What is unique about your fantasy setting?

[William]

Originally Posted by 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.

Maybe your world is still in the creation era. Major gods are running around drawing continents and races out of the mists and the oceans and making them out of their dads' dangly bits and the ribs of primordial monsters and such. In the interstices between these gods' masterworks, raw potential can be filled in by those of great spiritual power (if they aren't consumed by horrors of uncreation). Your brave players, being among the first peoples in the world, literally create places by exploring, out of their hopes and fears.

You're not being lazy and not drawing up the game world, you're giving your players a chance to have major effects on it. :^)

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I feel like contributing.


One of my settings is a fantasy world that's progressed to cyberpunk levels of technology (but not dystopia) and where magic is something only select races can do. But this magic (which doesn't have a supernatural component, so it's technically kind of more a weird biology-initiated scientific phenomena) isn't really that special any more because tech can generally do the same things it can. So you have a fantasy setting with fantasy races and monsters that at least feels like it's Doing In The Wizard and has actually left Medieval Stasis because of that.

Except there really is a supernatural world, it just stays hidden. So it's an Urban Fantasy setting inside a TL9 pseudo-Science Fantasy setting.


The other is a multi-world excuse not to have to care about maps: everyone cares about the areas of a given world around and/or between the naturally-occurring portals, and anything else about the macro-structure of the place like whether it's a planet or an infinite plane or if any of them are even in the same universe doesn't matter (at least in the meta-game sense, though in-game probably a lot of inhabitants don't care either). Beyond that the setting descends (or ascends, if you will) into Saturday Morning Cartoon logic: default assumption is tech and society are contemporary, but there's hidden pockets of others all over the place; magic, mad science, and other super-powers are real and known and around, but they don't warp the setting to be about them. The setting is way too big and convoluted for someone to know all of it.

Have the PCs tackle whatever adventure you feel like today, then go somewhere completely different and have then tackle a different weirdness, then go home and get attacked by discount ninjas.


(Sorry if the stuff I've written is kind of incoherent and/or vague: I don't have the same sort of human drive to concretely identify everything.)

[ericthered]

I've built many fantasy settings that I feel are unique. But my current campaign, thus marking the most successful setting, is not especially unique compared to the others. But it does have some abnormal features.



I've got a custom culture with three differently sized species. They live together, and various forms of work are more or less associated with differently sized folks. We call them the Melbronx. They have rough reddish or greyish skin, and a bony crown on their bald heads.



Magic systems are racial, and each has different trappings. Elves work by touch, and can augment their bodies, and occasionally their minds. Melbronx use devices crafted from gems and precious metals to read minds and blast fire balls. And goblins mine mystic metals from the earth. Humans... don't get anything. They lived on historical earth 1 year ago.



The world is a patchwork of lands taken from other worlds, smoothly cut. 500 foot cliffs are common, and the land will abruptly change from one terrain type to another.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by William

Maybe your world is still in the creation era. Major gods are running around drawing continents and races out of the mists and the oceans and making them out of their dads' dangly bits and the ribs of primordial monsters and such. In the interstices between these gods' masterworks, raw potential can be filled in by those of great spiritual power (if they aren't consumed by horrors of uncreation). Your brave players, being among the first peoples in the world, literally create places by exploring, out of their hopes and fears.

You're not being lazy and not drawing up the game world, you're giving your players a chance to have major effects on it. :^)

I love it! Actually, it has already been fun to have the players help figure out background details. They've named the NPCs and determined some of their personality features as we play. Far less GM-centric than things used to be at my table. This is good. I don't have the time I used to have for obsessive world building.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalin

I love it! Actually, it has already been fun to have the players help figure out background details. They've named the NPCs and determined some of their personality features as we play. Far less GM-centric than things used to be at my table. This is good. I don't have the time I used to have for obsessive world building.

Some cycles back, I ran a campaign set in a single huge castle with multiple towers, each tower the domain of a small lineage of magically gifted aristocrats. I invited the players to make up lineages—come up with the magical style, describe the marriage customs and the internal political structure, draw up family trees, even make up the dress styles—and with their consent I added a fifth House to fill out some conceptual space their magical themes didn't seem to cover (we decided that its founder was the brother of one of the other founders). Then each player created a senior aristocrat, a cadet aristocrat, a member of the castle guard, and a lower servant (intended for comic relief). I thought it worked really well; I think of it as one of the highest points in my entire career as a GM going back to the mid-seventies.

[talonthehand]

The goblins in my setting are true egalitarians. When they kidnap children of other races, they raise them as goblins and are considered to my psychologically and socially goblins in all ways by their society, even though physically they may be an elf or a dwarf or whatnot. This has led to the objectively tougher or more magical species thriving as goblins even as the little green guys got rarer and rarer. The current Goblin King is an elf woman named the Immortal Terror, who has led a reign of destruction for the past several hundred years.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Some cycles back, I ran a campaign set in a single huge castle with multiple towers, each tower the domain of a small lineage of magically gifted aristocrats. I invited the players to make up lineages—come up with the magical style, describe the marriage customs and the internal political structure, draw up family trees, even make up the dress styles—and with their consent I added a fifth House to fill out some conceptual space their magical themes didn't seem to cover (we decided that its founder was the brother of one of the other founders). Then each player created a senior aristocrat, a cadet aristocrat, a member of the castle guard, and a lower servant (intended for comic relief). I thought it worked really well; I think of it as one of the highest points in my entire career as a GM going back to the mid-seventies.

Sounds like an entertaining mix of Ars Magica and Gormenghast.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

Sounds like an entertaining mix of Ars Magica and Gormenghast.

It certainly had elements of both, and the players remarked on the latter. But the backstory was lifted from Exalted. And one of the players nicknamed her adolescent character (from the House of Darkness) "Hermione Abhorsen," which gets you two more references.

As the old joke has it, if you steal from twenty people, it's research. . . .

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

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.

Thank you :)
Dwarves inhabit the upper sides of the goblet which are icy mountains. Chaos spirits come down from the top and the dwarves fight them.
The central part of the goblet is an ocean and the stem is the base of a world tree

[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. Elves are also considered the youngest of the races of men, having a bloodline tied to the faeries. Common elves are based off the stereotypical fantasy elf, but with the strong bloodline from the seelie court. Elves that have a strong bloodline from the unseelie court are known as orks. Orks are based off the stereotypical fantasy orc with skin colors ranging from shades of brown to green. I ran with this idea after learning about orcs in the Lord of the Rings and how they are just corrupted elves. Dwarves live on top of mountains, not in them. Based off of high-altitude cultures. And I haven't done much with the Eotens yet. I just know there average adult height ranges from 7' to 9'.