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Traditional vs. weird settings

Do you prefer traditional or weird settings?


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    134

0sacred

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Traditional settings typically are Tolkienesque worlds, like anything set in the Forgotten Realms. Character races will typically include humans and human-like races (like Elves, Dwarves, Orcs) and Earth-like terrain and flora/fauna, with many areas pleasing to the eye in a traditional fashion. Players will rarely be surprised by the landscapes they traverse and the creatures they encounter.

Weird settings might include stranger character races (animal people, robots) and deliberately alien locations (like in Albion, Morrowind, The Outer Worlds). Wether such design choices are aesthetically pleasing differs from player to player.


I'm more drawn towards games with a traditional setting. It's easier for me to immerse myself in them, and I find it relaxing to travel through them. I'm particularly fond of rustic villages and small towns that serve as an adventure hub (like in Icewind Dale 1&2 or The Bard's Tale).
 

Crispy

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I hate to be the one to spoil the notion of the thread, but I think an RPG (or any game) that combines traditional settings with forays into or other entire areas that are considered "weird" is best.

One example is, of course, Forgotten Realms' Underdark. I realize that the Underdark is considered part and parcel to FR, but it's considerably more alien and isolated than just about any other major aspect of FR's milieu, other than maybe an alien planet (which really would be a different campaign at that point).

So, give me both!
 

fredsteel

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
I agree with what puur said, but as a personal preference; settings like E.Y.E and Planescape: Torment have always captivated my attention. The more alien and unrecognisable the setting the better.
 

Lord_Potato

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If you have good writers onboard, try doing the weird stuff. Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium are great due to their writing, but Tides of Numenera fails completely in this regard.

If you have mediocre writing team, take the beaten path. You can still have great RPG, but writing will probably not be its strongest point.

Honestly I like both types of settings, as long as worldbuilding is competent enough.
 

0sacred

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I hate to be the one to spoil the notion of the thread, but I think an RPG (or any game) that combines traditional settings with forays into or other entire areas that are considered "weird" is best.

One example is, of course, Forgotten Realms' Underdark. I realize that the Underdark is considered part and parcel to FR, but it's considerably more alien and isolated than just about any other major aspect of FR's milieu, other than maybe an alien planet (which really would be a different campaign at that point).

So, give me both!

I feel like this is a trope started back in the old Might&Magic and Wizardry days though; having weird areas to mix things up in the mid - late game. I like how indie fantasy RPG's usually stay within the traditional setting until the end. This is due to money & time constraints, I know, but still.

I would totally play a game set entirely in the Underdark though. The premise of the Underdark is good if not very solid; everything is twisted by dark magic and foul gods, and it makes sense for a unique biome to exist there. Better than the mushroom aesthetic of Morrowind and Outer Worlds for sure.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Traditional settings typically are Tolkienesque worlds, like anything set in the Forgotten Realms.
Dragonlance is the Tolkienesque D&D/AD&D setting; the Forgotten Realms is the utterly generic, bland replacement for Greyhawk. The Known World / Mystara is the pulp fantasy setting with diverse cultures modeled on real-world ones. These four conventional campaign settings were followed in 1995 by Birthright, which attempted to integrate domain rulership into the core of campaign play even with low-level characters, but was otherwise a fairly standard setting with a subdued pulp flavor. Due to the success of its shift towards campaign setting material in 1987, TSR began publishing unconventional campaign settings in 1989 with Spelljammer, which was AD&D IN SPACE with a gonzo "kitchen sink" mentality. Ravenloft followed in 1990, inspired by the adventure module of the same name, as an attempt to implement the Gothic horror genre in AD&D. Dark Sun in 1991 was the fantasy equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland setting, where water and metals were rare. The final unconventional campaign setting was Planescape in 1994, which exploited AD&D's existing cosmology but rendered it even more bizarre.

There were also two campaign settings for variants of AD&D. The Oriental Adventures hardcover book in 1985 established rules inspired by Japan and China and sketched out in a few pages a setting called Kara-Tur, which in 1988 received its own box set. In 1992, TSR launched the al-Qadim campaign setting, based on the Islamic Middle East, with two box sets, one for the new rules and one for the setting.
 
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Traditional. Pulling from the wealth of history is far more likely to produce something good. This is not to say innovation cannot exist or we must regurgitate that past. I'm just saying that innovation within the boundaries of the timeless good will probably yield better results. Can you imagine Numenera being created before D&D? Inconceivable. There is a reason why it happened in the order it did.

P:ST is used as an example, but it's still relying on standard tropes. It would still be a good game if it were your first exposure to the genre, but it wouldn't be a great game. Part of the experience is observing the subversion. For example, would Fall-From-Grace be as interesting she were just an escaped slave and not a prim and restrained metaphysical demon of malevolent lust? No. It's also why her romance plot is so unique, because it's one that cannot be consummated. It's an anti-romance. For that to exist, you must first have the tradition to subvert. In this case two. A demon and romance itself. Otherwise it has no weight.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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At what point does a well-written story start to shift from a traditional setting to a weird setting? Morrowind basically takes place at the weird edge of an otherwise more traditional setting. Forgotten Realms is very weird once you start looking into it. Tolkien, despite being the daddy of all fantasy, is remarkably different than his imitators.
It seems to me that even if you start out with a solidly traditional world once you start writing in it, you're gradually going to go in a weirder direction no matter what you do. Simply put, defining the politics and laws of the various races of the world edges us away from that tradition. Defining what locations and what exist in those locations make them stranger. Traditional tends to only exist when we don't examine the world at all. At which point it doesn't really matter.

Ultimately, I guess I do like having a weird setting, merely because I feel a bit tired of just seeing generic settings. I feel some degree of annoyance towards post-apocalyptic games for the same reason.
 

Cryomancer

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Lacrymas setting is the best. Eunuch paladins and female only barbarians who lost her child in the childbirth.
 

KainenMorden

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Forgotten Realms is very weird once you start looking into it. Tolkien, despite being the daddy of all fantasy, is remarkably different than his imitators.

Can you give some examples of this? Not arguing or being facetious, honestly asking and curious. I feel like the underdark may be alien to tolkein's high fantasy, low magic setting but I haven't read Tolkein for many years.
 

S.torch

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Traditional settings typically are Tolkienesque worlds, like anything set in the Forgotten Realms.

A large part of the settings that exist today, and those that can be traced back to the past, do not belong to what you call traditional settings. It is easy to think that we are full of "traditional settings" inspired by Tolkien's works if we only look superficially at the elements that compose it, and that is where the preconceived (and erroneous) ideas are created in the heads of the ignorant that High Fantasy is all about sappy stories, even on a site like the RPG Codex, so the situation outside of here is worse because they know even less about what they are talking about.

To lay some groundwork, a setting that was at its core (and not superficially) inspired by Tolkien, should have strong and well-defined moral lines (not to be confused with cheap moralism, which is more typical of modern settings). It draws from different mythological traditions that were largely revived during romanticism. Apart from the fact that it focuses more on fantastic creatures than on humans.

Most settings deviate from any type of common roots. While we're at it, let's take a few examples of some pretty famous stuff:

- Pathfinder: A setting where there is travel to other worlds and universes, all of which exist at the same time, including our current world which has even been travelled to in those stories. There are a number of twisted races which should be closer to your definition of weird.

- Divinity Original Sin: It started out as a setting that wasn't taking anything seriously until its second installment came out. Few moral definitions and no races are inspired by Tolkien's other than human.

- The Elder Scrolls: 0 moral delineations and is a seesaw of inconsistencies from day 1. Their most beloved game is a place full of mushrooms (Morrowind), their best known game is a place full of humans (Skyrim) and the game in the middle of these two doesn't even take its own setting seriously (Oblivion).

- Initial Forgotten Realms: Human-centric setting, no matter that there are some regions where there are no humans, this is the most predominant and superior race by many aspects on the continent, said in their books. From the beginning they had lax morals and questionable details. Most of its races only look very superficially similar, and in many cases not even that. It has undergone so many changes over the years, nowadays it has no morals at all in its world and races, can't really be considered a fantasy setting anymore.

- The Witcher: It's not even high fantasy but low "fantasy". It shares much of what has already been said with the previous settings.

As for the weird ones that Outer Worlds thing is your average sci-fi series made by insufferable Californians. Weird settings are Dark Sun, Planescape, and even Bloodlines (which takes a lot from Anne Rice), more special than all that.

Needless to say, all the characteristics you ascribe to "traditional" fantasy here are not its own. Traditional settings as they are called here are responsible for some of the strangest places and creatures that exist in fantasy. In fact: The weirdest things that exist all belong to High Fantasy.

I could go on and on, but it's honestly not worth it. The vast majority of RPGs don't even have enough detail put into them to be considered to have a setting as such. The funniest thing of all is that some settings that might have some REAL similarity to Tolkien, are almost never mentioned because they are not popular. This is the case of Greyhawk, Gary Gygax's original setting, which has an very clear morality. Even so, it is far from being part of the same line, as it is EXTREMELY human-centric. On top of that it is more than 25 years old. Something more similar is Dragonlance, but it is also more than 20 years old.

Traditional or High Fantasy settings are a huge minority. Because now everyone wants to be "gray", "clever" and "different" or an amusement park with elements that don't fit, before they even know and understand the medium they are in.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Tolkien, despite being the daddy of all fantasy...
William Morris, W.H. Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Abraham Merritt, Lord Dunsany, Eric Rücker Eddison, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and Gene Wolfe were unavailable for comment. :M

- The Elder Scrolls: 0 moral delineations and is a seesaw of inconsistencies from day 1. Their most beloved game is a place full of mushrooms (Morrowind), their best known game is a place full of humans (Skyrim) and the game in the middle of these two doesn't even take its own setting seriously (Oblivion).
The Elder Scrolls setting, in the human provinces of Tamriel, draws heavily on the pulp fantasy type of campaign setting, similar to Robert E. Howard's Conan stories or to D&D's Known World / Mystara setting. Each of the four human provinces is inspired by a different real-world analogue: High Rock as seen in Daggerfall is British/French, Hammerfell as seen in Daggerfell is Islamic North Africa, Cyrodiil is the Roman Empire (although the setting in Oblivion is an incoherent grab-bag, with only the Imperial City having Roman architecture), and Skyrim is Vikingland. However, the three elven provinces, and even more so the cat-people and lizardman provinces, are quite bizarre according to the lore, thoroughly into the territory of an unconventional or weird setting. Not coincidentally, of the four games after Arena, only Morrowind occurs in a non-human province (and was an excellent presentation of a sui generis unconventional setting), while Bethesda/Zenimax in its pursuit of a larger audience seems content since Morrowind to rotate between the human provinces, with Cyrodiil and Skyrim almost certainly to be followed in the Elder Scrolls VI by a return to either Hammerfell or High Rock, if not parts of both as in Daggerfall.
 

luj1

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Weird because originality

This is why I could never play banal mundane shit such as Gothic, Witcher, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc.
 
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ItsChon

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I generally prefer "standard" settings. I'm not the biggest fan of settings where time can easily be manipulated or there are a different worlds/universes. I wouldn't consider games like Morrowind or Underrail to be "weird". That being said, there are exceptions to every rule, and Planescape is an example of a fantastic "weird" setting. Would love to hear further examples that are of such quality.
 

NecroLord

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Morrowind.
It does have elves and Dwarves(though they are more similar to elves).
However,the setting is not your average High Fantasy forests and castles and knights in shining armor.
I prefer traditional settings because they are easier to play and create right.
Weird settings need an original and creative mind with many far-out ideas.
 
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Cryomancer

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Dwarves(though they are more similar to elves).

Disagreed.
Elves = High magical / low tech
Dwarves = High tech / Low magic

They have steampunk machinery and are amazing crafters, the empire aeons after its demise can't make a crossbow as good as Dwarves.
 

NecroLord

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Dwarves(though they are more similar to elves).

Disagreed.
Elves = High magical / low tech
Dwarves = High tech / Low magic

They have steampunk machinery and are amazing crafters, the empire aeons after its demise can't make a crossbow as good as Dwarves.
True.
But what I meant is that they are related to the elves. They are considered one of the Mer races,like the Ayleids,Chimer,Dunmer,Bosmer,Altmer.
 

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