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Um, yep, if that does it for you
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I was in a game once with a cool DM, big Tolkien guy, who obviously took a lot of inspiration from Tolkien's material. He put a lot of work into setting everything up from what I could tell, and even had a lot of the linguistic and song elements in there.
Now, I'm a big Tolkien guy too, but I was utterly bored by it all, because I'd already read it before. I knew this world, I knew its themes, because he made it so much like Tolkien that it felt like a second-rate clone, with all the predictable beats being hit. Trying to emulate something else in your games to a T can make players glaze faster than anything, because locking your game down so hard to emulation will shackle it to the source material, which will make players think: "Why don't I just go read Tolkien?" Substitute "Tolkien" with any particular genre or style to emulate, of course.
On the other hand, I've noticed I feel a particular spite towards the idea of uniqueness for uniqueness' sake, or what I call "subversion of expectation." When you take familiar elements, then flip them around, then claim total originality, that really irks me. "Yeah, I have goblins that are short and cockney and live in the mountains, BUT these are friendly and noble and elegant! Yeah, my Elves are a dying race fallen from glory that live forever, BUT they act like savages and aren't civilized!" That's not creativity. Taking a fantasy trope then reversing it, turning it on its head, is to me as insufferable as emulating a style too closely. Subversion for subversion's sake.
For example, I'm admittedly not even fond of The Elder Scrolls' orcs. "They're warlike and brutal and tough, BUT they're noble not-Asian-folklore-inspired warriors!" I have zero interest in that sort of thing. To me, it's the illusion of creativity, not creativity itself. Better than a basic subversion, I suppose.
Then again, as the final note of my bizarre perception of emulation, copycatting, and subversion, perhaps my favorite "fantasy setting" is Warhammer Fantasy, which shamelessly emulates the ideas and styles of many genres, stories, and the real world itself. Its Empire is the HRE, right down to the counts, German names, and political workings. Yet, it doesn't shy away from that, it runs with it, hamming it up with outrageous Reinassance attire and goofy German names translating to half-nonsense in English, the accent everyone uses in this Germanic nation. Its Orcs and Goblins aren't just big and mean, they're bigger and meaner! The Elves are hammed up according to their regions. Dwarves love drink almost as much as they love gold and are so grumpy they'll write your name in a book if you look at them funny.
And I love it. And despite copying so much and emulating so much, it also developed into something unique, making a name in its own right. So I'm definitely not trying to say that a game borrowing any material heavily from others is always bad.
I'm not an expert, by any means, but to me the best advice is this: if you're going to emulate something, to take inspiration, or even copy something, go with it. Expand on it, deepen it, embrace it. Present your material head-on without the slightest doubt. You maybe, just maybe might make something great.
Copying something for your game isn't usually good, but it's worse to copy something then shy away from or try to hide it. Own it.
Copying something for your game isn't usually good, but it's worse to copy something then shy away from or try to hide it. Own it.
I agree that you must own it.
But "copying something" is how Hollywood makes billions. Alien was "a haunted house, but in space!" and so was Event Horizon. Star Wars was "Hidden Fortress meets Flash Gordon".
Tremendous awesome can be born from stealing ideas left and right.
This is why, as a kid, I loved Mystara so much. Sure, it makes zero sense for their faux-Roman Empire to share a border with the faux-Abbasid Caliphate to the East, and the hobbit nation-state to the West, or for the hobbits to share borders with a landlocked Renaissance Italy (say that again but slowly) further West, or the Abbasid stand-ins to border on the goddamn Vikings (with fjords and all) further north, and there are also ersatz Native Americans, Golden Horde Mongols and Teutonic Knights out there somewhere, and Pacific Islanders, and elves, and dwarves, and imperialist alien wizard-lords, and a Little UN of wizards somewhere, and orcs, and... you know, just throw it all out there and let the gamers sort it all out. But such is the appeal of a kitchen-sink setting.
This is why, as a kid, I loved Mystara so much. Sure, it makes zero sense for their faux-Roman Empire to share a border with the faux-Abbasid Caliphate to the East
And the really ironic thing is, it all came from the maps in The Isle of Dread and the Expert Rules. Which were basically cool names and three sentence descriptions. And incidentally, why I think the Known World is a much more evocative setting than Mystsra.The rather ironic thing is that in Allston's original Grand Duchy of Karameikos, he's drawing from a very specific period in history: the Balkan frontier of the Byzantine Empire, c. the 15th century. I just don't think subsequent authors caught on.
The rather ironic thing is that in Allston's original Grand Duchy of Karameikos, he's drawing from a very specific period in history: the Balkan frontier of the Byzantine Empire, c. the 15th century. I just don't think subsequent authors caught on.
Now that you mention it Allston's Mystara stuff always seemed a bit more plausible and fleshed out then that of his contempories.