Fantasy is pure shit it's always

REH?

The Italy part is stupid tough: imperial Rome was everything but limited to Italy.

>you've seen one fantasy setting you've seen them all

what is The Black Company
what is The Malazan Book of the Fallen
what is The Way of the Kings

read more my friend

Veeky Forums bait is pure shit it's always
>popular setting or game as the subject of derision
>less popular game or setting as the implied alternative
>or weird obscure game
>exotic topics of trolling is either politics or religion
>despite being a dead game, most of it still centers around 3.5, even 5e gets less trolling
>muh shit-twinkie 4th edition
>muh hurr durr pauldrons mehreens
>despite being largely hostile to furries, the subject somehow still stirs up shit on Veeky Forums
>some angry troll no one gives a fuck about

you've seen one Veeky Forums bait thread you've seen them all

Conan isn't pleased, user.

>what is

exactly my thoughts because I never heard about any of that shit I bet it's target audience are 14 years old anime enthusiasts but I'm 22 too old to read copypasted LOTR rip offs about Sir Cuckedalot trying to defeat not Sauron I'd rather fucking watch the paint dry instead.

Robert E. Howard.

Oh, Robert E. Howard.

Yeah, it's weird because his map design isn't really much better. It's more or less on Golarion's level, only it's older so it gets a pass.

>fantasy England as the protagonist faction
one is closer to Spain/Crusader kingdoms, and another one is Italian/Byzantine

>North is inhabited by barbarians likely a combination of Conan the Barbarian with a caricature of norse culture
>or fantasy Russia
ok you got me there

>exotic culture is either fantasy Japan, Egypt, Aztecs or Arabs
no fantasy Japan, the others exist but there is also fantasy India, Africa and lovecraftian tibet/antarctica for extra exoticness

>Orcs despite being a warlike culture always use stone age technology, even Tolkien ones had machines despite being pushovers
>muh elegant yet dying Elves
>muh harr harr I'm gonna hook ya in the gabber ya cunt Dwarves obsessed with axes, gold and being butthurt
>beast race is either cat or wolf like because no one would jack off to pigmen
all fairfolk races are re-imagined with the original mythology considered equally with tolkien and gygax

>some evil demon no one gives a fuck about
the "evil demon" is in fact evil itself, the opposite of the natural order of the world, and is a black void that consumes reality; its offspring are worshiped by dark cults around the world, while its avatar is always a mortal who tried to become a god and succeeded, thus becoming a paradoxical avatar of original sin

How cliche'd is my setting?

If italy didn't tip you off the first time you saw it, then yeah, you probably should.

>Asgard
>Turan
>Iranistan

so fucking creative that Robert E Howard was

Cliched enough that you felt insecurity sufficient to try and get us to validate it.

To be fair to the man, he was a hack in the most accurate sense of the term. His whole reason for writing was to make money by the word, and he made no excuses for it beyond needing the money.

Just because you switched England for moorblood countries doesn't make it any less cliche you fucking spaghetti.

(^:

>he was a hack

so was Lovecraft and Tolkien for that matter in fact all old fantasy is pure garbage

You are either trolling or retarded

In any case go watch paint dry somewhere where there is no internet access

Unreadamable/10

Oh, no, he was, make no mistake.

He was the first to "rebuild" Eurasia/Africa in this fashion, to actually give a fuck about a... hrm, pseduo-ethnological angle.

The problem is that you can' really take the most iconic periods of european nations and make that shit original more than once.

Bullshit.

>What if Europe
>Was North Africa

/pol/ - the early years

Just saying man. If you think it's cliched (and you would have to on some level to even bother asking), it probably is and you shouldn't be trying to get us to justify it for you.

>no fantasy japan

Why live?

>one is closer to Spain/Crusader kingdoms, and another one is Italian/Byzantine

"My protagonist factions are the sum of all Europeans"

I always thought of it as a "pre-deluge" Europe.

>the "evil demon" is in fact evil itself, the opposite of the natural order of the world, and is a black void that consumes reality; its offspring are worshiped by dark cults around the world, while its avatar is always a mortal who tried to become a god and succeeded, thus becoming a paradoxical avatar of original sin

Isn't that, like, 3 final fantasy final bosses?

Iranistan is bad.
But most of the others make sense. It's pre-history, they're places that are supposed to fade into myth and legend.

Actually the "dry mediterreanean" was a thing in geology in the thirties.

>it's pretty sad how less catastrophic geology is nowdays for us fantasy nerds, you can' really go on and come up with an half-plausibile deluge or something and use it to justify weird ancient history

Conan stories suck it's always
>damsel in distress
>Conan saves her

or
>Conan encounters a monster
>flips his shit
>oneshots him anyway

I kek'd at the moment where he exchanged racial slurs with one black guy though.

No, I don't mean hack in the sense of being untalented, I mean hack in the sense of producing art not for artistic merit but for money.

Not sure about Howard, but Tolkien doesn't really fit this definition.

>Bullshit.

In his own words:

>Literature is a business to me - a business at which I was making an ample living when the Depression knocked the guts out of the markets. My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living. I may cling to many illusions, but I am not ridden by the illusion that I have anything wonderful or magical to say, or that it would amount to anything particularly if I did say it. I have no quarrel with art-for-art's sakers. On the contrary, I admire their work. But my pet delusions tend in other directions.

Source: the Complete Chronicles of Conan.

He didn't consider himself an artist, and produced primarily themeless pulp that was meant first and foremost to make money. He was a hack, and I don't mean it as an insult.

And yet the Hyborian Age is one of the definitive fantasy settings

That's not saying much since fantasy is to literature what metal is to music - garbage for children.

Is it supposed to be dry-med? It looks to me like Algeria (Cimmeria) butts right up against the generically nordic countries. I might just be overstating the size of not-Africa but the shape of the curves seems right.

I mean, Pictish Wilderness and Aquilonia translate fairly obviously to real world Europe but the geography (If not climate) seems to match the overall shape of the African continent.

That's fine. There's nothing wrong with pulp produced for profit's sake. Howard's stories were quite entertaining, they just had little artistic merit on their own outside of being highly influential.

You say that like those are different.

Execpt:

Tower of the Elephant
Black Colossus
Rogues in the House
Queen of the Black Coast
A Witch Shall be Born
Beyond the Black River
Red Nails
Hour of the Dragon

Why do crave being so ignorant, user?

He didn't exactly mean "I don't give a fuck about what I write", user. He meant he wanted the stories to be successful.

Maybe that's because it's the mark 2 after Gibraltar was dismissed as too unrealistic and "oh this entire fucking Inland sea has this tiny fucking choke point, like that makes any sense".
At least that's what I like to think.

oh well, for me it was the great penis of the north that made me realize it was europe...

>He didn't exactly mean "I don't give a fuck about what I write", user. He meant he wanted the stories to be successful.

He was pretty explicit in that he didn't consider himself an artist. I'm sure he was fond of the characters, but his aim was still profit and first and foremost.

There will always be astronomy for that, though.
>He didn't exactly mean "I don't give a fuck about what I write", user
Have you ever read Tarzan?

Just tooling around by posting in this thread for the laughs m8, I know my setting has plenty of derivative elements.

The only real way to write good non-cliched fantasy is to return to the cultural soul that produced fantasy, making things exotic for their own sake won't solve much.

Generic tellurci cataclism did ensue a tthe end the Hyborian Age, but yeah, dry med is canon.

True: he did think of himself as an artisan. Quite correctly, I guess.

Almost none of the stories are like that.
Conan spends a good amount of time fleeing for his life.

>Have you ever read Tarzan?

That was Burroughs wasn't it?

See, this shit is why people go apeshit for things like Dark Souls lore, because it *isn't* the Euro-American fantasy autofellatio that we all know by now. Feels better when someone else (e.g. a Japanese studio) is doing the figurative dick-sucking of the source material i.e. Western fantasy "canon".

>That was Burroughs wasn't it?
Oh, you are right. I think I suffered a brain fart and confused the two.

>all the same
>in the things he listed there are 16 possible different combinations

>Feels better when someone else (e.g. a Japanese studio) is doing the figurative dick-sucking of the source material i.e. Western fantasy "canon".

Which Japanese studio is doing this? If you look at, say, Berserk, you'll find contemporary Western fantasy done arguably better by non-westerners, who are looking at all of western folklore as the source material and not just dungeons and dragons.

>almost all enemies and NPCs are knights
>t-this isn't like generic european fantasy!

fucking lol

Dark Souls by Fromsoft is "Totally Not Berserk: A Video Game". The director is a huge Berserk nerd and jerks off to old European architecture.

I'm not sure you could miss the point more if you tried.

I'd like to say something snide about how capital L Literature has become nothing but an irrelevant, navel gazing, atavistic circle jerk, but R. Scott Bakker's blog (Three Pound Brain) has already done a better takedown than I ever could.

Alot of the most influential art was delivered as mass entertainment. See: Shakespeare's fart jokes and sex puns

>beast race is either cat or wolf like
That's because far more people have affection for cats and dogs than any other animals for an obvious reason.

I didn't expect tumblr "artists" to steal jokes from Titus Lucretius Carus of all people.

Bakker is 1000% shit writing though. "Literature" has it's head up its own ass, but Bakker is literally just mad his edgy bible fanfics where every woman is a whore and every man is a sad dude who has INNER DARKNESS aren't taken seriously by lit critics. "Literature" is mostly shit with a handful of redeeming examples, but so is genre lit.

is it really stealing if nobody knows who came up with the concept in the first place

DS2 is not canon, and should not be considered a Dark Souls game

Then DS3 shouldn't be considered a game at all, because it's pure suckage compared to DS2.

At least you could say Dark Souls 2 doesn't count because it wasn't directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki while Dark Souls 3, for all its faults, was.

>There are people who still think DS2 is better than 3
How can such shit taste exist? Is /v/ leaking again?

>Aldia mentioned, with his signature spell "Soul Stream" found in the Archives
>giants with hole-faces in Irithyll
>giant tree in Firelink Shrine that drops a Giant Tree Seed
>Yhorm's chainmail hood itself is a reference to the hole-face and his boss fight a callback to both the Giant Lord and the manta ray demon thing from Demon's Souls
>lands of Mirrah and Forossa explicitly mentioned and represented by armor sets
>Drang Knights in Irithyll and Lothric Castle
>Vendrick's Shield of Want
>Nashandra's portrait in Irithyll next to Gwynevere's
>Laddersmith Gilligan from Earthen Peak found dead in the Profaned Capital next to a bunch of his ladders
>Highlord Wolnir's crown states he got the idea of collecting crowns after hearing about Vendrick
>Alva, Seeker of the Spurned returns

it has more interesting and inspired level design though

...

I dunno, I kinda liked the mellow, contemplative tone of DSII more than what DSIII attempted to do with the lore. II is like returning home from a long day of hard labor and feeling every muscle ache while you get comfy at the fireplace, letting your mind wander and reflecting on your life.

III is like getting mugged by Jehova's Witnesses in the streets after a hard day at work to me.

>it has more interesting and inspired level design though
I think you mean "Has more retarded impossible space"
Seriously, The world space makes no sense, and most of the places like the wharf, jail, and depths are just boring.

The only interesting places in DS2 were the Aerie and Loyce

Explain to me how the English are not the protagonists of history.

>muh forever cycles reincarnation fanfiction.net tier lore
>good
DS2 had the WORST lore of the Souls games.
At least DS3 actually tried to build on the lore and give it closure. Further, it was in production long before DS2 was, and it was written specifically to be a continuation and finishing of the franchise.

DS2 just tried to slap names and references together in the most retarded and haphazard way just to go "hey look, we're referencing DS1! Are we cool yet hurrr!"

I meant DS3 not DS2. DS2 is "a box with a path in it" and I'm not gonna defend it online, not even as a joke. It has some good levels (Lost Bastille, The Gutter but only in Scholar edition because that version doesn't shred your framerate, Shrine of Amana, Undead Crypt for aesthetics only, Dragon Aerie and all of the DLC areas) and you *can* argue that the impossible space is due to them scrapping the warp point world map halfway through development, but yeah. DS2's levels overall are not so good.

more like the villains amirite

Not if we count the DLC's.

England spawned the protagonists of history.

>>muh harr harr I'm gonna hook ya in the gabber ya cunt Dwarves obsessed with axes, gold and being butthurt
and beards, don't forget beards

>who designed this, an alien?
I still feel stupid for taking so long to get this joke

Except DS2 was actually a good game, while 3 is a steaming pile of unplayable shit. Lore doesn't count for much when the GAMEPLAY is bad. You know, since it's...a game.

>>Aldia mentioned, with his signature spell "Soul Stream" found in the Archives
Except that's wrong, since its been heavily implied in the lore that the Head Scholar of the archive, who trained Lothric, was actually Sullyvahn

Also, for the rest of those I'm fairly certain they were either originally written for DS3, but got ripped for DS2, or were just thrown in just to appease the need for a connection for DS2

It should be obvious by this point that he was convinced to do the sequels by Namco. He didn't want any, he wanted to make Bloodborne. And now that he has Kadokawa's monies backing him, he made it clear he won't make more Souls games.

all the little fiddly bits

>Except DS2 was actually a good game
>The game were every enemy have a tracking device permanently locked on the player
>Good

So what are the rohirrim turks mixed with swedes or something ?

Also when he wrote that shit, there was no googles and wikipedias for every nerds to know every detail of every bullshit dead religion, so far less people probably even recognized those names.

The DSI references are the weakest points of DSII, true, but they kinda have to be there to make casul players aware that yes, this is a Souls game in the Souls universe. Where I think II's lore shines is the things that aren't connected to the previous game.

>the question of what makes a King worthy of his title
>Vendrick trying (and failing!) to become like Gwyn (which is kind of a meta commentary on sequels if you squint hard enough)
>Nashandra using you to break down the safeguards Vendrick had installed to make sure she never reaches the Throne
>Vendrick and Nashandra's whole dynamic
>Aldia's "muh cycles" if you don't instinctively hate lore that isn't "muh Berserk"
>the little side quests like the dullahan NPC whose body you have to fight, or Lucatiel's whole story

And III is better for having Aldia beat you over the head with "IT'S A CYCLE THAT NEVER FUCKING ENDS IF WE DON'T BREAK IT OURSELVES OR SOMETHING GOES REALLY REALLY WRONG" because that way, III's main story has way more impact; something DID go really really wrong and now the cycle IS ending. This doesn't make sense if you don't introduce the concept of cycles in the first place.

>Sulyvahn

I haven't heard that one before, but of all the candidates for "scholar who doubted the linking of the flame" (Kaathe, Aldia, Crystal Sage, Sulyvahn), only one of them looks like a deformed wax head, has the title of Scholar and is able to create artificial dragons (like the wyverns in Lothric Castle who have Pus of MAN infecting them, which only affects humans) which is something that would definitely have caught Oceiros attention, since he wanted to become one. I'm not saying it's definitely 100% Aldia, since there's also Kaathe statues in the Archives, but I think there's a lot of arguments in favor of Aldia being Lothric's tutor that aren't just Soul Stream being there. And Miyazaki doesn't place items randomly so Soul Stream being there is definitely on purpose.

This is b8

Normans without water.

This but you could even say iranistan could be an old name for the same place.
Iran isn't that new in name.

No can't you read the map? Scandies are elves. Rohirrim are German or something roughly.

How would that be bad though?

>mechanics are Blood Souls simply smashed into a Dark Souls game
>magic builds are obsolete from release, still are
>dex affect cast speed (lol)
>millions of Estus chugging at light speed
>PvP nonexistent
>anything larger than a longsword is shit
>poise broken
>millions of bonfires everywhere
>stat inducing builds obsolete

Face it, the dev team DID NOT want to do DS3, and it shows. B Team at least put heart into the second installment, and it shows. DS2 was a way more solid installment than 3 could ever hope to be.

>Except DS2 was actually a good game,
>Agility tax
>Agility existing, period
>too many boring humanoid enemies with the same moveset
>difficulty is just adding HP and Poise to enemies, looking at you Sunken Chodes.
>broken casting and 0cast speed havel mages being super common
>even laggier backstabs thanks to the headslap
>fucking hexes
>the most boring boss design in the entire series
>the DLC's "co-op" dungeons
>Santier Spear and RITB spam
>making people buy the game twice just to give us all the features they had promised in the beginning.
>the WORST and jankiest hitbox detection in the series, with the most retarded attack tracking
>healing being fucking trivial thanks to soulgems and estus together
>worst level design in the franchise
>worst implementation of boss adds and multi-enemy boss fights
>Shittier Ornestein for no reason
>Ancient Dragon being the worst Dragon Boss in the series
>invisible forest enemies

The only good things from DS2 were character respecs, Ivory King boss fight (even if the lore was retarded), and Ornifx

>DS2
>the game where half the bosses can be beaten by running up to them, walking in a circle around them, and then occasionally attacking
>good

>Shittier Ornstein for no reason

That's Dark Souls 3 though.

Oh come on, a lot of the problem with DS3 is just that you don't have that mechanic from bloodborne where you get some health back if you immediately hit an enemy after taking damage. The game as a whole isn't a steaming pile of unplayable shit though, that is ridiculously hyperbolic.

They're not chinese, I guess.

if you don't think Velstadt and the Mirror Knight are the tightest shit you can get the fuck out right now

the game's problem is that it tries to be Bloodborne and Demon's Souls at the same time and manages neither.

I'm talking about the "Old Dragonslayer" from DS2, aka one of the most retarded things about the game

Dragonslayer Armor both fights nothing like, nor has any lore connections, to Ornestein you illiterate fuckstick

Then why does he have the Dragonslayer spear (but with a different blade u guise!! it's origonol!!!) and Ornstein's armor. Why is he even called "Dragonslayer Armor" if it's not an epick reference to Ornstein? Old Dragonslayer was half-assed boss fight, but no less out of place than Dragonslayer Armor.

>or fantasy Russia

Fantasy Russia/Ukraine/central asia would be Rohan... white horsemen with spears.