Adventure Games

Our World, Only Skewed.

How do we do "Fantasy" fiction? There are of course many approaches that can be taken to address this question and one need not look too far to see the outcome of our many diverse takes on what Fantasy as a setting can be. Consult just a few novels or short stories selected from those labeled  the "fantasy genre" and a wide and diverse variety can readily be discovered - everything from the near historical Song of Fire and Ice written by George R.R. Martin, or J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth tales, to the other extreme to be found in the futuristic stories about Zothique written by Clark Ashton Smith and The Dying Earth tales by Jack Vance and we can see that any comparison between fantasy worlds can vary considerably. 

The authors of the FRP game Dragon Warriors describe their default setting as "our world only skewed" which for them is "what fantasy ought to be". A more magical version of our world, familiar to us through our shared personal experience as earthlings and through acquired knowledge of our cultural histories (DW borrows tropes from British history), provides us, as "adventure gamers" with a contextual foundation upon which to build our fantasies. Most things in the game's setting will work as they do on Earth and many elements will be as we perceive them to have been historically. The points where the fiction varies from reality is where the magic exists.  

Dragon Warriors is not alone in leveraging the familiar to anchor a magical setting for use in gaming. Columbia Games uses their setting of Harn which shares many aspects with medieval England and the Fighting Fantasy books and games are set in the world of Titan which contains many familiar tropes. 

Familiarity gives us the freedom to imagine, to create, to add twists in the fabric of reality that make sense because it is all grounded in the familiar. This is why writers of the supernatural will spend time on the mundane details that are so familiar to us (comfortably familiar in many cases) accessing mental images of various mundane things we know are real, only to set us up for the eventual shock of encountering the nearly unbelievable. It is this juxtaposition of the known and the unknown that causes a mental tension which we enjoy while reading (or gaming) comfortably seated in a familiar chair. 

The familiar, yet magically different setting called Lands of Legend, which is built into the game Dragon Warriors, facilitates a comfortable fantasy game experience in a way very similar to the fiction of Prof. Tolkien - familiar, yet slightly different in that magical way. I find that the familiarity of setting and tropes gives me more freedom to imagine , to create, and to add twists in reality that actually make sense (and is therefore more easily engaged with) because it is all quite grounded in the familiar. It also aids in conjuring up a dark and spooky flavor much like dimmed lighting can do in a familiar room. By building the setting into the rules (and vice versa) the "stage" and "cast of actors" fit nicely together, thus facilitating the sort of adventure stories one might want to explore together with one's friends while playing Dragon Warriors. Experience a comfortable (and safe) adventure while making some nice gaming memories in a familiar yet magical land.