Do your eyes glaze over at the details other people's fantasy settings?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
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.

That was a great first post. Welcome, Marktplatz!

I read somewhere that Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age — likely the blueprint for every patchwork-of-quasi-historical-stuff setting — started out as a means to get Conan to adventure in Ancient Assyria this issue of Weird Tales, and in Medieval France the next.

I don't know if the story is true but it makes perfect sense for me, as a GM; you build calques of historical or fictional cultures when you want PCs to venture on them beyond the restraints of History (or, in fictional calques, of the source fiction). I am actually pretty easygoing with games set in historical or proprietary settings, in the sense that I don't mind playing fast and loose with canon (if the PCs are original characters, it's already an "alternate timeline" by dint of them existing, and that's before injecting any fantasy elements intop the mix), but using a homebrewed facsimile allows the GM and the players a few more degrees of freedom.

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.

Of course, for a homebrew, this is overkill. My homebrew methodology is laid out earlier in this very thread.
 
Last edited:
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.
 
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.

That isn't actually copying, that's merely drawing inspiration, which is what I think most people here actually mean. Copying is when you just have a slavish imitation of something that was already done.
 
You mean what Hollywood did to WoD to make the Underworld series to the tune of $540M?

I'm advocating wholesale theft of ideas, but always bring along a file for the serial numbers and some fresh paint!

People claim to want new, but what they pay for is familiar with a twist.
 
I look at it like this - Roleplaying is a unique way to experience a setting, completely unlike the passive experience of watching or reading. As such, situations that are completely cliche are made new by the very fact that players can make any choice, do anything they choose in response. So even stealing ideas and concepts wholesale from a film or TV series is taking something and making it completely new, especially if players aren't already familiar with the source. Hence I swipe liberally from any media. I have a wider range of tastes than my players, so its completely new to them.

There was this old cartoon I used to watch as a kid, Dragon's Lair, based on the seminal videogame of the same name by Bluth Animation. Just before the commercial break, the show would always cease on a cliffhanger, and the narrator would tune in saying "What would YOU do?" I always think back to that when it comes to RPGs, because in my mind it perfectly encapsulates the hobby.
 
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.

That's actually why I chose it for a bunch of roleplaying newbies and ran it for 2 years. It's really easy to pick up and make up characters for and the smorgasboard of pseudo-historical nations make it easy to digest. That's always been my problem with really exotic and far out there shit like Talislanta or Planescape, it takes longer to pitch and far more concepts have to be conveyed. Everyone knows what a dragon is or how to play a Viking, not many people will know how to play [insert name of unique culture based on Aztecs/Hittites that worships a giant star-eating Skeletor].
 
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

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.
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.

To me, blank spaces on the map and a quick thumbnail description mean I have the freedom to take ownership of the setting, make it my own and add bits to suit the game I'm running. Instead of having to work around someone else's ideas.
 
I just thought the Gazeteers' cover art was the bee's knees, even to this day. :shade: Something about sultry woman, strong man, action shot hits a latent "I wanna triptych! Gimme!" nerve in me. Thankfully the content survives the test of time better than 7th Sea's nations of Theah splats with a similar aesthetic composition. :music:
 
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. Darokin and Ierendi made little sense in comprison (though Ierendi wins points for originality if nothing else). Stealing from history always serves to give one's campaign setting more versimilitude.
 
Now that you mention it Allston's Mystara stuff always seemed a bit more plausible and fleshed out then that of his contempories.

Unlike a lot of game writers, Allston consumed a lot of media and non-fiction that wasn't gaming material, and brought it into his gaming. He stated multiple times that he wanted his game sessions to feel like the source material rather than a game. (He was a filthy hippy storygamer :tongue:) It's one of the reasons he was able to make the jump from game writing to fiction writing for a general audience.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top