I feel like all great fantasy needs an element of I Have Decided to it. I Have Decided this otherwise premodern setting has a race of 19th century rural Englishmen who are under four feet tall. Melnibonians don’t shit. The pope is a turtle who teaches adventurers magic spells.

Dragons have a 3 stage lifecycle and there are some complications arising from their cocoon stage.

Even though there's guns and spaceships and planet-destroying-superweapons the Cool People fight with laser swords.

Michael Moorcock and other writers have very strong opinions on things and it shows up in their books

tangentially related, just wanted to make my quarterly plea to, if your schedule has lightened a little bit, do a d&d game here on bluesky