High fantasy high magic

>Dragons flying around
>Zombies and skeletons in every abandoned cave ever
>Vampires infiltrating society
>Wizard Guilds everywhere
>Literal God-Emperor with dragon powers
>Demon gods messing with people's lives for shits and giggles.

LOW
FANTASY

I don't know what game you're playing where you're spending "95%" of your time fighting animals and bandits, but it sounds like you're one of those people only plays a game for like 10 minutes and then feels qualified to review it.

>high magic
>high magic
>high magic
>high magic
>debatable
>debatable
Any more south park reaction images you want to get out of the way before you respond?

The Elder Skub

Hey dumbass, I know you're retarded and all, but I just stopped by this thread to tell you why.

Low fantasy does not mean a lack of crazy fantasy shit. Low fantasy is about tone and theme.

Elder Scrolls is still primarily a setting with farmers, commoners, and a society that is mostly faux roman medieval. Even the more crazy parts of the world, like Morrowind, have logical and sensible ways to get food, water, and to build homes.

There are no crazy Final Fantasy magictek style buildings with huge floating crystals. People still settle conflicts through man and (cat)man steel. It is a low fantasy setting with high magic, with occasionally higher fantasy elements.

Obviously you've never played morrrowind because most of your time is spent travelling, running small quest errands, and fighting off cliff racers and nix hounds.

>Morrowind: Main quest is about 3 elf gods and an insane elf god who wants to build a giant robot.
Oblivion: The main quest of the game is to kill an actual demon god when wants to suck the world into his own dimension of slavery of despair.
Skyrim: Quest is about killing a dragon who wants to consume the current timeline.

LOW
FUCKING
FANTASY

Except there are LITERALLY floating buildings in Morrowind...

There's one.

It was stopped by God.

There's also a glowing magic wall made of ghosts. Is it common? Hell no. It's a unique thing with one specific purpose.

Meanwhile everyone on Vardenfel still eats eggs, scrabbles in the dirt over dumb house politics, and calls every other elf with a different skill color that comes in a dirty outlander.

High Magic.
Low Fantasy.

Get it through your head.

Lets be real, the game isn't about the struggles of farmers, commoners,and how society works.

The games are about getting magical demon armor and ending some world-threatening threat and going on an adventure for gods and demons.

How is it possible to be this stupid I have no idea.

>Dragons flying around
low fantasy
>zombies in every cave
low fantasy
>vampires infiltrating society
low fantasy
>wizard guilds everywhere
high magic
>literal god-emperor with dragon powers
low fantasy
>demon gods messing with people's lives for shits and giggles
low fantasy

Any more questions, retard? If it can be found in Conan, then yes, it's fucking low fantasy you troglodyte.

The first setting I ever worked on was a low fantasy, high magic campaign. It was literally the future of our world, but 'reset' by the human spirit like in Unknown Armies. There were tons of weak magic users but only humans as the races, most of the animals and plants were pretty normal to us and so on.

Then I ended up working on a few weirder settings with lots of strange races set in mythological North America with Native American myths, which basically only had some shamanism and stuff as the magic, so it was a high fantasy, but low magic world.

Now I've moved on even past that an am considered something that approaches the weird gonzo stuff you see a lot on roleplaying blogs combined with a world where having sex with basically anything will create another viable being of a messed up hybrid race, so I guess I went to high fantasy, high magic.

Maybe I'll move on to low fantasy, low magic one day. I'm not sure, I just keep changing my tones ever few years as I invent new settings.

okay arguing user-fags, here is the definition

High fantasy is defined as fantasy set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than "the real", or "primary" world.[citation needed] The secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or "real" world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of magical elements.

this would mean low fantasy for Skyrim.

I would disagree, it is a metaphor on how plump and civilised we have become thast even a fucking COMMONER can ask a random person who just ran up to them in the street to take their random piece of shit not twenty steps and through a door to someone else.
[this is a joke, but boy does it piss me off]

I love Skyrim I really do, but it just isn't that great when held under very close inspection, oblivion was much better in terms of writing but I have only played those two games so everything else I cant comment on

>High Fantasy, High Magic
The Elder Scrolls

>High Fantasy, Low Magic
The Lord of the Rings

>Low Fantasy, High Magic
The Witcher

>Low Fantasy, Low Magic
Game of Thrones

Am I wrong ?

I don't even know. The definitions seem to change every week, and no one can agree on them.

I think maybe you people should stop arguing over your made up definitions of made up terms you've created in arbitrary frameworks that only apply to your own made up standards.

You're aware the world of Elder Scrolls is all a dream in the head of a being called the "god-head", Nirn itself is held in existence by magical "towers" that keep it from fading back to pure potential, the stars and sun are holes in dimensions, and planets are the corpses of gods.

Yeah, sure sounds like it's set primarily in the "real" world. Next you're going to tell me Destiny is Low Fantasy too.

In before 3 different samefag responses full of "retard" to bolster your non-argument.

I've always liked stories about people living in world with a high level of cosmic shenanigans. But mostly just dealing with the effects and not understanding the why or how.

Kind of makes it hard because the that's kind of a low fantasy/high fantasy blend with magic depending on the situation.

>Low fantasy

Morrowind happens on earth?

To be fair, you unintentionally have a point. Destiny is honestly less High Fantasy than Elder Scrolls. Aside from the Light, which is basically the Force from Star Wars, the rest of the world follows real-world laws.

Nobody uses that definition anymore, and nobody should once fantasy became a solidified genre.

Low fantasy
best examples are game of thrones, and lord of the rings.

High fantasy
think most isekai light novels, or warhammer fantasy

>High fantasy is defined as fantasy set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than "the real", or "primary" world.[citation needed] The secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or "real" world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of magical elements.
this definition is less useful for roleplayoing games vis-a-vis literature. therefore, i don't accept it as such.

well, for a RPG it really doesn't make much difference if the setting is earth or merely earth-like. the frequency of fantastical elements or the issue of scope of the campaign are more relevant.

In background sure but in the parts of the world we actually focus on WHFB is not high fantasy.

high/high

I prefer ...IN A TIME OF HIIIIIGH ADVENTURE

youtube.com/watch?v=5ZY2mRG5mzg

Also Veeky Forums tell me what is the best thing in life?

>Final Fantasy magictek style buildings with huge floating crystals

This is just an example of shitty world building

>he doesnt like floating magitek crystals

Hot water, good dentistry and soft lavatory paper.

Sauna, a tit in your hand and the taste of of hot chocolate

>Low fantasy, low magic

I'm essentially the game of thrones meme. I really want to play Harnmaster but I doubt I'll ever find any players. Turns out most players don't find a scratch from a thistle going gangrene and killing their character engaging and fun gameplay.

TES literally has time traveling robot assassins and spaceships.

Yeah, but that stuff mostly in the lore. If you don't read the in-game books it'll all seem like some mostly-ordinary fantasy.

You should just accept that your waifuniverse is shit

Ackchyually, instead of arguing, there's a specific definition for low and high fantasy. Low fantasy is not a setting, it's a premise for a story. It's about a specific something fantastical happening in an otherwise normal world. My Neighbor Totoro is Low Fantasy.

High Fantasy is stories told in a fantastical world. The setting itself is the fantasy element, the story exists within it, and might not even wholly depend on the fantastic nature of the setting. By this definition, Game of Thrones is high fantasy, despite being fairly medieval and gritty, because the whole setting is complete fantasy.

I would use the terms high and low magic for all that stuff you guys are arguing about. Or start saying something like High and Low Steaks or Large and Small Scale, because High and Low Fantasy have specific literary definitions.

This DESU, butthurt TES fanboy has defending this garbage for the last 4 hours now.

>"HBDURR, I WANA BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY LIKE THE BIG BOY GAME OF THRONES! I REALLY AM LOW-FANTASY, HONEST GUISE!"

Just accept it's a stupid game video game that runs on videogame logic and stop trying to make it out to be some deep and artistic "serious" work that it's not.

Use something other than high and low fantasy, then. You already made up high and low magic, and that is intuitive and functional. High and Low fantasy isn't working well for you guys, all you're doing it's arguing. Pick a more unitive nomenclature that describes something more specific like .

>Low fantasy is not a setting, it's a premise for a story. It's about a specific something fantastical happening in an otherwise normal world.

By that definition, Elder Scrolls is definitely not low-fantasy. People can say it's "normal" all they want, but it's still a world where gods regularly interfere in mortal lives, the moons disappear at random, and magic pieces of paper can kinda sorta tell the future but not really and reading them makes you blind somehow.

Nothing about TES is a "normal" world unless you literally actively avoid most of the content in the setting.

And you should drop it too
TES might be stupid, but so is ASOIAF
Real men play Warhammer, start as trash men and end up shanked by goblins and smothered in ogre poo

I completely agree. The key is choosing a definition that you can easily use to describe a clear difference. Arguing about high and low fantasy based on the setting "Literally having X" or "Not even doing Y" is fucking stupid.

I vote to use "High or Low Adventure" to describe stories, not settings, like . Do you go to distant lands and see/do exotic things? High Adventure (most of Skyrim, sometimes not though). Do you mostly stick around a fairly similar area, or are already familiar with all the elements of the story which are most important? Low Fantasy (Most of Game of Thrones, but sometimes not).

Or you could also say that high and low fantasy are terms that describe stories, not settings, in which case you could say there is a lot of low fantasy in Skyrim but also some high. Then I'd say it's about tone. The story in Oblivion about the invisible town would be low fantasy, because it's about magic complicating the ordinary way of things. But closing the Oblivion gates is more high. It's not like nobody knew about Oblivion in general, so it's not fantasy coming to the primary world. It's the approaching evil of the world. High fantasy.

see

All of these are interresting and you are not original by creating low fantasy grimdark settings again and again.

What does fantasy has to do with seeing exotic things ?
Fantasy is what deviates from the norm of the real world
Originally, fantastic litterature is composed of extraordinary elements in a mundane setting
ASOIAF is low fantasy because, apart from the geography and a few details, very few things are different from our world in medieval times (even if it's a vulgar caricature of "medieval")
TES is high fantasy because there are SHITLOADS of demons, vampires, undeads, magical beasts, dryads, interventionist gods, elves, wizards, etc ...
Also both physical worlds are about similar size (except we don't see a lot of Essos in ASOIAF) and have the same potential for adventure un far-away lands
Just because you've never left america doesn't mean a realistic RPG setting in Myanmar is "high fantasy"

>Aren't high fantasy and high magic the same thing? And vice versa?

Not at all. The definition of High Fantasy is that the story takes place in a fictional world/universe. The definition of Low Fantasy is that the story takes place on Earth. Amount of magic has nothing to do with it other than the baseline needed to qualify the work as fantasy in the first place.

You can look it up.

Super high fantasy, super high magic

Flying air ships. Floating islands. So many races that it's impossible to remember them all and their distinctions.

Convenience stores that use ice elementals to keep food cold. Pirating tomes of ancient lore through a crystal spider web. Wizard exams dispelling magic before they start so you're not cheating with +intelligence soft drinks. Spending your time at the coliseum where they make dungeons and send adventuring teams through them. After all, blood sports aren't a big deal when you can just rez the dead afterwards.

Bring on the cowboy, the wizard, and the ship engineer and set sail for adventure as we fly to the Nine Hells to kidnap a devil princess to show her what the outside 'worlds' look like.

I concur and suggest the following definitions:
high/low fantasy = the frequency of fantastical elements
high/low magic = subset of the above, magic being one fantastical element (monsters are another)
high/low adventure = scope of the plot

less useful for RPGs where gameplay is more impacted by the frequency of fantastical elements than the question of whether it takes place on Earth or not

>Mfw you did nothing wrong but misread my post.

I completely agree with everything you said. Fantasy doesn't have to do with adventure. Adventure doesn't have to do with the setting. That's why I suggested all these people misusing high and low fantasy as terms start using high and low adventure to describe the types of stories that are generally told in those places. This way, you can't argue that TES is high fantasy, but you could discuss whether the stories told in the games are typically high or low adventure. I'd say they're typically low adventure, with the main story lines being generally high adventure. But that's an open topic, you can talk about it meaningfully with a more specific terminology. Both types of stories are told in the high fantasy world of TES.

A story set in Myanmar with characters that are Western like me would not be fantasy at all. Least something fantastical happened, in which case it'd be low fantasy. In both cases, it's high adventure.

I concede that this would be an advancedly functional system. I just don't think it's worth confusing the already legitimate meaning of high and low fantasy just to discuss RPGs.

i think it's going to happen irrespective of what anyone says because people use terms according to their practical needs

Definitely low fantasy, high magic.

I now realize that I had in fact misread your post and that we agree
Sorry for being abrasive and a bit retarded

>low magic
>wheel of time

haha

As someone who enjoys TES a lot, the crazy video game logic that even shows up in universe is the best part

Nobody "needs" to use the terms high/low fantasy when they really mean high/low magic. The latter is far clearer anyway.

>definitions don't matter things mean whatever I want them to mean
Postmodernists please leave.

If by "leave" you mean "stay"
Yes

I bet you're fine with people using the word literally when they really mean figuratively. I'll choke the life out of you with my bare hands if I see you IRL.

I hope you're being literally figurative
Or is it figuratively literal ?

no, low/high magic is a subset of high/low fantasy, as magic is just one type of fantastical element. a setting without ANY magic but with monsters and fantasy races everywhere is still high fantasy.

>a setting without ANY magic but with monsters and fantasy races everywhere is still high fantasy
Only if it takes place in a fictional world.

no one will come to my aid here, and no I wont tell you destiny is low fantasy, I tell you destiny is crap without the expansions so it does not matter.

and besides [I didn't know about the god head] if that's true about the god head, it does not matter anyway, he can change it at a whim ergo the answer matters not

fair enough

who said i was wanting this to be serious? game of thrones is better written and acted out [although the latter was due to tech limitations]
and yes its a game but we want to have a discussion/ argument. if you don't like it leave your answer to OP and get the fuck out

I have no idea how you're defining fantasy and magic.

I'll lay out my own definitions:
>Fantasy - contrary to reality. The world is simplified and the psychological traits of the people inhabiting it are unlike our own world. In a fantasy world, when a good person fights for what they believe in, they improve the world. The heroes are good and the villains are bad, the heroes are not conduits of suffering.

>Magic - anything which does not obey the laws of physics, chemistry, natural selection, and so on.

I like "fantasy" settings to be non-fantasy with limited magic with as much homebrewed things as possible. New ethnicities, cultures, vegetables, monsters, etc, but the fundamentals of the world are like our own.

as mentioned before, this definition isn't a very useful distinction when applied to RPGs. a high fantasy world is a world with many fantastical elements, as the name implies.

>as mentioned before, this definition isn't a very useful distinction when applied to RPGs.

why not? there are plenty of fantasy RPGs that would be considered low fantasy by the academic definition, like world of darkness or unknown armies.

Yes, you're correct.

Elder Scrolls is high magic and high fantasy. Yes, you can be an envoy doing minor fetch quests, but the main plot of all games is to save the world or something dramatic like that.

wow. you, uh. you. need to read.

like at all.

LOTR is high fantasy. It's used as the de facto example of high fantasy.

It's basically the metric one uses to measure fantasiness.

Got it. You seem to be well-read.

>LIKE THE BIG BOY GAME OF THRONES
GoT is fucking shit. What are you on about.

You aren't very right but you're not excessively wrong so I'll let it slide, n'wah

>Low fantasy
>best examples ... lord of the rings.
Are you retarded?

Again, whether or not it is useful doesn't affect it's meaning. And it's name only implies what it does for you because of misuse. It's like if you'd been using the word "car" to talk about "vampires", and we told you that "car" refers to cars, and you were like "That's not a useful distinction for RPGs, because there aren't usually cars in them."

>Hur dur, look at me, I never even ever liked it, look at you idiots.

Kys

>Hur dur, look at me, I like something simply because it's popular, look at you idiots
KYS

Since there seems to be a dearth of understanding I figured I'd go deeper in the lists.

High magic, high fantasy
This is default D&D (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk). It's also Elder Scrolls, Record of Lodoss War, Naruto, The Belgariad, Shannara (weird exception).

Low magic, high fantasy
Conan, Malazan Book of the Fallen (...again, exceptions), Earthsea, The Cosmere (in parts), The Pirates of Dark Water, The Witcher

High magic, low fantasy
Basically all urban fantasy falls here, as this is where Dresden Files, Iron Druid, Mercy Thompson, Anita Blake, Daniel Faust, et alia sit. There are some odd duck urban fantasy series that are low/low, of course.

Low magic, low fantasy
Game of Thrones starts here, but very few works that are trying to be fantasy stay here. The Indian in the Cupboard, The Green Mile, the Thief series (games), about half of C.S. Lewis' work, much of Rudyard Kipling, really it's tough to find things that manage to stay there.

I really hope you don't consider Narnia to be Low Magic, Low Fantasy.

>High and low fantasy are distinguished as being set, respectively, in an alternative "secondary" world or in the real "primary" world. In many works, the distinction between primary or secondary world settings, and therefore whether it is low or high fantasy, can be unclear. The secondary world may take three forms,[7] described by Nikki Gamble in her explication of three characteristics of high fantasy:

>Primary does not exist (e.g., Discworld, Dungeons & Dragons, and The Wheel of Time)
>Entered through a portal from the primary world (e.g., Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Dark Tower)
>World-within-a-world (e.g., American Gods, The Gods of Pegāna, and Harry Potter)

>A few high fantasy series do not easily fit into Gamble's categories. For example, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is set in primary world of Earth in the ancient past,[8][n 1] and he adamantly disagreed with anyone who thought otherwise..[n 2] According to Tolkien, he had set it in the inhabited lands of geographically north-west Europe.[n 3] The Professor himself disagreed with the notion that his stories diverged from reality, but rather defended his position that the "essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by enchantment of distance in time.".[n 4][9][n 5][n 6][n 7] Nevertheless, Middle-earth, is sufficiently divergent from reality to be classed as a secondary world and hence high fantasy.

tl;dr - the definitions of high and low fantasy actually have to do with where it's set, and Tolkien was a crazy person who argued his story happened on earth, hence it may be consideredd low fantasy on a technicality (but it's usually labelled high fantasy by anyone with sense).

Basically, the terms are senseless and we should stop using them.

The part with the giant robot is awesome

Low Fantasy, Low Magic

I didn't even suggest that I like it, my opinion on the work isn't even relevant. I'm just pointing out that you said a total of zero meaningful things based entirely on a contrarian premise. The person you replied to only said that GoT was popular, your responded by saying it wasn't (or something, unclear. Really you were just venting that you don't like it despite it's popularity.) Now your accusing me of liking it because it's popular. Is it popular or not?

Get over yourself, faggot, you haven't said anything consistent or meaningful yet because your only agenda is pointing out how cool and intelligent you are by not looking something popular.

Well, they are good at describing what they describe. We just aren't using them at all correctly.

>that armor
>spearWOMAN
>low fantasy

That doesn't look very low fantasy...

You both got me. I totally forgot what the actual image was.

It literally generic fantasy setting #3287675643345. It's shit. The only reason it's even remotely popular is all the nude scenes and character development. The setting has literally nothing of interest that hasn't been done better elsewhere. Get over yourself, faggot.

Fantasy is really a spectrum OKAY I'm sick of you bigots talking in genre-binary language

#mediumfantasy #allfantasyisbeautiful #smashthetolkienarchy

But for real can we jut say FOR THE SAKE OF DISCUSSION high fantasy = completely foreign world, mythological events, while low = world which follows similar rules to our own, mundane events?
And can we also say some settings have elements of high and low fantasy?

Great, now can we talk about these things instead of arguing over pointless definitions?

You cannot keep getting mad that people dislike using the terms in a way that is both unintuitive and not useful.

Especially when they are used to describe RPG campaigns. In that scenario Game of Thrones being 'high' fantasy and Lord of the Rings being 'low' just causes confusion. Just using high/low magic is not entirely suitable as a replacement either. So you need to find another way to describe the amount and frequency of fantastical things.

there's something really weird about how he's holding that "sword"