Every so often I get the urge to run something more fantastical and irrational - something where magic is everywhere and poorly understood, where monsters are mythic and better understood by Freud than Darwin, where there are no farmers or cities because everyone is either Conan or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Something illustrated by Frazetta, Brom, John Blanche, Dali and Brueghel the Elder, penned by Leiber and Vance, and printed in 1968.
It just so happens that I have recently come across Meanwhile, Back in the Dungeon, which doesn't exactly help. I mean, just look at this stuff:
Gah! I fell into the same distraction yesterday while looking through a copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics... all those wild and wacky images without any concerns towards the plausible glue holding them all together.
ReplyDeleteOnly moments before I'd been looking through references on Sanskrit for my homebrew setting... now I'm obsessed with laughing worm men and steam powered gnomes.
Laughing worm men are something we should all be paying much more attention to.
DeleteI really like the phrase realist furniture.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Meanwhile, back in the dungeon... is wonderful.
The arched building over the river is downright inspirational.
ReplyDeleteVery much agree. That would make for a cool setting element all on its own.
DeleteThis seems like a pretty-easy-to-have-both situation.
ReplyDeleteMaybe not both in the same session, but easily both in the same campaign
Then you get conflicting themes, Zak. And that means End Times.
DeleteHasn't everyone noticed yet that Zak does mish-mash without constraint? He is an illustrious exponent of the lowest form of D&D.
DeleteKent, I've been entirely tolerant of your weird Zak Smith fetish until this point, and Zak can look after himself, but you're starting to piss me off with it now. If you're going to comment on my blog, I'd rather you didn't post anything about him. This is a blog about role playing games, not a place to air your strange crushes. Thanks.
DeleteDescribing contempt as a 'fetish' is a token of needlessly curried favour. You, I think, have the 'crush'. Bye byes.
DeleteThe thing about conflicting themes is they only really matter if the players are jarred by the grinding of gears, I think spacing things out in time as well as through player groups can get people past this.
ReplyDeleteMost long-running serial fictions (tv shows, comics) or kitchen sink novels (Gravity's Rainbow being the obvious example) manage to segue gracefully form one tone to another over time and, indeed, maybe _have to_ just to keep things interesting.
That may be why indie games (one-shotty, movieish, skinny, efficient) tend to worry so much more about themes than D&D and its ilk (campaigny, tv showish, fat, lots of options, redundancies).