PixlBit

More riffing on Dragon Magazine 81, January 1984. The rock group, The Police, played their last tour in 1984. The only video game connection I can think of is that drummer, Stewart Copeland, over a decade later, did the music for Spyro the Dragon and its three sequels. Here's a track I liked from the first game.

                       

Back to Dragon 81. The Role of Books section, written by Lewis Pulsipher, had reviews of several books on the daily life of Ancient Rome, Classical Athens and Ancient Egypt. The suggestion was that, by reading this stuff, you could get ideas about how to make your D&D campaign more realistic. He made an interesting observation under the one about Egypt:

Typical fantasy campaign worlds tend to resemble France, southern England, or a medieval version of Midwestern America: a vast land blessed with good agriculture, decent weather much of the year, and no dominating feature or oddity of climate. I’ve not heard of a fantasy world in which a monsoon, bringing rains vital to farming, dominated the climate, or in which a single feature like the river Nile, its waters replenished by annual floods, dominates life.

That’s right! Climate is hardly ever taken into consideration in fantasy worlds of every medium. Day/night cycles are in video games like Morrowind and Oblivion. I remember watching the sun rise and set in both of them, and being amazed by it, but I can’t think of a game that has sudden rain, or wind, or changing weather conditions. I think that might be a task for this current gen. No?

He continues in the next paragraph:

I’ve often had a hard time believing in the worlds of many fantasy novels, which hardly seem to change in any vital way despite the passing of hundreds if not thousands of years.

He’s talking about novels, but I think the same can be said of fantasy video games. I guess the answer might be that most fantasy games only take place over a short time, where things like geology really don’t change; but think about this: what if a volcano erupted, a flood or earthquake happened, or a meteor hit the earth during gameplay? Is there a game with any of those? There’s the Moon crashing into Earth in Majora’s Mask, but that’s a game ending event and not something that just occurs as you're playing. Any others you can think of? I can’t.