Both Grounded and Fantastic: A Central Tension

08 Oct, 2025

A Lakelands setting post

In a previous Lakelands post, I discuss a central tension that animates the setting, one which rejects both hope and cynicism. To a significant extent that tension is just a question of realism to me: the denial of cynicism in particular gets at something true. As it happens, an emphasis on realism is one half of the other central tension that animates the setting. This second tension isn't a two-fold rejection like the first one, however, but is instead a two-fold embrace: the Lakelands are both grounded and fantastic.

Source: Rohollah Saberi, 2023

The Fantastic and the Mundane?

As an undergraduate English major I was enrolled in a seminar called American Literature: The Fantastic and the Mundane, taught in the 2008-2009 academic year by Michael D. Snediker. It wouldn't be correct to say this course had a particular influence on the Lakelands setting, but the second part of its name does come to mind whenever I think about what I want to do with it. The Lakelands are both fantastic and mundane.

To a certain extent, "both fantastic and mundane" represents my approach to every game I run. Although I'm drawn to fantasy and supernatural horror settings, I also engage with games best if they adhere to a degree of anthropological realism. I want to ask, Given a certain fantastic premise, what then would happen? For instance, take this question: "Given everything we know about the fantastical drow, including their strictly hierarchical society with a polyandrous aristocratic class, what kinds of literature would the drow write?" The bounds on that "would" are of course determined by plausibility, by the invisible rulebooks that describe how I think societies and cultures and literatures behave. I say they are "of course" determined by plausibility because there aren't a lot of ways "would," instead of "could," makes sense in that question; the other possibility is, "what would happen in a particular genre," but that's not what I'm really asking, even if it's what others are asking. Now, there is a version of "what then could happen?" that I find interesting, but that's still one where "could" is bound by plausibility: what's the most surprising, funny, or dramatically productive thing that could still happen in this scenario, according to those invisible rulebooks? For instance, I'll ask this question: "Given the existence of a whole new subspecies of dicephalic human, what are some amusing cultural practices they could reasonably develop?"

There are people who seem to get this approach immediately, who understand that good fiction disregards some kinds of plausibility but commits to other kinds of plausibility, and does this fairly consistently throughout the work or series.¹ What kinds of plausibility it ignores and what kinds it observes are part of what gives a work its particular flavour. There is no problem with a text being unrealistic; there can be a problem if a text is inconsistently unrealistic, if it surprises you with a kind of implausibility it had up to that point carefully avoided. There are people who get all this, and there are people who don't seem to get this. I've never known how to explain it to the ones who don't get it, so for now I am just going to assume anyone reading this is one of the people who gets it.

One of the things I'm trying to do with the Lakelands setting, I suppose, is design it to allow and encourage my natural inclinations. There are settings I love that are nonetheless very difficult to approach this way; Gamma World is the first that comes to mind. Another thing I'm trying to do is double down here: I want to maximize this tension between reality and unreality. The setting is not entirely about the tension between the fantastic and the mundane, but at least a portion of it is.

Both Grounded and Fantastic

"Mundane" isn't quite right, though. It's almost right. The Lakelands is a setting where accountants and other mundane spreadsheet jobs really do matter: anyone who can figure out the logistics of getting generic painkillers from a Montreal warehouse to little Wisconsin villages is a hero. The mundane does matter, but that's not exactly what I mean. The word I keep returning to is "grounded." "Mundane" implies something at least a little boring; "grounded" does not. If you're grounded, you're oriented toward what is, and what is likely. Because the real world is often interesting if you pay attention to its details and have some amount of curiosity, it is not necessarily boring. A grounded game gives space for these small details.

I like a grounded game in part because I'm interested in the little quirks of everyday life, but that's not the only reason to embrace grounded games. Groundedness can also improve the fantastic, in two ways. First, it creates contrast; I talked about this in a previous post about NPC types, where some characters heighten the tone and genre by embodying them, while other characters heighten the tone and genre by denying them in favour of realism. For instance, a cowardly and practical retainer in a chivalric romance makes the knights look all the more heroic. Second, groundedness helps sustain the suspension of disbelief: certain concessions to the reality principle help players (including the GM) accept all the deviations from it.² In order to indulge in a fantasy, we need to disguise it at least a little bit with scraps of reality. Is the inverse also true: just as the grounded heightens the fantastic, does the fantastic heighten the grounded?

All this only matters if there's a way to bring it to the table. The Lakelands setting in particular creates and sustains this tension by dividing the grounded and the fantastic into specific distinct but interpenetrating spheres: the Weird is fantastic; most everything else is grounded.

The Weird, and thus the fantastic, is most concentrated in dreamzones, places of heightened imagination, both positive and negative, though much more often the latter. These dreamzones are created indirectly by the Unbound, whose Arrival started the North American apocalypse, and the Unbound are agents of pure nightmare, of terrible fantasy. Those eldritch gods, however, will be off-stage for most Lakelands games, and so dreamzones remain the most prominent force for the fantastic. What happens in a dreamzone isn't entirely without limits: everything inside was once something normal that has since been transformed, and there are (mechanical and fictional) limits to how quickly and radically they can change, but what can happen in them goes far beyond what happens in the real world. If the GM wants to heighten the fantastic, dreamzones and the things that come out of them are the surest ways to do it.

The rest of the Lakelands are overwhelmingly mundane, with a handful of careful concessions to the post-apocalyptic genre. The concerns of the people who live there are often realistic ones: putting food on the table, keeping family and community traditions, impressing neighbours, repairing the leaky roof, praising God (or honouring the gods or whatever else their religion requires), finding and pleasing a spouse or spouses, and so on. And, just as in the real world, there are people with less grounded concerns, who seek fame or notoriety, who wish to rebuild society according to their moral vision, who are so afraid of aging and death that they will go to any lengths to deny their mortality. To the best of my abilities, the world of the Lakelands adheres to what would happen, given all of the setting's cosmic horror aspects – or, at least, it adheres to the most interesting things that I think could happen, given those aspects.

These are not two worlds apart, however. Creatures of fantasy leave the dreamzones from time to time, and invade the world of regular people. Regular people also have a habit of entering the dreamzones and bringing occult objects and ephemeral spirits back out. Members of each world must, to a large degree, obey the laws of the world they've entered: mutant monsters can only survive the world outside the dreamzones if they have coherent anatomies, while regular people are more physically and psychologically mutable inside those Weird spaces. The tension is achieved by grounded characters and fantastic creatures crossing the boundaries between realms of comparative plausibility and realms of comparative imagination. (Of course, neither is pure: both plausibility and imagination are constrained by genre conventions and by the need to model the world in a game that is fair to the players.)

Grounded Fantasy?

I've mentioned elsewhere that I wasn't aware of Seedling Games's post titled "Grounded Fantasy" when I settled on the phrase "both grounded and fantastic." A similar sensibility to my own motivates grounded fantasy, from what I can tell; certainly quite a lot of that post's discussion appeals to me greatly. As just one example, take this, which relates to both the grounded-fantastic tension and the hope-cynicism tension:

It also flips some other OSR-ish tropes on their head. Your character doesn't matter to the world, you're nobody special. But much like in real life, so what? You matter to your friends, to the community. And interpersonal relationships are more likely to matter in grounded fantasy. You are part of a larger society. You can't just roll into town, commit a bunch of crimes, mess things up for everyone, and expect people to be fine with it. But you aren't a disposable pawn, either.

That's just realistic: people have, and care about, their relationships.

However, I don't think the Lakelands is grounded fantasy, exactly, for a number of reasons.

1. The Lakelands setting isn't fantasy, at least not in the genre fiction sense; although I do make certain nods to fantasy conventions, I am working more squarely in the post-apocalyptic genre and in the cosmic horror/weird fiction/gothic horror genre cluster.
2. I'm not committed to high lethality, if only because I currently plan to use a low-lethality system, Fate Core, as the setting's assumed system. (Although New School Revival mechanics aren't part of a definition of grounded fantasy, it's notable that Seedling Games assumes most grounded fantasy will be NSR and the Lakelands for the time being aren't.)
3. As Seedling Games describes it, in grounded fantasy magic "isn't common enough to affect day to day life or regular society" and "exists [...] as a series of exceptions"; the Lakelands, meanwhile, have been entirely transformed by a supernatural apocalypse. While most people don't encounter the Weird in day to day life, the Weird certainly affects day-to-day life in hundreds of ways.

I therefore can't simply point you toward Seedling Games's "Grounded Fantasy" as an explanation of what I'm doing. You won't go too wrong, though, if you read it while saying, "This is in the same family as what the Lakelands is doing."

It shouldn't be too surprising that several TTRPG creators and bloggers are converging on similar playstyles. In this hobby we're all trying, whether we know it or not, to find the places between imagination and reality where we're most engaged. By some accounts, that's the whole thing fiction does: concede just enough to realism that we can accept the fantasy. We each have our own fantasies and our own sense of what's plausible, of course; it is ultimately the case that every creator will make different concessions to different senses of what's real. We're all negotiating between the fantastic and the mundane. What I've outlined above is how I'm hoping to do it with the Lakelands.

#cosmic horror #dreamzones #post-apocalyptic #style and approach #the Lakelands #the Weird