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Yora
2013-12-27, 03:46 PM
The vast majority of Fantasy worlds can be traced back directly to two main sources. Victorian Era fantasies about medieval England that were successfully spread as history, and Tolkiens fantasies about prehistoric England, which he had the decency to clearly identify as fantasy.

You know how it goes: Humans dominate the world, elves and dwarves lost almost all their power and retreated into a few remote strongholds, and there some halflings around too. Dragons were once common, but not anymore, and the same goes for giants. Only orcs and goblins are still common and they are generic evil guys. Then you got your kings in their castles, with all their knights and their court wizard. You know, standard stuff.

Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance work that way, as do, from what I've heard, the Song of Ice and Fire and Witcher series, as well as the Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age games to an extensive degree. Not that this is has to be a bad thing, but once you've seen it so often you probably feel like something else.
TSR really spiced things up with their Planescape and Dark Sun settings, and more recently WotC also made their attempt with Eberron, which was also quite successful. And even when I start planning a campaign wanting to do something different, it tends to slip back into generic 13th century England again. So what things did you work into your campaigns to make them a different type of fantasy world than the generic standard, or what elements have you seen in fantasy settings from other sources? I'm quite interested to learn more about what people did in this regard.

hymer
2013-12-27, 04:01 PM
I use a lot of stuff from antiquity - ancient Rome, ancient Greece, that sort of thing. This has a lot to do with my being much more familiar with political struggles and schemes in such settings than I do in the high medieval world. So when things get political, the structure of the late Republic is clearly an inspiration.

I also often have other races than humans be the dominant ones. Elves and Dwarves in decline have been done a lot, so in my latest campaign, everybody is in decline (at least until the PCs can turn things around). Before that, I had a campaign where elves were the dominant power in the region, albeit a fairly hands-off one. They had an experiment with keeping a few human cities as protectorates, trying to find out if this was a viable way to deal with humans who couldn't seem to fathom that cutting down trees is an act of war.

I recently made a campaign heavily inspired by Viking-era Scandinavia, a rich mine for fantasy roleplaying if ever I saw one.

I also once has a campaign where the PCs were all orcs from the same tribe. They spent their time gathering goblins for arrowfodder, materials for patching up their precariously repaired equipment, and lots of food. Goblins were the diet when there wasn't enough food, bad for morale that. Dwarves were horrors, and halfling settlements were much sought after (though I don't think they ever tracked one down).

AMFV
2013-12-27, 04:08 PM
The Midnight Setting by Fantasy Flight games is a pretty good campaign setting for contravening standard adventuring world assumptions.

Edit: Mystara as written is also a very different setting than a standard one, featuring many magic type stuff.

Yora
2013-12-27, 04:24 PM
Oh yeah, Midnight is pretty cool. While not actually correct, lots of people have summarized it as "What if Sauron had won?", and it does give you a pretty accurate picture of how the world looks.

What I did with my current setting was to take a great deal of the generic fantasy standards, but set the campaign several thousand years earlier, when the elves and dwarves are still in the middle of their empire building, with humans as one of the many barbarian vassal people. Similar to the Roman auxilliary troops.
It's a nice start, but not actually that different from a campaign set in one of those border areas where men, dwarves, and elves mingle in a generic setting.

Knaight
2013-12-27, 04:27 PM
I generally base things heavily on non-English history when creating setting elements, and don't generally use fantasy races. This alone keeps things away from the generic "medieval"* fantasy.

I also generally avoid decline. That's not to say that it isn't anywhere, but the whole trope of some great historic empire that modern states are pale shadows of is something I essentially never employ. Sure, that might be the case in a particular locality, but odds are that somewhere fairly nearby is another civilization far more advanced than whatever dead one is overshadowing the locality.

That alone shakes up a lot of the core sources. Victorian presentation of the medieval period was very heavy on it being in the shadow of Rome, which was far greater. While there is some truth to this in a few aspects (e.g. the old roman architecture being extremely impressive in the early middle ages), it gets way overblown in presentation. Generic fantasy then tends to take that up to 11. You've got the artifacts of old magic that can never be reproduced, the gigantic unified civilization which is now a bunch of ruins far beyond modern architecture, the titanic and wondrous beasts which no longer exist, etc.

Spin that around, and you've got something very different. The artifacts of old magic are indeed very impressive for their time. There's some beautiful artistry, and some very clever design. Functionality wise, they're obsolete. The ruins are also incredible things - in the sense of how it can be amazing to see what people did before they had modern materials and machinery. What is currently had is not something precious that much be preserved against slow decay, but the best that can be done with current knowledge and current societal infrastructure, both of which are being improved.

*Though the generic medieval fantasy always seems to be lacking in actual medieval institutions.

TheCountAlucard
2013-12-27, 04:28 PM
Can I ask ya to look at Exalted, again? I know it's not the first time I've asked this of you, but it really sounds like something that fits the bill.

Exalted draws on everything from Conan to the Odyssey to Tales from the Flat Earth and One Thousand and One Nights to Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West.

The breadth of the setting is truly staggering, covering areas inspired by dozens of real-world and fantasy cultures, often with a startling amount of realism to it (at least, as realistic as you can get with gods and demons anyway).

Yora
2013-12-27, 04:35 PM
I also generally avoid decline. That's not to say that it isn't anywhere, but the whole trope of some great historic empire that modern states are pale shadows of is something I essentially never employ.
The theme of decline had a clear purpose in Lord of the Rings, since the story was basically about the end of an era. It's made pretty clear that one major element of the story is passing the torch to the humans, which in turn explains why humans rule the world alone now.
I often feel that the theme of elven and dwarved decline simply appears in most fantasy fiction because Tolkien did it, but without any real purpose for it in these other settings.

I made it a deliberate choice to set my campaign setting at the start of history and make it a setting defined by creation and expansion. But even then, you still need a world into which to expand, and if you're going to find anything of interest there, it had to be inhabited by someone else before. Someone wrote an article about D&D being inherently post-apocalyptic, since that's really the only way you can have large number of ruins filled with treasures and powerful magic.

One thing I took from Skyrim are the Ancient Nords as still encountered in the tombs of the Draugr. I just made them Ancient Elves and portray them as wights (inspired by... Lord of the Rings). They are an older civilization, but not a superior one. Their tombs and ruins are more primitive than current constructions, but they knew more about the time before their own than people remember now, making their ruins valuable sources for knowledge about the very early times.

inexorabletruth
2013-12-27, 04:46 PM
I only really play D&D… so my options are limited to their mechanics which tend to favor iron-age tech. But even within those mechanics, there are options.

Post-Apocalyptic:
I was in a campaign once where everyone played as warforge characters who awoke from their storage facilities an undetermined amount of time after the end of civilization. It was a very interesting world to explore. Unfortunately it was too taxing on our DM once finals (he was in college) came up so we quit the campaign. But until that point, he was kind enough to use great visuals and wrote elaborate narratives to describe strange creatures, landscapes and skylines. We spent most of our time immersed in the "environment" just collecting data. In all reality, we were just nerding out about the extensive detail the DM put into the campaign.

Air World:
Think Skies of Arcadia, D&D edition. God, that was a fun campaign… soaring the skies in a pirate airship, looting, thieving and exploring the vast fractured planet. Most lands were little more than floating islands, and falling off your ship didn't necessarily kill you, but there was a chance that you might get stuck floating in the fractured planet's gravity, bobbing up and down like a rubber ducky in a bathtub, if you're too far away from anything to grab on too. At that point your only hope was to get rescued before you were picked to pieces by harpies.

Renaissance Era:
It's not a huge difference from pseudo-Dark Age D&D, but it ads a touch of elegance and grace to the campaign. Science is more highly prized than magic, and art is more powerful than weapons. It creates a different dynamic in the dynamic in RP, because skillful kill-bot brutes and blasters have a harder time gaining respect and are more likely to receive scorn for their exploits than praise. I'm DM'ing one like that now, and the players are really picking up on the period. They tend to fight like ladies and gentlemen… so to speak.

I have more, but these were the cream-of-the-crop campaigns that stepped outside of the box. All in all, I prefer LoTR inspired fantasy, so I gravitate towards those.

If you're asking about systems (not campaign ideas) that favor non-traditional settings, try Shadowrun. I hear it's more sci-fi a-la "The Matrix." There's also a Naruto TRPG, an official MLP TRPG, and a Star Wars TRPG: all of which would be non-iron age and would certainly have nontraditional setting, combat, weapon, and period options.

BWR
2013-12-27, 04:48 PM
There are enough non-'standard' settings that you can find most anything. If I want something a bit outside the norm, I go there. Dark Sun and Planescape have been mentioned.

Prof. M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekumel)setting. Fantasy stories, one of the first campaign settings (published 1975), avoids much of the standard pseudo-mediaeval Europe stuff. More like Dark Sun, in a way.

Dreamtime - a small indie game set about aboriginal Australians.

Various Asian-based settings, like L5R.

Post-apocalyptic alien invasion god avatars in Tribe 8

Post-apoclayptic alien insect invasion fought by leftover technology that everyone thinks is magic: Engel.

The old World of Darkness has some stuff that is based in Europe.

Heck, even the standard campaign settings have their non-European bits. FR has the south, branching off to the Arabian-inspired Al-Qadim, The Asian Kara-Tur++, the South/Meso American jungles of Maztica.
Mystara has its standard PME (pseudo-Mediaeval Europeans), but also Vikings, Renaissance Italy, Classical Greece and Rome, Amerindians, pirates and swashbucklers, Mordor-clone, magical super empire, the Hollow World with innumerable extinct cultures, including Stone Age humans and Neanderthals, Tex-Mex cowboy orcs, Aztecs Azcans, pacifist high-tech elves, Ancient Egyptians, etc.
And you have Golarion, which is basically Mystara 2.0

captpike
2013-12-27, 04:57 PM
I sort of dislike the generic medieval-with-magic as well. that is why in my setting I changed some of the basic assumptions




he basic idea of the world is that the gods of fire and earth are dead and the waters have risen to cover almost everything and then frozen, many races that were alive and now gone, there are only a few cities left, and those cities that do exist have to go to extreme measures to get enough food to exist.

the major civilizations:

Mistit: city of magic, they use undead to farm and for most grunt labor (its the only way they know of to get enough food)

Dus: ruled by a man called "The Emperor" who casts a spell on the fields that allows the city to exist, there have been several rebellions but sense no one has ever found a way to cast the spell needed on the fields he has always been put back in power.
also everyone in the city has a price on their head, you can walk into a government office and pay it off. at which point killed them is no longer a crime.

Mularies: ruled by female eladrin who worship the god of beauty and lust. the richest nation by far, but in some ways a very shallow one, who honestly believe that beauty is more then skin deep.

campaign doc https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-XBPQJ2VFsbaXpqWDZDeEIwN0k/edit?usp=sharing

Grinner
2013-12-27, 05:39 PM
Post-apoclayptic alien insect invasion fought by leftover technology that everyone thinks is magic: Engel.

I've read the opening fiction from the English edition of Engel, and I must say that I hadn't been expecting that summary.

Consequently, I'm beginning to suspect that much so-called "standard fantasy" is actually comprised of attempts to subvert the usual fantasy tropes. The problem may be that they're simply so superficially similar to Middle Earth that you never realize otherwise.

Amaril
2013-12-27, 05:41 PM
I don't think the classic traditions of Tolkien and the like are anything to shy away from if they serve the themes of your world. Are you building a world focused on the conflict between Law and Chaos, the struggle of the last remnants of ancient civilizations fighting to hold on to the glory of the past in the face of the relentless march of progress and change? Go ahead and use declining elves and dwarves. Are you doing it just because all the fantasy you know of uses? Don't. It's just like any world-building technique--good in the right situations.

Lord Raziere
2013-12-27, 05:52 PM
Can I ask ya to look at Exalted, again? I know it's not the first time I've asked this of you, but it really sounds like something that fits the bill.

Exalted draws on everything from Conan to the Odyssey to Tales from the Flat Earth and One Thousand and One Nights to Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West.

The breadth of the setting is truly staggering, covering areas inspired by dozens of real-world and fantasy cultures, often with a startling amount of realism to it (at least, as realistic as you can get with gods and demons anyway).

doesn't seem all that different to me. its still a bunch of adventurers with swords fighting things in a world where magic is rare and most places have a king, with some distant supernatural monsters causing problems.

Tectonic Robot
2013-12-27, 06:17 PM
doesn't seem all that different to me. its still a bunch of adventurers with swords fighting things in a world where magic is rare and most places have a king, with some distant supernatural monsters causing problems.

Well, yeah, but that fantasy isn't based on Tolkien or Victorian stuff, like the OP specified; it's based on eastern theology, wushu fights, all sorts of crazy stuff that you don't get often in most fantasy games. Also, I don't think swords are even that common, when you have all the crazy weapons in Exalted, like deadly spider gauntlets that shoot poison at people.

Also, the backstory is pretty unique and interesting, and stuff. I'd recommend checking it out too if you want an alternative experience.

Also, they don't really have kings, so much as satraps and sultans and elder councils and emperors and warlords. Kings are comparatively rare!

Lord Raziere
2013-12-27, 06:27 PM
I have. I have the whole of 2nd edition Exalted. I like it, but I still don't see it as that different.

and how are anything of those really the different from a king? how is a strap different from a noble with a different name? how are these different aside from you know, the elder council thing?

I mean sultan, warlord, emperor? how are these not the same? they are just different words to describe a boss who commands all the armies on a feudal level.

and the backstory? the backstory is "golden age started to go wrong and then everything decayed and decline" just like any other fantasy.

I like Exalted, but it sometimes has delusions of grandeur about how different it is from other fantasy.

Grinner
2013-12-27, 06:34 PM
I like Exalted, but it sometimes has delusions of grandeur about how different it is from other fantasy.

If I may interject, I don't think Exalted was ever intended to be unique. I think it was supposed to be high fantasy done right.

TheCountAlucard
2013-12-27, 06:36 PM
I have. I have the whole of 2nd edition ExaltedI believe that endorsement was for Yora.


and how are anything of those really the different from a king?This really isn't the place for a political discussion, which that would be pretty much by definition.


I like Exalted, but it sometimes has delusions of grandeur about how different it is from other fantasy.Rather than try and shoot down other people's suggestions with your opinions, why don't you read the OP and suggest stuff yourself?

Thinker
2013-12-28, 12:09 AM
I draw my inspiration mostly from folklore, fairy tales, and to a lesser extent religion. My library includes books on Irish, Italian, Slavic, Chinese, and Japanese folklore, Brothers Grimm and Canterbury Tales, and Greek, Celtic, Chinese, Hindu, Norse, Egyptian, Sumerian, and Canaanite religions. The worlds I create are typically at the beginning of an age of exploration, progress, and discovery. For societies and cultures, I look to real world cultures and typically modify them with aspects of the Old West, the Age of Sail, and the Enlightenment.

Yora
2013-12-28, 07:07 AM
While I am not a huge fan of the setting in general, I like what Morrowind did with the world. Travelling by giant bug through forests of giant mushrooms to towns made from massive turtle shells is something quite different.
And while the Final Fantasy games I played are more sci-fi with magic, I very much enjoy how they really went a far way to show that those worlds are very different from ours. Often I think it's going way too far into silly to be useful for an RPG campaign as I have in mind, but the general direction is something that more people should consider. I think 4th Edition Forgotten Realms tried something like that. Which would have been a great idea, if it hadn't been a change to a setting with a long histroy of "traditional fantasy".

BeerMug Paladin
2013-12-28, 09:33 AM
I once played in a homebrew game where the planet was broken up into shards. There were ancient old shards teeming with monsters and ones that had cities and farms. Ones the sizes of continents and others about the size of football field. All floating around in a loose spherical bubble.

Every 4 weeks (I think, can't quite recall the interval) the plane of shadow (or something, I wasn't quite sure) would intersect the world and bring all sorts of eldritch nasties out into the world. Every city in the world put up a huge magical shell to prevent things from coming inside.

If you were out in that madness, either in an airship, or on a shard, it was really bad for you.

A lot of the cities and setting detail reminded me of Eberron. I'm a big fan of having fantastic landscapes in settings, so this really did appeal to me.

jedipotter
2013-12-28, 12:44 PM
So what things did you work into your campaigns to make them a different type of fantasy world than the generic standard, or what elements have you seen in fantasy settings from other sources? I'm quite interested to learn more about what people did in this regard.

I've done an Elven Empire and Dragon Empire setting, both set in the Forgotten Realms past. It was quite fun to have humans as the weak ones, with few cities or any real power. It was also great fun to get away from human ideas, like set boundary lines. An elven land is ''as far as they care to go that day'' and elves are not picky if someone uses their ''claimed property'', at least for good elven reasons.

Dimers
2013-12-28, 02:01 PM
So what things did you work into your campaigns to make them a different type of fantasy world than the generic standard, or what elements have you seen in fantasy settings from other sources?

I like to put in Higher Powers that interact with the players. Why would a deity be distant from an apostle, if the deity can easily manifest in the world and have a chat? The decision to have gods talk with followers has a LOT of consequences that lead away from generic fantasy. It effectively changes the nature of the gods themselves, as well as all the mortal institutions based on them.

Atheism, animism and pantheism can also be pretty important changes to the standard setting.

Having a single sapient species is pretty unusual these days, too. Imagine a game where the only antagonists have pretty much the same face as you ... hardly the standard dungeoncrawl.

Regardless of how many races you include, social structures can vary widely from Tolkien or Arthur. What if everything is family-based? Not clan, not tribe, but who you're related to by blood/marriage/adoption and how distantly? What if the world is largely communistic, with nary an overlord to be found? Alternatively, what if iron-fisted domination is the order of the day, and any individualism earns you expulsion from any protection or aid?

Arbane
2013-12-28, 02:51 PM
Having a single sapient species is pretty unusual these days, too. Imagine a game where the only antagonists have pretty much the same face as you ... hardly the standard dungeoncrawl.

Exalted again (mostly), Legend of the Wulin, Paranoia... :D

Thinker
2013-12-28, 10:12 PM
What if everything is family-based? Not clan, not tribe, but who you're related to by blood/marriage/adoption and how distantly?

That's a clan-based society.

Craft (Cheese)
2013-12-29, 04:29 AM
Prof. M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekumel)setting. Fantasy stories, one of the first campaign settings (published 1975), avoids much of the standard pseudo-mediaeval Europe stuff. More like Dark Sun, in a way.

Fun fact: Unlike most people, I learned about M.A.R. Barker's work on Klamath before I ever learned about his roleplaying stuff.

tensai_oni
2013-12-29, 07:46 AM
This is where I mention Earthdawn. It's not a game about decline. It's about growth, and legends.

In the game's setting, an invasion of terrible monstrosities known as Horrors happens cyclically. The game is supposed to be played in an aftermath of one such invasion, with the world being rebuilt and explored, and a lot of wonderful mysteries of old to be discovered.

The game is full of magic, and it's not in domain of powerful and the adventurers only. Even a farmer will have a magical trinket or two, and can learn simple spells to help him with his trade. Magic, and in fact everything in the world, exists because of legends, tales told by people and the land itself. Everything and everyone has a Pattern that develops as they participate in important events, and manipulating that Pattern or weaving it together with others is a big part of magic itself.

Setting-wise, the game is located somewhere around the Black Sea (the geography is based on real life, this is because originally the game was supposed to be Shadowrun but in the ancient past, but editions past first slowly abandoned that idea - for the better IMO), and it shows. The setting is certainly unique and feels eastern, a mix of influences from Middle East, India, Slavic regions and Mongolia while also being its own thing. Either way, standard fantasy it isn't.

On the other hand the game's mechanics are an absolute mess. They are really terrible. But we're talking the fluff parts, not the crunch. And Earthdawn's fluff is nothing short of beautiful.

Roxxy
2013-12-29, 10:26 AM
You know how it goes: Humans dominate the world, elves and dwarves lost almost all their power and retreated into a few remote strongholds, and there some halflings around too. Dragons were once common, but not anymore, and the same goes for giants. Only orcs and goblins are still common and they are generic evil guys. Then you got your kings in their castles, with all their knights and their court wizard. You know, standard stuff.

So what things did you work into your campaigns to make them a different type of fantasy world than the generic standard, or what elements have you seen in fantasy settings from other sources?The biggest difference between the setting I'm working on and other settings is, I think, the technology and visual style. It is a setting where firearms (semi-automatic rifles, double-action revolvers, and such) are universally available. Melee weapons are only used in emergency/extreme close quarters situations (many monsters will close into melee range before many shots can be fired) or against creatures with DR (most undead are more vulnerable to hacking or smashing than to puncture wounds, for example). Trains and steamships are common. Any major city has electric streetcars, with the choice between subway, surface, and elevated system depending on terrain, funds available, and street traffic. Radio and telephone exist, and the average house has electricity and running water. Stylistically, I like the highly fantasied look in many medieval rpgs that goes heavy on laces and straps with a half medieval/have 18th century vibe. I also have a thing for plaid and hoods, so those feature into my setting, too. I very much like gothic elements, and they feature heavily.

The setting focuses on two continents, one inspired by North America and the other by Australia and Polynesia. The first continent is Thyressa, the second is Minoka. Thyressa boasts two major nations, Vendalia and Markklund, while Minoka is under the control of one government. Thyressa had other nations, and there are other continents, but the widespread use of magic-based WMDs has left only a few standing in the region. Vendalia and Markklund survived by virtue of neutrality, Minoka by virtue of terrain and the fact that their enemy was not so well armed as many others. In the wake of these WMDs lays magic wasteland. There are other surviving nations on other continents, but they are not currently the main focus.

This wasteland is pretty nasty. It enchants forests, spontaneously creates undead from corpses (I have Pathfinder Bestiaries 1, 2, 3, and 4, Libris Mortis, The Monstrous Undead Compendium, Tome of Horrors Complete, Necromantic Lore, the Monster's Handbook, the Advanced Bestiary, and a love of finding or making new ghoulies. Undead are a major part of this campaign.), grows plant creatures, mutates some creatures into aberrations (seemingly at random), causes rampant haunts, as well as many other effects. Some people still live there, but most have died, with the lucky managing to flee.

Markklund is the oldest nation on the continent. It's loosely based off of the Norse, Celts, and Iroquois. It is the only nation with castles, and has an open policy towards taking in immigrants but a strict policy on forcing them to adopt Markkish culture and language. Markklund is seen as rugged, cold, and covered in forests, but it's south-central plains are the breadbasket of the continent.

Vendalia that takes up most of the west coast. It is loosely based off of Greek, Italian, Ancient Egyptian, Turkish, French, and Spanish culture, having been formed by colonists from a "Mediterranean" empire. It has a somewhat fast paced lifestyle and obsession with novels and cinema and the celebrities they produce, and the wealthiest economy thanks to a well diversified resource and manufacturing economy. Surfing, a sport imported from Minoka, has proven massively popular here, and spawned a large youth movement.

Minoka is loosely based off of Japanese culture, but is a nation of exiles who didn't fit into normal cultural expectations, ethnic minorities, and indigenous peoples. Minokan culture tends to be somewhat laid back, and emphasizes both individual freedom and community responsibility, with a healthy balance being an often touted ideal. Most of the country survived the war intact, but the northern islands were heavily bombarded, and have yet to recover. The military fully intends to reclaim these islands, but the fight against the wasteland itself is proving quite costly.

Markklund and Vendalia are constitutional monarchies (with popular elections for parliament) in which parliament chooses which member of the royal family gets to reign, while Minoka is a republic.

I consider elves, dwarves, and orcs to be human subspecies. Magni is a term referring to regular humans. In Markklund elves and dwarves outnumber magni, while orcs are a sizeable minority in Vendalia.

Orcs were originally what they are in Pathfinder normally, but eventually the widespread use of firearms led to the death of the orcish way of life, as the other humans eventually had too much firepower for them to handle and the desire to stop the raids and wars once and for all. The survivors were enslaved, and a great many were brought to Vendalia and other Thyressan nations (not Markklund, though). Eventually slavery was abolished.

Elves are a people known for being skilled with both science and magic. They aren't smarter than other humans, but they do tend to have very good information retention. On the other hand, they also tend to develop mental problems or social difficulties at a greater rate than other humans do, and are more susceptible to mind effecting magic.

Dwarves are a people known for doing things just because they can be done. It's why they build cities in such strange locations, engineer all sorts of technological and magical marvels, and undergo the most daring expeditions. They are hardy both physically and mentally, but don't tend to be good with book learning or explaining things.

Kitten Champion
2013-12-30, 12:55 AM
Two concepts I introduced to our Pathfinder setting were hybridity and multiculturalism.

The races of the world used to be isolated Tolkien-esque affairs, until some unpleasantness occurred. The sapient races found themselves in a prolonged war with Lovecraftian monsters, it wasn't long before they found themselves in an alliance with eachother and just about anyone or anything with a sense of self-persevation. Nations fell, borders were dissolved with the only line on the map that mattered being the one that separated "us" from "them". Order was reformed through necessity and maintained with an iron fist of the allied military, those who didn't adapt to the circumstances were exterminated. Eventually, it became crystal clear that they, no matter how fierce they fought or the impact of the innovative new technology (cannons and guns at first -- and evetually tanks and skyships) they employed in the battlefield, they were not going to overcome the endless swarm of monsters. A final solution to leave the continent to the monsters and colonize a distant land.

Basically we took the narrative of Warcraft III and made it more Pathfinder-ish and then tweaked it around to put the war and escape of the WCIII campaign into a longer time-frame -- more like WW1 + One Hundred Years War + Black Plague spread throughout two and half centuries of hell.

So once the colony was established, and after a few years when it became apparent that the monsters weren't following them over the ocean, the colonies' order quickly broke down. The meticulous and sometimes brutal war-time government had lost the majority of the effective control they had. Libertarian politics became predominant, vicious criminals rose to become autocrats over industrial city-states, new religions formed and started accruing power, and the colonists scambled to form a new cultural identity while fighting the harsh environment.

Hybrids are the norm in the setting. While those who are racially "pure" have not exactly vanished, their numbers are dwindling over time. It's a simple matter of living and fighting aside one another for generations, that uniformity of purpose and familiarity, not to mention a number of traits useful for survival in an existential long-term war with monsters (such as a deadly epidemic that mostly killed Humans, but spared hybridized humans) made miscegenation much more common. Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, Muls, Gnomes (Elves/Dwarves), Alvor (Orc/Elf), Draugr (Orc/Dwarf) in varying mixtures have superceded vanilla races.

Just as the races have intermixed, cultural traditions held by the various races have largely been set aside as impractical anachronisms. They either found their way into relevancy through subtle revisions and redefinitions, or became a matter of contention between the new normal and the olde world. There was no Common in the world before the war, it had to be cobbled together as necessary from various tongues and hasn't really settled down into a formal structure, dialects can change from town to town, city to city. Religion has similarly become a mucky morass -- feel-good new-aged pop-philosophy, ancestor-veneration, abtract concepts of a univeral spirit, nature-worship -- usually anything but the fire-and-brimestone polytheistic gods of the olde world which both divided the races and ultimately failed to save them anyways. Holidays, music, art, theatre, fashion -- most conspicuous culture is very much embracing the new and generally overtly positive and romantic. In most ways the cultures of the world have eroded considerably, to which there is a backlash of conversatism in some quarters, but there's such a demand for optimism and sense of belonging that tradition has been conflated with an unremitting modern history of horror and heartbreak.

Class is the major contention in this setting, although racism exists in subtle ways and colonial states occasionally squabble violently. The sense of security and freedom has left people able to pursue their fortune, but in many ways the colonies are more oppressive than the old world. The military rule was highly meritocratic and inclusive even if it severely limited one's choices in life to what the service needed, while the loose league of colonial states really only exists to keep money in the hands of the plutocrats. Their civill government is a corrupt nepotistic beauocracy, where bribes get you everywhere. On the other hand, they tax loosely and rarely interferre with an individual's life capraciously. Life in the colonies is difficult, but not especially dark.

I just think hybridity would be more of a thing than the misunderstood loner who doesn't fit in with either culture and will either overcompensate with lawfulness or go all chaotic. The fact that D&D often follows the Tolkien-esque route of various fantasy races allying to accomplish some heroic feat and established sexual reproduction between them as a thing -- you'd see more miscegenation. It's part of moving away from a pseudo-medieval stasis, where every culture pretty much remains in some neutral position with accustomed outlooks and prejudices and only humans contemplate having sex with everyone else for some reason. The racial integration was accelerated considerably in our setting, but well... if a party can benefit from using various race's talents towards some grand objective, what could a society do with the same basic methodology applied universally?

SassyQuatch
2013-12-30, 02:26 AM
There isn't enough room on a planet to house all my races, and the planes were sealed by the gods.

So the current campaign is on a virtual clone of Ringworld. And since that isn't enough building space there are sky cities all the way up to small floating continents. And cities and such built on the interior of the ringwall. Tech level in the region is around that of WWI, plus mid-level magic with just a little teeny tiny access to high magic. And that's as far as I can go right now for fear of spoilers but there's more. A lot more.

DigoDragon
2013-12-30, 08:12 AM
I once took part in a D&D adventure set in the world of Thundarr the Barbarian. It was pretty interesting to go dungeon exploring in what were once grand modern cities of the mid 21st century. The leading "race" of the world were the mutants, an NPC-only group of evil we had to deal with constantly.

Morph Bark
2013-12-31, 10:38 AM
and the backstory? the backstory is "golden age started to go wrong and then everything decayed and decline" just like any other fantasy.

I like Exalted, but it sometimes has delusions of grandeur about how different it is from other fantasy.

Exalted is quite different from most fantasy, but the "problem" is that it's fundamentally based on pre-existing mythologies. It's just that those mythologies were primarily Asian rather than European, and ancient mythologies all around the world follow very similar patterns, simply because to a lot of people around the world, the same kinds of stories appeal.

Weird stuff like the mushroom forests with turtle-shell villages Yora mentions are very appealing, but only in moderation, as people tend to go back to more familiar stuff sooner rather than later. That's why breaking with Tolkienian standards and making something new-but-not-totally-weird that makes sense as a world is probably the best overall result you can get, even if it won't be the best result in any particular area (originality, world cohesion, etc).

Dawgmoah
2014-01-14, 03:37 PM
The flip side of Fantasy Flights' "Midnight" would be their "Dawnforge" setting. You are from the Old World and exploring the New World across the sea. Still have ruins and things: think of a larger Mayan Empire extinct with their cities and temples to be found scattered about.