A bit of commons fuel was lit by noisms' post on reality in fantasy, and reaction includes posts by Talysman here and FrDave here. He does seem to know those nerves to touch.
It interests me, but in more of a long-term pondering way, in that I've found an approach to the overall problem that works for me when I need it. So here's the bit I'm focusing on:
... think about what farms would look like if there were giant flying predators like dragons, griffins, hippogriffs and so on in the world. Nobody would keep cows or sheep, because they would be being eaten all the time. No cows or sheep means no leather or wool. Good luck trying to extrapolate a setting from that which you could base a game on.
This is a more limited thought experiment. If FrDave's proposal of sudden dragon arrival is ruled out, and we imagine dragons appeared the way other life did, we could assume that everyone developed together and identify critical moments of prehistoric emergence.
To go with something very obvious to start, what if dragons were dinosaurs? Maybe a form that survived the presumed extinction event by being more mobile, or more able to be, or living or retreating underground, perhaps learning to trap or breed small mammals.
Even if we don't go with humans as a later dragon breeding project, and/or rebel species fleeing topside or breaking out of the reservation, we then get more general opportunities for speculation. How would coexistence with dragons affect our long-term development?
Whatever the answers, cows and sheep as we know them today might not come into it.
And what about a steady state fantasy, in which intrinsic or higher forces keep balance, the emptied fields restocking at dawn or populations flowing, but with no overall change?
And what about a steady state fantasy, in which intrinsic or higher forces keep balance, the emptied fields restocking at dawn or populations flowing, but with no overall change?
Re substitutes for leather and wool in a dungeon-delving setup, how about having treated giant mushroom caps - subterranean of course - as leather, and thin grass growing in a roiling mass beyond directional light as wool? Reasons for 'delver' to be a major trade.
To borrow formulations from the original post, speculative, academic questions can lead to lots of gameable content if you take it seriously, but needn't mean number crunching.
To borrow formulations from the original post, speculative, academic questions can lead to lots of gameable content if you take it seriously, but needn't mean number crunching.
As a simpler experiment, and more tactical, if we do assume sudden dragon arrival, or handwave it, how would you defend a community from one? As a change from zombies.
Update: There's a linked concept in Wermspittle, plow grubs. Now that's some fantasy.
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Update: There's a linked concept in Wermspittle, plow grubs. Now that's some fantasy.
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