Abstract

Dungeon Masters may or may not make use of familiar fantasy elements whose beginnings lay with Tolkien, but they must always put their players in a world. Dark Sun, Eberron, and the Planar City of Sigil little resemble the history, languages, lands, peoples, and places of Middle Earth, but they follow Tolkien's practice of creating a world in which all these elements are meant to fit together. The first part of fantasy is the human capacity to separate the qualities of things from the things in which they appear, and to imagine them in other things that do not have them. Many Dungeons Dragons campaigns treat magic as a kind of alternate science, but in fairy tales there is more to it than that. Fantasy succeeds when it transports us to an imaginary land, and we escape the grayer parts of our own for a little while.