The Standard Fantasy Setting
- Jon
- May 16, 2019
- 12 min read
In a land of kings, magic, and grand legends, a darkness gathers. A disparate group of adventures will have to face scheming nobles, fire-breathing dragons, and the demonic armies of the Dark Lord to save the world. There will be epic castle sieges, mystical enchanted weapons, scenes of merriment with tankards of ale, and a final struggle in a whirlwind of elemental energy. And at the end, the heroes will save the day, and return home.
You know the story. You know the world. There are perhaps thousands of incarnations of this same tale, all taking place in similar worlds. There are variants, of course - some versions are colorful and idealized, some intentionally comedic and parodying, some drenched with darkness and grit. Some focus more on individual heroes, others on grand armies, and others on the political machinations of scheming nobles. There’s no one element that all of these worlds must have, but most share enough similarities to be in the same family.
This is the Standard Fantasy Setting.
Part I: The Origin of Magic
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is often credited with forging the Standard Fantasy Setting from Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, Norse mythology, and his own imagination. After all, the hugely influential series has most of the tropes we associate with the concept: a vaguely feudal magical world, knights and kingdoms, ancient evils, monsters, elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, wizards, epic quests, detailed maps, elaborate worldbuilding and backstories, invented languages...all of it.
We can trace the Lord of the Rings’ ancestry through a number of works, but it wasn’t until Frodo first left the Shire that they were all combined in such a way. As The Lord of the Rings exploded in popularity in the 60s and 70s with the support of the hippies and counterculture, writers, readers, and publishers wanted stories that fit the new itch for more such adventures. LotR clones, such as The Sword of Shannara and its series, sprung up almost overnight, telling stories of adventures in magical worlds.
But the Standard Fantasy Setting - not Middle-Earth specifically - doesn’t really perforate through the world’s storytelling consciousness until the release of the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. For the uninitiated, D&D is part dice-based war game, part storytelling framework in which one person called the Dungeon Master (DM) leads a party of players, each embodying a different created character, through a series of dungeons, towns, adventures, and battles, mostly in some version of the Standard Fantasy Setting. D&D has led to a huge, sprawling scene of roleplaying games of different genres and intentions, but that’s a discussion for a future post. D&D, at its best, creates memorable moments of epic fantasy adventure for a group of friends, many of whom, in both those early years and the present day, attempt to transfer their adventures across media into other forms.
Together, the twin tendrils of Dungeons & Dragons and the Lord of the Rings-inspired burgeoning fantasy genre brought the elements of the Standard Fantasy Setting into the mainstream. The rules of D&D codified many of these elements, including the technology level, types of magic, fictional humanoid species, plot types, aesthetics, etc., so that the vast majority of players would be either playing in a few pre-made worlds of this type or encouraged to create their own, still fitting within the constraints of the game. While D&D can be “hacked” (that is, the rules can be changed and altered), most players stick with the game’s pre-written statistics, enemies, and focuses. Everyone can make their own fantasy world, but to play D&D as written, they have to share a lot of elements. They have to be set in the Standard Fantasy Setting.
Many initial home-brewed worlds for D&D campaigns became popular book series (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, etc.), further entrenching the tropes of the SFS into both the market and the fans’ conception of fantasy. The SFS made the jump to video games with series such as Dragon Quest (1986), Final Fantasy (1987), The Elder Scrolls (1994), Warcraft (1994), Fable (2004), and Dragon Age (2009). The Standard Fantasy Setting found its way into other media too, from tabletop miniature games, to an increased visibility in film with the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), and even in the budget-conscious world of television with Game of Thrones (2011-2019). There’s no storytelling medium that hasn’t been filled with the worlds of the SFS.
To many people, the Standard Fantasy Setting is the fantasy genre. Fantasy means magic and swords and dragons. Veer outside of this narrative, and your story is lost in the pile. The popularity of the SFS is due in large part to how mass media and popular culture are driven by market forces. These were the stories that influenced many of us as children, or influenced the creators of these works as children. They’re tied - for better and for worse - with our conceptions of ourselves, with our imaginations and dreams and memories of times with friends or as escapes from being friendless. They’re usually empowering fantasies that deliver adventure and excitement, but enough familiarity that we don’t question them or give them too deep a look. Look behind the curtain, we seem to think, and discover the truth of adulthood. Nothing is simple. Reality is complex, but often...boring. Banal.
But our imaginations are shaped by the inputs we feed them, and the reason the SFS is so central to many a fantasy fan’s heart is not entirely an intrinsic love for these tales. That plays a large part, of course, but we can’t learn to love what we’re not exposed to. People connected to real strengths of the SFS setting, but when the market learned people liked this kind of stuff, it pushed it out, and kept pushing it out, until we didn’t know there could be anything else.
If you’re a fan of the stories the SFS delivers - and there’s a good chance you are, if you’re reading this - this entry might have you convinced that I harbor a hatred of the SFS. It’s possible you’re feeling that defensiveness that comes when people criticize the things you like so much that they’re baked into your conception of yourself. I know the feeling. I know it’s probably not a good thing to let yourself be defined by stories, especially when corporations take advantage of that to sell you things, but I understand how hard it is to avoid that kind of love. I haven’t figured out how to do it myself.
Because I love the SFS. Many of my favorite stories take place there: the Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, the Dragon Age games, the current D&D campaign I’m playing in, just to name a few. I still find myself daydreaming about making even more variations on this world. My upcoming critiques are not meant to tear the setting to pieces, or to ridicule or insult anyone who enjoys them.
But I don’t believe in just “turning off your brain” when consuming stories. As I’ve said before, and will keep saying; stories don’t exist in an ideological vacuum. They’re reflections of the context in which they’re written, and they all have something to say about the real world, whether they intend to or not. It’s useful and interesting to critique the things you love, to realize what forces are at work in them, and to better understand what they’re trying to do and actually doing.
So, let’s do just that.
Part II: The Darkness and the Light
Fantasy has a deep ideological divide at its heart. On one hand, fantasy can bring us romantic, idealized versions of a mythical past, wrapped in a story where good and evil are clearly delineated, and by bravery and friendship, we can defeat the darkness and return to peace and quiet. It’s a world without the complications of the modern. It’s fantasy-as-nostalgia. It’s comfort food. I get the appeal of this approach, I really do. We all need comfort from time to time.
But fantasy should mean more than just that. We can imagine anything! We can tell any kind of story with fantasy, in weird and strange cultures that speak to our current world while also giving us glimpses at something else. The SFS rarely deals out actual wonder or cautious fear and interest. It rarely unsettles, or confronts us with actually new or challenging ideas. We know what types of stories to expect here. But we should demand more from these tales. Yes, this requires more work from both storytellers and readers - getting our bearings in a weird world without becoming too alienated to relate to it is a delicate balance to strike. But we should be willing to take that plunge and work through it, because what lies on the other side is worth it. The potential of fantasy is limitless, even more so than science fiction. We can build any kind of world in fantasy - it doesn’t have to fit into even the roughly possible, logical, or historical. But as China Mieville says, “the problem with fantasy isn’t that it’s escapism, it’s that it can’t escape.”
From a pure level of storytelling, the Standard Fantasy Setting is...well, unoriginal. It’s often boring. I’ve seen many more brooding anti-hero warriors, charming bards, and eldritch demon armies than necessary. It often feels like we’re just watching the same movie with different actors. There’s so much more we can do with fantasy. It’s a deep, strange ocean and we’re only splashing around in one particular inlet. There are weirder things swimming out there in the depths.
But the Standard Fantasy Setting as a whole also carries with it some other troubling attributes, baked into the setting back in less socially cognizant days. The SFS world tends to be an inherently conservative one, with many manifestations having pretty retrograde ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and more. The “Golden” age of fantasy’s popularity in the 60s-80s didn’t tend to provide many avenues for women outside of comically under-dressed eye candy or damsels to be saved (or more likely, both). Even when women are written as more decisive characters with narrative agency, they’re often defined wholly by their gender in a male-dominated world. The concepts of separate fantasy “races” with pre-determined intellectual abilities and moral compasses gets dicey quickly, especially when so many of them are traditionally coded with tropes and motifs from other non-Western nations and peoples. When you base the entire genre around one particular time period in one particular part of the world, you find yourself easily slipping into Othering and (perhaps literally) Demonizing versions of real world cultures outside of your own. The eponymous dungeons of Dungeons & Dragons are usually excuses for our violent protagonists to plunder treasures from other cultures for profit, in an eerie parallel to the blood-soaked colonial histories of the West. The “murder hobos” of many stories fight their way through societies, taking what they will from them and solving all problems with the pointy end of a sword.
Fans who get defensive or outright hostile when confronted with these tendencies often throw out the rallying cry of “historical accuracy,” a meaningless phrase when used to justify a world built hodgepodge from thousands of years of history and including such objectively unhistorical elements as, well, dragons. Perhaps more often, they retaliate with cries of “it’s just a story” or “it’s not the real world”. The problem with these excuses is that nothing is ever “just a story.” The stories we tell are reflections of the worlds the storytellers inhabit, and the cultural norms and values of these settings can’t help but be in conversation with those of the writers and the readers. It’s not the real world, true, but using this excuse (1) condemns fantasy to be only ever a semi-nostalgic, conservative blanket of pure escapism, and (2) even then, only to a very particular subset of people, mostly straight, white, cis, men. Keeping the SFS unchanged and embracing its more unfortunate trappings prevents a whole host of other people from ever getting the real value of a comforting escapism, and prevents all readers from engaging with fantasy’s other, less-utilized strength of new possibilities and imaginations.
The SFS is also inherently conservative in that most of these worlds posit a better time before the dark forces of evil swoop in - and the heroes succeed by defeating the new problem and restoring the world to an idealized status quo. It’s a similar problem to that of superhero stories: our heroes are usually reactive, rather than proactive. It’s rare that the SFS subverts itself and proposes a better, new, forward-thinking state of affairs for its heroes to aspire to. That’s a task that is often left to science fiction. Again, that’s one of the negative side-effects of SFS’s stranglehold on the genre. It’s so tied into our conceptions of the past that to take it in new directions is rarely even imagined as a possibility.
The SFS - despite its strengths and beloved reputation - has its fair share of problems. It’s ubiquitous, drowning out other more vibrant possibilities for the genre, and many of its common tropes have troubling implications about gender, race, power, sexuality, colonialism, and other real world identities. No story, genre, person, or, well, thing, is free of problems, and I don’t condemn people for enjoying these stories. I just hope that people can hold two true ideas in their heads: you can love something and criticize it at the same time.
If you’re still with me on this voyage, perhaps you’re asking the very valid question: “what’s the alternative to the SFS?”
Part III: Forging Something New
If you can’t picture what fantasy looks like outside of the SFS, you’re not really to blame. The market loves SFS, and only rarely showcases alternatives. There are some other popular subgenres within fantasy that take magical elements and bring them to our world. But there are still plenty of incredible fantasy stories out there, that build on the bones of a secondary world with history, magic, and epic adventure without staying trapped in the most restrictive versions of the SFS. Some of my favorite book examples include the Bas-Lag cycle by China Mieville, the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, the Divine Cities trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett, the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone, The Orphan’s Tales by Catherynne M. Valente, the Ambergris Cycle by Jeff VanderMeer, The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman, and the Worldbreaker Saga by Kameron Hurley. There's also the many wondrous worlds in the actual play RPG podcast Friends at the Table, the art-deco darkness of the comic book Monstress by Marjorie Liu, and the brightly-colored dystopia of Supergiant Games' Pyre.
How do these stories take fantasy into new directions, away from the SFS? How can creators write new stories outside of those bounds?
I can only say what I’ve noticed about the unique fantasy stories I love, which is of course colored and shaped by my own identities and life experiences. You should look to the voices of other fantasy fans, perhaps of people different than you in those areas, for some of these answers. But this is my blog, so I’ll give you some of my personal suggestions for how good writers have and should craft new fantasy stories in less-charted waters.
Setting Inspirations: Go behind medieval Western Europe for inspiration. Other cultures around the world have rich histories and legends to inspire you. Don’t copy these tales wholecloth, especially if you’re not from that culture, but drawing inspiration from other places will automatically take the story in new places.
Technological Boundaries: Fantasy doesn’t have to mean pre-industrial, feudal technology. There’s a certain romance to a swordfight, but with magic and new histories, you can craft a setting with a mish-mash of technology without being bound to the time of swords and bows.
Identities, Genders, and Sexualities: Challenge the standard (straight, white, Western) approaches to cultural identities and behaviors, families, gender, sex, and sexualities. There’s no reason a wholly new world would have the same gender norms, approaches to sex and sexuality, or family units as our own “standard.”
Economics and Politics: The SFS usually posits a vaguely feudal world, or one dealing with the early days of mercantilism and capitalism. All political and economic systems rise and fall with the particular histories and geography of society - feel free to explore with other real world alternatives or invent your own.
Critical Worldbuilding: Look at the disparate tropes of the SFS and more critically engage with how they’d affect other aspects of the world. Many SFS stories bring up interesting magical features without deeply looking into how these elements might affect other parts of the world. History, science, politics, society, war, religion, technology, food, romance - none of these areas are separate from each other. They all influence and connect. They should in fiction, too.
Protagonists: Grapple with what kind of characters get to have their story told, and examine what that reflects about both the fictional setting and the real world. Who hasn’t gotten to be the protagonist of these stories?
New Ideas: Use fantasy to explore new ideas and ask provocative questions about the way we live now, rather than insisting that these stories have nothing new to say about the world outside their bounds. All stories have something to say about the real world, even, and especially, if they insist that they don’t.
Beyond Genre: Take fantasy outside of the bounds of genre, and combine it with elements of science fiction, horror, romance, literary fiction, history, etc. There’s no reason that science fiction and fantasy should stay separate, or you can’t tell a romance in a horror and fantasy world. I’m waiting for my deep psychological literary-fiction take on a fantasy world, for instance.
These are just a few ways to embark on a journey outside of the comforting home of the SFS. It’s a necessary trip, I think, but also one that doesn’t mean we can’t ever go back. There will always be a soft spot in my heart for these worlds, and for some of very favorite pieces of fiction that are resolutely planted inside them. I’m still playing in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and getting ready for my fifth re-read of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (hopefully The Winds of Winter might be out by the time I’m done). I think criticizing these stories isn’t a slap in the face to those who love them; it’s a sign of respect for them that they’re worth really thinking about. The Standard Fantasy Setting has truly shaped our world and our thinking in ways we’ll never fully understand, just as surely as our world has shaped it. And that’s worth thinking - and writing - about, if anything is.
Once a month, I’ll write a post exploring some element of the Standard Fantasy Setting. For each of these, I’ll take a quick look at the element’s origins, showcase why it’s so prevalent and beloved, offer a critique of some of its flaws, and present some suggestions for how to handle this trope going forward in the genre. Expect the next couple of entries in this series to tackle the setting as a mythical pre-Industrial Western Europe, the Evil Empire, the common fantasy “races” of elves, dwarves, etc., fantasy maps, the art of worldbuilding, approaches to religion and politics, and of course...dragons! Let me know if there are other particular elements of the SFS that you’d like me to explore.
Thanks for reading!
One of the reasons I never cared for science fiction or fantasy fiction is that it is so male. And lots of times the same story told yet again with different props. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.