It seems that just about this time every year, as I gain some personal time away from work, my mind turns once again to the question of which kind of fantastic roleplaying world I would like to explore. Finding my fantasy is almost an annual ritual… and one that usually fails.

If we just consider the fantasy genre for a moment, it doesn’t take long to recognise that this is a very broad and ill-defined category. In the realm of fantasy roleplaying games, fantasy is all at once bound tightly to the tropes and assumptions of Dungeons & Dragons while being also free to be anything we can imagine.

Most fantasy roleplayers accept a prescription for their fantasy which bypasses the need to consider the subgenre possibilities. The classic example is the sort of hodgepodge of fantasy assumptions which permeate each edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a mix of mythic and modern elements which give a quick pathway to play.

Early on in my own gaming, I began to encounter different flavours of fantasy world which altered or ignored the now standard tropes. The most obvious early examples would be Tekumel from “Empire of the Petal Throne” and Glorantha from “RuneQuest”. These games presented a different kind of experience which engaged my imagination.

Eventually, I discovered the idea of building your own fantasy realm – and not just in terms of designing a milieu that broadly accepted the standard tropes, but of questioning the kinds of elements you’d include in the first place. Down this avenue lay the question of subgenre and of exploring the possibilities outside the generic fare.

In my recent play, I’ve come to recognise that the failure to identify my desired subgenre of fantasy is at least as much of a problem – and perhaps more of one – than my choice of game rules. I know that the main reason I reject Dungeons & Dragons as a game is my lack of desire to play within the standard tropes.

The problem is that I am not sure I have positively identified the particular flavour of fantasy that I would enjoy exploring. I can say that it is probably low-powered and with mysterious magic, but I am uncertain how else to define it. I am drawn to an earlier era of technology than the usual medieval assumptions, but I am also drawn to a more ancient way of thinking too.

My preferences seem to indicate a pre-scientific, pre-modern, and much more mythic mindset. I am drawn to the exploration of lost places and of different ways of experiencing the natural world around us. It seems to me that, in the post-modern world, one of the only ways to explore such ideas is through the medium of roleplay.

I think that, at heart, I am a wanderer seeking to discover a World as much as any other element of the play experience. It is in the journey away from the most common expressions of fantasy that I sense I might be making this quest alone. I know not quite where the portal will take me.

Game on!