When's the last time you saw an original fantasy setting...

>Let's be real, medieval times sucked
Compared to XX century and onwards yes.
For an average person though, XII century was the best period to live until later half of XIX century
Almost all technological and cultural advancement during those ages benefitted only the upper strata, nobility and burgeoise, while peasants were getting only a scraps of that. Scraps that weren't anywhere close compensating for worsening climatic conditions and developement of political systems far more oppresive towards low classes than feudalism.

>Bible
Fanfic of Sumerian mythology but with one superpowerful deity who can't be wrong, perfect at all times and people either worship him or pay the price.

Or you could like... just use some imagination. Just because a world has swords in it doesn't automatically mean it has to be super historically accurate medieval Europe. It also doesn't have to be "Tolkien but X". Personally I dislike many many aspects of Tolkien's work and would never base a fantasy setting on it.

I dunno... I feel like a super weeaboo saying this, but watch some fukken anime or read some manga or something, boot up your inspiration drives and get your imagination going. Magi, Dungeon Meshi, there's lots of stuff out there that's neither Tolkien nor historic-accuracy fap.

Ayup.

>Can something be more than just "like Tolkien but X"?

Yes, easily. For starters, you can take the other half of Tolkien, because the "like Tolkien but X" snowclone genre had not that much Tolkien in it to begin with and has now photocopy-of-photocopied itself even further away.

For example, did you know that Tolkien elves had +2 Con, loved the seas more than the forests, and the books never say they had pointy ears? Also, the extra manuscripts suggest they originally used rudimentary telepathy to communicate amongst themselves, but this mostly fell out of use with the combination of the development of language and meeting nonelven races who did not share this ability.

Yes. Doing something original -well- is much harder than doing something unoriginal well. An axe doesn't function worse than a spiked chain because it's not original.

>using the tools of heretic gods
while I applaud you for your good taste in gaming, dustfag go home

The "Low Life" setting for Savage Worlds is about as original as fantasy gets.

>Elder Scrolls
>literally started as an inhouse game of D&D

Yes, but look at it now. While Arena and Daggerfall were fairly generic, I'll give you that, Kirkbride is who really started to make the setting of the Elder Scrolls stand out. If you don't trust me, go replay Morrowind.

>There is no original fantasy setting
Conan?

u just mad 'cause ur made of weak flesh and the scions of the virtual endless 2 swag 4 u

Conan was based off of Lovecraft's Dreamlands if I'm correct.
>being this much of a shill
do you like never being able to feel anything?

I've tried (and failed) to explain this to my local autist, the one who constantly slurs "Hurrrrr you stole that from X" whenever I'm running games.

Nothing is unique. Nothing. Everything can be related to anything else. The South Park Simpsons episode covered it perfectly. However, what matters is not the inspiration, but what you do with it.

>Conan was based off of Lovecraft's Dreamlands if I'm correct.
This is so wrong I don't even remember what right feels like anymore.

>Let's be real, medieval times sucked. The feudal system was born from a necessity to repel bandits. No one could get anything done without an infrastructure, so there were harsh roles to combat harsh environments. And then throw magic and other races into the mix and it should be even harder to maintain. It feels like everything is being bent to accommodate the experience of becoming powerful rather than interacting with a world that reacts back.
Yo OP, you should talk to these guys:

>Conan was based off of Lovecraft's Dreamlands if I'm correct.
I always though it was some sort of fake history.

Some of the monsters Conan stabbed were imported from Lovecraft tho

Warhammer RPG V2 was pretty great as a med-fan setting or even just a basis
You can have high interaction dynamics if you don't care about following the canon and enough time to craft enough probable reactions of the universe at least partially

Robert and Howard were best friends and happily shared notes, ideas and stories with each other. The two of them played off each other well, with Robert countering Howard's despair and nihilism with heroism and passion.

Outside of DnD/RPGs and Video Games, the generic fantasy setting has been on the out since the late 80s. You'll still see mages and knights and sometimes dragons around, but even the stuff that has swords these days tends to be a little less medieval and a little further along.

Never.

I did saw some creative fantasy settings, but they didn't look like medieval western europe.

>Kirkbride worship
It's still a boring hero's journey, except it has desert Drow.

It was unique when it first appeared ,so how can you know that it's not unique if you didn't even tried to create it?

Read the Iron Dragon's Daughter recently, that's pretty original. Sort of like a magitek cyberpunk Alice in Wonderland with elements of Evangelion.

>Bible
>Original

>Let's be real, medieval times sucked. The feudal system was born from a necessity to repel bandits. No one could get anything done without an infrastructure, so there were harsh roles to combat harsh environments.

This. Especially if you're running a fantasy game, everything you come up with will be a remix at best, if not a straight up ripoff - and that's fine. Almost every plot will have been done before, but you can still imbue it with new meaning thru new contexts, perspectives, emphasises. Like that's literally all Shakespeare did.

This.

Wasn't the last original book Don Quixote? Or something like that?

Dungeon Meshi is fucking great. It takes time to talk about things we hardly ever hear in fantasy. Like cooking in a dungeon and dungeon ecology.

>Well Howard, ur such a fag. How about I stab your nerdy-ass monsters in my next book?

>Let's be real, medieval times sucked. The feudal system was born from a necessity to repel bandits. No one could get anything done without an infrastructure, so there were harsh roles to combat harsh environments. And then throw magic and other races into the mix and it should be even harder to maintain. It feels like everything is being bent to accommodate the experience of becoming powerful rather than interacting with a world that reacts back. I get that we want to play the most interesting people that do the most interesting stuff, but it sacrifices the world for it.
So what, you want to play Game of Thrones? Fantasy settings don't need to be a 'realistic' interpretation of your bro-history conception of feudal times. They're based on myth more than history, legends of valiant heroes, dastardly villains, big ass monsters, etc. No shit it's unrealistic, but the idea of doing a setting that takes a more 'realistic' approach to real-world history with some fantasy elements isn't exactly 'original' either: look at Game of Thrones or Warhammer Fantasy (especially what I remember of WFRP).
Really the fantasy settings that I find most interesting are the ones that take the mythmaking impulse to different areas of history other than feudal Britain, Germany, and occasionally Japan to be 'exotic'. What about a fantasy take on a stone age society, where the forests are deep and uncharted and all you have is a pointy stick? Or a society suffering under (or shaking off) a colonial empire? Of course all of these have been done before - the Wolf Brother series of YA books did the former, Ursula Le Guin sometimes deals with the latter - but they're settings that still feel fresh compared to your standard DnD shit.

except Don Quixote is a clear pastiche of chivalric romances

>Medieval times sucked
>The feudal system was brutal
I mean, I only ever took a basic Medieval History 101 class in uni before I dropped out, but kind of the overarching theme of the course was that those two statements aren't true.

Like, I didn't retain much and it was a while ago, but you should take a look, do some research and whatnot, you'll find things weren't quite what you think.

Go watch some episodes of Medieval Lives with Terry Jones on youtube.

You know Robert E. Howard commited suicide, right?

Like, I adore both figures, just saying you're foisting this alpha broham persona on a person who was pretty sensitive and timid. And that makes you look dumb.

I imagine he said it with a lisp.

But doesn't it deconstruct them? Before it was cool to deconstruct, I mean.

>One half of Veeky Forums
>Every fantasy setting is try hard original edgy shit now! I want the old tropes back!

>Other half of Veeky Forums
>Every fantasy setting is generic tropes and Tolien rip offs! I want something new and original!

Every hour of every fucking day

>You
>I didn't read a single post in this thread and I'll try to act superior to everyone!

In every fucking thread there's a fag like you.

Yes, and that was it. Howard developed Conan and his other characters on his own, Lovercaftian monster and entities were just a friendly shout out as per

>Veeky Forums is filled with contrarians

say it ain't so

Is it really all that important that a setting is original? Wouldn't you rather have a setting made with love (and possibly some verisimilitude) than one made specifically to be original? Personally, I find the worst thing I know is when people think they're clever - which is part of the reason I could never like Terry Pratchett as much as I wanted to.

>Has the genre become so stable that there's nothing more to discover?
Not at all. In fact the "genre" such as it's defined, is incredibly versatile. Alice in Wonderland, for instance, is a fantasy story. So is Peter Pan. It's stupid, creative people that keep going back to the hoary old cliches that are the problem, and a too narrow conception of what fantasy can be, almost inevitably copying Tolkien, and doing it incredibly poorly.

Planescape at the time was a very avant-garde setting for D&D, and still my favourite today.

I, conversely, think it sucks balls.

Why do you think that user?

Exactly this. If you're tired of playing in settings based in Tolkien, workshop a playable setting based on Wizard of Oz, or Conan the Barbarian, or even go back to Tolkien's inspiration and write right out of mythology.

Personally, I avoid Tolkien-esque like the plague. It pretty much only worked when Tolkien did it, although obviously some of the staple races and things translate well to other works.

Medieval Lives gave you the impression that it didn't suck for easily 90% of the population?
It's one of the few periods of world history where "brutish and short" applies.

It's an everything sandwich full of mayonnaise, tooth paste and bicycles.

The Clay that Woke is pretty interesting.

I don't see the comparison.

>And Volcano spoke: Let there be Volcano! And there was a Volcano.

I do. It's everything to the point of being nothing. It isn't a setting, it's all settings and that isn't for a lot of people. They want a single cohesive setting to explore in depth.

It is irrelevant if something is 'totally unqiue' for it to be actually unique and original.

For example; combine sword and sorcery themes in a bronze-age setting set on two planets that use stargates to go between them and fill them with some sci-fi style races instead of fantasy. There you go, that's a pretty unique setting.

Using lots of generic parts is fine because I see it from the opposite direction; EVERY fantasy setting is unique.

You should see Golarion. It's not a setting either, it's a theme park.

Isn't this Golarion?

Yes there is. It's called reality. People set their first fiction in reality.

>When's the last time you saw an original fantasy setting?
Attack on Pokemon Hunter was pretty close.
The individual pieces were pre-used, but the composite was definitely greater than the sum of its parts, and led to unique character challenges and themes.

>implying the tanakh is not part of the bible

Inverse World is pretty cool. It's set on the inside of some magical megastructure. The sun lies at the center of the world, and the sky is made of stone. There are floating islands, but since the light comes from the same direction as gravity is pulling, life on them is based around tangled jungles of vines and creepers hanging off the bottom. The places most similar to our world are in the semi-liquid cloud sea, where the islands and cities have light refracted to them from the water vapor to create a sort of all-pervasive aurora. And everyone has an elemental alignment based on where they're born. Born on an island, you're earth-aligned, stocky and strong. Born in the water or a cloud, and you're water-aligned, having traits of a fish. Born in the open sky, and you're air-aligned, having wings.

what is gilgamesh

have you tried anything from the Dragonriders of Pern series?

I've yet to see anything like it.

Transformers. Its lore is unique. Nothing like it came before, though there have been many copies since.

"Originality" is a trap which claims a lot of amateur writers and worldbuilders.

Try to be contrarian and turn every cliche you know on its head? People won't like it, because it's just a shallow subversion. Try to be counter-contrarian and play it all straight? People also won't like it, because you're just regurgitating a bunch of tropes and cliches with no real substance.

Some people here are advising you to just transplant your setting from "Medieval Europe" to some other region/time period. I caution against that. Exchanging your poorly-informed understanding of Medevial Europe with your poorly-informed understanding of [Insert Region Here] will not accomplish anything. Mostly because the world will still be functionally identical to any other, except the names and buildings are different.

You bring up "Like Tolkien but X". I should remind you Tolkien's work was nothing like modern fantasy worldbuilding. D&D stuff is just a pastiche of kitchen sink fantasy and mythology tropes thrown in together, with the understnading your're supposed to take out or keep stuff at your discretion.

So instead I offer this advice: write what you like, and make sure you're skilled enough to keep things interesting and consistent. To again use Tolkien, he liked Vikings. Like, he REALLY liked Vikings. So he put Vikings in his story. But by virtue of his worldbuilding, he couldn't make them seafarers. So he made them horsemen. And he made horses a part of their culture, but didn't go overboard and say "These are the Horselords of the Horselands. They are the most skilled Horsemen in the realm, and they worship the Horse-God." He gave them culture and history and personality beyond some simple gimmick. And he did this all throughout his writings. It worked, because above all he liked what he was writing and he was skilled enough to make it interesting.

It's a PARODY of chivalric romances, at least the first part, and a pretty funny one at that. I don't know what the fuck you thought you were reading if you thought it was serious

maybe we could have something original that isn't edgy?

Er, actually, wait no. we got that with early seasons Adventure Time, and Veeky Forums never really latched onto it.

Nevermind you're right they're just insatiable.

By this point, what isn't Golarion?

To anyone who hasn't read it, it's essentially about a guy who reads so many chivalry novels he goes insane and decides to become a knight-errant

Ohh, this is neat. Where is this from?

One Piece?

or some LindyBeige.

He's like the ultimate weeaboo.

vikings on horses... Isn't that basically the mongols?

The top of the guy's helmet looks like a smiley face

I wonder if we should make an updated version for the modern times.

>Thats not a windmill! It's obviously a titan!

In his defense, that is how most "Fantasy setting, what do?" threads are like.

>Everything's grimderp and edgy, I just wanna save a princess from a dragon.
>Fuck you fag, everything's just generic Medieval Europe, I wanna play fantasy Byzantium with a bunch of political intrigue!
>Gurm is a hack, GoTfags please leave
>It's all Tolkien's fault
>Is LotR grimdark?
>Is LotR noblebright?
>Well in MY setting, Elves are like Aztecs
>Well, in MY setting, Elves are like Mongolians
>Well, in MY setting, Elves are niggers
>tfw you'll never play in a heroic cliche setting cause all everyone wants is political intrigue and shades of grey
>tfw you just want something interesting but everyone just wants to play Tolkien simulator.

Am I missing anything?

Rohan's nothing like the Mongols, famiglia.

>he white knights a cam-girl called SW33TY THANG online.
>a DBZ-fan mexican otaku follows him around.

One of the best moments of the Rohirrim is kinda ruined in the movies.

They get so riled up about the battle of the Pelennor Fields they begin singing so loudly that they're heard all the way to Gondor. It's only after they see Theoden and Eowyn wounded that they shut up, go back to formation and being chanting "DEATH" like they do in the movie

That a pretty big myriad of POVs, user. Specially on Veeky Forums.

...

then I guess he's not vikings on horseback, is he.

where are you people finding all of your political intrigue campaigns? I know a guy who would kill to be in one of those.

>Implying all Vikings ever did was pillage and burn

Also

>Rohan
>he

>/v/ in a nutshell.jpg
>Veeky Forums, the new /v/, in a nutshell.jpg
>frankly almost every board but /s4s/ and /trash/.jpg

>implying all mongols ever did was pillage and burn

I have to greatly disagree. I think it has enough to be it's own setting. Things like Sigil, the Cant, the Factions, the Outlands, the Blood War, and the interactivity and connectivity of the multiverse. The realms of gods and the dead. There's plenty for it to stand on it;s own, and I maintain Planescape is best used as a setting that's on it's own.

>implying all mongols ever did was pillage and burn

Only further reinforces my point, user.

The guy seems to think Vikings on horseback are functionally identical to Mongols, because he seems to think both societies only raided places and destroyed whatever shit they couldn't steal.

How about, instead of sitting here and whining, you...I don't know...
Make something original?

Because that's impossiburu.

>instead of sitting here and whining
>zachbraffandjohnmcginley.jpg