In a single sentence, describe a twist to a "generic fantasy setting" that would render it unique and appealing

It's a generic fantasy setting, except everyone is cute anime girls. Maybe girls (male) for the forbidden ones.

Do what my friend did for his setting:
>its always raining

Aliens invade.

One sentence only, user.

>so sword art online?
You had all those works to choose from, and you pick SAO?

nibber that's just england

It's going to be a political campaign. I've watched a lot of Game of Thrones and just finished playing Dragon Age: Origins so I have lots of good ideas about the plot.

i had an idea for a campaign once which starts out in a low fantasy sword and sorcery setting that eventually gets colonised by a high fantasy race from across the seas (maybe evil elves)
magic represents the industrial revolution or some shit

OP said appealing

Dwarfs

i'm sorry, i should have said 'so the kobold wizard's dildo of enlightenment +2 (an adventure for 3-6 players)'

There are whores in it.

Easy.
Twists are a crutch used by shitty writers who can't generate interest with imagery and good storytelling, and wanted by shitty consumers that can't enjoy things for what they are and have to have something "special."

The elves aren't giant cunts.

>everything should be the same forever
Shut up stupid.

They're all furries.

You didn't say appealing to who.

It is set in a magic induced Nuclear Winter.
Including cold weather, always overcast, even when there are no clouds and still get sunburns after five minutes of being exposed to the sun.

The nice guy becomes bad and the bad guy becomes nice.

Too generic maybe?

Feelsbadman.

I had some ideas for what is essentially a generic fantasy setting, but just to break the monotony, was actually set on not Earth rather than not!Earth - the sentient races would be alien races native to this planet with monsters I can make up rather than having trolls and dragons and shit. What relates it to your idea, though, was just the detail of having ruins and archeotech left behind by more advanced aliens (Plot twist: Are these humans? Could be, for a laugh, but I guess it's unimportant) who had visited the planet some time before. Not exactly a stroke of genius, I just liked the idea of getting away from the same aesthetics and tropes we always see, rather than sticking with them but applying some edgy twist to them.

It's the elves who are the expansionist superpower seeking to subjugate the realm under the heel of their shining hosts and dragon riding wizard lords, citing the "barbarians"' own eventual (however traumatic) elevation into "true civilization" as noble cause.

>everything needs a "gimmick"
Eat shit, you're the reason writing doesn't have to be good to draw attention and get popular.

And you're the reason fantasy is eternally derivative and boring. There's nothing wrong with gimmicks, so long as they're executed well.

The world is locked in eternal darkness with light and heat as the chief commodities.

go play your dragon age nerd

This is the other idea I've had which I quite like. I wasn't thinking so literally nuclear winter, but rather just the idea of a world which was once a typical fantasy setting, until magical advancement got out of hand and the shining kingdoms largely engaged in mutual destruction. Following this, some towns may have begun to be re-populated, but largely people live in rural communities and know fuck all about the magic of their ancestors.

Magic really is drawn from inherently evil beings and the Not!Catholics are totally justified in killing magic-users.

Wow, shit, guess you fucking got me with that hot, well thought argument.

If the writing is executed well in the first place you don't need a fucking gimmick to make it interesting.

Is it even possible to do "young lad rescues princess from dragon" tier fantasy world played straight and keep it interesting?
I guess it's still unique in that dragons are weak enough that a single human can outwit/defeat one and steal its dinner/hostage/slave.

Look up a Savage Worlds setting called "Evernight".

Nowadays that concept would just get dismissed as too obviously political.

the setting has cold war level technology

>The Great Game with dwarves and elves

I would play it.

While it was never really explored, this was one of Discworld's bonus "deepest lore" moments for me - the stories we see are all character-driven + humour in a very low-power way, but Pratchett made it clear that the world had lots of high-power stories there (even if it was just to create a sense of the epic to then riff on).

Stuff like
> Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'
> There were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard.
> The world had seen what happened when wizards got their hands on enormous amounts of magical power. It had happened a long time ago and there were still some areas where you didn't go, if you wanted to walk out on the same kind of feet that you'd had when you went in.

> cold war
>The Great Game
That was about a century earlier

I'd still play it (either)

Because both the hero and the anti-hero are "brothers", created by parthenogenesis, an very hidden technology of the major bad guy.

He controlled every part of their childhood to lead them to what they are. He knows them very well. The hero goes mad by discovering the truth, the anti hero goes nice by love.

All magic is derived from dreams and ultimately only has power over and from within dreams.

>Nowadays
That's been a political riff since Tacitus

Discworld wizards are basically just Veeky Forums meme no sense of right and wrong wizards and they're great.

Your point?

The elves live underground and the dwarves live in trees.

I meant more like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_espionage which I had heard referred to as the Great Game in homage to the definitive one.

The frequency of Japanese highschool boys appearing out of thin air to harass the locals has been recently growing to worrying magnitudes, requiring the realm's wizards to convene to come up with a solution.

Direct them at any random assortment of waifus, they have a special talent for always picking the most violent and disdainful one. It's a problem that solves itself.

It's very easy to see why, it's the West (Brit Empire/US) vs Russia, there's so much espionage, and there's fighting in Afghan as well...

Either Great Game works though

I saw somewhere an idea for a apocalypse scenario, where it starts to rain and never stops

It's been done before a once or twice, look up "Deluge Myths"

Orcs (poison), elves (wood), dwarves (stone), colossus (light), harpies (darkness), mermaids (water), dragons (fire) comes from the dream realm. It exist since thousands of years.
Wizards have to meditate a lot to reach the realm and connect to a crew/family to use its powers, slowly transforming you into the creature.
Some people are born linked to the realm and can freely use it.
Only one individual have all powers balanced, it appears at random times, sometimes never for thousand of years.

During the story, another individual is born with all powers, to counter the chosen one, or to love it, it's hard to know.

It's well thought out, with a set of social, political, and economic systems that actually work and make sense.

I meant as a rpg campaign

50 Fathoms

A generic fantasy setting but no elves

Never read a bible?

...

All weapons in the setting have wills of their own and possess their weilders into unspeakable acts of carnage, and only monks are free from the "warhammer's curse"

Never considered setting a game during a religious myth era?

Magic isn't real. Any supernatural phenomena; mad gods, wise wizards, fiery dragons, evil liches, all are illusions created by a huge conspiracy of stage magicians.

>In a single sentence, describe a twist to a "generic fantasy setting" that would render it unique and appealing.
Everyone living in the setting is an isekai otherworlder thinking they are special for being reborn into a fantasy world, yet no one is aware of it because they were strictly told by the deity who did their rebirth to not tell anyone about it.
Hilarity ensues.

Earthdawn would be a better example

Wouldn't they realize something is amiss as soon as they realize no waifus are to be found and everyone else is a dweeby Japanese highschooler?

No, you don't get it. All of them are reincarnated into generic fantasy people, but none of them are able to share that information, directly or indirectly.

Magic fades as technology advances.

But it was a matrix all along. The XY453 program oriented on "magic and wizardry", created by the Zun-Tsung-Go corporation (a huge corporation creating tons of matrix for humans wanting to escape reality (they enter it after their memory being erased)). The rest of the real setting is a huge cyber-punk one.

The two individual with all powers will create a gigantic bug, then wake up, and try to fight the matrix system (they developed actual magic powers after the "rebirth" (isn't anticipated by the system, and the dream realm actually exist (gods created the bug to change the system))).

>no waifus are to be found
They'd waifu/husbando each other.

no no no
you cant' use that dub for that argument, it that discussion
gimmicks are the same that happen in real life, surprises
because time flows faster when you're surprised

Whats the Best system for an
"One hundred years of solitude" game?

Played straight.

Type Moon does this, but it's urban fantasy, not medieval fantasy.

I remember Veeky Forums made up that setting once. The premise was that all magic is based on illusions. TL;DR: the ancient almighty magical empire said to mythically faded away due to its inhabitants "leaving for the land of the fairies" actually collapsed because everyone was too busy playing magical VR games. "The land of the fairies" are the self sustaining remains of what once was a giant magical version of the Matrix, with the fairies being NPCs.

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/44055218/

The world is an actual living godhead organism, and each race is spun from it's myriad thoughts.

>elves don't build cities
Disgusting.

"It's good"

Magic is nanobots, because it's actually occurring far after an apocolypse caused massive civilizational regression of a sci-fi setting.

I can dig it.

Generic, medieval fantasy setting, but ayy lmaos are real and have somewhat of an active presence.

Not like, "Oh some strange comet crashed to the earth eons ago, and strange animals as well as a reclusive and advanced race have dwelled around it ever since." But literally like, flying saucers go around abducting cows and aliens land to trade or interact with people, whom try their best to understand it all (probably in a religious context) or just try to get on with the toil of their daily lives. Maybe in the grand sceme of things there's like some stellar conflict going on, and while the space-equivalent of the geneva convention prohibits exploiting underdeveloped worlds and races, it's fine to stop by for repairs or refueling and to interact with the natives. And to help mediate things, the equivalent of the space UN has like an embassy for the natives to air any concerns or grievances or crimes about alien activity but generally they're supposed to be non-interventionist. Except of course in cases where like an alien ship crashes, or a shifty alien salesman, provides natives with advanced tech to the extent that it greatly is upsetting the natural order/expected arc of history, then space UN intervenes.

But yeah basically, like your standard fare medieval fantasy, where a peasant farmer might have a UFO to land and barter for some chickens, or in a jousting tournament by the king and in among the cheering spectators are some alien tourists joining in the fun without a need to hide or disguise themselves.

Low magic, humans only.

>a single sentence

The first sentence ding dong

It's flared up recently.

that would be nice
magic items are forgetten goods of tech, from a toaster to weapons able of reaping the planet a new asshole. Dungeon are just the ruin of high-tech cities.
Gods are actually more or less damaged IA that were in charge before the collapse
hard mod : no human, only various descendants more or less mutated depending on genetic tinkering/radiations

"And then, without warning, the slavs arrived."

It's not a single sentence, if you need a dozen more for clarification.

Eh, you could still have humans, but yeah, fantasy creatures/races would be the result of of mutation/genetic tampering. To expand on "magic is nanobots", the idea is basically that there's just a swarm of nanobots throughout the world (maybe more dense in some places than in others, meaning magic is stronger in those places), and magic is essentially people somehow interfacing with them to get them to preform various effects.

I read the first sentence and got everything I needed to know. Everything else was nice extra but not neccessary.

I'm pretty sure the rain stopped at some point in that story, but what do I know?

Yeah let's go ahead and just shit all over creativity.

The setting is basically Vietnam, with elves as the Vietcong and Dwarves with M60's and axe bayonet helping the humans.

Yeah fuck the thread premise.

Actually yeah, a generic fantasy world where the twist is literally nothing about it is generic.

How's that one.

You must be a real treat at parties.

king arthur like fantasy, except really fucking indepth