The Dying Earth Subgenre - Your Thoughts

[Xathan]

Actually, I think that's a really good point and part of why I prefer post apocalypse to dying Earth. In a dying earth, the tone always seems to imply that social decay is as inevitable as your own fragile mortality, and nothing you accomplish will matter. Dying earth is about survival. Post apocalyptic is about rebuilding and creating among all this horror, giving the plaryers a chance to have a hand in bringing the world back to life.

[SabrWolf]

A Different Perspective:
I've never really been able to play in a game that could said to be a Dying Earth setting. In fact, the only thing I've done that's even close to that was when I ran a game in the WotC 4e Dark Sun setting. And the world in that game wasn't dying, dead, or even hungry. Hell it wasn't even an apocalypse world. It had just been ruined by the foolish and selfish squandering of the planets magic resources (life itself) by some very bad people/rulers.

From what I've been hearing about DE settings however, I am intrigued to see what they would be like to play in. I'm not entirely sure of of what's grabbing me about the idea, but I do tend to like settings with a lot of Bleakness to them. I also use a lot of contrast and symbolic meaning when I run games. With that in mind the ideas I get when I think about running a game in a DE setting to utilize a sense of contrast from the bleakness would be small and subtle (or not-so-subtle as the case sometimes is). A small flickering of candlelight in the oppressive bleakness.

I get the feeling from this thread that that particular way of running a DE game wouldn't be the best however. Especially since (it would seem) the light in the bleak needs to shine bright and strong, even if it is a very localized light, in DE settings.

[Tangent_Jaerc]

Does this genre have an effective antithesis in fantasy?  Eden or Primeval might fit, if one takes the premise that a newborn world is it's opposite. I'm curios what y'all think or if there's some anti-Vance fiction I could read.

[HippopotamusDundee]

To be honest, I think that C. S. Lewis' "the Magician's Nephew" probably qualifies as anti-Vance. Not only is it about a very literally newborn world, but one full of potential and possibility and one lacking that sense of fading overgrown grandeur that suffused most of Vance's works. (though the Charn sequences are oddly Vancian, when one thinks about it).

[Steerpike]

Tolkien is pretty much the anti-Vance in a certain sense.  Middle Earth is set in the distant past, not the far future.  Characters in Vance's worlds tend to be motivated by greed, lust, and other venal motives.  Sex is pretty prevalent.  Magicians are usually petty villains at worst or enigmatic, uncaring scholars at best.  Everything feels uncertain and sort of futile.  The plots tend to be personal (vengeance, survival, making money).  Non-human races usually want to eat and/or torture or rape you.  Everything has a veneer of cynical amorality.  In Tolkien's world, everything is epic.  Wizards are kindly, wise, semi-angelic figures or else world-threatening tyrants.  Plots have to do with saving the world from darkness or at least slaying dragons and winning wars.  Characters tend to be motivated by honour, righteousness, or full-blown megalomania.  Morals are hyper-prevalent and sex doesn't seem to exist, certainly not onscreen.  While there's a sense of melancholy to the elves passing that might be compared to the dying earth, in Tolkien it's a kind of bitersweet mystic ascension, whereas in Vance's Dying Earth it feels like the end is totally random, entropic, meaningless.

[Tangent_Jaerc]

Magicians Newphew scenes with Narnia unfolding certainly are literally oppositional. Cool thought.

Good counterbalance rhetoric for classic fantasy being anti-Dting Earth. I feel enlightened, but remain convinced that both Vance and Tolkien are ultimately smilar because they depict worlds sliding downward, with Golden Ages far behind.