Deconstructing the standard fantasy setting?

As an exercise I wanted to try writing something in the vein of A Song of Ice and Fire, except set in the standard fantasy setting as popularized by Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk. For simplicity, the world is a fantastical version of our medieval Earth, with the same continents and ethnic groups (e.g. french, gypsies, mayans, han chinese, etc) as well as new ethnic groups like goblins, snakemen, elves, dwarves, etc who are probably integrated with existing ethnic groups (e.g. celtic elves, viking dwarves, mayan and chinese snakemen, etc).

How exactly would the widespread presence of magic, monsters and wandering bands of murderous hobos affect the societies of medieval Earth? Would wizards and clerics rule by default, or would they confine themselves in ivory towers after their attempts to do so led to several world wars? Share your input.

First: Based on how you've described it, I'm not sure this would be a deconstruction of the standard fantasy setting. Integration with the real world, sure, but you can see the same thing in Urban Fantasy.

Second: A Song of Ice and Fire is already a deconstruction of fantasy, specifically focusing on how brutal a fantasy would would realistically be.

Now, with that said, I suggest you take a look at the mythological origins of the many Fantasy tropes. From there you can begin to deconstruct them.

• Tolkien's Elves were inspired by the "alfar" of Norse (and Germanic) mythology, adding in some Finnish and Welsh flavor, especially in the languages. Modern Fantasy writers tend to focus on the "Welsh" aspect (or "Celtic," these days). The Dwarves had similar origins.
  • In general, make sure you understand why Tolkien did what he did. It's not enough to copy his work.
• Plenty of "fearsome" Fantasy humanoids came from stories about foreigners: "Ogre" come out of French folklore, "Orc" from Anglo-Saxon, and "Troll" from Scandinavian folklore.
• There were also mischief-makers, like Goblins (French or Anglo-Norman origins) or Poltergeists (in ancient Rome)
• Gnomes came from the Renaissance, specifically around alchemy. They were originally thought to be "earth elementals."

Also look at other world mythologies and see what fits and what doesn't. As it stands today, the Fantasy genre is still pretty bland and it needs something new.

And this next part is rare for me, since I don't normally share my stuff: For a while I had a Contemporary Fantasy idea that fused the standard fantasy tropes with the real world. It was set in the United States (the original High Concept was "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 IN AMERICA!"), so I'm going to include some details relevant to there. Some of them are simple, others are complex. Feel free to use or mutate these ideas...

• Two different Elf subcultures: Celtic and Nordic. Celtic Elves were mostly found along the Atlantic side, especially in Appalachia, while Nordic Elves primarily settled in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. (Note the migration patterns of different real-world ethnic groups: Scottish groups settled in colonies like Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia; Scandinavians came in waves to the Midwest.) Dwarves followed the same path as the Nordic elves.
• Orcs as a nomadic culture that valued physical strength. In my version they were Dragon Riders, but they don't have to be.
• Mages were in charge of running The Masquerade (I had one, but you don't need to).
• Initially I had a conflict between different styles of magic (Nordic "Battle Magic" with actions, Roman "Spell Magic" with words, and some others).
• Over time that conflict mutated into one with some "undead" variants of those races.

Again, these last bits are just a bunch of free ideas. Use them how you want (or don't, your choice).

edited 29th Aug '14 11:46:04 AM by AwSamWeston

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

Well, as mentioned before, GRRM is already there on the Deconstruction part.

But you can certainly focus on an ASPECT of Standard Fantasy World to deconstruct. I'm reconstructing the "Rightful King Returns" trope with three things:

• The throne's usurper is a minor noble who has no fucking clue how to run a country, but isn't necessarily EEEEEEEEVIL. He's just an arrogant and spoiled third son who's barely older than the prince himself, which is why he accidentally lets the prince and princess escape and gets blindsided by the civil war he starts.
• The king's older brother (the king married into the family from another country) withdraws all trade while he takes in the civil war refugees, has his spies start a covert search for his niece and nephew in case they're alive, and threatens to retaliate with his own army if the usurper tries to so much as sneeze on the king or queen.
• The queen's cousins, who will be her heirs in the event that her children are confirmed dead, pledge alliance to their in-laws and promise that in the event the prince and princess are dead, they will remain allies to the potential-former king's country out of loyalty.
• Civil war sucks, since the usurpation will have lasted for a good year at least by the end of the story. Even with the royal family restored, they've got to spend at least one or two years to fix whatever they can.

So my plot has at least three backup plans if the prince and princess are dead, unlike the usual "Rightful King Returns" plot where everything's black and white, there are no siblings, cousins, or in-laws, and everything will be all right in the end.

edited 28th Aug '14 9:15:41 PM by Sharysa

One problem specific to D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder is that spellcasters are God. If you want to deconstruct that, you've basically got the Tippyverse.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Or, you could go the Discworld route and make your magic system follow a rigid system of laws, making it very impractical or even dangerous to use it to fix all your problems (for example, using the Discworld example, it takes just as much energy telekinetically retrieving a book off a high shelf as it would if you had just grabbed a ladder and climbed up to fetch it).

To answer your questions, Zenoseiya...

First, I think there'd be a complete cessation of research in technology and science, with all those resources being funneled into magical research and development instead. No swords, no pikes, no armor - just magical bolts from one kingdom at another. Warfare would go from hand-to-hand to intercontinental overnight.

Second, I think this amount of power would drive some (if not most) of its high-level users mad. There won't be any murderous bands of hobos, because some lunatic Mage Lord will wipe them out in the name of fingernail-length purity or something silly like that. The only survivors will be the ones who are 'protected' by an equally strong Mage Lord, or who go into hiding.

...if it's not clear by now, excessive and especially widespread magic should by all rights leave 'fantasy' behind and starts looking like a mecha sci-fi with the serial numbers filed off - a freakin' Evangelion situation, I'm afraid. (Crank up 'Decisive Battle' now.)

So my suggestion would be to take this setting underground. The survivors live underground (think Avernum or Dr Strangelove here) - and not just the Muggles either! The lesser Mage Lords, the ones who saw what was coming and got the hell out of Dodge with anyone else who didn't want to get caught in the crossfire. There's a rumbling from above every so often, and they've put together the same mythologies for it that we have for lightning and thunder.

In short, a full and proper Deconstruction of this (actually very specific) standard fantasy would result in the 'ivory towers' not being literal towers so much as large swaths of continents. There are no world wars, just absurdly petty disputes involving the magical equivalent of multi-warhead ICB Ms.

A Deconstruction is often not all that different from a parody in setup - you take the original and turn it Up To Eleven - but we call it that because it forces the audience to look at the ...I'll just say 'trope' here, differently. It's not something you can go halfsies on and call it good - you've gotta commit to it.

Or, you could go the Discworld route and make your magic system follow a rigid system of laws, making it very impractical or even dangerous to use it to fix all your problems (for example, using the Discworld example, it takes just as much energy telekinetically retrieving a book off a high shelf as it would if you had just grabbed a ladder and climbed up to fetch it).

That's not deconstruction, that's an aversion. Deconstruction means playing something straight and exploring the implications.

The Tippyverse is pretty much the definitive deconstruction of 3.5ed God Wizards.

edited 7th Sep '14 4:30:00 PM by storyyeller

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

As to monsters, I imagine that, similarly, the result depends on the nature, power and ubiquity of the monsters in question: a land full of nigh-unkillable horrors might lead to heavily-walled living regions, carefully expanded bit by bit, while minimally-powerful monsters might have little more effect than introducing a slightly odder sort of fox-hunt to the local upper class.

As to magic, I think that a lot depends on the nature of the magic in question, including what limitations (if any) it has, whether it can survive the death of the caster (or even the loss of their direct attention), how well it applies to the creation of magical items, whether it can be automated, who has access to it and to what degree, and so on. A world with widespread magic that relies on the caster's continued attention, which doesn't apply well to item enchantment and which is available to almost all people to some degree seems likely to turn out to be rather different than one that applies extremely well to item enchantment but not to direct casting, and requires decades of dedicated research to master, for example.

Culture could also play a significant part: I could see mages cloistering themselves more often than not, dedicating themselves to research, or indeed ruling over every land from ocean to ocean, dependong on what their culture teaches them.

I also disagree with Deus Deno on the "power driving the majority mad" point, but that, admittedly, is personal feeling rather than something that I'm in a position to back up with strong arguments. I do think that you'd likely get at least some mad mages blasting the countryside, but I think that you'd likely also get severe mage lords, and kindly ones, and so on—just like kings, essentially.

edited 7th Sep '14 4:54:11 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

My Games & Writing

Yeah, point.

Maybe not 'mage madness' then, but more like all they have to solve their problems with are MLRS ICB Ms, and it's pretty much impossible to use them in a way that an outsider can see as 'sane'?

But who says that all that they have are destructive spells? Various magic systems have quite a variety of magics available, including teleportation, destruction, conjuration of materials (including food), terraforming, weather-working, and so on.

I can see the mages appearing somewhat inscrutable to non-mages—but if they're benevolently so, and especially if they're also quite common, then this might seem quite acceptable to non-mages.

edited 18th Sep '14 6:03:33 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

My Games & Writing

One thing to consider is that, thanks to teleportation and scrying spells, the more educated people of this world will have a much better idea of what global geography is like than people in Real Life did in that era. So even if you're in medieval Europe, you might still run into mages teleporting in from Australia or the Americas, which could have all sorts of effects.

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

One idea along this vein that I've been thinking about for a while is that in a world like this, pretty much everyone would be a magic user. Not because of some sort of cultural purity, but simply because of natural selection.

Think about it. Pretty much all of the animals that we see in D&D esque worlds are vastly overpowered as far as pure survival goes. 3.5 had stats for dinosaurs and they were pretty much mid/low level dragons IIRC. Think about it- the largest, strongest (land) animals that have ever lived are basic bitches compared to the top predators of the world. This implies some sort of evolutionary arms race going on, possibly as an evolved response to the dead constantly walking the Earth.

In this scenario, any human that didn't have some sort of ability to defend itself via magic would get killed off. We're essentially skunks or something in the context of this world. And in fact, we do see this split. Elves and humans are two groups that broke off, presumably several thousand years ago, except the elves tended towards magic using more than the humans. Now, they are being forced into direct competition, and inbreeding between these two groups and predation from gigantic predators that humans are unequipped to deal with are slowly driving them extinct.

So just remember: the next time you're enjoying a fantasy story, just remember that all of the humans in the setting are only a few generations away from being wiped out by the local terrasque or whatever.

Spidercat, Spidercat, sleeps on a spidermat.

I wouldn't be too sure. In real life, humans are already not very powerful against many kinds of animals one-on-one. Yet we dominate them, and that's because of technology. Even stone age technology, clubs and spears and the ability to communicate and work in teams, is a huge advantage. That's an advantage humans would *still* have against magical animals, and probably still pretty powerful. The elves might be able to outcompete the humans, but I wouldn't expect the wild (magical) beasts to do it.

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Even before technology, our ability to run for endurance instead of speed is a HUGE game-changer. A lot of animals can't do endurance—they mostly sprint for a few minutes and then they burn out. Human endurance is good for being a Super-Persistent Predator AND for self-preservation by being able to run, not FASTER, but LONGER than whatever is trying to attack us.

Wolves are also good with endurance, which may be a reason why we managed to team up with them.

Endurance running is good to hunt something, but not so much to escape being hunted, since our own top speed is rather paltry (The world records are, rounded to one d.p. 37.6 km/h over 100m, 36.2 km/h over 200m, 33.3 km/h over 400m, 28.5 km/h over 800m and 26.2 km/h over 1500m).

The trick would be to stay in a spread-out group and keep changing direction as you run (zig-zagging for example). Traveling alone is stupid when you're in the middle of a food chain, which is why we didn't do it until we started getting arrogant XD

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

Or, you know, until we started being at the top of the food chain.

edited 9th Sep '15 12:59:08 AM by Aetol

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

And that's still only useful against animals with a similar top speed, not one miles faster.

Thanks to weapons. Without a sharp stick we're all but helpless. Which is why we are naturally in the middle of the food chain, regardless of our modern weapons-granted position.

How else do you think the ancients survived?

Most predators don't attack moving groups. Those that stalk and ambush prey tend to pick off stragglers instead of tougher targets.

edited 9th Sep '15 9:42:53 PM by nekomoon14

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

also from the Giant in the playground forum was some speculation that magic created a sort of homeostasis in technological advance. The ability of magic to do things caused the need for technology to stop progressing, but due to the nature of magic not advancing itself left the world in a permanent pre-enlightenment period.

(Magic being an individual pursuit that takes intensive study and doesn't advance from one generation to the next. IE it takes x amount of time and study to be able to reach a given level/spell, even when you teach your future apprentice the value of x doesn't decrease whereas with science and technology that value goes down as scientific method improves procedures)

One thing to consider when going the D&D route is how the rules affect the world, which is touched on in the OP (by acknowledging the power of mages and clerics). In fiction, this seems to be ignored or downplayed and at the gaming table it may be ignored, houseruled or left to become a game-breaker.

If deconstructing D&D type fantasy specifically, remember that mages need to survive the dungeon with 4 hit points a few times to reach their quadratic potential. This could mean that only jack-of-all-stat wizards reach kingdom shattering levels, or that high-level mages had to dump-stat their prime requisites in favor Dexterity and Constitution to reach said high-level, and thus might not be able to cast the accompanying spells.

Another possibility for mages is the sorcerer-king paradigm found in Dark Sun. High-level mages got that way and then stayed that way. Now they probably seek to stamp out little mages before they get big enough to upset their own high-level campaigns.

Clerics are a big problem, even at low-level. A single 1st-level cleric can handle a lot of the things that historically wiped out a lot of people. They might not be able to hold back the Black Death, but they would greatly extend average life expectancy. Also, what happens when they start using detect evil? They might not solve a crime or be able to do justice as we know it, but they'd be able to purge their villages of potential ne'er-do-wells... so what happens to those folks and the villages casting them out? How do cultures develop when evil is objective, quantifiable and readily identified?

One possible limiter for clerics is their deities. Clerics would have to stay in line with their religion to maintain their powers, but clerics of the god of lies might be able to pretend to be a cleric of the god of justice. Does the god of justice take action? Don't forget that gods have hit points in most versions of D&D and if it has hit points it can be killed and looted. What happens to clerics who's gods get wiped out? Next campaigns crazed cultists, perhaps?

One big consideration for deconstructing D&D and it's closely associated tropes is the math and the rules behind everything. At some point, logicians, philosophers and scientists are going to figure out that it takes 1 to 8 whacks with a sword to kill ye average footman depending on the strength of the whacker and constitution of the whacked. They'll also realize that heroes and veteran footmen take 2 to 16 or 3 to 24, and so on. For that matter, they'll figure out how many rats you need to kill to become ye veteran. Are there be hero schools to teach would-be adventurers these things? If people don't figure out the rules of their world (which would be just as sure as gravity), then why don't they? Do the gods shuffle the rules around when someone breaks the game?

[quoteblock]As an exercise I wanted to try writing something in the vein of A Song of Ice and Fire, except set in the standard fantasy setting as popularized by Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk.[/quoteblock]

Andrzej Sapkowski did it ages ago. Read The Witcher books or play the games for inspiration.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

The problem with combining Game of Thrones with D&D is the alignment system. The Game of Thrones is narratively fueled by betrayal, but you have to trust someone first before they can betray you. In D&D, the scope for this is limited by the fact that everyone knows Orcs are always evil, Palladins are always good, and clerics almost never act against their patron deity's declared interests. In D&D, the behavior of races and character classes is predictable in a way that they aren't in GOT (I would put Tolkien in between the two).

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Not really. Alignements are descriptive, not prescriptive. A Lawful Good character can betray you. They just cease to be Lawful Good.