Continuing the discussion from Ought I to change the name "Flat Black"?:
After designing Flat Black as a reaction against Tonio Loewald’s Flawed Utopia I got a similar bee in my bonnet about the things that RP gamers tell each other “actually” in fantasy settings, which are usually far from universally true in mediæval Europe and often not even accurate concerning northern France and the champion country of England. Hugely often we assume that fantasy is “just like mediaeval Europe but with magic”. And that strikes me as tragically unimaginative. I revolted by devising a fantasy setting in which I systematically contradicted the lazy assumptions of pseudomediaeval fantasy, and called it “Jehannum”*.
- Fantasyland is in the northern temperate latitudes. I put Jehannum in the tropics.
- Fantasyland is occupied by white people. The Jehannese have warm reddish-brown skin tones, straight to wavy coarse black hair, and usually brown, hazel, or (rarely) green eyes. They are generally not very tall, and tend to be slender to athletic in build.
- Fantasyland is on the west coast of a continent. I made Jehannum an archipelago.
- Fantasyland has a cool to mild temperate maritime climate with marked seasonality and snow in winter. Jehannum is hot and humid all year round.
- Fantasyland subsists on seasonal wheat agriculture in which peasants (remarkably) own or rent circumscribed compact farms. I gave Jehannum Javanese-style irrigated rice agriculture in which peasants co-operate in “water societies” to share and re-use irrigation water.
- Fantasyland is feudal. Jehannum has a political set-up that is really a lot more like the reign of James II† with a dash of the Achaemenid Empire.
- Fantasyland is ruled by an equestrian military aristocracy. In Jehannum the aristocrats sail ships rather than ride horses, and are more mercantile than military. Their social and political dominance is contested by landowning gentry from the non-coastal parts and by tradesman-citizens in the cities.
- Fantasyland is agrarian. Jehannum is largely urban.
- Fantasyland has nuclear households. Jehannum has extended households.
- In Fantasyland buildings are made of stone or brick, sometimes of wattle & daub. In Jehannum they are often made of bamboo, matting, and thatch; in the countryside they stand on poles or posts to keep the floor off the wet ground. There are lots of roofed areas with no walls. “Windows” are often covered by fixed grilles to exclude marauding leopards.
- Fantasyland has sexual mores based on those of Europe in the Renaissance and after. Jehannum normalises age-structured homoromantic relationships (often sexual) for unmarried people.
- In Fantasyland women wear dresses and men wear trousers, boots, and sleeved tunics, sometimes with capes. In Jehannum people wear rather little, and their clothes are draped rather than tailored.
- Fantasyland has powerful gods of human activities such as love, rulership, war, and hunting, or of other abstractions such as death. Jehannum is animist: the only gods are the spirits of physical things such as the Sun, particular islands and mountains and rivers and fields, of houses and boats and castles.
- Fantasyland has temples in which priests represent the gods to the people and channel divine power. In Jehannum priests are functionally the diplomats who are chosen by a community to represent the people to the gods. They manage offerings and negotiate deals.
- In Fantasyland the priesthood is a career. In Jehannum it is the final phase of the career of a retired politician and former warrior.
- In Fantasyland big community ceremonies are either devoted to the gods, or are political, or are seasonal and agricultural. In Jehannum they are about commemorating the heroes of the community.
- Fantasyland has elves and dwarves and hobbits under assumed names, and orcs. Jehannum has a race that can fly and a race that can breathe underwater, and no “monsters” who are born deserving to be killed.
- Fantasyland has Good and Evil. Jehannum has people.
And so on. There was a lot§ in Jehannum based on ancient Greece¶, some on mediaeval Japan, a little on Enlightenment England. Some of it — such as the operations of the World of Dreams in producing ghosts, exemplars, and avatars — was original or seemed so at the time. But a lot of it consisted of inversions or other defiance of the feeble clichés of Fantasyland.
I am afraid that this sounds snobbish, but the majority of fantasy seems to have been set in Fantasyland with no consideration of any alternative, and I find that dreadfully disappointing. Why should fantasy keep defaulting back to “Fantasyland”, this vague and inconsistent setting that is “just like mediaeval Europe except with magic”, as guessed at from the works of writers and film-makers who have, generally, known nothing about social or economic history and cared less. With the infinite universe of possibility before us, why does so much fantasy eschew imagination and originality? Why are all high fantasy Fantasylands so much the same? Why do we never even get ancient India with magic, ancient China with Taoism, or ancient Greece with mageia?
* Later I changed its name to “Gehennum” for phonological reasons that no longer seem compelling.
† Later, that became the “Classical Period”, and Gehennum sprouted an “Archaic Period” with politics and government like Greece in the early 5th Century BC and a “Decadent Period” with politics like Japan in the Muromachi Period.
§ The original players’ briefing was six pages of truly tiny type — operating the laserwriters in the ANU libraries was expensive for poor students back then, but we all had good eyes. Gehennum eventually grew 36 pages of 12-point Times, a map or two, and a 72,000-word alphabetical encyclopaedia that I wrote during a bout of hypomania over Easter 1991.
¶ One long-time player described it to a newcomer by saying “[i]magine that the population of mediaval Indonesia were hypnotised and told to behave like Ancient Greeks”.