How to achieve originality?

my actual setting

You mean people who actually read the lore and dont just spout memes?

Pretty much every fantasy idea has happened already. Walk through a used book store and the shear number of books you've never heard of makes that apparent.

The key is making old ideas interesting. Add flare, make a twist. Archetypes aren't your enemy, lore that's established is easy to connect with. Just do it well if you can't do it creative.

Haven't seen one of those, yet.

Realize that you don't need to be original. Nothing is truly original, and all the great works are based off of or inspired by something that came before it. Don't work off the desire to make something original, work off the desire to make the setting good and fun to play in.
When thinking about if your race it too snowflake-y, thing about how they fit in to the world, what they do, what their culture is like, etc. Also, I'd recommend trying to limit the races in your setting to a handful, 5 that matter at max. When you get too many a lot of them become vestigial.
Another thing on races and originality: If you feel to the need to be original, don't include elves, dwarves, orcs, etcetera. They are a part of the standard fantasy setting.

This. You don't want to aim for originality, you just want to aim for QUALITY.

In fact, you don't want originality at all. Because all throughout history you can identify major themes that run through myth and legend, and history itself. These themes NEVER GET BORING. EVER. You just have to do them well. Quality. Originality is a modernist meme. Good artists copy; great artists steal.

The trick is to understand what you're stealing, steal from multiple good sources and combine it in a consistent way.

I believe Megamind put it best:
Presentation.

Honestly all of this advice is near the same but I'll throw my 2.5 copper pieces in.

If you want a general idea, start with a setting you like. What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? Anything that is the latter can be tweaked to become part of the former. Add something from outside the setting that can fit without being too snowflakey. Finally, variety does not replace depth. It's better to have a few fleshed out characters with nuance than a boatload of one note caricatures. Happy DMing!

People who read the lore would know that the only good guys are Trolls.

>Night Elf for life
>Not Nerubian master race

>

Megamind presented so damn good.

Agreed. What you can do is start with elements you like, and really work from there. But fit them in, work with it. You'll end up with something very different, but certainly your own.
So for example my setting stared with:
Fallers from Commonwealth: Chronicle of the Fallers Series.
Power Armour, space marine style.
Youjo Senki inspired battle wizards.
Underlying substrate/sublimate from Sleepover by Alastair Reynolds.

Now I have a science-fantasy setting where a newly discovered type of being from sublimate (aka reality's bedrock) are going to start invading/possessing people in one of Humanity's few colonies, after a politically dissident group of professors decides to "help" a large underclass created by a world war (on that colony) a century ago. The planet in question has 2 political power blocks with different military doctrines that incorporate magic and mundane military elements in an organic way. The tech level is kind of near future. Personal laser weapons exist (one bloc's military uses them), but require a bit of magic to give them more than a few shots. Still yet to run it, but I think what I've got so far is really good.

There's three ways to be original:
- Mix and match everything from everywhere else. The resulting combination won't have been tried before.
- Make the most batshit insane setting where everything is alien and you can't assume anything.
- Just make a normal setting for your genre, but flavour it your own way. Use the archetypes as a template, and fill it in such that you feel proud of your ideas.

I hope you go down the third route.

Pro-tip: Your setting won't be judged by spergs on Veeky Forums who don't actually play games. Just focus on making your game fun and exciting for your players, since their opinions are the only ones that matter. Chances are that none of your players will even think about whether or not your setting is "original".

Veeky Forums has become so bitter concerning creativity.

Creativity is fine, but nerds are always going to be assholes about realism and perceived holes in your verisimilitude.

Unless you're planning on publishing your work who fucking cares?

And even then, you shouldn't care.
Look at that fat fuck Martin, wrote the most trite and dull shitpile possible and people loved it.

Steal from history, carefully yet shamelessly. An empire thrown into civil war because the emperor failed to set down a religious revolt, so loyalists tried to stop future uprisings through rebellion against their religious enemies, but that instead damaged the emperor in the council's eyes, so the council decided to set down the rebellion with their own army, while the emperor rallied his imperial forces, eventually losing the war because the council allied itself to the Clans of the mountain-ridden North. Now there's a power gap as the Northern Clans, the Council and the Army are all powerful but in a three way war for political domination.

That's an unique-sounding setting, right? It's Britain on the verge of the Second English Civil War. Just reflavor it how you want it. Space opera could work quite nicely, for example.

The daily gondor clearly shows that the orcs are good bois who dindu nuffin.

>I like fantasy that's DARK and REALISTIC like game of thrones!

...

Catch HYPER AUTISM and casterate yourself.

...

Elderscrolls?
Or do you mean morally good and bad?

Originality comes from the analysis, deconstruction, then reconstruction of pre-existing elements. That's how all creative acts work, you can't make something from nothing.

Transformers is original, robots from a dead planet that hide on Earth as vehicles and fight a war over it's violent colonization, enslavement and strip mining for fuel had never occurred as an idea before.

But all of those elements had existed previously in other media.

>How do I create an original setting like pic related
By copying everything good that came before it

WOW is an amalgam of every fantasy trope that has come before it.

Fuck the latest expansion was litterally spelljammer.

This

There is nothing original about WOW, what makes a story original is the characters and their stories, what made WOW original was the fact it was a massive open world with little instancing at a time games of its scale and scope had S shaped loading zones every 5 minutes

>I always feel like I inject too many snowflake races, overused elements and poor lore.

Just do the opposite then. If you can identify where your writing falls flat, that's half the battle! All you have to do work is work on stimulating your creative side!

And yet pathfinder tries that and fails miserably. Golarion is pathetic.

So clearly there is some kind of special sauce you have to add to make that actually work.

>I always feel like I inject too many snowflake races, overused elements and poor lore.

Just do the opposite then. If you can identify where your writing falls flat, that's half the battle! All you have to do is work on stimulating your creative side!

>How do I create an original setting

You can't, and never will

Instead mix and match from already established settings of your liking, while improving points that you think aren't so good. That's how fiction evolves

Self-consistency is a major factor a lot of amateur works fail at. You have to make all the ingedients of your world play nice.
You can't have thinks work one way then change it because it's inconvenient elsewhere. Realities are made of rules, not exceptions.

I'm don't think that's paizo's only problem though.

>How do I create an original setting like pic related?

He says, posting world of warhammer

Azeroth is a haphazard quilt of ad hoc cliches. It is not a paragon of worldbuilding to be emulated.

Stop using big words that you don't know the meaning of

*azeroth is fucking rip off of everything

I mean exactly what I said. Warcraft at least had consistency within each title until endless WoW expansions. They've successively Frankensteined so much shit unto it that it's jsut fucking mess. King Fu panda is popular, let's plop a Kung Fu panda continent between the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor that wasn't there before.

Well, pandaren were first made as the April fools joke when someone at the studio back in Warcraft 3 days saw the sketch by Samwise. The sketch itself was him and his daughter drawn as samurai pandas. It has nothing to do with Kung fu panda

They made an obscure April fool's joke a playable race due to movie popularity.

There's this one setting that aimed to be as original as possible, so it had none of the standard fantasy races, and a shit load of unique culture + unique flora/fauna. It's even available as a free PDF. It's so unpopular that I can't even remember its name. At the end of the day, a lot of us just want to play elf wizards/dwarf warriors and fight the orcs.

> Originally written between 450 and 180 BC

Azeroth wasn't original back when it was first created. It was a brazen rip-off of Warhammer. It took what, thirty years of very gradual back-and-forth building up on the lore by different writers to make this setting first compelling, and then original. At this point, no less than a hundred people have contributed to the lore of Azeroth over several decades, and it's no secret that many of them had extremely different ideas and directions in mind. Of course you shouldn't try to imitate that.

I'm not saying that one person can't create a completely original setting: Glorantha is a good example. It's very unique, and, to my knowledge, it was created by a single person. But do you know much about Glorantha? And I'm not saying that it's because Glorantha doesn't have the marketing power of Azeroth, although it's a big factor. It's rather that when you have a lot of people contributing very different elements bit by bit, you get a rough approximation of what the society at large would enjoy. Some people may enjoy this part of your world, some others a completely different part. It's very hard to get it all right on your own. It's much easier to stick with what you know most people will recognise and appreciate. But that wouldn't be very original.