PrimeJunta

I dunno, perhaps we've been reading different fantasy. Some of my favorites among the "classics" are Fritz Leiber's Swords cycle, Michael Moor****'s Elric, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea. None of these quite fit your description IMO. Le Guin especially explores the social ramifications of magic, and her characters have a lot of frailty and fallibility. All of these exist in static, apparently fundamentally unchanging worlds and societies too, though. (Tolkien disliked Wagner and vehemently denied that his Ring had anything to do with the Nibelungen one. Which made me LOL when I read that, admittedly.)

Did you factor in the cannibalization? I.e. the extra revenue from EA wouldn't be gross, it'd only be the difference between the EA price and the initial sale price plus interest. I think it's a fairly safe assumption that every EA sale made is one day-1 sale lost -- it's unlikely IMO that many EA buyers would not be day-1 buyers if EA was not available.

@Nonek If you're really interested in this aspect of Tolkienian mythos, he talks about it fairly extensively in Letters. There's also a fair bit of stuff in Unfinished Tales. I don't think he had that kind of parallel in mind, though. The Rohirrim in particular he modeled on the Anglo-Saxons transplanted into a horse culture -- he was unhappy about them losing to the Normans largely because they had no cavalry, and wanted to set that straight. The major point though is that all through the thousands of years of Tolkienian mythos, there's no real change. The wars in Beleriand are fought with the same weapons and same tactics as the wars of the Ring thousands of years later. The orcs of Morgoth are no different from the orcs of Sauron. The society of Gondolin is ordered more or less the same way as the society of Gondor, even though we're talking two entirely different cultures. The only change is that things keep getting worse. The apogee of elven achievement was Fëanor and the making of the Silmarils; it was all downhill from there on out. The high point of human culture was Númenor, which was a pale echo of Valinor, and its story was one of continuous decline. Same thing for everything else. So the war of the Ring wasn't during a dark age; it was a continuation of decline that started before there even were humans or elves. In the entire history of Middle-Earth, nobody ever invents anything. Somebody might make something uniquely glorious or powerful -- the Rings, the Silmarils, a badass sword --, but that's a lone, individual achievement, not something that changes anything in society, warfare, farming, building, or anything else in any meaningful way. It's only in the Lord of the Rings itself that there's clear signs of technological innovation, and that's presented as exclusively evil -- Sandyman's new smoke-belching mill, Saruman's rape of Orthanc's trees to feed his forges, and what have you. The trilogy culminates with the return of the King -- a restoration of an ancient, just order where the high and noble rule by (divine) right over the happy but dumb peasantry (Ioreth!), just like in Númenor or the early days of the kingdoms of the Dúnedain in Middle-Earth. Most heroic and high fantasy is similarly timeless, whether we're talking books, movies, or games. I'm bored of it.

@Nonek Yet Tolkienian fantasy is archetypically static. The only type of change that's there is decay. Nobody ever invents anything, except apparently Saruman, and that's not exactly a redeeming quality of his.

@TrashMan Out of curiosity, are you for or against firearms in P:E? I'm asking because of my hypothesis that it's a proxy for general conservatism in taste regarding fantasy.

I just did some browsing on the P:E wiki (massive kudos to the people maintaining it, by the way). We know quite a lot about the world of Eora already, more than I thought really, since the lore has been coming out in dribs and drabs. I really like it. One thing that I thought was kind of "meh" about P:E back during the Kickstarter was that it seemed like very traditional pseudo-medieval western high fantasy. I've done that so many times, in games and books and movies, that I really wasn't all that keen to see another one. That's in fact the main reason I only backed at a relatively modest level (and why I backed T:ToN for significantly more). Now, however, it's clear that Obsidian's writers have put any number of really interesting twists on it. So much so that it's almost like it's only tradfantasy on the surface. Man am I digging it. Elves and dwarves. I didn't think there was a way to make them interesting again, but hey, they did it. Quite simple too, really. Stick 'em on the Antarctic ice cap. It's also arguably true to their origins, since Tolkienian elves and dwarves are to a great extent modeled on Nordic folklore. I'm especially digging the character concept of Sagani, and the notion of Pale Elves speaking an ancient language far, far away on endless fields of ice is exciting. Breaking the mold of culture=subrace. In tradfantasy, nonhuman cultures are monolithic. If there are different elven cultures, for example, they're different subraces, like the drow for example. Big points for breaking out of this mold, and making the elves of Dyrwood and Eír Glanfath the same subrace but different and antagonistic subcultures, and for the really interesting elven-human combined culture of the Aedyr Empire, complete with institutions like the haemneg. Social issues. Slavery seems to be an institution that the loremasters have considered carefully, since we know how each of the different cultures treat it -- practiced in the Aedyr Empire, abolished but lingering in Dyrwood, while the Vailians conduct a brisk slave trade. (I wonder if we're going to meet a Vailian slave trader? That could be explosive simply because they gave the Vailians dark skin... I hope we do actually.) We've also got a lot of information about the status of the Orlan, religious antagonism between followers of Magran and Waidwen, the complex relations between the Glanfathans, the Aedyr Empire, and Dyrwood, and so on. The aumaua. Polynesian-Japanese flavored semi-aquatic demihumans instead of slope-browed half-orcs with the occasional Noble Savage rising above his racial station? Yes please! Change. One standard trop in tradfantasy -- whether Star Wars, Tolkien, or D&D -- is that nothing much ever changes. Empires rise and fall, for sure, but there's no technological or real cultural change. If the possibility of change is present, it's always a threat -- a Dark Lord threatening to unravel the entire world. Fantasy, especially high and heroic fantasy, tends to be extremely conservative in its outlook this way. Obsidian did tell us that they were doing this from the outset, which I think was wise of them, since I think a lot of fantasy fans, perhaps especially IE game fans, consider this central to the genre. Firearms are symbolic of this -- I think a lot of the resistance to their inclusion springs from here: having them is a reminder that things are changing, which does break out of one of the most fundamental features of tradfantasy. I can understand that, even if I don't sympathize with it. Fantasy with change is much more interesting to me than static fantasy worlds where the Dark Lord rises, and is defeated, and Balance is Restored to the Force. Ancient history connected to the present. Okay, so we have to have a mysterious ancient lost empire leaving creepy ruins all over the place. It wouldn't be a proper fantasy game without them. Trope, yes, but a good one. I dig the twist they gave this too: figuring out what the creepy ruins mean for the people living among them. That they've become sacred sites for the Glanfathans, and a resource to plunder for the Aedyr Empire. (The former, by the way, nicely explains why the ruins we've seen look so clean and well-trafficked -- obviously their Glanfathan keepers have been taking care of them.) All in all, I've been enormously pleased with the direction Obsidian has taken with regards to the lore. The core tropes are there -- elves, dwarves, ancient empire, wizards, rogues, priests, what have you -- but just about everything has an interesting and new twist to it. This is much more interesting than, say, what BioWare did with space opera for Mass Effect, i.e. just put in all the tropes without examining and questioning any of it, which made everything incredibly predictable. I like it when writers keep me off-balance rather than feeding me something that's familiar and comforting. I'm getting increasingly excited about this game, and most of that excitement is because of the lore. Thank you for that, Obsidian.

If you donate lavishly, you should get a reputation for being generous... or foolish. It should not erase past misdeeds. Perhaps if you're running for political office and want the backing of the faction you're funding...

Looks nice. Really, really nice. Interesting to get a peek under the hood as well, but the whole is coming together super-well. Point light shadows would be gravy. This really is how IE games would look if they'd kept making them!

Waitwait, I think we may actually be in agreement here. From where I'm at, the Priest and Wizard classes appear to fit the Vailian culture nicely, whereas the Barbarian, Chanter, and Druid are more Rauatai or Glanfathan, no? If so, what exactly was your objection again?

Okay, now you're confusing me even more. Why do you figure the Vailians practice no magic?

Why do you figure the Vailians used to have druids and shamans but stopped believing in them? As far as I know, Italians or their cultural predecessors (Romans, Etruscans, Greeks) never did. They encountered Gaulish (Celtic) druids, of course, and reported on them -- just like the Vailians are (presumably) encountering Glanfathan druids. (If you think that Renaissance people didn't believe that magicians couldn't cast real spells, by the way, you'd be mistaken. Witch trials went on looong after the Renaissance.)

Ahhh... OK, now I get what you're saying. Thing is, the P:E setting is a colonial type situation. We have the Vailians who are a lot like Renaissance Italians, and then we've got all the other cultures like the Aedyr, the Glanfathans, the Rauatai, and so on. Some of these cultures have coexisted for a long while; others have only recently encountered each other. Now, a Vailian druid or shaman would be odd, but a Glanfathan druid or Rauatai shaman wouldn't. The tech level has nothing to do with it IMO, but cultural context does.

I still don't get it. We had magicians, both fictional and real-world, in both periods, doing more or less the same thing and having more or less the same status. Even the old AD&D rulebooks explicitly state that the rules are applicable up to and including Renaissance-level settings. I think there are even stats for an arquebus in there somewhere. So other than conservatism ("all the IE games were pseudo-medieval and had no guns"), why does pseudo-medieval + magic make sense, but pseudo-Renaissance + magic is "a mashup?" It's not a bloody mashup. The Renaissance with its alchemists and astrologers, saints and miracle-workers, was just as "magical" a time as the Middle Ages from where I'm at.

Of course there don't have to be. The question is, why is it a problem if there are?

What if we're in a world where there isn't an equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church? P:E's doesn't.

Why couldn't gunpowder and the crafting of firearms be similar trade secrets?

@Chilloutman if everybody had magical powers, then yeah, there might not be all that much room for technological progress. However if everybody doesn't -- and it's pretty clear that even in P:E not everybody has a soul strong enough for that -- then there'll be just about as much demand for it as in our world. What's more, the traditional pseudo-medieval fantasy world already demonstrates a lot of technological progress. We typically have steel armor and weapons, monumental architecture with arches, domes, and perhaps flying buttressess; we usually have elaborate siege artillery like catapults, ballistae, and trebuchets. We have crossbows, sometimes repeating crossbows. We have complex mechanical locks and traps. And so on. If magic is so universally useful, why did anyone bother inventing those? And if they did invent those, why would they suddenly stop just before gunpowder?

No, Faust was historical. I don't believe real-life medieval magicians could throw fireballs or control plants either. If pseudo-medieval fantasy magicians are legit, why do they suddenly stop being legit when 1400 rolls along?

Come to think of it, consider Skein Steel. That's a combination of advanced metallurgy and animancy -- drawing the soul of a victim into copper, then alloying that with iron and other things to create a super-strong steel. That indicates that animancy itself would be a major driver of technological innovation. Perhaps the discovery of skein steel led to metallurgical techniques that made production of arquebus barrels easier. To continue the real-history parallel, the alchemists Messier-31 mentions were mystics and magicians, but that didn't stop them from discovering formulae that actually worked. Trying to discover the Ultimate Essence or the Philosopher's Stone, they developed techniques for extraction, distillation, purification and so on that proved vital to technological progress.

Or Obsidian just hasn't thought it through. I'm inclined to think that we just don't know all the important details. Obsidian is generally pretty careful with their lore; it would not be like them to leave a glaring hole like this.

How is Renaissance with magic a "mash-up?" Our real Renaissance had the likes of Nostradamus, Paracelsus, and Faust -- these are as close to wizard archetypes as you can find in real history, fer cryin' out loud.

What if not everybody is magically talented? What if permanent magic items are extremely time-consuming and expensive to create? Check the item creation rules in D&D for example -- they cost lots of GP, special materials, and XP to make, as well as quite high levels of magical power.

@Chilloutman and if it did actually, observably, incontrovertibly work, then how would the emergence of guns cause shamans to disappear? Or, alternatively, how would the incontrovertible existence of miracle-workers stop people not thus talented from making technological advancements?

@Chilloutman The majority of the planet's population believes in the supernatural in one form or another. I did a bit of quick Googling and it appears that about 75% of Americans believe in the efficacy of prayer to heal diseases, for example.