Lately, we’ve seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming “race” into “species” and “ancestry,” and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).
Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines – If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god’s decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.
Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?
I mean, do it anyway
If my book about deconstructing superhero stuff by turning the empowered into unknowable cosmic horrors turned out to be following a similar route to something else, I’d still write it
After all, what makes a story good isn’t just the premise, it’s the talent and drive of the author
And I’m sure you have both in spades
thank you for saying this but my creative writing skills are super rusty. partly because i don’t read enough.
i have a habit of absorbing the writing style of the last author i read, so i started using that as an excuse not to dive into new fiction. that and ADHD
i have a few genre “worlds” i keep adapting and updating over time.
but who knows maybe there can be an entire genre of “proletarian based materialist epic fantasy” and Grayson Saunders will be cited as the origin author
Well, I haven’t read a work of fiction that wasn’t a comic book in… counts on fingers about a year-ish?
It’s more about writing something I want to see in the world than anything else
And Prole fantasy sounds awesome, maybe I’ll get to something along those lines in the future
You are in absolutely no danger of writing like Saunders. His prose has been described as “making a heroic attempt to seem like English” and he likes it that way.
i did some research and someone said he writes like an attempt at translating the language of his fantasy world. yeah might be tough
still i was working on something for years that is similiar enough to his basic premise that i might try to check out how he went about it. right down to the “military fantasy” because there’s tons of focus in my works on revolutionary small unit tactics and adapting what are essentially arcane “waste products” into useful materials, technologies, and weapons by the mostly mundane radical human faction
He’s more about large unit operations, logistics, and large scale civil engineering.
aww man i love those things. mostly the civil engineering part.