Blessed Minds IV

First some appropriate music.

Realism is a relative term when it comes to fantasy, because whatever we may see as unrealistic from our perspective could perfectly well be realistic in a fantasy RPG setting. An ettin creature is not realistic, they don’t actually exist, so they are not real, but if ettins exist in your fantasy world then they are real and thus realistic in that world.

What is more important to me than realism (from our perspective) in an RPG is how believable and logical a thing is in the setting. Can I really believe in it? Does it make any sense? The same applies to the game rules. Do the rules make any sense? If the answer is no to any of these questions then I just don’t have the ability to enjoy playing the game – and the older I grow the truer this becomes.

When I was younger this was less of an issue, because my imagination had not yet been too hampered and hindered by the educational system and “growing up”. I didn’t need things to be that realistic. Cartoon worlds and rules like those of certain RPGs were already starting to become painfully unbelievable and illogical even back then, but a game like MERP still managed to fascinate me and entertain my mind – and I dear say even emotions – well into my teens.

In a sense I don’t think my imagination was as much hampered as it was blunted, and not just by the educational system, but by the world we live in. My senses have been bombarded since I came to be, and they in a sense no longer react as strongly as they should to the stimuli of our world.

So what if our world was different?

What if out world had been “primitive”, like the world of our forebears? If you only saw nature around you, would you then not react much more forcefully to e. g. the starlit sky? The face of the Moon? The beauty of a vast waterfall? The powerful waves of the ocean smashing into the bedrock? A huge and ancient tree? The view from a the peak of a tall mountain?

What if you then all of sudden saw this?

Life is a series of events, and each event triggers something in your mind, like age at some point triggers puberty. To become a good and honest man you need to protect yourself from many of these triggers though. All degenerated art, all humiliations of others, all abuse, all senseless cruelty, all exploitation and all justifications of greed and other forms of malice triggers something bad and degrades your mind.

The blessed minds of our young are divine minds and it is out duty as parents to allow them to stay divine and become greater and maturer without becoming soiled by all the filth of our world.

The next time you see some of this filth pay attention to the origin of those who produced it, who propagate it and who embrace it. Some human-like beings are born rotten to the core, because their minds are not like the minds of real men, and they strive to drag the rest of us down into the spiritual bog they themselves exist it. They wallow in filth, because they are themselves filth. We however are not. We are the blessed children of the gods. When given the opportunity we are the gods. HailaR WôðanaR!