What is it with Veeky Forumss insistence that every fictional culture/race be based so fully on some historical...

>the ring being the atomic bomb.

I have never, ever heard of this analogy and holy shit I just spat out my drink in laughter.

in most cases amateur efforts to create societies not based on historical precedent end up really stupidly.unviable

at least cleaving closely to history means the end result is believable

People still love to claim that orcs are an analogy for niggers.

I don't think you understand how widespread it was, tolkien had to add in the foreword of the second edition of the trilogy that this was not the case.
True, no one makes this connection anymore, but it was quite popular.

Veeky Forums is not a single person.

They do not. You are making a thread that "preaches to the choir" to get people to agree with your or beat up a nonexistent strawman.

Please stop making threads like this. Thank you.

No, but it functions as a collective entity within which certain trends and tendencies can be noticed and commented upon.

>What's with [thing that Veeky Forums doesn't do] ?
>Why does EVERYONE do this?
Please stop

Real cultures are not arbitrary. They are how they are because of the circumstances that brought them about. You really can't make up a culture without aping a real one both A) they are the only precedent for how cultures should be and B) similar cultures in similar circumstances will likely have similar traditions.

Your specific examples are incredibly stupid autism, but as a concept it is basically unavoidable unless you are even more autistic about world-building.

It doesn't happen in all cases, but it does happen when there's a setting where MOST cultures are closely based on real world ones then suddenly one that doesn't appear. It just feels "wrong" in context, I guess. I think people on the Warcraft threads are STILL jumping through mental hoops to try and "prove" that the Draenei are "really" [culture they think they are], and both Blood and Night elves get arguments so pointless you almost have to wonder if people are on some level terrified of a race not having a real world equivalent.

>THEIR BUILDINGS HAVE COLUMNS, A-AND THE ROOFS LOOK SLIGHTLY ASIAN, OBVIOUSLY THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE GRECO-CHINESE

Or the high elves from Warhammer Fantasy. They're "Japan" because they're isolationist, "Athens" because they're philosopher kings, "USA" because they have aircraft carriers, "Atlantis" because they live on an island, and at no point does it occur to anyone that maybe if they're pieced together from concepts of 15 completely unrelated countries, some of them fictional, it maybe safe to just call them A FANTASY CIVILIZATION.

well only a noble could afford that much custom fitted armour, and noble women are still vain about their appearance. The smith put heels in so that she will waste her money on his merchandise.

People are afraid of anything being different from established norms, you make something even a little different from something that already exist and people will get angry at you and call you a "contrarian" or "special snowflake" and other dumb shit, ignoring that fact that that's basically how every fantasy race we know today came into being.

That's what bothers you? Not the bonnet instead of helmet?

I completely agree. It's stupid.

Everybody sensible knows the high elves are supposed to be the british anyway.

Laziness and lack of inventiveness.

I honestly think when people cut and paste history for fantasy cultures it's a very bad sign. Hell, even taking the them park version is possibly less stupid

You do know the original purpose of heels, right?

I'd like to see you pull a completely original and well-developed culture out of your ass

There's a huge difference between saying "this culture is inspired by Japan" and saying "this culture is [this world's] Japan, therefore if it doesn't have samurai it's an omission and however it's depicted is necessarily a statement about the Japanese."

To be fair Warhammer fantasy is kind of an example where EVERYONE is "fantasy X" so it's kinda understandable that people try to pigeonhole elves into one

Racists. Literally everything they think about is related to race in some way. So when they read or play fantasy, naturally everything is a racial commentary. They are sick individuals who believe in things like flat Earth, chemtrails, Illuminati, etc.

Sometime in between now and 2010 Veeky Forums became a living breathing dunning-kruger effect chock full of pseudointellectuals pretending to all be more educated than one another about one thing or another and their progressive lying finally caught up with them and became this big bloated pretend realism meme that it is now. It got so bad that shitposting actually alleviates the problems resulting from this board wedging those reddit and tumblr sticks so firmly up its own anus.

Only tg does this all the time in world building threads.

>Sometime in between now and 2010 Veeky Forums became a living breathing dunning-kruger effect chock full of pseudointellectuals pretending to all be more educated than one another about one thing or another and their progressive lying finally caught up with them and became this big bloated pretend realism meme that it is now.
Yeah, /qst/ was a mistake, but what are ya gonna do about it?

Elaborate, please.

If the Earth is round, then how come the Illuminati's chemtrails are straight? Logic dictates that they would bend with the atmosphere's curvature!

Flat earth theory originated in anti-illuminati practice you fucking lepton

The chemtrails have variable buoyancy to bend them in the opposite direction. It evens out to being straight when measured on a sphere. They just want you to think they're straight.

You know that’s not why the artist put then there right? Otherwise she’d have a bow, arrows, and maybe not even have plate on the back of her thigh since it’s uncomfortable to ride with it. The only reason the artist drew her with heels is because he wanted to.

>True Story

Had a player in need of a blacksmith for horseshoes, something I had put Zero thought into. The player got bent out of shape and attempted to "correct" me about ye-old-towns having historically accurate blacksmiths while travelling from town to town.

The setting was planescape.
The players were going between two gatetowns.
And they themselves were not using any horses at all, but an automobile like a model-T that they found. (I forget why he wanted horseshoes in the first place.)

A whole lot of bitching about how published artists draw better than they ever could because they aren't willing to put in the time and effort.

originally created to give better grip and leverage when standing in stirrups. she'd be better suited fighting mounted

I didn't say they were distinctly related, you mentally ill fuck.

I didn't even realize it was an issue till coming to Veeky Forums and seeing all the worldbuilders describe their creations as not!x culture near constatntly. Veeky Forums does this shit way too much

Whatever nigger

Man, I am sad that this /v/ and /r9k/ meme came over here.
Oh well, all Veeky Forums memes are banned, so say the newfag overlords, and we have to accept their off-board bullshit.

Because I'd rather have fantasy switzerland than standard fantasy dwarves for the millionth fucking time.

>I get that some frame of reference makes things easier to digest
This is a big reason.

I find RPGs that require more work for the players to understand the culture hurts their popularity. Not everyone wants to do a cultural study of some new thing for every game they play, so it makes it easier to say "they're kinda like Vikings" or whatever, it instantly puts an idea in their head to work from.

I've never seen that. I've seen people drawing worldbuilding ideas on historical counterparts, but that's because they literally want a certain culture, or splice a culture with a fantasy race just for fun.

It's easier to picture and digest. It's why throwing shit like kobolds or even goblins at new players is fucking retarded. Compare "what's a kobold again?" or "goblins are like little people with funny hats right?" to:

"These goddamn vikings can fuck off!"
"Uh oh guys it's a ghost ship. AHH ZOMBIES AND SKELETONS TOO WHAT"
"Oh shit are we gonna fight fucking MADUSA???"
"OH GOD DRAGONS"

Unless you're talking fantasy landsknechts that's just boring fantasy neutrality.

>Playing with casuals who don't know what basic fantasy races are

People are uncreative and it's easier to draw motifs from things you're familiar with than generate them yourself.
News at 11.

This problem permeates pop culture rather thoroughly. I think once you've got one cultural parallel (like the parallels between LotR's dwarves and the jewish people), people start trying to categorize everything like that.
I've seen it a lot with the Elder Scrolls. Because the series has races like the Nords and Bretons, who are named after actual ethnic groups, people want to categorize the Argonians as Native Americans and the Altmer as Japanese (despite there already being heavy Japanese influence on like half the cultures)

Cavalry heels and stiletto heels are very, very different things. Cav heels are, at the most extreme, about 2 inches, and squared off so they impede walking as little as possible. Stiletto heels are extremely long and pointed, making walking an exercise in balance.

Because history is the most interesting and indepth story ever told
God is a very good writer

>Because history is the most interesting and indepth story ever told
No it's actually dull and repetitive and full of stupid people repeating the same sins ad infinitum.

>basic fantasy races

What the fuck does this even mean? Like, really? This phrase right here is actually why I'm starting to come around on the fact that Amazon is poised to run LotR right into the fucking ground with web content. Hopefully, this will kill the idea that a "fantasy" work has to include "perfect elves, Scottish dwarfs, murderous orcs, crafty goblins" or any of that other boring, trite shit.

Then clearly, you can't read in-between the lines and understand how ambition has driven men throughout history.

Tolkien dwarves aren't scottish and orcs and goblins are literally the same thing. Besides, most fantasy literature nowadays doesn't use them. It's largely a tabletop/videogame thing

...

Ambition to wickedness. It's tiresome and dull - I'm not going to limit myself to the idiocy and sin of men throughout history when God has gifted me with a mind capable of imagining an infinite expanse of alternative and less obnoxious scenarios.

Because we've learned not to trust GMs with making shit up whole cloth?

Christ what a fucking eupho

If you want to enlighten us with history you think is interesting, you go on ahead and do so m8.

>Enlighten
I swear to fuck you pseudointellectuals all have the worst fucking vocabulary.
Why bother? Euphos always believe themselves better than anyone else around them as a coping mechanism for their failings, nothing would peak the interest of someone as utterly boring and predictable as you. You'd be scared of your own farts if they were one demitone higher than what you're used to hearing.

But literally anything. Literally any historical period, follies included, is more interesting than whatever rattles around in that failure you call your own mind.

>use "euphor"
>get mad when someone responds with "enlighten"
The absolute state of this site.

>peak

Cavalrywoman. It's why her thighs are unprotected. Next.

There are fantasy counterpart cultures in Warcraft, but aside from the Pandaren which were made to be not!Chinese by demand of the actual Chinese, the only obvious cases are the human kingdoms of Gilneas and Alterac which were explicitly based off of England and Switzerland, respectively.

MAN
ITS ALMOST LIKE PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT OPINIONS ON THINGS AND THAT YOU MIGHT MAKE YOURSELF LOOK LIKE A PSEUDOINTELLECTUAL BY IMPLYING THAT YOUR MIND IS A ABOVE ALL OF HISTORY
NOT SAYING WOJAK POSTER IS BETTER THAN YOU, THAT GUY IS A FUCKING IDIOT

>above
I find history dull, therefore I must be existentially superior to people throughout history?
Jesus Christ I hate retard (((reasoning))).

That's a weird way of saying retards are smarter than you

>x finds history dull
>therefore x MUST think himself superior to people in history
i r smrt liek u xD

I was a big fan of not!cultures until it bored me

Learned a shitload about all the autistic little villages and regions of the planet but I realized I basically created earth with weirdly shaped continents and a discount Europe, East Asia, Africa, etc

It's like you're leaving out everything inconvenient to you, which retards also do.

I remember Aristotle writing that drama was a superior learning tool to history because in drama, everything happens for a reason and has a clear order. History is full of random unrelated shit.

Really? Not the tauren, who live in teepees, have totems, and wear beads and buckskins? Not the centaurs, who roam the plains of Kalimdor led by a "Khan", raping and pillaging? Not the trolls? I swear, Jamaican me crazy!

No they don't. They look retarded. I guess you're irish since you have a liking towards potatoes.

No one is seriously doing that.

>Real cultures are not arbitrary. They are how they are because of the circumstances that brought them about. You really can't make up a culture without aping a real one both A) they are the only precedent for how cultures should be and B) similar cultures in similar circumstances will likely have similar traditions.
You're refuting yourself here. You can make up a new culture by basing it on things that real life people don't have to deal with. If you then lend some aspects from real life to it you might get a different outcome as their societies foundations would lead them into a different way of seeing it and/or utilise it.

Ding-ding-ding-ding

Don't be thick. Her heels would be a fucking hindrance mounted aswell.

>The great jamaican slave empire.

That's the thing. Basing fantasy cultures on real world ones, even very heavily, isn't by itself bad. It only becomes bad once you begin letting the source constrain, rather than inspire you. When you actually want to establish something about your fantasy culture and someone goes "you can't do that/that's inaccurate, because that's not how it is in [source culture]", then things have gone too far.

You saw this all the freaking time in Legends of the Five Rings and 7th Sea discussions. If something in Rokugan isn't the same as it was in feudal Japan, it's not because it's literally a different place in a different world, it's a MISTAKE.

It's one of the main reasons the second edition 7th Sea setting became such a boring mess. People got so attached to the idea that the 7th Sea setting has to be the 17th century with alternate names (and Social Justice, natch) that any resemblance of creativity, internal consistence, or imagination was sucked right out of it (yes, making things more historically accurate ironically often made them LESS internally consistent, not more, because they kept all the crazy magic around but now tried to pretend that rather than influencing cultures it was just sort of "there" amidst the rest of the 17th century). From Spanish speakers getting assblasted that some place names in Castille weren't in grammatically accurate Spanish to entire legions of retards banging on the table screaming that there's some kind of agenda behind the lack of Jews and Africans in a 17th century European swashbuckling game.

7th Sea was a weird case study. I think someone on the Revenant forums once referred to that phenomenon as "7th Sea Nationalism". The setting was similar enough to real life that people had a tendency to get behind whichever nation represented their real one so passionately that they took insults to it personally, "inaccuracies" as insults, fluff losses as political commentary and so on.

Did...Did you just call him a fucking lepton? What the fuck is your problem, man?

Anachronism is jarring when there's a huge disparity between neighboring countries. I can usually buy that the setting as a whole is early Middle Ages but that they have early renaissance era galleons for example. It's really hard to accept that one country is based on Viking Age Scandinavia and that they're bordered by a 17th century HRE and a medieval England/France stand-in full of knights in shining plate armor and that a little bit further south there's a land clearly meant to be republican Rome.

That said, the people who want every culture in a tabletop game to be based directly on a single real world culture are quite simply wrong for lack of a better term. The entire point with basing your made up countries on real ones is to make the world familiar enough that players can wrap their heads around it and also make it seem realistic enough for them to suspend their disbelief without you putting years of thought and writing into every single country. If you just straight up copy real world cultures, however, you've just created a watered down boring version of the real world. The best route is instead to choose two or three real world cultures and combining them together with maybe one or two made up traits of your own choosing.

For example, if you want a country that acts like Tokugawa Japan you could also combine them with the aesthetics of medieval Naples to make it less obvious where your inspiration is coming from. Or rather than going for Tokugawa directly you could choose any other time appropriate isolationist culture.

Or if you want a merchant republic, start with something like Venice but give them some traits from say Han dynasty China and a Byzantine coat.

>People identify with their nations
Imagine that

Standard Fantasy Dwarves (STFD) is just a mind-numbingly boring cliche of Scottish mannerisms, Tolkien-ish plagiarism, and WoW-level excitement, which is to say "hasn't been exciting since 2003".

>finds anachronism jarring
Boy you wouldn't like my games

OP is less angry about that than about if Standard Fantasy Dwarfs have a Scottish accent, Veeky Forums demands they also dress like Scotsmen, fight like Scotsmen, be surrounded by beings from Scottish folklore and be in positions mirroring the historical Scots.

Who argues that?

Fetishism.

OP, for once.