I take trayburn as saying "you seem to have crafted a specific setting, with specific names of gods and previous empires, rather than, as in apocalypse world, left things open by saying 'there was an apocalypse, there's a psychic maelstrom -- decide in play what these mean'".

So that, for instance, there's no specific name of a character, institution, place(except the quasi-place "the psychic maelstrom"), or belief system which is a mandated part of AW as opposed to an example. Your game might have mudfish and someone named Dremmer, but then again it might not. In your AW:DA game, unmodded, there's a Xristos, there was an Empire of Eagles, etc.

In other words, AW:DA is not just a ruleset, it's a ruleset with a setting, the way that, say, Runequest came to you already boxed with Glorantha.

Quote from: trayburn on March 03, 2014, 04:00:20 PM

I see that, but why choose a lower rank?

Maybe you don't want to deal with so many aspects of holding management?

I agree with you on this one.  If it was to be more like vikings magic wouldn't exist, and I would also be very interested in such a variant.  What I would say though it just remove certain classes.  IF you remove the troll-killer you don't have monsters.  Also magic could just  be roleplayed as mysticism if it wanted.  I think without much trouble mysticism can be the role and it's not "magic".  Just remove Dragons and Monsters and replace with more natural occuring ideas.  In the Dark Ages, the unknowing world was magic enough. The Mongol Horde were so advanced in horse archery they were considered Centaurs.  A 7foot tall man was considered a "Giant".  Just make magic the reality of the scary life of the unknown.  To the English Vikings were monsters and so forth.  Change moral codes and you can get magic without having magic. 

Although you are right the game tends to the Game of Thrones World of fantasy when it doesn't necessarily have to be so specific.