Most fantasy settings are highly inspired by earth itself.
inspired by middle ages with folklore as DLC.
Have you ever considered making a fantasy setting completely bizarre and Non-Earthesque at all?
Making the dominant race not-Human like at all, not developing the same (or similar) technological history as mankind.
And if you want to put your creativity on Godlevel:
no humans, no plants. The concept of life itself behaves completely different. How? I don't know.
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>Have you ever considered making a fantasy setting completely bizarre and Non-Earthesque at all?
Yes. Constantly. But I have no idea how I'd actually go about it. Starting is always the hardest part.
You could try finding some random worldbuilding tables and starting from there.
those aren't nearly as bizarre as you make it look like
I dig that kind of stuff, but have never found players who would come along. It takes a lot of imaginative effort from players to put themselves into utterly alien roles.
God, it's hard enough to find anyone who plays beyond muh europe
whats this image from? those are interesting designs
I think they're depictions on people's accounts of aliens. Dunno how exaclty made it.
Huh, how wyrd.
I just love how humanoid these all are.
People who think aliens would actually look like this are so retarded.
except Mankind developed from Aliens.
Lol
Wouldn't a setting based on the idea that it's completely foreign to us Earthlings be based on Earth in the fact that this place is designed to be something that Earth isn't?
Fungus forests cover the land. Weather is heavy on large fog banks rolling around. Monsters tend to be giant insects/spiders. The only civilisation is a vast city that's semi derelict and where small enclaves of various races (no humans & none of the citis builders) exist and trade with each other: their folk tales say their ancestors were brought here as pets by *redacted*. They go out for treasure, truffles and heavy psychadelics.
>fungus
>forests
>weather
>insects
>city
>races
>folk tales
>pets
>truffles
Sounds a lot like earth, boss. You just put on some paint.
This mindset is childish and a bit dumb, because you cant make shit up, just modify what you already knows. Its all build in some sense of familiarity.
Protoplasmic slimes slap into each other occasionally in space, because atmosphere, gravity, and animals are too much like earth features.
Am I a good writer?
What about a human-only setting:
The entire setting takes place upon the body of an immense human.
The only resources available to the people who live on this body are blood from zits and cuts on the body coagulated into weapons and armor, hairs from the body used as lumber, mites and other bodily parasites, and small strips of skin cut from the "ground" that is the body of the great human.
People drink the salty water and fluids that pool in sweat pores.
The great kingdoms of the chest also have access to milk from the Pillars of Milk, and jealousy of this milky bounty causes the peoples of the belly to raid the kingdoms of the chest, when ever thousand years the land exhales enough that the climb up the ribs from the stomach to the chest becomes easy enough for armies to cross.
The kingdoms of the chest have set up a base in the bellybutton to gather the much sought after lint that forms there and makes for the comfiest textiles.
Expeditions into the mite ridden jungles of the deep south have never returned to tell of any lands beyond.
Yet the ominous, twisted tower that disappears and reappears from within said jungle on occasion always provokes more explorers.
To say nothing of the terrors from the sky when a whole other world of upside down folk occasionally crashes into city tops.
The slum dwellers with no homes to take refuge in of the lower belly see that tower plunge into a darkened sky of tangled fury, while torrents of sweat threaten to wash them all away
Me and some friends kind of did a light version of that for a Traveller game a while back, where we all individually brewed up races and made them the galactic council, with the only stipulation being making them relatively inhuman. In the end our space opera was populated by:
>A race of sentient gemstones the size of toddlers who communicated by projecting 3d shapes and wavelengths. Even with psionic translation tech, they still sounded like Lao Tzu on peyote.
>A species of six limbed gila monster that developed on a planet trapped in erratic orbit between five stars. As such, they had night once every few centuries, and were so nyctophobic as a species that their first few astronauts died from fear related heart trauma seconds into space.
>A race of sociopathic cyborg crinoids who pioneered cybernetics to survive their planet's massive radioactive nature.
>A race of cannibalistic fungus that mimicked the shapes and sounds of other organisms and lived in basically darwinian anarchy. They also literally didn't understand the concept of pronouns in grammar.
>A race of living mountains, which were formed by a symbiosis between actual sentient rocks and smaller organics that tried to kill them. One was our ship.
>A race of lanky furry mammals that evolved as parasites on a gigantic star-eating creature, and got summarily enslaved once people found them.
Other fun side-species involved telekinetic hagfish with a language that translated terribly in all cases, tiny goblins covered in gems, and one very large planetoid made entirely of a sentient, friendly, and very foolish slime mold.
Damn was that game fun.
No but now you're correctly hitting OP's request of "completely bizarre and Non-Earthesque at all?"
I didn't say it was a good request.
Honestly, what would a zero-gee setting, say something that's set in a giant sort of cloud of breathable atmosphere with "clumps" instead of islands, and there's cities surrounded by nets to stop weirdos coming in through any means other than the main gates.
Isn't that some SJW thing about environmentalism and other elf shit?
I think a good point to start would be the Ur Quan Masters. Non human doesn't have to mean "so alien you can't understand", just something that developed in a non earth environment with non human natural tendencies.
This. Autists who try to reinvent the wheel are the worst DMs. They think 'different, unique, and unfamiliar' are substitutes for 'engagement, verisimilitude, and charm'.
News flash, faggots. Your world is dog shit because you define it by a negative - NOT like earth - instead of asing your setting design on things like theme, culture, and geography.
Unique =\= interesting
Different =\= engaging
New =\= fun
It's made worse by the fact that most of these retards think writing an autistic encyclopedia about their world will get people to like it. Take a fucking creative writing class, then drop this fucking rearded notion.
PEOPLE WANT THEIR STORIES TO BE FAMILIAR
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE > EVERYTHING
Now kindly fuck off.
How about you fuck off, you tremendous autist? Nothing of what you said is pertinent to what OP suggested. You just reeee out because you think you know something we don't, when all of this is just fucking obvious.
So back to your sand box. Maybe in a year's time you can join the civilized individuals trying to entertain a novelty.
neat
You are everything that is wrong with the world.
I guess the closes thing i've done is a homebrew that takes place in some form of afterlife. The world is a nebulous swirl of spiritual energy torrents. All the characters are either dead souls or other more or less alien spiritual entities. Everything is based on concepts, emotions and spiritual might. Distance is a fluid, variable thing that can be manipulated through force of will to move around.
I stopped working on it halfway due to losing interest.
I only have short sequences in the astral plain or the umbra
but when I do, I make sure it's not just an "alternative setting", but governed by the spiritual situation of the characters
Actually yes, but not in the way you're thinking. I've wanted to write a setting based on the computerized worlds of 80s-early 2000s franchises like Reboot and Tron with influences from online chatrooms such as Worlds.com and the Sims Online, and games such as the Nameless Mod and System Shock, with aesthetics being deeply rooted in the late 90s/early 2000s. Less SoA and Log Horizon and more virtual mindscapes that are pretending to be facsimiles to something "real" such as a forest full of billboarded trees which are really just textures on a flat pane in a large rectangular space whose walls feel like glass to touch even if they're supposed to represent foliage, with older parts of the sever the world takes place in generally being more primitive and uncanny compared to the newer parts trying to emulate the real world to a degree comfortable to humans since newer programs practically worship them and actively want to be like them.
One major feature would be exploring the full implications of "users" digitizing themselves to live in this world, with one out there idea being a bunch of Neo-confederates using the servers as a chance to start a new country away from the perceived decadence of their peers, as well as a group of HEMA enthusiasts who weren't exactly mentally stable going full Don-Quioxle and declaring themselves to be defenders of a particular group of programs neo-feudalism style, on top of rogue programs who want to escape the server to the "outside world" in order to have a better lot in existence than being practical cogs in the machine, with some believing that entering this plane would be enough to turn them into users (humans) in a biological sense, which in their minds means ascending to at least demi-godhood.
Objects made out of "real" materials such as steel and titanium as opposed to data also tend to be ridiculously effective at both resisting and destroying digital things in general, the setting's "magical" materials.
The humanoid form is amazingly utilitarian. To think that aliens could not look like that just because we do is even more retarded.
Tribes of conscious everhungry space creatures, who actually feed with black holes as mouth. Such creatures usually develop in size from one star system to full fledged star cluster. Made of gravitational and light waves they care little about parasites inhabiting rocks of their body. Also emp microfarts.
you know why this is an impossible task?
i couldn't tell you something that has no words to describe it in the first place.
this is not only limiting the way i can transfer the idea to you, but also the limit in human thinking.
its completely impossible to imagine something thats not based on anything we've ever seen. everything is inspired by anything thats part of our existence. you can't go off bounds. thats what makes you human, and not a god.
i like it
>ReBoot
>Tron
>Even Digim*n
Sounds fun. I really love the notion that objects are more virtual data sets than the actual earthlike shapes they represent. I would rather focus on in-system situations and keep characters entering or escaping the system to the material world as an exceptional subplot. Then again, that will surely depend on each GM. using the system.