What is unique about your fantasy setting?

[AlexanderHowl]

I was wondering if people would share the unique elements of the settings for their fantasy games or games that they have played in. In my own case, I have used a fantasy setting where the dominant races were victims of a global magical catastrophe that gave them complex reproductive cycle around two thousand years ago. The first stage involves birthing plants that produce one birthing fruit every decade that contain a baby in place of seeds (they also provide smaller fruits every year that do not possess babies). The second stage involves sexual reproduction that produces seeds instead of babies that grow into the birthing plant if planted in fertile soil (they require a decade to reach maturity and produce fruit for another ninety years).

Birth control is accomplished by not planting the seeds created by sexual reproduction. If the seeds are cooked, they contain 10 FP worth of magical energy for spells of a single college, with the recipe determining the college that the cooked seeds can be used for. When women eat the seeds, they heal 1 HP. When men eat the seeds, they lose 1 HP.

[mlangsdorf]

I've mentioned this before, but the big unique thing about my fantasy setting is that evil overlord who commanded the orc armies that overran the human realms a millennium ago is an elf. The PCs are rebelling against the evil empire, and they're pretty sure at this point that all of the upper echelon of the imperial nobility are elves. Not some pseudo-Drow dark elves, but tree-loving, forest dwelling, pretty Tolkeinish elves. And these elves rule an empire based on cruelty and oppression.

The other slightly unique thing about my game is that magic is strictly limited. The big limit is that you can't safely use magic to inflict harm on another person, whether indirectly or directly, intentionally or accidentally. It has limited the PCs in some ways, and it makes the distinction between black mages and white mages much clearer.

[Refplace]

My Chalice World setting is a Chalice on the back of a turtle and heavily spirit oriented, including giant sea turtles that are shaman.
Also it uses the 6 element system, though most focus on the material 5.

[Phantasm]

Let's see here.

Ranoc, a world where magic and gunpowder are vying for supremacy. Where the orcs of the Northern Frontier come south in great ships raid the coastlines of the southern nations. Where monotheism and polytheism clash, with the Church of the One True God in the one nation declaring non-human peoples mockeries of the Chosen People. Where the jungle-dwelling kobolds of the southern continent eek out a nation of their own in imitation of their northern neighbors. Where goblins and humans intermingle in the cities. Where aerial cavalry of pegasi, hippogriffs, and occasionally dragons dogfight with bows, lances, and occasionally wheel-lock calivers.

There's more to it, of course. Click the link in my .sig. :)

[Dalin]

My fantasy world is unique in that it doesn't exist yet. We just finished "You All Meet at an Inn" from Pyramid #3/98 using DFRPG. So the world consists of an inn in a mountain pass. We named the innkeeper and his wife, two visiting merchants, and the stableboy (who was tragically dismembered by a horde zombie). I dressed up a few things in the dungeon to suggest some possible cultish threads for future adventures, but that's it. Might have a desert on the other side of the mountains so that we can run Mirror of the Fire Demon next.

Considering how much work I put into world building for my last campaign (1996-2006), this is a radical change. I'm still deciding if I might just slip this game into territory in the prior world, mostly to make it easier to generate names and geography or if I'll literally just build the world one adventure at a time.

[whswhs]

I don't know if Tela is unique, but it's at least unusual in that the seven humanoid races do not each have a single culture and language; in fact that's not true of any of them—there's no "elvish" or "dwarvish" or "trollish." Each race has multiple culture areas with different typical customs. The dwarves of the mountains of Occasia expect male dwarves to show up with dowries to prove their fitness to marry the daughter of a mine; the dwarves of the great island Fodina Magna expect the men of a mine to offer proof that they can support a dwarf woman. And cultures aren't static; Fodina Magna is going through a social upheaval in which dwarves without brothers adopt each other and team up to court a wife.

I think it's also somewhat unusual in that the supernatural is not based on an impersonal magical force or energy, nor on gods, but on spirits: Tela is an animistic world. Magical practitioners are basically shamans with knowledge of the local spirits.

[ajardoor]

Well, my fantasy setting is set in the modern day Earth, no other humanoid races like elves or dwarves exist, and magic is a publicly known fact of life. All three of those aren't the base of any other fantasy setting I know (Shadowrun has non-humans, magic is a secret in Unknown Armies, and most fantasy settings aren't set in the present day "real world").

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by ajardoor

Well, my fantasy setting is set in the modern day Earth, no other humanoid races like elves or dwarves exist, and magic is a publicly known fact of life. All three of those aren't the base of any other fantasy setting I know (Shadowrun has non-humans, magic is a secret in Unknown Armies, and most fantasy settings aren't set in the present day "real world").

That sounds like one I was cooking up a while back, except it was set in a TL6 world with much higher water coverage than Earth. Magic still has its uses, but steel, oil, and cordite are now the material components of war.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Refplace

My Chalice World setting is a Chalice on the back of a turtle and heavily spirit oriented, including giant sea turtles that are shaman.

As in, the world is on the inside of a giant goblet? Look up and you see the opposite side of the world?
That's pretty cool.

[weby]

I do not know how "unique" anything in my setting is, but several things are very different from standard fantasy settings at least.

Some things:
None of the races are native to the place as the world is a huge gateway as interplanar travel to and from it is much easier than with other places. And most races have something weird about their background.

Some examples of races:
True elves - Nearly extinct race now due to a bio-genetic attack by true orcs in their final war that stopped their reproduction totally. They were a race of interplanar conquistadors who loved war and fighting as sport and enslaved most of the world until stopped by the orcs.
True orcs - a Nearly extinct race, that was a fairly peaceful culture based on magic, until attacked by the true elves.
Other elven races: They were bio engineered by the true elves to continue the fight against orcs and maintains something of themselves and their heritage.
The goblinoid races are also manufactured, but by true orcs to serve as armies against the elves.
Humans are the remains of a colony of ultra tech civilization that was cut off from the interstellar community by a total war type situation. They tie in to the timeline of my scifi setting.
and so on.

Magic is also bit strange that it is very variable over time. Every 150 years magic power peaks for 6 years and then crashes to almost nothing and then slowly climbs again. But each such 150 year cycle has magic being slightly higher than the previous.

Most of the time most of the world is what GURPS calls normal magic level, but each year of the 6 years of "period of destruction" as they are called sees a huge rise, and by the sixth year of the period magic is insanely powerful, where a single casting failure can level a small town, fires created by create fire never go out naturally and other similar things.

And by the tenth or so such even a average mage can be a huge tool of destruction. Thus empires will clash and eventually someone will learn how to use those energies directly and that tends to spread and result in weapons of mass destruction used by many factions and that will then totally destroy most civilizations and kill most of the world population. The side effects of such also cause the magic to drop dramatically for several 150 cycles until the whole thing starts again.

Other than those the setting is a fairly normal "mature magic" setting with things like gates between places, magic help in keeping crops healthy, flying ships, healing magic available to most people and such being normal. Thus the normal farmer or similar is not poor but instead what would be called middle class. There are of course many effects of magic as technology in as part of an adventurers life and magic being the normal means of doing things.