Azerothian Fantasy

"In Azeroth, they have have sort of fantasy fiction about a world that is in many ways similar and yet wildly different from their own. In this unbelievable world there is no magic, no special powers at all. It is a world where people have to figure out how to go great distance quickly without portals, where healing must be done with clever devices and unbelievably complex potions, and the populace has become dependant on machines to take the place of magic. The cities are beyond belief, millions of people, and largely isolated from Nature, to the point where the inhabitants can even defeat the weather within the massive building in which they pursue most of their quests. The inhabitants live their lives surrounded with exotic machines of very description, and authors often take great pleasue in coming up with a plethora of fanciful and silly mechanisms to serve even the most mundane functions.

In most of this fiction, there are no clearly defined levels, and it is possible, by choice or happenstance, to level down as well as up. Without great monsters to fight, the inhabitants of this fantasy world fight each other in battlegrounds as enormous as their cities. There are no healers, only people trained to repair the combatants, just as they would repair a machine, and the priests cannot resurrect. When there are no battlegrounds, they hold mock battles in which they contend over balls of various sizes. Others who wish to risk their lives and levels master various arcane activities, and others play the auctionhouses, which are again as massive and complex as their cities.

Of course, most of the people of Azeroth simply disregard such fictions as impossible nonsense, but fans of the genre find the drama of a character struggling with the rise and fall of their level to be utterly absorbing, and the breadth of imagination it takes to create a whole world so different from their own.

Written largely by humans, the attitude towards this genre varies from race to race. It is particularly popular with gnomes, dwarves, and goblins but Blood Elves disdain the very concept of a world without magic. Night Elves and Taurens find the machine-dominated societies disturbingly dystopic and view a taste for such fiction a sign of a maladjusted personality. Trolls and Draenai particularly enjoy stories in which a denizen of Azeroth is transported - usually by a faulty portal - into this other world. Draenai stories of this sort usually have the main character righting wrongs or aiding the downtrodden with magic, or sometimes without. Trolls, on the other hand, relish the mischief wreaked upon unsupecting citizens by the magic using main character. Orcs, as one might expect, enjoy grand, sweeping tales of battlegrounds that span entire countries. The Forsaken find these stories openly discriminatory, as there are no undead there. The argument that there can been no undead if there is no magic holds no sway with them."

Credit goes to mshcherbatskaya, quoted from here.

Interesting read. And, I learned a new word!!!
Dystopic

write a short story about this azerothian fairy tail from the perspective of a native azerothian telling the tell to the orphans of orgrimmar or stormwind... hee hee