"Should Fantasy be Less Fantastic?" Topic

Personally I'm fine with with chainmail bikinis and other impractical costuming for fantasy figures. Nay, I may even prefer it. Yes, even for minis set in cold weather climes.

I also not super impressed with models with American style weight on them. I'm a fat kid myself but I don't have any interest in seeing models that look like me out there.

Fantasy can be helped with touches of realism, I know, but fantasy should also be fantastic. Fantasy is inspirational, not an excuse to get comfortable with my personal failings against bacon, chocolate, pizza and other delicious foods.

I will budge on montrously oversized weapons and mammaries though.

So should fantasy be fantastic or should it be more realistic?

I think it can be both and both can be appealing.

I like Game of Thrones. It has very little in the way of fantasy in it and might as well be a historical drama until season 5 for the most part. There are Dragons and brief sights of wights plus some magic but you could probably do the story without them.

Then there is Elric. Traveling through time and space, having little chats with Gods, summoning demons everytime he gets into a tight space. Plus his sword eats souls and shits the excess energy into its wielder.

I like them both.

Even in gaming both can be fun. Warhammer was high fantasy in that it had lots of different races and magic. Different versions of it played more like a historical big battle game though, like 6th edition. Powerful creatures were powerful but there weren't that many of them and then did tend to be a bit over the top and, at least around here, didn't show up on the table much.

A battle between dwarfs and Empire didn't look that much different from a 16th century battle in Europe.

Then there is Age of Sigmar, demonic hordes come pouring out of the realms of Chaos while the Sigmarite warhost is being lightninged onto the tabletop. All of them trying to either stop or start a ritual that will split reality itself into easily bite sized pieces.

Mmmm! Bacon :) it depends on the setting I like Hyboria as a 'realistic' fantasy and the Old school Warhammer for doses of unbelievable_believabvle fantasy is good also chainmail bikini chick good for RPG but I bulk at that Sigmar 12 realms rubbish, it has to have at least one toe on the ground I think.
Cheers nice thoughts going on guys.

Like Pictors Studio I enjoy a range of fantasy settings.

Middle Earth is fairly low magic – but when magic turns up it is really potent.

Old School D&D tended to have magic hanging around like baubles on a Christmas tree, but I also ran campaigns where a +1 dagger was a rare and potent magic item. Both approaches can be fun.

I'm thinking more of figures here but I'll let this go where it will.

I'm not completely sure about your point about overweight figures, although many 28mm figures are sculpted in a stumpy, short-legged style which makes them essentially 1/48th versions of people like myself. Which I endorse, of course. I'm not seeing a lot of figures who simply look like they eat donuts all day, though.

Fantasy comes in many varieties, from the very common European medieval style derived from the folktale tradition through Tolkien to D&D, the Pulp fantasy thread (R.E. Howard onwards, iconography by Frazetta and Boris Vallejo) with many variants including African, Viking, Japanese, even Napoleonic cultural elements. The strange, wonderful mesoamerican imagery of 'Tekumel'.

The point, I think, is not to be more or less 'fantastic' but to be 'imaginative' – I've seen an awful lot of very pedestrian fantasy, both in literature and models. There's also a need for internal consistency within a genre; you might have a viking culture, even one with magical elements, but you shouldn't have slightly random aspects of other cultures appearing without explanation or logic.

Lastly, I'd note that many historical figures from the Bronze Age look much more fantastical than the mainstream of fantasy imagery. Boar's tooth helmets, anyone?

While super models with bloated battle axes and increasingly dispropotionate figures seemed destined to dominate fantasy recently thanks to George Martin, Joe Anacrombe and Cameron Miles interest has returned to a more realistic medieval environment for fantasy. Essentially getting us back to a more "Middle Earth" feel – the old master knew what he was doing.

Works with over the top anything goes magic still persist but we now have alternatives in literature though fantasy gaming has not quite caught up with current trends and if anything has gone to further extremes.

As Martin often points out if magic were really so powerful wizards would rule not kings and armies and castles would be pointless. And every plot complication can simply be magiced away.

I much prefer well proportioned figures in a cohesive setting that allows for magic as a rare and potentially risky tactic but still sometimes worth the chance. The setting need also allow for courage, strategy, armies and diplomacy to have effect above and beyond what magic alone can achieve. Heros are hardly heroic if so overpowered that they need fear nothing.

Eventually a game company may catch on to the modern trend for fantstorical settings and produce a line of human figures with actual human bodies. Till then we still have the many plastic historicals (esp Perry Brothers, Fireforge) which work fine in a reasonable fantasy setting.

(Games Workshop at one time actually produced such figures and had a decent setting.)

As for current game systems the best I've found is modfied DBA 3.0.

TomT

Great topic.

I think it all boils down to personal taste really. I for one like Fantasy that draws a lot of inspiration from history. Not sure about Chainmail Bikinis, but I am not against them either.

I guess the only thing I mind – and not only in the realms of Fantasy – is those people that try to force their opinions and preferences on others.

The OP raises an interesting point. I think that in the media, fantasy is veering solidly toward the realistic and gritty. The BBC version of The Last Kingdom looks like Game of Throne and LOTR without dragons and hobbits -- or to flip it, those franchises look like they are set in Anglo Saxon Wessex. People seem to prefer this, and I counted myself among that group at one time, but now I wonder if pendulum has swung too far toward reality and gritty.

Perhaps fantasy has lost too much of the fantastic. Two areas where fantasy seems to stay more toward the fantastic (although with very different visions) are children's programs and miniatures.

Personally, both for media (stories/novels) and miniatures, I'd like to see a broadening of fantasy to other cultures, beyond the standard western ones.

There's a burgeoning African fantasy writer's movement (a bit hit and miss on quality though), and some limited miniatures to match (e.g. Eureka's 10mm African fantasy), but I'd like to see more. And more Indian (as in India) or Asian (Black Hat, Eureka, Splintered Light have some in terms of figures) fantasy would be great.

As long as it's fun I like it – but prefer outlandish armour and outsize weapons on artwork rather than models.

As to influences, can be anything – my 'latest' is pure whimsy:

easterngarrison.blogspot.co.uk

"For fantasy to work, it must be based on reality."

The best fantasy stories, books, or movies are the ones in which you can almost believe in.

Be as fantastical as your imagination can be but make it seem real. That is the trick. There can be plenty of magic, as long as the rules of physics are applied consistently.

If we are just discussing sculpting, the inflatable sword thing really bugs me.

I get it that swords at a scale thickness would break in a nanosecond on a wargames figure made from anything sensible (plastic, resin, white metal etc) but they could often be a bit more realistic than they are. Often, modern figures are slightly more 'accurate' weapon-width-wise than they might have been a decade or more ago (plastics have a bit to do with that, I think) but the days of warriors holding a 4 by 4 and pretending its a sword are not gone for ever, sadly…

As for genres, I'm a dreadful LotR snob so I guess I like my magic 'low slung but daunting…'

John T

Consistent. If you wanna be realistic be realistic. If you wanna be gritty, be gritty. If you wanna be snarky, be snarky. If you wanna be over the top, be over the top. Just try to pick a timbre and stick with it.

I like a range of figures but I do blink now and again at "weapons too big to carry, let alone swing"

I am finishing off a GW WH Empire standard bearer whose standard probably would require a John Deere 5E series tractor to move

I tend to use a lot of historical figures as my fantasy rank and file, with "fantasy" figures for heroes, wizards, etc.

Of course, once in a while I put a lot of time and effort into making my fantasy figures more historical:

I tend towards the more realistic end of the spectrum.

I like to use fantasy figures mixed in with my historical figures, usually as special characters. I am annoyed by figures with plate cuisses, poleyns, greaves, and sabatons, and no armor on their arms or thorax. I do not understand why so many figures come with loin cloths, particularly loin cloths reaching down to their ankles. I don't know what to think about figures depicting a society that can obviously forge steel weapons, but can't weave wool or linen, so must wear furs. Still, the fantasy figures aren't doing this just to annoy me: the sculptors/designers are using fantasy art as a guide. I just wish they wouldn't.

My assumption with buxom leaden lasses has always been that this was originally to allow for easy identification, back in the day when sculpts weren't as good as they are now. I have bought some flatter chested gals, partly to encourage more manufacturers to make them, but I'm not beating myself up over this issue. Chainmail bikinis? I've converted most of the figures like this that I have to have a fairly complete set of clothing

Like many others, I prefer my fantasy with relatively low key magic. Yeah, I'm another LOTR fan. While I love the movie Frozen, every time I come to the scene where Elsa freezes the fjord and brings on a winter, all I can do is wonder how much energy that would actually require, and where it would come from.

I also agree about keeping my regions and fantasy systems straight. My Vikings aren't going to run into any zombies, so long as they hang out in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Elves, dwarves, trolls, and dragons, yes, but no zombies. Maybe a wendigo or two, if they venture into the forests of Vinland.

Yes, by the way, I would also be interested in a different fantasy culture, particularly a line of fantasy figures based around ancient India, in part because there is a great Conan story with just such a setting, and it looks like that world would be fun to game.

Grelber

Greiner: look at Empire of Petal Throne

I can go with either, though my general preference is that the non-fantastic bits look pretty realistic and medieval, to better put the monsters or magic into perspective.

I've come to find "near-historical" figures rather pointless. If they almost look like renaissance knights, or whatever, I can just buy renaissance knights instead and use 'em for historicals too.

That said, I also harbour a snobbish disdain for chainmail bikinis.