Is "medieval fantasy" a creatively dead setting?

>is to make shit boring as fuck?
Black Company and aSoIaF are boring now ?

The only thing required for medieval fantasy is that it's a medieval society and tech level and that there's fantastic things going on.

If you want to get creative with it there's thousands of ways to innovate on that.
>focus on guilds instead of courts
>introduce phenomena inspired by other mythologies, god-like entities walking the earth, reincarnation, talking animals, alien overlords
>create new and different backdrops and landscapes, archipelos, tundras, canyons
>switch up the genre of story telling, from epic heroism, to noir crime to SoL
I'd advice switching up the roster for playable races too but too be honest I don't particularly enjoy the concept of playable races. Can't we just all be humans, maybe from different cultures with different specialities if it's a metropolian setting?

We have very different preferences, then. Though what you are describing sounds to me like science-fiction. A problem I see with commonplace magic layered over a vaguely recognizable setting is basically what you described- there is no plausible way that the setting would remain recognizable or relatable.

Still, Id's inderesding : DD

Those are some pretty cool ideas, but I'm more talking about exploring the technological and social changes that having magic would bring about, re:

>t. actual furry

This is why every game i run ends up having aliens in it at some point. Current campaign is just goblin invading town, with the twist that the goblins are cloned cyborgs from a crashed spaceship.

Both aren't interesting settings.

Something I see in worldbuilding circles. Nothing grinds my gears more than seeing someone do the same Elves, Dwarves and Humans bullshit with the respective tropes along. I've seen it before. I've read it before. I've played it before. It's boring. For some yet unknown reason people fall back to this thing over and over again, and usually by their own will. They don't even want to be too different.

And then you get talk about genres. People are scared to expand the "fantasy genre" or go beyond its limits — whatever the fuck those limits even are. I don't understand why. Just do your thing, go with the flow of ideas. Don't stop because "it isn't fantasy" or "this is too scifi".

I don't mean you should necessarily try to be some unique snowflake fuck or creative genius. Just stop willingly limiting yourself. Please. There are no chains. You're just imagining them.

Genres were a mistake.

>unique snowflake fuck or creative genius
see, I think that's part of the problem too.
We fucking DEMONIZE originality on here.
Someone who puts a lot of focus into something is an autist, people who want to show off something creative they did are branded as "special snowflakes," etc.

We shame and belittle SO many people who just want input on, or heaven forbid some recognition for, taking creative risks because it's "cringey" or doesn't immediately mesh with our tastes or because it "strays too far."
The chains are very real, and we made them ourselves.

no, but slavish devotion to genre conventions definitely is.

Read good book, watch good movies, put serious effort towards becoming a better writer instead of trying to be "more creative" than the next guy.

...what does that contribute to this thread?

Like, yeah, I work every day at improving writing and shit, but if you don't think innovation and originality are necessary parts of worldbuilding as well, you need to drink some water and have a quality think on what makes roleplaying fun.

I am with you on fantasy races like elves, dwarves and even humans, having become too stale and "samey" in a lot of published fantasy settings. This is the reason why I love the Dwarf Slayers from Warhammer Fantasy, because on every level the dwarves in WHF are generic and boring (don't know if it is Seinfeld Syndrome), ecxept for the slayers, which I do not see anywhere else. Sure there are dwarf berserkers here and there, but I don't think they stand out like slayers do.

And since DnD and now Pathfinder are game systems that many people today know, they perpetuate this notion of having a standard cast of player races; Man, Elf, ½-elf, ½-orc, gnome and ½-ling. I've always wondered why orcs aren't playable, but half-orcs are - So that is what I actually like Elder Scrolls for doing. But back when I played a lot of Pathfinder, if I was the DM I'd always take this line-up of races, remove some from the setting altogether, add others to it, and change up one or two in some way, because having the same old every time is tiresome.

I just think way too many people spend all their time wringing their hands over originality when what they should be doing is creating a setting they like and then writing well within it. If your love and dedication go into something, then it will naturally become original and different. Trying too hard to not be derivitive is pretty much shooting yourself in the face.

There's Orion

Well, I meant more like chasing the idea of becoming or being unique is a bit sketchy. Either you are or you aren't. Just do your thing. Don't necessarily even think about uniqueness.

Forget tropes. Forget genres. Think outside the box or burn the whole fucking box and start from there.

Orcs aren't playable ?
Our DMs never forbid them.
As long as it's sentient, not OP and the DM agree in his setting, any race should be playable.

I also think it's dead. It went the way of the pulp adventure. Legendary old franchises like LotR are still drudging along due to their sheer recognisability, but there's nothing to replace them and there never will be.

>By which I mean, has the whole genre of "middle ages + magic and monsters" become so codified and stuck in its own conventions that it's in creative stagnation?

Yes, but not for the reason you listed, but because people who usually make or write fantasy settings don't often take into consideration how their fantasy aspects would change EVERYTHING.

The other part of the problem is that people who usually do understand this are criticized by ignorant puritans who claim their settings are "historical inaccurate" or otherwise suffer from anachronism.

Like, people who complain about potatoes or why there are no "black" hobbits.

Creative =/= fun

>Strawman
>Opinion
>Another Strawman

Wow, great discussion. What excellent quality of posts we have on this fine board.

>By which I mean, has the whole genre of "middle ages + magic and monsters" become so codified and stuck in its own conventions that it's in creative stagnation?
Nope since even today some writters can show their unique and fresh view on
>"medieval fantasy"

Everyone has an idea of what "medieval fantasy" is supposed to be and none of them are particularly creative, fun, or interesting.

Yes Mark, we know about how your setting is """"""""""realistic"""""""""" and """"""""""unique"""""""""" but we'd rather just fight monsters and earn treasure than take 10 minutes to calculate exactly how much we can carry without suffering from from encumbrance and we'd rather play races like elves and dwarves than sit around playing humans with no remarkable characteristics beyond being not!France, not!Germany, not!Scotland, and not!Italy.

Just cut the bullshit already, there's a reason why more people remember settings like Dark Sun and Eberron over Greyhawk.

Yes. They've always been boring.

No more creatively dead than space opera, cyberpunk, or any other popular genre fiction setting concept.

The real issue is most authors are creatively bankrupt and do nothing interesting with their world-building or narratives.

>I hate fun

It's all about execution, and it's entirely possible to inject new and creative things or put creative spins on old things in settings, even ones that have been done to death like medieval fantasy.

See Game of Thrones. You know, that massively popular and successful medieval fantasy series?

Most of medieval fantasy isn't even medieval, it's early renaissance only without guns.

Yeah, it's almost like user posted "male human fighter with brown hair" as some sort of humorous statement not to be taken completely seriously.

How about a Napoleonic Fantasy Setting?

See, the problem is that unique settings become more difficult to relate to.

Everyone knows tolkien-fantasy, it's comfortable. Getting a group together to play in the Forgotten Realms is easy because it's what everyone knows.

The being said, I don't do this. My settings explore fantasy-magic-bullshit to their furthest extent and become more science-fantasy than anything else.

> Rifles & pistols that fire spells like wands.

> Bound elementals that act as AI to control and automate municipal processes and act as information brokers.

> Way Gates for instant travel.

> A floating wagon that has to be pulled by horses because the lateral movement runes stopped working 22 years ago.

> Witchlight lanterns

> Armor and weapons fashioned from spell-woven ceramic and carbon

> Cities and building interiors folded into pocket dimensions so they're significantly larger on the inside

> Common household appliances like freezers, microwaves, matter replicators made possible by ingenious and complex artificy mass-produced by automated factories run by bound elemental AI

And that's just looking at the natural next-step tech levels that structured magic would lead to.

But with all that being said, I've brought out a few unique settings here with these kinds of ideas and they got torn to pieces so you can all go fuck yourselves.

I think these sort of genres have periods of growth and stagnation depending on many interconnecting factors in society.

I think fantasy has been in a period of stagnation for awhile now but has recently started growing again. You can see this in the popularity of media like GoT and the growing player base of DnD players. I think it's just starting but give it a few more years and we'll start seeing fantasy growing and updating itself and becoming something better.

>It's from the 5th to 15th century.

I don't think it's set down in stone. For my part I use from the fall of Rome (476 AD) to the fall of Constantinople (1453), but it is entirely arbitrary.

God yes. Thank you for finally saying it.

Do you think medieval romances and folk tales should also consider the socio-economic impact of dragons, wizards, and hippogriffs?

i Honestly don't think the problem with creative stagnation stems from lack of history knowledge.

>GoT
>not ASoIaF
Take your cuck propaganda back to R*ddit.

> Is *successful, popular thing* boring now?

You know where you are. You should know what kind of answer you're going to get.

If they are trying to do anything beyond teach a moral lesson to children then absolutely.

This, finally.

The strength of character development is worth a billion goofy Mos Eisley Cantina races. It seems people feel like mechanical depth the least interesting type of character depth is the be all end all of character development.

>autist
Hi newfriend. Autistic is a compliment here.

The crowd where GoT is popular isn't the one you want at your table. GRRM is a hack.

Hello, newfag.

it's just a setting. you pretty much also need plot.

No ideas are bad, because some of the shit you love best are shitty and boring ideas that are executed well, almost certainly.
If you mean in TRPG's, then it depends on the skills the GM.
If you mean in writing, then it depends on the writer.

Why are people always so quick to say stuff is not relatable?

We have astronauts, I can imagine an astronaut. There is Isekai fantasy and tons of novels about portals to fantasy worlds. Mages make portals in numerous fantasy settings. But a portal to the moon like in the other anons example suddenly makes the setting unrelatable? It baffles me to no end. Oh no, I have to imagine a thing in a -fantasy- book, now I'm totally disenfranchised.

Fucking this.
I've read the "there is no originality"-spiel as a way to shut someone down from trying so often. In the dedicated worldbuilding threads no less.

YES PLEASE

>Common household appliances like freezers, microwaves, matter replicators

>I've read the "there is no originality"-spiel as a way to shut someone down from trying so often. In the dedicated worldbuilding threads no less.
That's the opposite of how it should be used.

To be fair, that's how most settings are.
No-one thinks about what the world will be like for common folk.

That's partially
1: Most people don't care about how dragons will affect crop rotation and bean farming.
2: Most history also ignores the low level commoners and focuses on the high level power players.

Came here to post this. In order for a setting to truly feel like a legit organic setting, it's important to have implications for the magic and technology available in that setting. Somebody said that this would make the setting less relatable, but it actually makes the most sense as in the real world finding logical applications of such things is how the real world itself advances in terms of innovation. It would only make sense that a world with magical communication happening often would eventually make it into its equivalent of the telephone the same way our world does. Without stuff like this, while the world itself may have been birth from the creative ideas of a person, the world itself lacks that kind of passion and creativity, thus it feels lifeless.

>Believing the Pre-Tolkein and Post-Tolkein fantasy myth

Tolkein
Did
Not
innovate

Everything from Middle-Earth was found in earlier fantasy books, Lord of the Rings was not genre breaking.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert on the literary context of Tolkien, but one thing I would say that seems unique to Tolkien is the sense of ruin, of melancholy and loss that pervades his work, the idea that despite Good's triumph over Evil, something's being lost and that the magic and wonder is leaving the world.

Also Tolkien's appeal has lasted for over half a century. That'd suggest that his works speaks to something pretty fundamental

>sense of ruin, of melancholy and loss that pervades his work, the idea that despite Good's triumph over Evil, something's being lost

He actually got this aesthetic from George MacDonald, Lilith by the same author takes theses themes up to 11 and is probably the most depressing fantasy book ever written.

Basically this. It's always fun to watch them try to explain away wizards as super rare and then have half a dozen in the main cast. Similarly, I've seen way too often when the established physics of a universe get fundamentally fucked up just to drive a world shattering conflict.

Half of the appeal of LotR is the Bilbo/Frodo archetype of being normal people dragged on to a fantastic adventure, with a war story tacked on in Frodo's case.

Lilith is far more of something CS Lewis is influenced from than Tolkien due to how allegorical the whole thing is. Tolkien has publicly talked on how he himself isn't a fan of overtly allegorical themes.

That being said, Tolkien has definitely been influenced by MacDonald, but really just influenced not directly copypasting anything.

>How many settings can you find that have teleportation spells? How many of them have a space program?
>How many settings have means of instant communication (speaking stones, telepathy, magic scrolls, etc.), but don't have communication networks?

Yeah, fucking hell, I know a guy who has all this crazy magic in his setting, sometimes going well beyond the normal realms of "this is a mishmash pathfinder setting that isn't Golarion because I'm original", except he falls into the exact same trap as Golarion in that everything is just a stagnant nothing. The world doesn't change because of all this magic, and the "connections" this magic makes, like portals between towns and long-range communication are unimaginative at best. It's a real shame, but not everyone wants to write Shandy for every setting.

I mean, I do, but not everyone.

Sounds fun

I don't agree that the genre is stagnant. Why? The devil with any story is never the genre, but the details within.

Some of the very best stories come from environments where precious little that is unusual is going on. This allows the reader to fill in many mental blanks, which liberates the author/GM to focus upon crafting something compelling. It's the interplay between people and the conflicts that really come to the fore, and they show so strongly when they must be focused upon.

The trap is a misplaced sense of what creativity is. Creativity is not throwing as much of the bombastic as possible into a scene. This is my beef with settings like numeria. In numeria, everything needs to be utterly alien and detailed. This is fine, to a point, but saps the reader or listener's precious attention span. You can only push that button so much before you desensitize them.

Yes, it is firmly in the ghetto of genre fiction, written by people who have no frame of reference other than other genre fiction.

Generic medieval fantasy is what happen when a generation discover tolkien and make books ripping off surface elements.Then people grow up on these books, influence further books AND D&D. Then D&D influence said new books who then influence D&D and videogames who then...

You get the idea. Fantasy's been circlejerking itself in a spiral of unoriginality. But there is also the problem that anyone trying something vaguely new gets shit on.as 'snowflake'. Of course, it often is but 90% of everything is crap anyway.

The problem with seriously considering the implications is that the only autists who care about that are also the ones who will go out of their way to try to poke holes in your explanations. Easier to just handwave it.

Let's be real here, most of us know fantasy purely via D&D and derived products, videogames and maybe some anme. Lord of the Rings is the only older shit most of us know and it's popularity is owed very much to the Peter Jackson movies. Beyond that, we got Game of Thrones.

Most people who play tabletop RPG and are under 25 have probably never read the works of, say, Lord Dunsany, Moorcock or Howard.

hell most fantasy staples, like full plate armor paladins and fighters commonly wear, don't even show up as a common thing until the Renaissance

Every fan of high fantasy hits a "sick of elves" phase, I feel, but the truth of the matter is that the average person who sits down to play D&D wants to act like a dwarf, banter with an elf, and fight some goblins.

There's plenty of room to inject weird shit into the world within that model and I certainly like to do that when I get the chance, but the average person who wants to engage with a fantasy role playing game is doing it because they find the trappings of genre conventions appealing, not because they want me to "subvert all the tropes" for them.

I feel you. I have several of my own settings created that are something either completely different or just a reimagining of general fantasy tropes, and to me they don't feel like something the general public and/or the average player would enjoy. I think it's easier to make something everyone can understand and process that they won't have to guess about every five seconds when working through. TTRPGs are a poor place to make something new and original when your players are working off of experience that would then be expired. It's easier to make a good campaign than it is a good/original/whatever setting or mechanic or whatever.

"Subvert the tropes" is just another type of unimaginative copying. It is just the tiresome obsession with novelty with no real substance.

While they are certainly not above smugness and pretentiousness, there are some OSR blog which show some interesting re imaginings, ranging of just one race to a class to a monster. Sure, D&D is fine and dandy if it's what you and your group like but one does not need to reinvent the wheel by starting back at reinventing fire.

>"Subvert the tropes" is just another type of unimaginative copying. It is just the tiresome obsession with novelty with no real substance.
It's usually done by pretentious postmodern blowhards who don't understand why this element came to be in the first place.

Is postmodernism really anything other than the shallow pursuit of novelty?

>muh taxes

Fuck off, Gurm

>It's usually done by pretentious postmodern blowhards who don't understand why this element came to be in the first place.

Or literal autists from TV Tropes

It is a lost of (entirely meaningless) things but I like to think of it as an attempt at the 'high brow' version of emo teenagers saying how nothing is meaningful combined with an utter lack of talent. It's like the story of the emperor with no clothes, except people are circlejerking at how deep a turd in a cup is and how profound and 'sticking it up' to 'the man' it is.

Meanwhile, a wise man see a turd in a cup being held up at the same level as michaelango's David by a bunch of idiots.

This. Typically the people who complain about stagnation in the genre of fantasy literature have either inundated themselves so deeply in decades of admittedly derivative works that every surface element reads as trite or never really engaged with the genre beyond its surface elements at all. A Song of Ice and Fire, Kingkiller Chronicles, and the Gentleman Bastards books, for example, are three wildly different stories that all have very standard "fantasy" trappings about them, and the similarities beyond the surface level quickly dissipate once you actually engage with them as independent works.

The reason why these surface elements exist is half replication, but it's also half because the works are being written for people who find those elements appealing. High fantasy doesn't have an elf problem so much as you probably have a problem with elves - it seems asinine to complain about the "standard fantasy races" or another "fantasy medieval setting" in a genre written for people who find elves and wizards cool as aesthetic, conceptual trappings and not people who think they're trite.

People want to play D&D because of, not in spite of, fantasy tropes that they like. Trying to reinvent the wheel always strikes me as a practice in self-indulgence that's more likely to alienate the core player base of the hobby than actually accomplish what it's setting out to do. People like the Witcher because they like fantasy shit. People like Game of Thrones because they like fantasy shit.

or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dwarf"

TV Tropes was such a mistake. It may tell you what story elements are but it does not and cannot tell someone how these elements are used or why they are used the way they are, resulting in autist seeing every single work being stripped down to it's bare components.

They have pretty boring settings, yea.

Setting in itself does not make the story. But....yeah, Game of Throne sucks and nowadays it is 'babbys first fantasy'.

>I don't particularly enjoy the concept of playable races. Can't we just all be humans, maybe from different cultures with different specialities if it's a metropolian setting?

>Not thinking playable races are boss as fuck

>And that's just looking at the natural next-step tech levels that structured magic would lead to.

NOT ALL MAGIC IS DND. REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

One need only look at their entries to realize how little credibility they have. There will be next to nothing other than Harry Potter in the Literature section, and then six paragraphs of MLP examples, and more anime examples than you can shake a stick at.

The point of a setting is to provide a backdrop for a story to take place. The setting is not THE STORY. A setting is only as bored and tired as the story being told in it. If all you're doing is Eragon: The Plagiarizing of course it's going to be shit.

Read The Red Knight, Christian Cameron.

The Genre isn't dead or ossified, the authors are just reading too incestuously. Fantasy authors read fantasy authors who read fantasy authors. Get some mythology into your work, some history, some philosophy, some theology, some of the classics. You need to read stuff besides Fantasy and Scifi when you're setting up your setting.

Oh, and stop doing world ending threats for fuck's sakes.

people still enjoy it, so its still fine

It has not.

People generally simply copy what's been done rather than attempt something new.

We have loads of historical setting books. Particularly for GURPS/brp/rq/SW. Even if you're not running one of those, you can use the setting books.

You could also use them as well detailed inspiration points for your own setting.

>setting that isn't shit
>"You must play a male human fighter"
>Magic is rare
Does not compute.

>aSoIaF
>GoT
Aren't those just an endless parade of shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people? Why would I be interested in a setting where everyone is evil?

It sounds like you just want to put modern/future technology into a fantasy setting and have the world work basically the same as ours, except the technology runs on magic instead of electricity.

It's not exactly creative to just take D&D and remove most of the spells and every alignment except Neutral Evil.

I'm pretty sure he was just arguing how fucking stupid it's that a setting with magic as science (eg. majority of high fantasy) stays in medieval stasis for thousands of years. Even worse if magic is easy to learn and common or there are ruins of magitek civilizations everywhere, but no-one ever succeeds replicating their tech.

I'm not so much bored of Middle Ages settings, but more so of "unrealistic" fantasy settings (before any autists get triggered, I'm using that word loosely).

I love a setting like Game of Thrones (initially, at least, before all the resurrection and dragon shit) or Lord of the Rings where there isn't really any overt magic, and everything feels like it could've happened. I like gritty, but with light-hearted moments. Dark Souls and Bloodborne fit, if you ignore the player magic systems.

I don't like shit like D&D or Warcraft, where stupid armour, massive weapons, cartoony designs, and overbearing magic systems make it obviously fake. They're so far removed from Middle Ages that they aren't even in an analogous time period any more.