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Here and there a whole new world is lurking, just waiting to be written down. It comes in hints and references, one word at a time, the terms breeding and multiplying with one another. There's the loamy, fertile medium of established tropes, everything so commonplace as to be beneath notice: the Elves and Dwarves, the Mages and Rogues, all the inbred and indistinct cousins. And then there are the seeds of something new. Ashen-Born that shuffle forth from razed fields and burnt-out fires. Sightless cultists who comprehend the world through the palpitations of their flesh and skin. Brands of ice that sear onto forearms and lash out with frost, instantly identifiable, impossible to remove. Just add a single, barely-original idea - a single simple word, sometimes - and cross-reference it with the components of an already exhausted world. And just like that, you'll have created a Fantasy of your own.
The beauty of Fantasy is in its taxonomy - lists of races, and racial traits and abilities; classes, attributes, skills and specializations; artifact and weapon types of all varieties; schools of magic and the laundry lists of spells to choose from; bestiaries teeming with monsters and their modifiers; elemental alignments, resistances, weaknesses; subclasses, domains, clades, and orders; any category you could imagine. This is the potential of human imagination: going down a list of options and ticking off the boxes. Modular fantasies, units of prefab inspiration, mix'n'match 'em as you please. Select a race
Our daily wanting's just so stunted in comparison, so dull, so undefined. Try to imagine a world of your own, without restriction: speak of your dreams, your fears, your barely-repressed anxieties, your hopes, the deepest parts of your soul. How rich and diverse and variegated of a world and its inhabitants can you create? Write, and write, and write, and see how long it takes to get as far as a table of 16 worn-out words would take you. Or, if that's too hard, imagine yourself as you are now. You are a thermodynamic miracle, a multiplying of improbabilities whose existence is nothing less than astonishing - the improbabilities of existence, of life, that your parents and your parents' parents and so on ad infinitum should all happen to meet. But without the statistics, without all the tables and factors multiplied against each other, how can you qualify that, how can you separate yourself from the crowd, how can you earnestly convince yourself that there's something unique about you compared to every other person in the world? How could you possibly live accordingly?
What do you live for? What do you most desire? Fight for your class, your race, your nation, the god you worship - and fight the ever-gnawing sensation that none of this is meaningful. There's none of the cleanly-differentiated factions of Fantasy here, no single words that set in stone your alignments and alliances. Don't all your most precious identifiers Balkanize and schism and drift and blur and crumble into obsolescence over time? Can you imagine your children's children living in the same world that you lived in? Don't even your mortal enemies likewise laugh, yearn, sicken, bleed, don't they share with you some same essential humanity that's impossible to strictly define? Isn't there some empathy there, some inescapable recognition? There's a part of you over there, on the other side. There's something that knows what it is to want, to delight, to suffer. There's nothing inherent about you or your clan or your ancestry. All that separates us is the arbitrary and reversible benefits of circumstance, of old debts left unsettled.
What would you want to be then? What's worth wanting? What speck of identity can you claim other than being Yourself - and what's left for you to aspire to then? Change everything you can about yourself, change your job, your nation, your allegiances, immerse yourself in different schools of thought, reinvent yourself entirely - and all you have is the same simple skein of flesh stretched along some other imaginary axis. A different set of delusions, a different set of arbitrary values to defend. Deep, deep down, aren't we all the same? Then how could you hope to ever be anything different?
Real life has no discrete variegations, it all just slurs together into points on a spectrum. Fantasy's when you delineate all the options. Fantasy's when you read out all the rules. Fantasy's extrapolation from a series of variables, combinatorics, because math is so much more imaginative than any human could ever hope to be. All our identifiers in real life are arrangements of convenience, blinkered, tribal allegiances designed to set us against each other. We're born and raised in largely pre-generated roles, all attributes neatly correlated, a series of predetermined futures for us to imagine. Fantasy takes our inbred biases and abstracts them - Good and Evil, Chaos and Order - makes them clean and distinct and separate, and lets us believe in the possibility of assembling something new.
So imagine a world of your own to inhabit. Put a name to it, a hybrid word, a derivative, a variation. Write your demons down - reduce them to a single word, something tangible, something concrete. Write about something that can stain the pages, or something that can wear a stain. Write of Ash, or Snow, or Sightless Skin, or Stone. Write in compound words, in broad generic building blocks slotted clumsily against each other. Write of the Eyeless Sea that roils at the borders of the world, the Ashen Maw, the Eyeless Stone, the Ashen King, the Sea of Ash that stretches far as eye can see. It's simple, isn't it, once you've got the words written down. The churn of creativity, words permuting under their own momentum, an entire world waiting for you to fill it in.
Write, and pretend you're writing down your dreams, elaborating on your fears, that all the words form something meaningful. This is Fantasy. None of it has to be true.
The beauty of Fantasy is in its taxonomy - lists of races, and racial traits and abilities; classes, attributes, skills and specializations; artifact and weapon types of all varieties; schools of magic and the laundry lists of spells to choose from; bestiaries teeming with monsters and their modifiers; elemental alignments, resistances, weaknesses; subclasses, domains, clades, and orders; any category you could imagine. This is the potential of human imagination: going down a list of options and ticking off the boxes. Modular fantasies, units of prefab inspiration, mix'n'match 'em as you please. Select a race
[Dwarf. Elf. Goblin. Human. ]
and from there pick your class.
[Rogue. Bard. Fighter. Mage.]
Take up a weapon,
[Sword. Spear. Staff. Bow.]
name a home from which to start
[Plains. Mountains. Forest. Swamp.]
and with just 16 words there are 256 different people you could be, 256 different identities to inhabit. Add a new column, a new set of modifiers, and watch the possibilities multiply exponentially. Select male or female, and double the possibilities. Select an alignment, select a main stat, go through the skills and count all the combinations. Add to the lists at your leisure. Make up new names, new variables to multiply with. Be a Chalk Giant. Be a Chirurgeon. Be a Half-Breed. Be Undead. Dual-wield. Dual-class. Multiply them, and multiply them again, and again, and again, and again. What did you want to be when you grew up? Could you have imagined a thousand, or four thousand, or twelve thousand, or all the multiplicity of options open to you?
Listen. We could be anything we wanted. Our daily wanting's just so stunted in comparison, so dull, so undefined. Try to imagine a world of your own, without restriction: speak of your dreams, your fears, your barely-repressed anxieties, your hopes, the deepest parts of your soul. How rich and diverse and variegated of a world and its inhabitants can you create? Write, and write, and write, and see how long it takes to get as far as a table of 16 worn-out words would take you. Or, if that's too hard, imagine yourself as you are now. You are a thermodynamic miracle, a multiplying of improbabilities whose existence is nothing less than astonishing - the improbabilities of existence, of life, that your parents and your parents' parents and so on ad infinitum should all happen to meet. But without the statistics, without all the tables and factors multiplied against each other, how can you qualify that, how can you separate yourself from the crowd, how can you earnestly convince yourself that there's something unique about you compared to every other person in the world? How could you possibly live accordingly?
What do you live for? What do you most desire? Fight for your class, your race, your nation, the god you worship - and fight the ever-gnawing sensation that none of this is meaningful. There's none of the cleanly-differentiated factions of Fantasy here, no single words that set in stone your alignments and alliances. Don't all your most precious identifiers Balkanize and schism and drift and blur and crumble into obsolescence over time? Can you imagine your children's children living in the same world that you lived in? Don't even your mortal enemies likewise laugh, yearn, sicken, bleed, don't they share with you some same essential humanity that's impossible to strictly define? Isn't there some empathy there, some inescapable recognition? There's a part of you over there, on the other side. There's something that knows what it is to want, to delight, to suffer. There's nothing inherent about you or your clan or your ancestry. All that separates us is the arbitrary and reversible benefits of circumstance, of old debts left unsettled.
What would you want to be then? What's worth wanting? What speck of identity can you claim other than being Yourself - and what's left for you to aspire to then? Change everything you can about yourself, change your job, your nation, your allegiances, immerse yourself in different schools of thought, reinvent yourself entirely - and all you have is the same simple skein of flesh stretched along some other imaginary axis. A different set of delusions, a different set of arbitrary values to defend. Deep, deep down, aren't we all the same? Then how could you hope to ever be anything different?
Real life has no discrete variegations, it all just slurs together into points on a spectrum. Fantasy's when you delineate all the options. Fantasy's when you read out all the rules. Fantasy's extrapolation from a series of variables, combinatorics, because math is so much more imaginative than any human could ever hope to be. All our identifiers in real life are arrangements of convenience, blinkered, tribal allegiances designed to set us against each other. We're born and raised in largely pre-generated roles, all attributes neatly correlated, a series of predetermined futures for us to imagine. Fantasy takes our inbred biases and abstracts them - Good and Evil, Chaos and Order - makes them clean and distinct and separate, and lets us believe in the possibility of assembling something new.
So imagine a world of your own to inhabit. Put a name to it, a hybrid word, a derivative, a variation. Write your demons down - reduce them to a single word, something tangible, something concrete. Write about something that can stain the pages, or something that can wear a stain. Write of Ash, or Snow, or Sightless Skin, or Stone. Write in compound words, in broad generic building blocks slotted clumsily against each other. Write of the Eyeless Sea that roils at the borders of the world, the Ashen Maw, the Eyeless Stone, the Ashen King, the Sea of Ash that stretches far as eye can see. It's simple, isn't it, once you've got the words written down. The churn of creativity, words permuting under their own momentum, an entire world waiting for you to fill it in.
Write, and pretend you're writing down your dreams, elaborating on your fears, that all the words form something meaningful. This is Fantasy. None of it has to be true.
