Quote from: daniel_ream;920682Oh, I'm quite sympathetic to the fact that it is impossible to make a truly historically accurate film/show/book.  The past is a different country and all that.  I'm saying there's a middle ground between rigorously accurate-but-impenetrable and Buffy-speak/Whedonisms.

Yea. For the record, Drake doesn't do the Buffy-speak type stuff. There is a difference between a period romance piece like Georgette Heyer where you expect the audience to know the slang of the times and a non-niche novel that needs to appeal to a larger audience, and I think Drake's stuff all falls in the second category.

Quote from: daniel_ream;920682It's funny you mention Drake because I'm reading The Complete Hammer's Slammers right now and I think some of my annoyance stems from the "write what you know" problem.  Back In The Day, when I was a callow youth and fantasy was Written Properly, Dammit, and Those Kids Stayed Off My Lawn, fantasy authors generally had some broader life experience to draw on when writing.  Zelazny was an accomplished amateur fencer and effectively an MA in medieval history.  Drake served in an ACR in Vietnam.  A lot of the trad fantasy I've tried of late feels like the author went straight from reading fantasy in high school and university to writing it professionally.

Somewhere there is an intro or something where Drake talks about being asked, "how should I write military sci-fi scenes if I have no military experience". His answer is "don't". Zelazny was (also) a knife fighter.

Quote from: Tod13;920697There is a difference between a period romance piece like Georgette Heyer where you expect the audience to know the slang of the times and a non-niche novel that needs to appeal to a larger audience [...]

Another interesting data point: the 2004 BSG reboot.  I watched that once with a girl who had no familiarity with either US military jargon or SF in general.  I found I had to pause about every 5-10 minutes to explain what the characters were saying and why certain things were such a Big Deal.  And BSG was almost as mainstream when it aired as GoT is today.

QuoteSomewhere there is an intro or something where Drake talks about being asked, "how should I write military sci-fi scenes if I have no military experience". His answer is "don't". Zelazny was (also) a knife fighter.

Hmm.  That's not in The Complete Hammer's Slammers[/quote].  Both Drake and Gene Wolfe write intros about non-military writers writing military stories, but their beef seems to be more with authors who present the military as some form of two-dimensional cartoon, either unrealistically heroic or villainous.  Even then, though, you can tell the difference between military works by authors like Tanya Huff and David Weber, and Drake and Cook.

For Game of Thrones people's ethics are very much not not century middle class liberal which is why it came as a breath for fresh air for a lot of people. However, the people's epistomology is annoyingly modern. Pretty much everyone who hasn't seen magical things with their own eyes is a secular rationalist and the whole structure of tradition and belief that held together the way people lived in pre-modern times doesn't seem to exist. For example I don't think any holiday has ever been mentioned. Feast and fast days and the like were important shit but they seem be completely absent from Westeros. Not a big deal in itself but there's a dozen other examples like that which make Westerosi culture strangely hollow.

Same with the way fuedalism works in the setting. The Freys are looked down on since they've only been lords for 600 years. Fuedalism was never a tenth as static as Martin portrays it.

Quote from: Daztur;921085For example I don't think any holiday has ever been mentioned. Feast and fast days and the like were important shit but they seem be completely absent from Westeros. Not a big deal in itself but there's a dozen other examples like that which make Westerosi culture strangely hollow.

Still are a big deal everyplace I've ever lived or visited.

QuoteThe Freys are looked down on since they've only been lords for 600 years. Fuedalism was never a tenth as static as Martin portrays it.

Oh I think it was one tenth as static at several points in time.

Quote from: Bren;921089Still are a big deal everyplace I've ever lived or visited.

Oh I think it was one tenth as static at several points in time.

Yeah the idea of an agricultural society without any harvest festivals is just bizarre. It's not that I give a crap about harvest festivals per se it's just they're an example of the thousand little bits of pre-modern culture that should be present in some form in Westeros but just...isn't. I don't need any exposition about them but they should really be going on in the background, without them Westeros just feels hollow.

It's really obvious that Westeros is based on historical fiction with a side order of Shakespeare. Those focus on important people doing horrible things to each other and just slide over cultural stuff or take them for granted.

Now it doesn't help that so much cultural history is impenetrable post-modern garbage but you really need to read some to make a setting tick. Hell everyone should read Albion's Seed even if they don't care about colonial America so that they can put some thought into answering the kinds of questions that the author answers for their own setting.

Now I love the GoT books and love the character development but they're severely overrated when it comes to worldbuilding.

While not an RPG. The premise of the anime series Spice & Wolf struck me as an interesting mashup. Merchanteering/Economics + Deities & Demigods. One of my players watched it and didnt like it.

Quote from: Daztur;921131It's really obvious that Westeros is based on historical fiction with a side order of Shakespeare. Those focus on important people doing horrible things to each other and just slide over cultural stuff or take them for granted.

A mile wide and an inch deep.  This is the real "Tolkienesque" problem, a need to make everything so broad in scope that you lose the subtle details that make a setting breathe. Bujold's Chalion series is a marvelous counter-example.

Now that I think of it, again, I find myself wondering if this doesn't just come down to fantasy authors and readers having a strong tendency towards materialistic atheism.  It's like none of them can stomach even a whiff of religion or ceremony, and if you rip that out of your pre-industrial society, damn right there's going to be a large noticeable bleeding hole.

Quote from: Omega;921136While not an RPG. The premise of the anime series Spice & Wolf struck me as an interesting mashup. Merchanteering/Economics + Deities & Demigods. One of my players watched it and didnt like it.

I liked the concept, although the execution left something to be desired.  Stopping the plot with a screeching halt to deliver a three minute market economics lecture every episode was a bit jarring.  Perhaps there were educational subsidies that year.

"Powerful supernatural girl falls in love with feckless mundane boy" is its own genre in anime, really, although you sometimes get entertaining mashups like I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Decided to Get a Job which combines Clerks-style minimum-wage retail comedy with epic JRPG fantasy.

Wizard Barristers was an anime that had such potential and managed to massively self-immolate ten minutes in; in modern day Tokyo, wizards are incredibly powerful but casting magic of any kind without explicit license and permission from the government carries the death penalty.  Like, any magic.  The show focuses on a law firm made up of wizards who defend wizards charged with unlicensed use of magic.  So far, so awesone, right? Law and Order, Dresden Files edition.

Yeah, this is what they wear to court.  Also, there are giant magical mecha.  Because of course there are.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;909794Mash-ups that mix Westerns with other genres are starting to grate on me because I've met several geeks who refuse to watch any Western unless it has the added artificial sweetener of SF or horror, and are thus missing out on some great movies.

I haven't seen many of these work well for my tastes. The only ones that haven't completely turned me off are the western/kung-fu mashups from the 70's, though they were silly. I'm curious about Firefly/Serenity which I hear does the sci-fi/western pretty well.