Introduction by Charles Phipps
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with several popular fantasy gaming RPG settings (you probably can guess the ones I'm talking about). I've been a fan of fantasy gaming since I was twelve years old and fifteen years later, I'm still enjoying it. Nevertheless, I still find myself looking for my fantasy setting.
Even as a teenager, I always felt that the majority of fantasy role-playing games were obsessed with trying to market themselves to an all-ages market. I didn't begrudge them this, there's nothing wrong with trying to broaden your market base, but it often felt that the most interesting material had no place on the market. You could find 200 pages of Magical Items and Spells but not a page dealing with gender relations in a society where women can blast hordes of orcs with lightning. More mature settings were primarily for horror gaming or were war games first and role-playing games second.
Hello fans!
