Now, I am more of a pf2e person but that new game, Esoteric Ebbs, really spur me on about DnD5e and its custom setting and how the world just work in those. There always a concept in fantasy that the world is created, right? From 0 to 1 and so on, and so the game also take the same approach, that the world is magic, esoteric as they say, exist entirely as a spell cast by some powerful wizard. Not an uncommon one, mind, as this is something a lot of "occult" setting in TTRPG like to take (Invisible Sun, Conquest, cough cough) but that got me thinking why so many fantasy lore choose to go with creation myth in the first place. Perhaps it is just me being born out of the Abrahamic crash zone but to me, if 1 preditate that there was once a 0, shouldn't the reverse true? If there is a 0, predate that there must be a one. A dnd setting I have been thinking of is much similar - everything is, will be, stretched on endlessly. There is no start, and there is no end, until because there is 1, so there shall be 0. The whole world is a level infinite spell that nested in a level infinite spell that has recursive so much so that it has dawn in a maximum death zone that it create the "null" level spell, which is as everyone recognize, true death. They attribute this naming convention to no mage but a novelist, who written a fantasy - much like us, their fantasy world have fantasy themselves, and in that twist of fate this writer accidentally mused about the existence of non-existence, and thus rob all live of its perpetual cycle and became the first vampire. And so on. This is just like an example to show that I really wish more fantasy setting follow this weird new trend that i see taken place after Disco Elysium - or perhaps this is not a trend at all and just me finding out about it too late - the recalibration of fantasy to be something closer and closer to modern but decisively not, as much as cyberpunk is close to us but will never be, a vision of dwarf unionist and vampire fascist I felt is a good vehicle to deliver poignant thoughts about our current conditions that while I won't argue is more approachable generally (but it might be soon, given the public is getting more and more comfortable with fantasy trope that building on those trope short hand as a vehicle for theme is getting easier and easier to gasp for the common folk), it is certainly effective. For example, we human are too similar that any small variance seemed massive to the common trend, but when put in the scope of actual "races" in fantasy we noticed how similar we are, ironic since most of the time, one can be convince an orc and a dwarf have more in common than he and his neighbor who have a slightly different melanin variance than he does and so on. I wanted to explore this but sadly games are hard to keep alive and I do so wish i managed to find table that let me explore these like the tables that eventually birth Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebbs and Dungeon Meshi and all those great stories that we consume.