What is unique about your fantasy setting?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by SteamBub

Haven't ran any games in my setting yet, but I've been working on a dark fantasy. One thing I did in the setting, that I haven't seen done in other fantasy works, was how I handle the sapient races. The elves, dwarves, and eotens (giants) are just a branch race of man. Mainly based off of the way homo-sapiens had racial cousins like the neanderthals, homo-heidelbergensis, etc.

That's the assumption of my current fantasy campaign. Trolls live on mountains and in arctic regions, and dwarves in mountains; they're the oldest races. Elves live in forests and jungles, and ghouls in deserts and anywhere there are scavenging opportunities. Men live on plains, nixies along rivers and in swamps, and selkies on islands and beaches; they're the newest races. But none of them know this, as the species divergence took place before written history. . . .

[khorboth]

I'm not convinced that anything is truly unique, but some things are less-common:

ALL non-human humanoid races have inherent magic: Elves are unaging and have perfect night vision. Dwarves can analyze any inorganic material in their hands, have near-perfect spacial sense, and dark vision. Halflings can walk on any living plants even if it shouldn't be able to support their weight (wheat, twigs, etc). Umli have perfect balance. Orcs feel no pain or shock. Kobolds breed and evolve at an unnatural rate.

Half-breeds of each humanoid race exist, but are invariably infertile. They are derogatorily referred to as mules and generally discriminated against (your parents mated outside their species).

All crafts and most trades are tightly controlled by guilds and the lack of technological progress for thousands of years is explained by the iron fist of the Coalition of Magical Guilds (CMG). If something (tool, technique, anything) is invented which the CMG thinks may jeopardize the CMG's market, the craftsman in question gets one warning to stop, then, if he doesn't, gets blown the heck up. Then the trade guild in question suppresses the knowledge out of fear.

[Varyon]

My planned DF setting, Eru, has some oddities to it. First, it lacks a proper sun. Instead, its central equatorial continent is shaped like a double-ended box-head wrench with oversized heads, within which there are large bodies of water. Each morning, phosphorescent gas rises from the eastern lake over the course of an hour, then coalesces into shards that rush together to form a hot, bright sphere. The sphere travels over the the length of the continent, then drops down into the corresponding lake, shattering above it and sublimating back into the gas, which then sinks into the water there. At night, the world is kept from freezing by geothermal heat.

Next up is the Mist (which I'm considering renaming the Umbra to distinguish it from the mists in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, although my Mist certain was inspired by that, and because it's visually more akin to fog). This weather phenomenon has a lot of interesting properties - plants grow faster and more bountiful when exposed to it, animals (including people) get hungry and fatigued faster in it (but not thirsty - in fact, being in it will slowly slake thirst, and there are Mistflasks that will automatically fill with water in the Mist), it severely dampens magic and the five senses (range penalties are treated as doubled for magic, Sense rolls, and ranged attack rolls, but not for, say, determining if a thrown spear is beyond 1/2D), is repelled by open flame (but only if it's at least the size of a typical torch's flame - anything smaller is extinguished by the dew it deposits on surfaces) and closed areas like buildings and caves, and fuel that is being burned is consumed more quickly. When Mist is out, if not in direct contact with the Mist (from being inside a building, or within the "bubble" produced by a fire) it still causes you to get hungry/fatigued more quickly, although not to the same extent. Senses aren't affected within the Mist-free area, but sensing things that are in the Mist is even harder, with triple the range penalty (regardless of how far into the Mist it actually is). There are also the MistTouched, beings who are enhanced (a bonus to basically every stat, along with enhanced healing rates) while within the Mist, are unaffected by its negative effects, and each has a Mist-granted gift that is associated with a given body part, from MistEyes that have greatly enhanced senses to MistGuts who can eat nearly anything or MistFeet who gain short-range teleportation abilities.

The calendar's pretty odd too. Each season consists of 2 5-week half-months (actually just called months in-world), during which one of the world's 5 glowing moons is constantly in the sky, slowly making its way from east to west. Between each season is a Mist Week, 5 days of constant Mist during which the weather changes from one season to the next (and these can be jarring changes - Mortum, the winter equivalent, has 5 hour days and 20 hour nights, while the very next season, Partum, the spring equivalent, has 15 hour days and 10 hour nights). The middle month, Meterum (the harvest season), actually has longer day-night cycles than the other months, with 15 hour days and 15 hour nights. Each week consists of 5 days and a Mist Day (as the name implies, a day when Mist is out the entire time). Partum, Meterum, and Mortum each have a High Holy Day, a "virtual" day that occurs between the two demi-months, but only in larger population centers (the defining feature of a city is having High Holy Days), which are honestly too complicated to get into the details of here.

Oh, and while the inhabitants don't know it, Eru is essentially a (small) crater on a much larger world, the rogue planet Quas. Eru actually appears to be flat and surrounded by "mountains" that are actually the edges of the crater. Eru has roughly Earth-like gravity, Because Magic, but gravity gets stronger (or, rather, the Because Magic that reduces gravity gets weaker) as you climb if you attempt to scale the mountains surrounding the world, making them impassable. I am undecided if there are any other areas of note on Quas.

[WaterAndWindSpirit]

My setting is basically a fantasy version of "what if a fantasy equivalent to Fallout's FEV experiments made by a horrible dictatorship had gone horribly wrong?", and my other setting is "What happens to the first setting when they recover and develop enough tech to make spaceflight possible and colonize the universe, with psionics making FTL possible?"

[Donny Brook]

Maybe not totally unique, but defining:

-five distinct magic systems, TL2

-the great 'evil' empire is run by my race of cockatrices

-there is a game-mechanical path to godhood

-two main pantheons operate as rival cartels but a substantial rabble of independent gods are around too

-the two pantheons fought an apocalyptic turf war a scant few hundred years ago and most geopolitics and many high-level social conditions are sequentiae of that

-there are no humans; commonfolk are a kludge of north-euro concept "wee folk" and classical myth nymph-types and there is significant morphological diversity between individuals

-there is a place to go, physically, to 'hell', without using magic or gates etc.

-there is a large population of refugees from hell in one of the major states; hell is a real, albeit not major, part of the geopolitical reality

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

-the great 'evil' empire is run by my race of cockatrices

I KNEW IT! THE COCKROACH CONSPIRACY EXISTS!

...

Oh, cockatrice, not cockroach. Never mind, carry on. o/`

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

-the great 'evil' empire is run by my race of cockatrices
.....
-there are no humans; commonfolk are a kludge of north-euro concept "wee folk" and classical myth nymph-types and there is significant morphological diversity between individuals

Want know more.

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

-there is a place to go, physically, to 'hell', without using magic or gates etc.

I do love this part of ancient myths: you can just walk to (perhaps not literally).

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

-there is a large population of refugees from hell in one of the major states; hell is a real, albeit not major, part of the geopolitical reality

I have so wanted to do this: why have these giant realms if only characters with PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER ever visit? (Unless you're doing a god/myth game.)

[(E)]

My go to fantasy world was built around having as many options for characters as possible with a reasonable level of plausibility.
It's loosely based off Europe with a vaguely similar map.
To maximise the player options the world has 6 or 7 playable time periods.
1st age, humans are a primitive bronze age race who are relegated to the background. All the non human races are at the forefront. Elves are the dominant powers, Mythic level gaming.
2nd age humans and non humans are both common. The Icarian empire (Rome analog) rules a big chunk of the map. The empire has a network transferring magical power around the Empire, mana is a centralised resource. Contested by mighty Kaltoi druids. Epic power levels
2nd age late, the fall of the Empire
3rd age, dark age equivalent, the traditional mixture of deities is getting supplanted by unified worship (The Pantheon, somewhat analogous to the Catholic church) humans are the majority race. Dungeon delving and empire building.
4th age, mid to late feudal Europe, the elves have largely gone west and the dwarves keep their existence secret.
Grittier fantasy
5th age pre steam punk, largely human, magic reduced to urban fantasy levels.
6th age steam punk, elves rediscovered on that large continent to the west of Europe, dwarves once again part of society.

Each culture has its own approach to using magic.
Each culture is better suited to a specific style of gaming, One nation/culture has lots of warhammer overtones for example.
There is probably little that is individually unique but as a coherent whole it seems quite different to other worldworlss I've read about.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

Want know more.

Thanks for your interest. The world/campaign is supposed to be 'mythic fantasy' rather than mainstream swords-and-sorcery, and I wanted to let players be dwarf(like) or elf(like) or ogre(like) or goblin(like) without having to create specific racial polities or cultures. Once I had the solution to that, it kind of seemed that a human race was superfluous.

I do love this part of ancient myths: you can just walk to (perhaps not literally).

Climb in this case. The passage is in a mountain range.

[Ji ji]

The most unique thing in my fantasy setting is that there are no elfs.