So Gregorius 21778 released Rescue From the Temple of the Revealing Flame, an adventure for our Blood of Pangea game. This one's a nice mixture of classic Howard and Lieber's darker brand; but while fantasy (writ large) remains a welcoming landscape, the sovereignty of sword & sorcery is less flexible. High fantasy can incorporate its elements; but not the other way around beyond the purely incidental owing to its defining attributes, the Seven Seals (or traits) of the genre given below as follows:
1) Men (and women) using physical strength and cleverness to survive...
2) Hedonism; gold, sex, and other earthly pleasures, as a motivator...
3) Sorcery disdained (if not outright denounced) as questionable at best...
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4) Living day by day, and coin by coin, with no thought for tomorrow*...
5) Barbarians more virtuous than the so-called civilized people around them...
6) Banditry (and/or piracy) practiced with a concern for the innocent...
7) A prehistoric setting inspired by real-world civilizations, suitably exotic**...
Basically, no demi-humans or friendly magic as an impersonal force; sensual pleasures as the primary motivator; an amoral world of amoral heroes who nonetheless hold to a primitive code of honor, all in an exotic setting drawn from our ancient world. As fantastic genres go, sword & sorcery remains the most humanistic of them all. Tolkien delivered a hopeful missive of men made perfect, while pulp provided the unvarnished truth, even if it came with primal, often prehistoric, terrors. It's a genre that works best when properly understood...
*With notable exceptions; still, Conan wore his crown on a troubled brow.
**Leiber and Moorcock imagined other worlds altogether, but with a historic bent.
