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As some of you may recall, I wrote a Suvudu column a while back in which I discussed the definition–such as it is–of Sword & Sorcery fantasy, as opposed to Epic Fantasy (or other fantasy). You can see it here, if you want to review (or if you didn’t catch it the first time around).

Why do I bring it up now? Well, thanks to another Suvudu column–this one by Matt Staggs–the question of an S&S resurgence is being discussed on numerous forums. And in the process of one such discussion on Absolute Write Water Cooler, I made the following assertion. I’d like to share this particular thought beyond the confines of just that one forum, and see what everyone else thinks of it. Said post was sparked by a comment on whether something "blurred the line" between S&S and other fantasy.

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Oh, certainly. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

In fact, I’m not convinced the line ever really existed. Like so much else, I think it’s always really been a continuum, rather than a binary status. Sure, you have fantasy that’s almost entirely on the S&S side of the spectrum–Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc.–and then you have fantasy that’s almost entirely on the epic side of the spectrum–Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, etc. But the vast majority of fantasy falls somewhere on a long line between the two.

That’s why I maintain that there are certain tendencies that S&S stories have, and if a single story has enough of them, it probably qualifies–but there’s no hard-and-fast, yes-or-no determining factor. Ultimately, it’s simply a matter of where on said continuum a given person, or the market at any given time, chooses to draw the line and say "Left of this point is S&S, right is fantasy." The precise position of that line’s going to be different for different people and different periods.

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So what do you folks think? Do you agree with that way of looking at it? Or do you see the question as far more binary than I do?

(If you’re not a Dark Sun fan, this won’t mean much to you.)

I was just rewaching the end of season 3 of the (new) Doctor Who on DVD–the episodes where the Master takes over Earth. And that got me thinking about D&D (because, well, almost everything does), and the pseudo-destruction of the world.

So… What about a Dark Sun campaign where the whole campaign setting is a brand new event? The desolation of Athas into a blasted, barren desert wasn’t a slow, gradual process, but something that happened in one fell swoop–a natural disaster, an arcane war, a curse, whatever. And it’s something that happened recently, only in the past few years.

You still have the city-states and the Sorcerer Kings, but they’re new societies, still establishing themselves, still working on enslaving the populace to the power of their rulers. You have people traveling to them and willing to be enslaved, because these are the only civilized parts of the world left. You have bands of refugees, the survivors of entire cities, roaming the deserts in desperate search of a home, still trying to adapt to the loss of the only world they ever knew. And you have multiple resistance groups–both inside and outside of the city-states–fighting against the Sorcerer Kings who are slowly usurping control of what remains of society, and spreading their influence out toward the wandering tribes and the last lingering villages.

You might even still have religion, but it exists only in dying pockets as people abandon the gods, either for "allowing" this to happen, or as the Sorcerer Kings prove more potent than the priests of old.

How else would that change a campaign? What kind of story ideas does it open up? Anyone find the idea intriguing, or is just me? 😉

I just direct messaged someone on Twitter to find out if they’d received the private message I sent them on Facebook regarding an invite to a community on Google Groups. 😐

This constitutes irrefutable evidence that social networking has gotten completely out of hand.

Tonight, we made characters for, and played our first session of, a new Solomon Kane RPG campaign. (It’s a "Savage Worlds" game.)

This is my first experience with the Savage Worlds system. With the exception of a recent three-session playtest of a Trail of Cthulhu supplement, and a single session of Mummy: the Resurrection at GenCon, this is also the first time I’ve played an RPG that wasn’t D&D in about eight years.

After character creation, we only got about an hour of playing in, so I’m not prepared to comment on the system just yet. But I think it’s going to be a great campaign. Everyone seems to have a grasp of, and appreciation for, the source material. We’re focusing on genre and capturing the feel of Howard’s Kane stories (minus the overt racism) rather than historical accuracy.

My character? Rukma Kadam, an Indian mystic. He was once part of a cult who called upon Ravanna and had congress with rakshasa (Indian demons), setting them against their enemies. By the time everything went wrong (as of course it would), and the demons turned on their own community, it was too late for Rukma to do anything about them. The rakshasa and the bulk of the cult was eventually defeated by a "wandering Puritan swordsman" whose name Rukma never heard. (Cough, cough.) Since then, Rukma has wandered Europe and Asia, seeking out and destroying supernatural evil as a means of karmic atonement for his prior actions. He is currently traveling as the manservant/bodyguard of a woman named Isabella (my wife’s character), as this allows him free passage in parts of Europe where he would otherwise not be welcome.

It’ll be interesting to see how he interacts with the French musketeer and the Jesuit priest who are the other two PCs in the campaign. And for all that I’ve only played him for an hour so far, I’m loving this character. In point of fact, I think I may see his transformation from an RPG character to a short story protagonist somewhere in the future…

My only complaint is that we’re only meeting biweekly, so I have to wait fourteen days to play again. 😛

Today was apparently Phil Athans’ last day at Wizards of the Coast.

For those who don’t know, Phil has been part of their fiction department since the TSR days, and has been in charge of that department for several years now. I’ve had several opportunities to sit down and talk with him, and I’ve worked for him–albeit at several levels of remove–on a couple of different projects. Of biggest impact to me personally, however, was the fact that Phil was the guy who decided to offer me the opportunity to kick off the new Planeswalker line, and thus gave me the opportunity to write Agents of Artifice.

I had nothing currently lined up with WotC, in terms of fiction, but I was looking forward to working with him again at some point in the future. I’m disappointed to know that won’t be happening–unless he finds a job at another sci-fi/fantasy publisher, of course, and I certainly hope that he does–and also disappointed at whoever made the decision to let him go. The fiction department at WotC won’t ever be the same without him.

Thank you, Phil–for all the work you put into the books, and for the opportunities you gave me. I hope you find yourself something even better.

So since I still may (or may not) be in the mood to run something in the near future, I’ve been giving some idle thought to campaign ideas. And what keeps bubbling to the forefront of what’s left of my brain is to use the upcoming 4e Dark Sun setting as a baseline to build a campaign world that is actually Earth near the end of the universe’s life span, a la Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique Cycle. But, uh, more desert/Barsoom-ish, as befits Dark Sun. The assumption being that, as the universe enters its dotage, the laws of physics have begun to fray and unravel just a bit, allowing for the appearance (return?) of magic.

So we’d still have a few scattered major city-states–ruled by Sorcerer Kings, as per the DS setting–but that are made up of a combination of medieval-style stonework and the last lingering, broken ruins of the steel-and-glass metropolises of the age of science.

What I haven’t yet decided is

A) whether to go ahead and allow the divine power source, assuming that the old gods of Earth mythology returned with the return of magic, or to keep them away as with Dark Sun proper, and

B) what the hell the campaign itself will actually entail/be about. But I really like the basic idea…