
Raymond E. Feist on Building a World from Scratch - DanBC
http://www.unboundworlds.com/2018/05/raymond-e-feist-building-world-scratch/
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glaberficken
>"Many thousand years of hunting and gathering gets tedious, so as soon as
humans figured out beasts of burden and basic agriculture, they put down
roots, in both senses. It saved a lot of walking. It was also the start of the
concept of “after work,” which history teaches us is a thing most humans
strive to increase in any way possible. That is, leisure, time off, vacations
and every other use of time that isn’t working, hunting, fighting, and of
course sleeping."

I recently read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, where he thoroughly debunks this
notion that a transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural life-style
brought more leisure time. I found it compelling, but don't have the arguments
at hand at the moment.

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WaxProlix
The common wisdom that I've heard was the opposite of that: hunter-gatherer
societies had a wealth of free time. It's with agriculture, permanence, and
the optimization that they allow that we start to lose it. Similarly though,
no real citations here.

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btilly
If you read _Guns, Germs and Steel_ you will find the same information, with
citations of anthropological research supporting it.

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vajrabum
Raymond Feist built Midkemia around a RPG campaign. So did a lot of other
Fantasy authors of his generation, Elizabeth Moon (Paksenarrion), and Robert
Asprin (Thieves World) are two. Might be obvious but I'd say those games are
partly behind the explosion of fantasy starting in the late 1970s. It made
world building a lot easier, but there was a landmine. Feist either
accidentally or on purpose included elements of the game Empire of the Petal
Throne without acknowledgement or renumeration. He apparently wasn't the GM
and claims he didn't know where it came from.

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PhasmaFelis
> _Feist either accidentally or on purpose included elements of the game
> Empire of the Petal Throne without acknowledgement or renumeration._

What sort of elements? RPGs and fantasy novels have always borrowed liberally
from each other; unless it's particularly blatant/wholesale, I'm not sure it's
a major issue.

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kemayo
There's a not-bad summary of the controversy in this review:
[http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-134.html](http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-134.html)

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DanBC
I'm submitting this because it's an interesting article, but also because
UnboundWorlds has a lot of great content that I think people on HN would find
interesting.

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bargl
This series was my first experience with, some books I read as a kid are
better left alone. I have REALLY fond memories of the magician apprentice. And
it was really good at the time. But I've changed so much that when I went back
to re-read it I didn't enjoy it at all. I had to stop so that I didn't change
my perception of the rest of the series.

All that said this was an interesting article that puts a lot of the series in
perspective. Thanks for sharing. I might pick up his new world and see how
that one plays out.

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projectramo
The first rule of fantasy fiction: never reread what you liked when you were
13.

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acheron
Well, Tolkien holds up alright.

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projectramo
It just feels so slow. It actually made me understand the need for the modern
updates

