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 am once again asking people to read the Commonweal for a materialist depiction of what this sort of fantasy world would actually be like. (most sub-species designed by mages of varying degrees of insanity, many for battle or servitude, the entire biome permanently hostile from weaponised species unless a god-king is physically suppressing it, history so fucked from time travel that if you dig too far into time you get a sea of pure evil where humanity was probably wiped out) and how to solve it (Revolutionary Socialist Republic with a commitment to agency that readers will find unsettling (they’re prison abolitionists, if someone can’t live in their society they just kill them straight up)
scraps years of fantasy worldbuilding and attempts at short stories because somebody already did it better
i guess i better check this series out, cry a bit, then maybe do a full reboot
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
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.