Setting: His Dark Materials

I just finished reading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman this afternoon and was pleasantly reminded by how, in another world, it couldve been snuggly ensconced in the middle of Appendix N. In it, you have a little girl with device that tells the truth by use of nested metaphors, talking polar bears that wore massive suits of armor, a Texan (as in the country) aeronaut that makes his living gunslinging in a hot air balloon, angels, witches who can make themselves invisible, tiny poison-spurred people that ride giant dragonflies, a trepanned british explorer-cum-shaman who can control the weather, a knife that can cut into parallels worlds, and most importantly, people's conciousness' being visible and in the form of wild animals. Even by ignoring the (ir)religious bits of the books (and toward the end it gets a bit hard to do), the whole series is a wealth of weirdness that i can only describe as C.S.Lewis-ian.

Lewisian isnt the greatest word for it, of course, but it covers a broad base that a lot of settings pull from; its the genre of the fairy tale, where the dangers are familiar to the listenener, but made slightly magical to keep them new. Honestly, folkloric may be the better descriptor of it, though it doesnt fully describe the much more serialized nature of something like The Golden Compass and stories like it, where each scene/chapter is more akin to those bedtime stories your grandparent may have told you, where each night some new monster or ally would be introduced instead of having previous characters and their abilities being used in new and interesting ways (another connection could be made to Beorn in the Hobbit and many of the small 'sideplots' of many myths and sagas from around the world). Novelty is king here, especially of the kind where few of the elements interrelate in any major way.

Take, for example, the panserbjorne: polar bears with opposable thumbs who wear armor and live on Svalbard. They cant be fooled by humans, always keep their word, and are known to be the worlds best metalsmiths. When taken in its fullness, it sounds like something straight out of the Mahabharata or the Saga of Beowulf; in that same vein, it come straight out of the mouth of anyone telling a campfire tale and adding bits of flavour to an invention as they go. In a word, 'folkloric settings', like His Dark Materials, are the ones that have the most in common with creative (in the strictest definition of the word) GMing.