These conversations represent my thoughts coming together on the matter. It seems that some can't grasp the concept of fantasy without magic.
And, since I've mentioned it in both discussions, this Wikipedia entry sums up some of what I am interested in within this genre of the fantastic.
No Magic Fantasy and Keeping The Fantastic
I'm going to start this out by saying something that won't come as a big surprise to some: I'm not a big fan of fantasy literature. Sure, I've made my attempts at reading Tolkien, Jordan, and so many others that are out there but most of them have just not sparked my interest. There have been a few fantasy writers that I've liked over the years, but they tend to be sword and sorcery writers like Moorcock, Leiber and Howard. I guess that I just liked their energy a lot better. Because of this disinterest I got out of fantasy gaming round about 87 or, except for a couple of one shots back in college and a rather long run as a player in a D&D 3.0 game a couple of years back. The stuff just doesn't really get me going in a way that makes me want to run or play in a fantasy game for any long period of time.
I'm stating that so that we all have a baseline for the conversation here. This isn't going to be a 'let's talk Chris into liking fantasy literature' discussion.
However, recently (do to my buying up some old RQ3 stuff online...most of which I am still waiting to arrive) I've been eyeing putting together a fantasy game to run. Obviously I want something that will interest me as a gamer and a GM, which means that the heroic fantasy stuff is straight out. What I am interested in is something that has a very strong fantastic element to it, but without being the 'stereotypical' fantasy stuff that I am really not as interested in going into. Obviously, from the title of this thread, I am looking to run something with no magic in it. Period. No spell casters, no clerics with healing magic...none of that. I do want there to be elements of the fantastic in there, however. I want bizarre non-humans who are different from elves and dwarves, and who are more than just the familiar tropes and conventions dressed up in new clothing.
I want a world that is dangerous, strange and more than a little dark around the edges *but* at the same time I want the the heroes (the PCs) to be grand and larger than life. They are heroes who kick ass and take names, but at the same time there are grander threats to them out there in the larger world. But I don't want those threats to be so overwhelming that there is no chance of the PCs being able to achieve victory over these threads. I want mythic and fantastic, but without the usual trappings of magic that populate most fantasy games and books.
Please, comment and let me know what you think.
Edit: Here's an interesting blog post that was mentioned in the RPGnet thread.