Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" discussion

The Cosmic Horror of Sword & Sorcery
by Bill Ward




LINK: https://goodman-games.com/tftms/2021/...

Blurb from Bill Ward:

The bones of sword & sorcery lie close to the skin, and one sure blade-stroke is enough to lay them bare for all to see. There is plot-driven pulp action there, at the core, but supporting that is a foundation of swashbuckling historical adventure, and expectations of encounters of the picaresque and the exotic kind. To be sure we can also see the unsentimentality of the hardboiled, the individualism of the American experience, and a surprising dose of literary realism for a genre concerned with fantastic monsters, haunted crypts, and vampiric blades. It is of course from these supernatural elements that the horror of sword & sorcery emerges – indeed it’s where the ‘sorcery’ part of the name derives, and it is at least as important an ingredient in these tales as self-reliant protagonists, mysterious lost cities, and lands both far and strange.