>>5902483>Patrick Stuart artpunk osr mental meltdownI think his work has deteriorated a bit since Veins Of The Earth, his last campaign setting was just nonsense (I cannot even remember the name of it, but the setting was a bit like a dnd Sicario or fantasy aftermath of a desert Mexican cartel shootout gone wrong or something) But I think his earlier work Veins of the Earth holds up, Fire On The Velvet Horizon is good for inspiration, and also he wrote one extremely exquisite dungeon adventure I can recommend reading for that Free League Scandinavian Forbidden Lands rpg called Spire of Quetzel, that dungeon is really good.
His descriptions of the different types of darkness in the underworld subterranean underdark are inspiring, the dungeon creation is useful. The idea behind his style was to inject some more contemporary scientific perspectives into the underdark exploration, he cites sources like cave diving, mountaineering and science from the deep geological time studies etc. (there are radiation monsters, monsters inspired by pre Cambrian life etc)
It is not meant to be a historical medieval oubliette simulation hehe, it is more in the gonzo osr rpg blog spirit, I like the ideas in it even if they stray beyond the frontiers of coherence and believability.
Sometimes I do wonder whether stuff like this or say the Luka Rejec Ultraviolet Grasslands stuff really can be run according to their game world rules with any seriousness, how do players even comprehend or interpret or do anything given the haphazard insane melange genre world etc but I just like to read them for unusual worldbuilding ideas.
Personally my own wish and preference would be ideally to run all human settings, just imagine ttrpg Shakespeare, that is the ideal for me - entirely human speculative fiction; the feeling of drama rapidly dissipates for me whenever some surreal goblin troglodyte monster is introduced, the drama should be always human in scale. The way I circumvent this in many of my settings is to introduce monsters only in hallucinatory or dream-like episodes or alternate realms, the main world is entirely commonplace and ordinary, but whenever I introduce A MONSTER I am always secretly ashamed. It doesn't really always work, if I knew more about history I would always want to run an exact historical narrative framing.
I think this is also why I have not read GRR Martin lol, I just have a strange prejudice against him (Tad Williams was my first fantasy author, and R Scott Bakker is probably the last one I read entirely these days) In that interview with GRR Martin he mentions how it perplexes him that his audience has an endless appetite for the Game Of Thrones pseudohistory yet is reluctant to read the Henry V Shakespeare which he draws upon for inspiration etc. Well I have read all of the Henriad, all of Beowulf hehe, so I don't feel as much a need for GRRM or Tolkien hehe
