical instruments with them, carrying their music in their hearts.
A pity I can’t get together a team to playtest it.