My Review of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

I don't know if you know this, but I am a huge fan of The Dark Crystal.

Ok, that's a paltry attempt at humour. If you read this blog at all, you know that I hold The Dark Crystal up as the greatest example of true fantasy that has ever been created. I have written before about the astounding amount of creativity that I feel went into this film. Tolkien did something wonderful when he created Middle Earth; he took elements of existing mythology, added many of his own ideas, and blended it all together into a cohesive (and incredibly well-detailed) world.

Almost all fantasy (excluding 'modern fantasy,' obviously) has followed on that pattern to some extent. Some fantasy worlds do away with non-human races (like Game of Thrones), others add or remove or alter some non-human races (Earthdawn added the Obsidimen and T'skrang, for example), but they're otherwise all more or less the same basic idea of pseudo-medieval settings with magic.

This is not the case with The Dark Crystal.

PinkFae Archive #43: Fantasy: Defining a Genre

Today's entry is another article from the PinkFae Archives. It was originally published on 26 November 2016.

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Normally, when someone says the word 'fantasy,' a person is most likely to think of one of two things:

• A literary genre, or films and television shows in that same genre, involving magic in a world, most likely in the milieu of the European middle ages, that often includes elves, dwarves, goblins, and other semi-mythological beings.
• A desired or preferred sexual activity.

Obviously, we're not going to talk about the second of these. But as gamers, we often find ourselves in games that fit the first.

Sci-Fi vs Fantasy

One thing I've always wondered is why science fiction and fantasy are lumped together as a genre. When I go into a bookstore, the two types of books take up a single section, apart from 'romance,' 'comedy,' and general 'fiction.' Even though the general fiction section doesn't always confine itself to a specific setting (books in that area can be found taking place at any point in history – from prehistoric ages as in The Clan of the Cave Bear to modern day novels, which are legion).

More interestingly, the 'sci-fi/fantasy' section of a bookstore is often seen as the realm of nerds and geeks by many shoppers. Although it is true that non-nerds are less likely to peruse that section, it's not fair to say any of the following:

• Nerds won't go to any other fiction section.
• Non-nerds won't go into that section.
• Nerds will indiscriminately read anything in that section.

But even more interesting is the idea that the two genres are inseparable. The tendency to lump sci-fi and fantasy into a single section is nearly universal, even amongst nerds themselves. Even the cable channel Syfy (formerly the Sci-Fi channel) broadcast fantasy shows with great frequency. This question is relevant now with the release of the new Starfinder roleplaying game. It basically takes the Pathfinder system and uses it for science fiction gaming (though it still contains magic and other fantasy elements).

My Game In Progress

I've mentioned here before that I'm working on writing a roleplaying game. I think it's high time I talked about that.

I'm actually working on two games. They use the same system; I started writing Shifters and then realised that the system worked really well for an RPG set in the Tron universe. So I've begun adapting the rules for a game called The Grid.

I got the idea for Shifters when playing with a group that would cycle through GMs; one GM would run a game, then another GM would take over and run a different game. We played Changeling a lot, and one of the games was a crossover of Mage: The Ascension and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Several of the players in that group were new to gaming, and there was talk of introducing them to a lot of different RPGs. I found myself worrying about the fact that every time we switched to a new genre, we'd have to teach them a new system and spend time creating new characters. Even if we'd used a universal system like GURPS, we'd still have to make new characters every time we switched genres.

New Fantasy Setting

Perhaps I should have mentioned this a while ago, but I'm finally gaming again. I've joined a co-worker's D20 Star Wars campaign. I'm playing a Kel Dor Jedi. Not an ideal situation, but better than not gaming, right?

I tried to get the group to give GURPS a shot, but one of the players was adamantly opposed to learning a new system. So instead, I've begun a short game for the other two players, just as a brief GURPS intro/taster. We settled on a fantasy/supers crossover; one of them is playing a flying elf who shoots bolts of flaming spirit energy from his hands, and the other is playing a super-speed human. Much hilarity has occurred.

But this has given me the motivation to start reading my gaming books again. I recently started reading the 4th Edition version of GURPS Fantasy. Thus, I have developed two new ideas for fantasy settings.

Fantasy

It all started with The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote this epic saga, which captured the imagination of millions. Eventually, this lead to Dungeons and Dragons. Which, of course, spawned a great number of copycat games. Even today, when you use the word "fantasy," it conjures up images of a pseudo-medieval fantasy world populated not only by humans, but elves, dwarves, goblins, halflings, dragons, and a variety of other monsters.

But let's look at the definition of "fantasy:" The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the concept of high fantasy, in a Tolkien-esque setting. I'm just saying that it's not true fantasy. There's no longer anything creative about the typical elves-and-dwarves setting. It was created almost a century ago. Very little has been added to it.

This is one of the reasons I'm so fond of The Dark Crystal. It was new; the world had never before seen Gelflings, Skeksis, or Podlings. This is what I call "True Fantasy," the result of creative imagination, and unrestrained fancy. Rather than reuse what already existed, the creators developed something new.

Co-operation

Hello again! Here we go, off on another week of the Game Dork's diatribes essays! Today, I found myself thinking (don't ask me why) about a game I was in once. It was a GURPS Fantasy game, inspired in part by a previous GURPS Space game run by a different friend, where each player created his own alien race. There were some really neat species in that game... but one of the players liked the idea so much that he started a Fantasy game along the same lines. I still use two of the races from that game on occasion: my Staglings and John's Ængoa.

But enough about the irrelevant details. The thing I was remembering was a conflict that arose from a concession that the GM gave to me: I had asked that there be no "common" language. Since, after all, there's no such thing as a "common" language in the real world; why on earth would there be one in any other world? I liked the challenge of finding ways to communicate without being able to assume that we could talk to anyone we met.

So when it came time to create a PC party, we had to address the issue of linguistics. How would the party communicate? Would we all learn a single shared language? Would we carry magic telepathic artefacts? Would one party member learn everyone's languages and act as translator?

DM of the Rings

I'm sure anyone who's ever played D&D knows that the original premise of the game was Lord of the Rings. Especially if you've ever seen the original first edition rules, which try very hard to guide everyone into following the archetypes as seen in the books. Later additions were made, expansions added, alternate ideas tacked on, and now the game is much more open than it originally was.

The focus of the game has changed as well from the original point of Tolkien's works. In the books, it was all about the battle of good vs. evil. The game became an adventure of slaying monsters and collecting treasure.

Nowhere has this been better illustrated than in the webcomic DM of the Rings by Shamus Young. He describes the point of the comic perfectly in the first strip, so I'll let his words stand for themselves.

But my point is this: so many works (both in RPGs and in literature) are so thoroughly derivative of JRR Tolkien's works that the term "fantasy" has come to be a very cliché term. Whereas it once meant "the creative imagination," or "a capricious or fantastic idea," it now means "a work of fiction involving magic that takes place in a pseudo-medieval (or, on occasion, based on other periods or places in history, such as Roman or middle-eastern) setting and often involves supernatural creatures like elves and dwarves, especially as seen in Lord of the Rings."