The World of Sylansse aka All About Highest Fantasy by John Josten is a role playing game supplement published by Board Enterprises. This is part of the Small Bites series and is the “World Walker” version. The full version is available to Patreon subscribers and is nearly double the length. This supplement builds a different world to all the previous ones.
The supplement is available as a 31-page PDF for free from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover
The Introduction mentions the World of Fletnern, which was always intended to make sense, but there’s another type of fantasy setting, one they refer to as highest fantasy, one where fairy-tale things happen. What is Highest Fantasy? states this is a setting where magic is an everyday part of life, one where modelling the setting after Middle Ages Europe makes little sense. Again, the setting is supposed to make sense.
Sylansse Wiki introduces a new wiki, this one for the new setting. This has extracts taken from the wiki, covering history, legends, opinions, basics, continents, cities and sites.
The Sounding Board has reproductions of blog posts.
Cosmic Horror Themes in FRPGs considers using these. With cosmic horror, most people don’t know what is really going in, with three reasons given. This explains why a cosmic horror adventure could be dropped into a campaign that didn’t know about it; it was secret.
High Fantasy Enchanters starts by considering the differences between high and low fantasy and why enchanters would make things; to get rich.
High Fantasy – Enchanted Items considers the wages people would earn, and what sort of items would be produced, often based on what the saving would be by buying an enchanted item.
Lifestyles of the Magical and Mundane considers how magic affects the people of Sylansse and what sorts would be used. A Day in the Life briefly considers life in a fantasy world.
News of Sylansse starts with Sylansse World History, a world conquered by elves originally. Troll Liberation describes how the trolls were conquered, then how they gained their freedom.
The Good Life explains that Sylansse is described as being “highest fantasy” with magic everywhere, even if everyone doesn’t use it.
Small Towns and City Neighbourhoods covers The City-State of Gyven. Gyven is the only city-state in the world and was the first major city conquered by humans, and functions as their sort-of capital.
Monsters and Other Menaces covers the different intelligent races to be found; many of these added new sun-types after the world was hit by a comet, as described earlier. It starts with The Races of Man, which include halflings and giants, and has descriptions of the human factions. The Faerie now includes elves, some of whom are semi-divine. The Goblin races includes ogres and orcs. The Trolls include cyclopes and dwarves. Dragons include anything draconic.
On Magical Matters covers Magical Styles, which describes the six different magical styles of humans followed by briefer details on hill dwarves, mountain dwarves, high elves, wood elves and goblins, orcs and ogres.
The Enlistment Report is Training. The Slopes describes dwarven training, Elven Training Academies the elves and “The Farm” and The Mountain Academy two types of human training. More are then briefly covered.
What’s Missing? explains what’s in the full version.
In Conclusion wraps things up and provides links.
The Almanac of Sylansse has planetary details.
Sylansse World History is a brief Players’ Version.
The final page has a map of the continents.
The World of Sylansse aka All About Highest Fantasy in Review
The PDF is well bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. The Table of Contents is to a lower level of depth and is hyperlinked and there are also a number of external links. Navigation is good. The text maintains a two-column format and a few minor errors were noticed. There are a number of stock illustrations, both colour and black and white. Presentation is okay.
Though in format this is similar to other entries in the series, being a collection of generally related articles, in topic it is rather different. Until now, every Small Bites supplement has covered the same world. This introduces a new one. As stated, it’s one where magic is commonplace, though truthfully the overall level of magic is probably similar to other high fantasy worlds. The main difference is that this supplement explores just what that would mean for the world, something few supplements other than A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe have gone into. If magic is commonplace, it affects everything. The World of Sylansse aka All About Highest Fantasy is an unusual supplement for the series, but contains some interesting material, and it can be found by clicking here.
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