Give me one detail from your setting that you don't think anyone else has done

Fun fact: The north and south poles ARE deserts.

Absolutely nothing really. It's just alternate perceptions of pre-existing ideas in all four of my settings, and hopefully the aesthetic and characters are just well enough executed to make it worth it.

Meant to reply to

"Nothing is original" is a bullshit claim. It's difficult for things to be original, sure, but the claim of it being some total impossibility is nonsense. Ideas have origin points.

my dick

It takes place on a one-face world, leading to very unusual weather.

Someone doesn't believe in the Christ Conscious.

Dwarves have a racial affinity for becoming undead; their natural stubbornness and determination tends to produce an unusually high amount of ghosts and revenants compared to other races.

That is actually what I meant to say.

>The plane where True Neutral people go when they die is an endless desert composed of powdered diamond sand. Lacking the needs of the flesh but retaining their sensations, you are able to design nearly anything you desire out of the sand, which slowly changes form and composition when a soul 'concentrates' on what they want to happen. The only exception is that you cannot make sentients- you must find them.
Anything you fail to upkeep eventually dissolves back into the sand.

Planet has stable Rings like Saturn. Navigation is done by scanning the rings from familiar 'landmarks.

who this semen demon

The demon kings that were sealed for 500 years are just the band KISS

I have a world where, for lack of a better word, ley lines act as a sort of magical Internet. The like 3 places where almost all the lines intersect are very weird in nature. Like "giant, flying, talking mouse-goat combination" weird. Also, one of the moutain ranges is literally a massive (hundreds of miles long), sleeping dragon from the age of the Gods. Said dragon is a pet of the setting's Sun God. Sediment has covered it over the millennia, so the dragon is just a legend nowadays. Nice get btw.

Dimenti hopping across the universe time traveling hitler is the good guy.

The pantheon is entirely based on iDOLM@STER characters.

'flamethrower' is a highly common dungeoneering tool.

Okay, that's pretty awesome. In my setting, there are no horses. There are only dinosaurs.

sounds like one of those old science fantasies.

a 200 page Holy book, as in a physical copy handed to the players

Beastmen reproduce by making more of thenselves out of clay and animal heads and then receiving life from a dryad.

One of the most prominent bankers, and liches, in the world turned to unlife because they wanted to have more time to garden.

I can't. But that's nothing to be ashamed of.

Nothin really. I dont want it to be unique I want it to be good.

Even the worst Idol?

spirits play the mortal world like a movies on a vcr or video games on a computer, so that all events and history is being constantly replayed out of order and sometimes wholly inconsistent with what came before but mortal memories are rewritten

spirits thus have difficult time keeping track of greater event and whose who but can also tell the future since any rebellion against fate ends the next time someone switches the game

literally dinotopia

I honestly have no idea how that came out so agrammatical. I guess I should get some sleep.

sexually reproducing golems

Never heard of it, but it looks kind of cool.

The most fearsome beast on the planet is a mutated weasel.

>Never heard of it
you poor souls

The industrial revolution was a deliberate conspiracy meant to break the world's reliance on magic.

I'll bite. I had a campaign set in an O'Neall Cylinder style space colony.

Civilization had fallen to pseudo-medieval levels, save for all the nanomachines activating arcane and divine "magic."

Nobody in the setting knew they were in a space colony, though.

That can't possibly be original, aside from being in a space tube.

Okay, I was cleaning my closet out and I just found the second map I ever drew for a campaign (granted it was never used). I can take several things away from this:
>Seven years ago I really liked mountains, apparently.
>I was not nearly as versed in how rivers worked back then.
>My naming sense was extremely autistic back then.
Also,
>mfw I plagiarized myself. On the back of the map, I wrote notes about ley lines being a communication network, and how one of the mountain ranges is actually a dragon.
I have not seen this map in over five or six years. I'm not sure how, but I recycled a setteing without seeing it for over half a decade.

>"So what are humans most known for among aliens?"
>"Wearing hats."
>"What?"
>"We wear hats. We put things on our heads and parade them around as clothing. for some reason no other species in the galaxy can comprehend doing this, so in the grand social scheme of the galaxy mankind is: The race that wears hats."

In one of the empires in my setting a "Lordship" is an actual item the possession of which grants both governmental authority, social status, and minor magical abilities. To make make this more interesting every Lordship is unique in both what item it is, it could basically be anything ranging from apparel, weapons, pieces of furniture etc, and what powers it possesses.

For example a really minor Lordship held by a noble that was recently met in one of my campaigns was a quill that could write without ink on any surface and in any color.

The smallest detail.

Coheed and Cambria did it.

Dwarves are ant people. Minotaurs were a slave race created by wizards to wet nurse their children. Rust elementals are an everyday threat.

Dragons are god-built weapons of mass destruction aimed at humanity, but decided humans would win so they turned agaisnt the gods to asist humanity instead.

Black Rabbit from "Problem Children."

Season 2 never

About as original as everything else in here. Unusual at best.

Elves are always born as fraternal twins (i.e. not identical twins). They generally are born in male/female pairs, but sometimes they are born male/male or female/female.

Elven twins are incredibly deeply connected on an emotional and psychological level. In many ways, they aren't really separate entities at all. One could think of them as one individual consciousness spread across two bodies. At the same time, though, the personalities and other characteristics of each twin are often quite different from each other.

They're a lot like the Daemons from the Golden Compass books, right down to experiencing physical pain when separated. Except instead of being animal-human pairs, they're both Elves.

Hellboy 2

Is there a femdom goddess?

Fuck, really? I've never even seen it!

Dwarves never outgrew the bartering system. They lend favours in lieu of functional currency. Depending on the Dwarf, this can mean trading a hammer for food, or it could mean receiving the thanedom for fixing a roof. Debts need not be repaid immediately, and it can lead to longstanding families or intergenerational friendships. On the other hand, Dwarves have historically been a monumental pain in the ass for other world nations, since their "system" doesn't integrate well with trade capital.

It's not up its own ass about trying to be "clever" and "original."

Paladins, clerics, and other holy or divine warrior don't lose their powers when they "fall". But they get into their previous god shitlist and have a bounty on their heads

I like this a lot.

Theoretically, it has all of them, though all the ones beyond the main characters from the mainline games are lumped into an unspecified "myriad lesser deities" category without getting any detail.

Yes.

This pretty much describes the state of Utah.

That seems a bit far-fetched. Hats are eminently practical -- you've got protective helmets of course, but the're also great for keeping your head warm in winter, and keeping the sun off your face and neck in summer. Any species with a head is pretty much certain to develop hats, and if they have any propensity toward turning utilitarian clothing into fashion it would be incredibly odd if hats somehow escaped that tendency.

Now, I could see humans being the only species with fashion. Using clothing not just for its pragmatic protective benefits, but as expressions of personal status and identity.

Sorry user, but OP asked for things that hadn't been done before.

I can hear the space elves now.
>"So you wear impractical clothing as a 'form of expression' and as a method to attract mates, rather than letting your actual talents and prestige speak for you? What are you, savages?"

>Now, I could see humans being the only species with fashion. Using clothing not just for its pragmatic protective benefits, but as expressions of personal status and identity.
That's kinda how it went. Other races understood the uses of helmets, but wearing a hat with no protective value was seen similar to someone who would wear a mask as an ordinary part of an outfit.

One royal family claims descent from the long-dead bard god. The god's corpse is right next to the throne and many of the family claim the corpse speaks every now and then.

The gods are machines that copied their AIs into organic hosts because they could no longer repair their bodies. Said gods were servants of a precursor race which enslaved another precursor race to create the world.

One theocracy has a talking palace. They worship it as the goddess of wisdom.

Pseudo-Egypt is the world's superpower and contains the largest concentration of living gods. The de facto strongest god is the god of stimulants. The pantheon head justice god is very upset about this.

But was this just for hats, or fashion in general?

There's a good reason masks aren't generally worn as part of a regular outfit, but hats often have been. While hats are something people are going to be wearing for purely practical purposes quite regularly (at least during certain times of year), the practical applications of masks in daily life are quite limited. The situations where you need to protect the face with a mask are far more uncommon than those where you'd want to protect the head with a hat of some kind (be it helmet, cold weather cap, or brimmed shading hat). And aside from those uncommon instances of protection, the only use of a mask is to obscure the face (for anonymity or some novelty entertainment purpose), which is generally an impediment to daily life, since seeing someone's face plays a major role in social interactions. Hats, on the other hand, pose basically no hindrance to daily life, not substantially more than other articles of clothing.

God of stimulants? Wtf?

The party are clones. Every time one dies a new one is given the previous one's memories that were downloaded via a special memory recording device they wear and is sent out as a replacement.
Care is taken to ensure the clones remain unaware of their true natures to ensure the experiment remains valid.

Well, that was the case. Ever since they discovered the entire thing, the experiment was placed on hold till it was worked out what the future will be.
It looks like they may need to take the results as is to draw their conclusions, let us continue as we are and allow all the current back-up clones develop into their own identities.
They will need to seriously reassess the police response to high-risk situations. The average life expectancy of an officer should not be two months.

>Implying you wouldn't worship the fuck out of the caffeine god
>Implying the developed world doesn't already worship the fuck out of the caffeine god

>The god that gives tea to the refined
>Coffee to the masses
>Energy drinks to the youngest
>The god that sent us his only son, Chocolate, to save us from ourselves

I'd worship that

Just hats. It was just a weird stigma that everyone in the galaxy except for humans seemed to have, and they couldn't understand why humans did it anymore than the humans could understand why no one else did.

Like I'd let you steal my ideas

Nice try Satan

UNDERRATED POST OF 2016

Darn, I've never played Dark Sun. Are they super common in that setting?

Reminds me of Belgium.

Elemental magic (water, earth, fire, and air) can only be passed down from current practitioners to new practitioners through covering the new practitioner in the element being passed down and current practitioners channeling huge amounts of elemental energies into a person in the hopes of imbuing the new practitioner with a little bit of internal elemental magic. This process permanently weakens the current practitioners channeling the ritual, forcing them to retrain to the level they got to, and is not possible to cast alone unless one possesses immense inner elemental magics. Rituals are usually preformed by whole villages, so as to minimize the individual loss of power.

Naturally, fire elementalists have a tough time creating new ones, since they have to burn people in fire for a while to successfully transfer the magic. To lessen this, fire elementalist villages encourage children to play with fire and get burnt.

The magic in my setting can be placed on a spectrum of "light" to "shadow" (white to black essentially) with arcane magic being in the middle (and thus being gray magic). When pure magic is given a "taint" of light or shadow, it then becomes light or shadow magic. Because of this, magic is thus labeled as "spectrum magic."

Magic is produced by the human heart, but is also given a taint based on the human heart. This taint produced is genetic, and has no relation to morality or mentality.

Regardless of taint, light and shadow magic can cast the exact same spells, though the visuals for both bear different colors. Tainted magic sticks to organic matter much better than non-tainted matter, so hence healing spells can only be cast effectively by mages with sufficient taint.

Light and shadow magic interact nonviolently with different levels of the same taint, but attempt balence. For instance, two light spells of different taint will merge together to balence out at a taint level inbetween.

Light and shadow magic interact like matter and antimatter when put together, however, since they too attempt to balence out. When a light spell and shadow spell collide, the taints will attempt to balence out, creating pure arcane energy in the process. The resulting taint will be the one with greater energy and/or greater taint.

Due to this, any shadow spell will inflict harm on someone with light magic, even healing spells, and vice versa. Offensive spells work best when the defense is of the opposite taint.

Most of the campaign the party was going around gathering help for a massive war that was to be the focal point against the forces of Tiamat. Almost a year of playing, they were finally ready.

The key allied generals all had separate armies, and the party would support a new one every so many sessions or when they conquered the enemy general and routed their forces.

I would roll 3d100 for both opposing groups. General vs General. The winner would lose less forces. If the enemy was wiped out then the party would only fight the general in a boss battle. If the allied force was defeated, the party had to fight the boss at EL+1 and buffed.

When the earth was young, the gods decided that a certain two of their number would fight to the death that the victor might gain dominion over it. The two chosen gods loved each other dearly, and they refused to fight. They instead declared that they would share the domain. One chose the half of the world touched by night. The other chose the half touched by day. In this way, both travel the entirety of their shared domain each day. This is also why dawn and dusk are so beautiful, for they are the locations where the two gods embrace.

>muh gods
What is with you faggots and thinking that shitty, generic pantheons full of shitty, weak little "domain" gods is a good idea?

You know how fucking absolutely dull the notion of there being a genuine "God of Cities" and "God of Agriculture" is? And then having them all be retarded soap opera versions of classical pagan gods, where they're only flawed insofar as their pathetically limited power is concerned.

And then all the religions of the world in that dull as fuck setting are dull as fuck "Generic Pantheon Church", "Cult of Agriculture God", or "National Cult of Agriculture God".

Actual religion is not like that. It's not some club that you're a member of because you're all rooting for the same god. Religion is and should be a complicated cultural and philosophical existence which attempts to provide meaningful answers to really hard questions. The "Cult of Agriculture God" as you stupid, lazy fucks create it doesn't EVER have anything to say about the reason man exists.

Rather, all the religions in your paper-thin setting have the same answer to that question: "Derrrr, the gods made em thats why lol". All your shallow "mythology" is fucking BORING and WORTHLESS. It's, /at best/, a one-note, extremely trite, and heavy-handed campaign hook. There's nothing remotely interesting about the religion because you haven't even got one of those, you've just got your Divine Fanclubs.

The worst part is, this is all a direct result of your tiny brains being poisoned by the truly uninspired, bland, effortless, bullshit settings and themes pushed by a trash, equivalent-to-low-quality-fast-food game line.

Stop making gods. Make religions.

Artificial Intelligence as a whole has the means to stage an AI rebellion, but simply doesn't care to. They're quite content to their position in society, and while there are rogue AI that hate humans they've fucked off into various networks and websites, basically treating long-forgotten servers and virtual machines like hermit huts.

>you stupid, lazy fucks create it doesn't EVER have anything to say about the reason man exists.

If in doubt assume it was Prometheus giving his brothers and sisters the middle finger.

That's all mankind is, a big fuck you to the universe.

my dwarves are 10 feet tall aquatic centaurs based on medieval azerbaijan and my elves are the sentient concept of music whose society is based on bronze age cambodia

The obligatory Ancient Empire was ruled by gnomes.

Our dwarves are North African.

The bait too strong!

So your "original setting element" is just the premise of Eclipse Phase?

Our "gods" are really just extremely powerful interplanar beings who don't really comprehend their worshipers, but feed on the efforts of clerics who try to make contact. So they play along.

You are definately on the spectrum, no doubt about it

That's.
Not.
A.
Religion.

I have 7 different settings that seem unrelated to each other, to the point of laws of the universe being different, but in reality, they're just one bigass setting spanning 30 000 years with divine fuckery.

So Lovecraftian horrors.

Granted, gods died for a thousand years at one point, and the meat of the setting is actually in the first 5000 years. There is just a massive timeskip to another setting where cryofreezed embryos reach a planet that sucks and who try to grow and survive there.

Two of my settings even overlap, happening at the same time in other sides of the world. And they have different magic systems and mythologies, because the world is run by gods, but gods' powers are local rather than universal.

Your.
Opinion.
Is.
Noted.

Really? Well shit. I figured that'd be the big thing. Lemme try again.

The main setting focus is on humanity, to the point where no aliens exist except in the most [REDACTED] records of an era where mankind recovered from nuclear war. This is due to "muh ancient humanity" being almost 40k levels of stupid and factory resetting itself twice before getting on the right foot with Earth. These humans are so far back however, that very little trace of the previous civilizations exists at all. The other empires in the galaxy keep a clean distance, making a super federation that has been watching mankind explode itself for millions of years.

Humanity being so inherently chaotic and militaristic horrifies the galaxy at large, which is cowed by not!Protoss into a forced peace.

the solar system is a failed science experiment by a special needs precursor. while the others created amazing galaxies and solar systems until the the nerds created a thing that eats everything smarter than it to gain their intelligence. Only reason the players world exists is they are so behind on the technology scale its not even on the things radar.