I had lately been reading an absolute swath of low-effort isekai fantasy fiction, when Angry Steak challenged me to do a book report on The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson. The contrast between modern garbage and Appendix-N classics is stark. I could say a lot about the differences, but the main thing that stuck out to me was the "scale" of the story.

I mean this in terms of years, where The Broken Sword covers the adventures of multiple generations as opposed to common modern fiction which zooms in on a single adventure, commonly over the course of like a week or a month or something. I also mean "scaling" in terms of written scenes, both dialogue and combat/action. The Broken Sword just covers a much wider range of scenes, zooming all the way in to specific lines of dialogue, and random poems Skafloc invents, yet, not feeling the need to journalistically document every conversation, and freely "zooming out" to say something like "and there was much feasting for the rest of the season."

Take combat: Broken Sword loses no sense of the action, the fighting on the ships when the Troll Army meets the Elfin Fleet at sea is grisly, intense, and specific, yet it again does not feel the need to document what every character did at every moment of the battle. Precisely when Skafloc cast exactly which spell is not detailed. He "hewed and hewed" and a bunch of Trolls were dead. Exciting. My imagination fills in the gaps.

I think Imagination (tm) is really what it boils down to. The Broken Sword is comfortable being written in a "Legendary" style, which trusts it's readers to fill in the gaps with their own imagination.

AD&D players probably already see my conclusion coming here, but... This is the difference between AD&D (or OD&D) and 5e. AD&D provides for free scaling down to significant swings of a sword and scaling up to years of castle-building. The newer "streamlined" 5e actually turns into more of a slog, waiting for each superhero character to take their extra-special turn swinging at the Big Bad.

AD&D, and Appendix N ask more of you.

Also those Elf women are... bad news.