The Shadow of Yesterday is a fantasy roleplaying game that is very much defined by its peculiar setting, NEAR. Clinton characterizes it as “pumpkin fantasy”, akin to that genre of fantasy literature in which young boys leave the farm, take up the sword, learn of their world and their place in it, and ultimately redeem everything.
Aside from pumpkin fantasy, a major influence for many of us working on TSoY has been the idea of pulp aesthetics as a counterpoint to genrified post-Tolkien, post-D&D fantasy literature: Near is a very organic world (some would call it “gritty”) that draws pretty freely from sword & sorcery imagery and encourages stories to go where they will regardless of conventional structure. So there is a definite tension between uplifting heroism and literary realism in this material. It is a fruitful tension that I have seen no need to resolve: TSoY is at once sentimental and pragmatic; it is always exciting to sit down to play and see what we bring to being this time.
This is not to say that The Shadow of Yesterday is a generic fantasy game that suits anything and everything. To the contrary, Near has a very definite feel, one that is easy to recognize, as anybody who’s witnessed our frequent forum discussions on expanding and detailing Near can attest. To wit, Clinton even wrote these principles into his book:
Stories of Near are humanistic stories, and even when the protagonists might not be human, they are still people, and their fates speak to us on that level. Read this as a refutation of certain sorts of fantasy literature and roleplaying if you will.
There is more to Near in general, such as the Sky Fire and the Year of Shadow, but those are incidental matters of history, not underlying thematic purpose.