Making Fantasy Fantastical

 I remember when I first read The Lord of the Rings. I was blown away by the elves. Ancient and ethereal, majestic but humble, wise but sad. I feel like Dungeons & Dragons (and not just Dungeons & Dragons!) sometimes loses that sense of wonder. An elf or a dwarf is no longer different, mysterious and mythic - they're your neighbour, and they're either a racist stereotype or a human with plastic surgery. When a dragon-man sells you apples in the morning, how special is it to meet a dragon-man? When Doctor Dolittle came out in the 1920s, the idea of a man who could talk to animals was fantastical. Now, Speak With Animals is just a minor spell that many character optimization guides say isn't even worth taking.

Fantasy as a genre is all about showing us wonders that are different to the world as we know it. If we travel to the great torus-shaped city of Sigil at the centre of the planes, what is our base-line expectation? For the players who've been working jobs all week, going from marvel to marvel in their sessions is fantastical compared to their normal reality. But for the characters, who've seen so many wonders, wouldn't it become humdrum? "Oh look, another long-lost civilisation from before the dawn of time, with arcane secrets within that man was not meant to know. How droll." Surely, though, the answer should be both. Both players and characters should experience a sense of wonder and mystery.

Magic, in particular, is an odd one. Magic in D&D is so commonplace that it's more like a science than magic. It produces a regular, reliable, repeatable effect. There are other role-playing games that make magic more central and more mysterious. I might mention Ars Magica or Mage: The Ascension. The divine and the afterlife are also such well-known commodities in a D&D game, while they're so mysterious in our world.

I guess I'd better tie all of this in to Tirenia! We decided early on that we wanted players to be able to use any rules that they wanted, but that all flavour text was up for grabs. Firstly, we decided that everyone was human, even if they looked odd. It's much tidier than the very painful, race-essentialist approach. To have some 'commonplace' wondrous races, we decided to emphasise animal people. Cynocephali (dog-headed people) were a part of medieval folklore, and D&D has so many cat people, bird people, fish people, frog people, and so on and so on. Several of the other races that we're not using can easily be reskinned as animal people too - half-orcs became bear people, and halflings became mouse people. This is nice and whimsical, and allows for some 'mundane fantasy' races. Other races became humans with a special spiritual touch upon their souls. So 'elves' are now humans whose souls have marked by fairies. You can also get angel-people, devil-people, elemental-people, and of course dragon-people. They are people who stand out as special and unique, with a meaningful backstory. Of course it's as meaningful as the player wants - some people just want the aesthetic without the story baggage, and that's ok too. And there are some other races who we changed up to be different, but maybe I'll talk about gnomes, dwarves, goblins and orcs another day - this post is getting long enough as it is!

Tirenians are also quite ignorant about the rules of things. Is that a sorcerer, a warlock, or a wizard? Nobody knows the difference! What's the true nature of the divine? The priest tells me there is one ineffable god, and they'd know, right? 

We've made a conscious effort to have less magic in Tirenia than in a traditional FRPG as well, but when magic does occur, we make it play by fairy-tale logic rather than game rules. A statue can come to life through a supreme act of artistic creation - because of course it can. A man can literally steal the heart of an elemental - because of course he can. We've also decided to lean hard into the idea that dragons have an effect on the land around them: now Venice's canals are boiling, and Florence has a continual electric storm. I've had people ask me, "Is that possible?" for one thing which I don't want to mention right now, because spoilers for an upcoming release! The answer is... this one time, in this one place? Anything might be possible. 

Image: Woodcut illustration from Pliny the Elder's 'Naturalis Historia,' 1582. 


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