I preordered Monte Cook's Ptolus book, and reading about it I see that there is a huge spire around which the city is built, a spire 3000 feet tall. That's damned big.

As a long-time reader of science fiction, especially space opera, I've been accustomed to hugeness in a setting. Larry Niven is an author who really seems to get the notion that a writer of scifi (or even fantasy) can play around with truly stupendous concepts - billion-year-old aliens held in stasis, ringworlds that can have full-scale relief "maps" of planets like Earth and Mars as mere islands in an ocean, aliens that use entire planets as nurseries for their young, etc. Doc Smith had a similar penchant for the enormous; the opening of one of his books involved the collision of galaxies.

Yet fantasy fiction rarely presents such concepts. In my experience, at least. Tolkien did it a few times, especially in the Silmarillion, when battles could literally destroy entire continents. Lovecraft posited that life on Earth evolved from baterial foodstuff seeded on it by aliens who were, essentially, farming, and he presented us with beings so huge and powerful that their mere presence meant the end of life on Earth. Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" (which is really more scifi than fantasy, but whatever) shows us an entire mountain range in which each peak is carved into a statue of past monarchs. But rarely does fantasy tread on such ground (and in the last two examples, it isn't surprising to me that the setting is in the far future or involves aliens).

I wonder why this is? Scifi fans seem much more comfortable with extreme dimensions, where fantasy fans seem more comfortable with settings that have more conventional dimensions. Perhaps it's because, as modern people, we can more easily grasp the concept that technology will eventually enable us to build huge things or control enormous energies. Magic is a nebulous concept to us, in general, and seems more, for lack of a better word, personal in nature. That is, we seem to see magic as something that affects things on a smaller scale.

Thinking back on it, I can see that most of the fantasy campaign worlds I devised over the years were pretty conventional, or tame, in comparison to what I came up with for scifi campaigns. The more I think about it, the more inclined I'm becoming to create a campaign world in which cyclopean proportions are not unheard of. Canyons that literally reach down into hell, mountain peaks so high they can be used as jumping off points to the moon(s), mountains that can walk when they feel like it, flying cities, levitating oceans, civilizations millions of years old, etc. Why not have such things? It's a fantasy setting, right?

This is more of a thread about discussing the concept of enormousness in a fantasy setting than about answering a question. Any thoughts, ideas, concepts?

Interesting idea, you almost think it would be the reverse.  With SF, you have to at least give a hand wave explanation how such things as possible.  With fantasy, you really don't.  You could have a spinning mountain and no one knows why.

I've played around with dream planes and other dimensions, but I really should add more outrageous stuff to standard fantasy settings.

My long in development D&D campaign called the Sunless Sea takes place in a vast void, with chunks of land masses of various sizes drifting around an ancient city(which predates the oldest living being in the setting) controlled by the last living God of the setting. She(the god) has encased an elemental of some kind in a planet sized crystal and uses this as a sun.

She allows some chunks of land the "sun's" life nurturing rays and others she leaves in total darkness. Submit to her and your path will be illuminated...resist, and you will learn to fear the darkness.

It's a huge epic seting with strange cultures and even stranger magical technologies. Vast ships, some the size of small cities travel the Sunless Sea - ironic since I stole this idea of craftworlds from WH40k, a sci-fi setting :ponder:

Regards,
David R

For some reason the archetype of fantasy is to have a psedo-quasi-medieval setting, and assume that basic level of technology. Also to assume a relitively familiar world like ours, except there's some magic stuff going on.

I think the problem people run into designing more and more extravegently magical settings is that it gets harder and harder to explain the daily lives of the inhabitants. At some point, suspension of disbelief breaks down. But it's really a fairly arbirtary line in the sand - the introduction of any magic at all, naturally, is totally unrealistic. So where does it become just totally unbelievable? How many hands are you willing to wave, and just say "that's just the way it is"?

Quote from: Name LipsHow many hands are you willing to wave, and just say "that's just the way it is"?

Seven

Quote from: Name LipsHow many hands are you willing to wave, and just say "that's just the way it is"?

The weird thing about it is that readers are seemingly willing to accept one really big handwave in scifi - "technology can do it, eventually!" - rather than any number of handwaves in fantasy.

I don't know where the convention of "realism" in fantasy comes from - I absolutely adore the old Conan comics I used to read. Everything is just BIG. Temples, statues, machinery, monsters - everything is XXL, at the very least.

I like to be reminded - frequently - that I'm part of a fantastic setting, not reenacting the dark ages, mud, black death and all.

Quote from: Dr_AvalancheI like to be reminded - frequently - that I'm part of a fantastic setting, not reenacting the dark ages, mud, black death and all.

Same here. I have tried to include such elements in my campaign world...huge ruined cities from a time when giants were the dominant advanced civilization, sprawling cities built by centaurs, etc.

Since we're on the subject, what would be the elements of a truly fantastic setting? Examples from fantasy fiction, or even scifi, would be a good source of such things.

The issue may be the inverse of Clarke's Law (which is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishible from magic").  
 
In this case, if you scale up magic enough, it starts to become interplanitary/interplanar in scope, which looks scifi-ish.
 
Star Wars is a great example.  The tech is really window dressing, whereas the "magical" elements of the Force are pretty central to things.  I've heard several people say (correctly, IMO) that Star Wars is more fantasy than scifi.  Flash Gordon is another (somewhat cheesy) example.  Heck, even Eberron has gotten some flack for being too heavy in the magitech department and not "Troo Phantacie" (TM).  Personally, that's always been one of my gripes about Planescape -- cool as it may be, the setting just doesn't "feel right".

That's a good point, Sobek. Scaled-up fantasy looks exactly like science fiction.

I've observed already that virtually any D&D module can be converted to a sci-fi setting just by changing a few words here and there.

Maybe the problem is that we're trying to differentiate the genres at all.

Frankly, a lot of the sci-fi I've played in has been pretty damn mundane, too.  Look at Traveller -- I like the setting, but it's pretty darn tame.  Especially since most of the galaxy is pretty low tech in practice.

I think the key to truly fantastic settings is to make sure the players can keep up.  If they have no idea how their characters would fit into the setting, it's not gonna work.  They need some mundane things to tether onto.

Quote from: GunhildaFrankly, a lot of the sci-fi I've played in has been pretty damn mundane, too.  Look at Traveller -- I like the setting, but it's pretty darn tame.  Especially since most of the galaxy is pretty low tech in practice.

Traveller seemed to hint at some really big scale stuff, or really out-there concepts. In Twlight's Peak

Spoiler

there is the control room for the Ancients on one of their ancient planetary outposts that had what was basically a "point and click" weapon where you'd put a cursor over a holographic representation of an orbiting ship, take your finger off the button, and the target was just...gone.

In Signal GK

Spoiler

the PCs could discover and befriend an intelligent computer chip, and possibly use it to make their ship into a NPC follower, in effect.

Quote from: GunhildaI think the key to truly fantastic settings is to make sure the players can keep up.  If they have no idea how their characters would fit into the setting, it's not gonna work.  They need some mundane things to tether onto.

Which is fine, and not that hard to do, especially if the truly fantastic stuff is from an earlier age. But I imagine it could be done even if the campaign was set during that golden age of magic.

I think it has to do with mindset.  

We tie magic to the people in a fantasy campaign usually.  

Magic isn't considered to be infinitely scaleable by normal humans.  Technology is considered, in sci-fi, to be infinitely scaleable by normal people.
 
Magic, especially when game rules are involved, has built in limitations of scale, duration, fineness of control, etc...  Every time you remove or improve on one of those limitations your personal power increases in most settings.

Would you allow a spell caster to look back in time during the last hundred years for any and every time when the nifty relic he's searching for has surfaced in history and find out information about who had it, what it did, why/how it disappeared, etc?  

Would you consider it a zero level spell?  

You probably would in a sci-fi game.  It would be cast by putting the artifact's name in a good search engine.

Having all the information available through google at your finger tips would be considered diety level magic in the medival world that standard fantasy is in.  You are mocked if you have poor search engine skills these days.

The first thing I think you would have to do to overcome this mind set is figure out a way to make magic infinitely scaleable.  Does one mage cast one spell to do the thing you want done?  Or do hundreds of mages work together on crafting a complex spell that once perfect any group of 5-10 of them can cast in a variety of ways?  How does that change your world?


Magic is usually considered rare, even in the most high magic of worlds.  Not everyone is a wizard.  You want the feel of sci-if grandness in your fantasy world.  Assume everyone, every farmer, every goblin, every monster is a sorceror or wizard of level equal to hit dice.  A 5th level expert blacksmith is also a 5th level wizard.  
In a city of 200,000 you have probably 20,000 people that can make potions.
That's what your talking about with technology.  Technology is magic that everyone has access to and can use.  The one exception is, that of the 20,000 potion makers only 20 know why the potions work or how to make new types of potions.  The other 19980 follow preset recipes and formula's that only make the same identical potion over and over.

I understand your analogy between magic and tech, Xavier Lang, and I actually don't have much of a problem with it at all. Cyberzombie was exploring the implications of D&D magic and its impact upon a setting, and I feel it would be pretty much like what you posit.