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?
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.