Our ________s are exactly the same! The merits of familiarity

[quinron]

After a thoroughly enjoyable and informative read of this thread, I went for a re-read of The Playgrounder's Guide to Worldbuilding. While I was expecting it to some degree, I was still surprised by how often the advice was simply "don't make cliches," but even more surprising was the proliferation of "don't do anything that's been done before, go off book because the standard is boring."

I can understand trying to make something dynamic and atypical if you're looking to publish it, but my setting is only ever going to be used for my group, and I'm guessing thats the case for most people. I've been running for a lot of new players this past year, so I deliberately decided to make my new setting as "typical" as possible in all the elements the players might interact with. I'm having more fun trying to justify the core and make it interesting than I usually do trying to come up with new stuff. So why is it that the blanket advice given to most worldbuilders is "don't do core, it's boring?"

[Everyl]

I think a lot of worldbuilding advice comes from people who publish settings and/or books. Or at least from people who want to publish. And it's hard to argue with it - a new setting is much more compelling and interesting if it is noticeably different from other settings you've played in and/or read before.

Many of the best and most interesting published settings out there are the ones that differ the most from the assumptions of core rules, but those settings have an advantage that we as amateur world-builders don't - manpower. Often, dozens of people have put work into writing chapters of rules and fluff, proofreading it and editing it all for consistency, and playtesting the results to be sure it still works as a game. The result is setting books that are often fun and interesting to read in their own right, the sort of thing that many players will happily read because they enjoy doing so. It's really hard to write your own setting notes to that standard.

On the other hand, keeping things simple and familiar lets you bring new players into your game more easily. It sharply reduces the amount of work that your players have to do to make a character if they can rely on the generalizations in the published core books, rather than having to study up on all the ways your _____s are different. It may not seem like much to ask someone to familiarize themselves with a few (dozen?) pages of house rules and customized fluff, but if they've been casually playing by-the-book games for years, it can seem like quite an imposition to them.

If you don't have a regular gaming group of friends who you know are interested enough in your work to learn your setting, it may be best to keep your setting closer to core. As a GM who is currently lacking players, I have several settings that I'm kicking around in my head, and which one I will use should I find the time and friends necessary to start a game will depend on who those players are. One of the settings hews intentionally close to the core rules for races and classes, and most of the adventuring would take place in a region that the characters would know little about, so the players wouldn't need to know much about the setting, either. Another is vast and complicated, and I'd probably have to choose a small part of it to write up for the benefit of any players but the most willing to humor me.

So yes, originality is nice. If you're going to publish, you'll probably need a lot of it. But, IMO, it pays to have a more straightforward, accessible setting on hand, since not all player groups are the same.

[avr]

Generally my own world-building is for me first, as the people I game with are not going to read or remember what I give them in advance. After a slightly confusing discussion I discovered that one of the people in the last game but one I ran had agreed to join the game without reading any of the email I sent making the pitch for the game, despite replying positively to the email; it's a touching sort of faith but kind of limiting. I have to make sure that most of what I use will line up with expectations.

[BootStrapTommy]

Because why would you make a standard setting when there is already twenty standard settings already? Why waste the effort when you can just use what's already been done?

[quinron]

Because why would you make a standard setting when there is already twenty standard settings already? Why waste the effort when you can just use what's already been done?

The biggest issue I take is that almost every advice thread says that you should completely dump the standard races. To me, this a) creates a lot of work for both the GM and players, trying to reconcile their assumptions from core with the new setting, and b) undermines the traditions of D&D. There's a reason the core races - most of them, anyway - have stood the test of time: people know them, and they like them.

Take Eberron as a counterpoint. Yes, the warforged were wholly original for D&D, and no, I'm not saying that a new race is a bad thing, but they're the only new race that doesn't fit a preexisting archetype: kalashtar are psychic elves, shifters are half-orcs with their dichotomy between acceptance in the wild and distrust in civilized culture, and changelings are half-elves with their inability to fully belong to any group they're a part of. This is the habit with new races, especially with the neophyte worldbuilders who frequent advice threads: you can make a race of miniature bug-men with psychic powers, but when you pick their mechanical purpose first and their flavor second, you just end up with gnomes with exoskeletons.

The far more impressive feat Keith Baker accomplished was getting me interested in halflings again. In 3.5 (and in most other editions, really) halfling is one of the worst choices for a barbarian, with their frail little arms. But the idea of a dinosaur-riding Dothraki hobbit is so absurd and cool, you want to make one, optimization be damned.

And that's the advice I think is missing: you can usually get just as much novelty mixing up an existing race - a core race, even - as you can out of making a new one out of whole cloth; usually more, because 3 times out of 4 the new race is just an old race with a new coat of paint.

[Mechalich]

I suspect that a lot of the 'don't do core' advice is based on the principle that, unless your setting is sufficiently different such that it cannot possibly be mistaken for the Forgotten Realms (or in Pathfinder Golarion), then you might as well just use FR instead. It's vastly more detailed, complete, and robust than any setting a single individual (or in fact a single small company) could reasonably make, and there's really no reason to try and duplicate all that effort.

That being said, I think many people take this principle way, way too far. You don't have to dump the core races or core classes to change the setting to something new. A single major conceit in changing the rules or the established fluff can easily, if the implications are taken all the way, dramatically change a setting from the core. I absolutely discovered this when building an E6 world - just doing that means changing everything as a consequence.

I suspect that changing the races, specifically, is commonly mentioned for a couple of reasons. First, in 3.X developing new races is mechanically trivial compared to other changes you might make. Second, a lot of people simply don't like the core portrayal of the standard D&D races - which really isn't surprising as they draw fairly heavily on the specific ideas and prejudices of Tolkien and those have not aged with particular grace. However, I think that people are often too quick to abandon existing and well-established groups that players understand for something weird and convoluted that doesn't have enough work behind it to really function - especially true in cases where the new species is pretty much anything other than a mammalian humanoid - the old 2e Thri-Kreen of Athas book is a good example of the level of effort needed to really make an exotic race viable.

[Belac93]

The way I feel about familiar settings, is that they are great for new players, or players who want to use an odd concept. If all dwarves in your setting are spellcasters, how is it cool and different for someone to be a dwarf wizard?

Its interesting, but I find most of my players and me like different concepts, ones that aren't the norm. But if the setting is odd, players have to play stereotypical concepts if they want to stand out.

[quinron]

The way I feel about familiar settings, is that they are great for new players, or players who want to use an odd concept. If all dwarves in your setting are spellcasters, how is it cool and different for someone to be a dwarf wizard?

Its interesting, but I find most of my players and me like different concepts, ones that aren't the norm. But if the setting is odd, players have to play stereotypical concepts if they want to stand out.

I think that's the main point along which my creative philosophy divides from most other people's: I don't really see the merit of novelty for the sake of novelty. It feels lazy to me; that's 100% personal opinion, and I probably only feel that way because I get lazy when I do it, but if you're making a dwarf wizard just because you want something, you don't have to put in the effort of making a truly individual character. A dwarf fighter? If you want that to stick out, you have to think outside the box, you have to give them some personality, but I find it too easy to slip into "the dwarf wizard's personality is that they're a dwarf wizard."

[bulbaquil]

My argument is that "being different for the sake of being different" is, itself, a cliche.

Yes, there may already be 20 variations on Standard Fantasy Settings out there. No, you are probably not "bringing anything new to the table" by creating a 21st. Yes, you probably could get away with running in Forgotten Realms or Golarion or what have you. However:

Using an established setting brings with it all the implied baggage of that setting, including various aspects of lore or the world that you don't want to have to deal with. If you play in Forgotten Realms, for instance, you actually do have to resolve what's going on with Elminster, Drizzt, etc. and why they aren't involving themselves in whatever plot(s) you're running. And you don't have to worry about Wizards of the Coast throwing a Spellplague into the world and advancing the timeline 20 years, and thus having to figure out whether to go along with the changes, ignore them, deal with them somehow else entirely, etc. It also can be a bit of a challenge for players in multiple games in the same setting but under different GMs (or who ever change games or GMs) - sure, it's one pantheon and one geography, but in Faerûn I this event happened, but didn't in Faerûn II, and in Faerûn III this entirely different thing occurred, and so on and so forth.

Not to mention that while many elements of a setting might fit what you have in mind, certain elements might not, and they may be too hard to change without fundamentally altering the nature of the setting. If the GM/group wants a fairly gritty, survival-oriented game that still uses the D&D system, they might consider Dark Sun... except that they also want the game to take place in a swampy environment rather than in a desert one. Are there any swamps in Dark Sun? Are there any big enough to be plot-relevant?

Making your own setting, even if for all intents and purposes it's Forgotten Realms but with a different map, resolves those issues by removing any pre-existing lore issues and contradictions that might render your game more difficult to play. You don't already have pieces out on the chessboard, so to speak, when you run your own setting, and even if you do, they're pieces you (or your players) put there. No, your setting doesn't need to be as detailed and as fleshed-out as Forgotten Realms; it needs exactly as much detail as your group(s) and the game(s) being played in it demand of it.

As for keeping it fairly close to the core assumptions: Because it reduces the amount of guesswork, miscommunication, and TIME in the chargen process that your players (and you) may not have. It's a lot easier to absorb 1 page or a few paragraphs' worth of background material that basically says "this is what's different from the normal setting" than it is to build from the ground-up with a 60-page dissertation on how each of the completely-custom races works together. The "rollplayers" in your group are generally not going to care about all that work; they're going to skim the statblocks and look for whichever race best complements their build. The heavy-roleplayers might care, or at least be appreciative of it, but at the same time if you do have someone who wants to define their character by breaking away from the stereotypical mold, that becomes a lot more confusing when you change what the stereotypical mold is that they're supposed to be breaking away from.

[Belac93]

Not so much being different for the sake of being different, its mostly because we've all played those stereotypes so much, that we instinctively gravitate away from them now.

[ladubois]

I just came to this realization myself, a year or two ago when I started working on my first campaign setting intended for non-personal use (a long-winded way of saying that I theoretically intend to publish it, one way or another). While my first thought was how boring it would be to have the same elves, dwarves, etc. that you always find, I started thinking about the dozens of fantasy MMOs I've played and how there's only one (sometimes two, when I'm in the right mood) that I still play. And while, yes, a big reason for it being WoW is simply the fact that it has such a huge community, all my friends are there, etc., I do play SWtOR mostly by myself, and that second one I play entirely solo. Cutting to the chase: most MMOs have entirely unique worlds. They have things like baraka, kelari, and deva. None of these words mean anything to me, and if there's nothing familiar I can latch onto to start building my understanding off of, then how am I expected to relate to any of it?

On the other hand, several of the older school MMOs do fall into the "boring through familiarity" side of the problem. So many games have elves and dwarves, and yet those elves and dwarves basically just look like weird humans. They have no character beyond being elves or dwarves. And, again, that's where WoW succeeds. You can recognize night elves as being night elves, but they're immediately distinct. They're more feral and less... demurely graceful than typical elves which reinvigorates that mysterious and magical air that elves should have. And if we look at the tauren for one of their more unique races, we again see something we can immediately identify - it's a minotaur. But wait, they don't look beastly and brutish, instead they look... gentle? Pretty much the one exception to this is the draenei, but being only one out of so many readily identifiable options, that one outlier becomes more enticing since clearly the creators have a clear idea of their world, so you're more willing to take a leap of faith and discover what makes draenei draenei (at least, that's my theory).

I guess what I'm getting at is that you should have something that is familiar (so that people have a base to start from), but distinct rather than merely "unique". I think the ideal reaction people should have (and it should probably be had within... let's say a minute or so - half that if we're in a visual medium, twice that if we're just working with text) upon seeing your race is "Okay, so it's basically a _____, but...". For example, "It's basically an elf, but Middle Eastern." or "It's basically a dwarf, but fanatically religious." or "It's basically an orc, but French." I'm simplifying here, but it's something to aim for. You should certainly flesh things out well beyond that first thought (ideally so that a fan goes "No! It's completely different! They..."), but as an introduction, give your prospective audience something to grasp onto while and then use that to show them all the intricate nuances that make your olanri olanri.

That's what I think, anyway.

Spoiler: Incidentally, about that setting I made...

Show

It was for Pathfinder, and I decided to A) not entirely nix the standard races (at least not half-orcs, elves, dwarves, and gnomes), but simply reduce their worldwide populations to a single small nation for each, and B) use geniekin as the new "standard" races (in addition to humans, of course - they should always get a free ride, in my opinion). I then decided that the geniekin were the genetic descendants of a caste-like system from ancient genie empires. Ifrits were descended from the warriors and administrators, sylphs were merchants and diplomats, undines were scholars and entertainers, and oreads were craftsmen and ascetics. Even after centuries of divergence leading them to be as varied as any humans from the same country or region would be, each is immediately distinct and recognizable. And then, just to provide a little more spice and colour, I sprinkled in various animal races (tengu, kitsune, catfolk, etc.) who would essentially be addressed in the Other Races section at the end of the chapter. With the flavour and feel of the main races established, even just a paragraph or two lights the imagination for the rest.

[ThePurple]

Cutting to the chase: most MMOs have entirely unique worlds. They have things like baraka, kelari, and deva. None of these words mean anything to me, and if there's nothing familiar I can latch onto to start building my understanding off of, then how am I expected to relate to any of it?

Part of the reason that MMOs do this so effectively is that, even if they create something totally off the wall (like draenei, which can only really be explained as "good aligned demons" in WoW), players are eased into the world and how weird it is slowly rather than just having an infodump about how different they are. Because roleplay is so much more important to PnP gaming (in video games, because all interactions are preprogrammed, players can't really act in ways that contradict the established rules of the world), players *need* that infodump because, if you don't, they're liable to start doing stuff in your world that breaks with the established rules you have for that class/race/whatever.

For pretty much any campaign setting, while there *is* some benefit in familiarity, if it's exactly the same as what everyone else uses (unless you're operating in one of those fundamental campaign settings, like Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Tolkien's Middle Earth, etc.), it starts feeling like those worlds rather than your new one so you shouldn't really use standard races in the exact same manner as other worlds/settings do. If it's *too* different, however, it starts becoming *too* alien and players start seeing them as something only tangentially related to what they originally thought they were (e.g. they were expecting different but not *that* different).

You just need to figure out how to hit that sweet spot where it's familiar enough to be approachable while different enough to be interesting (which varies from player to player, so it's not even a consistent sweet spot).

[ladubois]

First off, I want to question your first sentence. "MMOs do this so effectively." That's the opposite of what I was saying in those sentences. Most MMOs do this poorly, and it's a major factor in why I only play two or three. But as for the rest, that's basically what I was saying, advocating the use of familiarity as a starting point to build something new and different. However, I'm going to counter your assertion that an infodump is necessary. Yes, players should know how your races do and don't work in your setting, but not every player needs to know everything about every race, and while I used MMOs as an example, I believe this same principle applies to everything from tabletop RPGs to novels (see footnote). Start with familiarity and build to distinctness.

What you should probably do is give a short, basic overview - a small-to-medium-sized paragraph or two at most - that establishes your race. The player should then have at least a decent idea of what each race is like in their head, and then they can choose which race(s) they might want to play and/or learn more about. Then you can start the infodump, however, unless you've really sold them on the race idea, anyone will be scared away by too much information so try to prioritize it and start with the big picture - what is the stereotypical member of this race? What sorts of personality traits do they tend towards? What's their overall culture like? Are there any cultures of this race that go outside that norm? What's their history like? As much as it may sound sacrilegious to a world-builder (which I definitely count myself as), your player should be able to stop reading whenever they feel like, and still have something accurate enough to work with. Even if they come up with something that contradicts the norm further down the page, outliers should always exist, and there's no reason that every adventurer especially should be just like the typical member of that race or culture. And, of course, as GM, you're always able - and free - to point out anything too egregious.

This is essentially why the core books have only a page or so at most on each race, and the bulk of racial information comes in extra, optional supplements. Not all the information in Races of the Wild or Elves of Golarion could or even should be found in the core book. Even "standard" settings like Forgotten Realms get Races of Faerun. The infodump should always be optional, and reserved for players who really want to get into that specific race. And let's face it. No one's going to be creating anything truly unique. Not only has "everything been done before", but the limits of the human mind mean that you can't create something with which you have no basis for comparison. At most, all you can do is make something familiar and then bury that familiarity under endless details and caveats - which is a terrible strategy.

Spoiler: Footnote

Show

Let's take another look at good exposition that introduces something unique and foreign, but without using the medium of games: Fullmetal Alchemist (which, I assume from your avatar, you are familiar with). Arakawa doesn't sit us down in the prologue explaining everything about how alchemy works. She introduces each element one by one until by the first chapter or two, we understand well enough what alchemy in FMA is. First, we learn that it can be used to turn one thing into another. Then we learn about equivalent exchange and how what comes out must go in. Then we learn that certain things (human souls, for example) are outside the scope of this system. And so on. From that very first repaired radio, we have what we need to understand what alchemy is, and then after that is established, we learn all the things that make it distinct and the intricacies of its rules. Alchemy in Fullmetal Alchemist is a remarkably complex system, but just from that first chapter you're given all the information you need to understand it well enough that you can make your own character without breaking the rules (as long as you were paying attention). And you get a kickass story to boot! So if that can be done, you can explain the need-to-know basics of your unique race in a couple paragraphs, keeping it both approachable and distinct.

[quinron]

Part of the reason that MMOs do this so effectively is that, even if they create something totally off the wall (like draenei, which can only really be explained as "good aligned demons" in WoW), players are eased into the world and how weird it is slowly rather than just having an infodump about how different they are. Because roleplay is so much more important to PnP gaming (in video games, because all interactions are preprogrammed, players can't really act in ways that contradict the established rules of the world), players *need* that infodump because, if you don't, they're liable to start doing stuff in your world that breaks with the established rules you have for that class/race/whatever.

For pretty much any campaign setting, while there *is* some benefit in familiarity, if it's exactly the same as what everyone else uses (unless you're operating in one of those fundamental campaign settings, like Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Tolkien's Middle Earth, etc.), it starts feeling like those worlds rather than your new one so you shouldn't really use standard races in the exact same manner as other worlds/settings do. If it's *too* different, however, it starts becoming *too* alien and players start seeing them as something only tangentially related to what they originally thought they were (e.g. they were expecting different but not *that* different).

You just need to figure out how to hit that sweet spot where it's familiar enough to be approachable while different enough to be interesting (which varies from player to player, so it's not even a consistent sweet spot).

Thank you for putting into words almost exactly how I think. It's hard sometimes to disentangle the thoughts in my head enough to present a clear thesis like this.

Your first paragraph highlights what I think is an important distinction between the philosophies of home-use and for-publication design: when you're not concerned with making the whole thing make sense as an organic unit right out the gate, you have wiggle room. I began building my current setting just a few months ago, for a new campaign with my new group, and I decided beforehand that I'd let the way they chose their classes and races and how they played their characters would inform the way the world was built.

So now there's an almost-exclusively half-elf nation in a valley that's basically the Lost World, which would never have occurred to me if the half-elf ranger hadn't chosen a pterodactyl as his companion. Once I decide to make something part of the world, it stays, but until then I've left myself plenty of vagueness to fill in as it intrigues me.

[mujadaddy]

My argument is that "being different for the sake of being different" is, itself, a cliche.

Nice. I agree, and if I'm presenting "straight fantasy" to a group, there is a lot which doesn't have to be discussed, because it can be assumed. This leaves more time for discussing actual interactions with people, rather than explaining that a Zuka has four eyes and can only see colors in moonlight, or whatever.

[Gwaednerth]

Personally, I do like things that feel different. A world exists to be explored. Unfamiliar societies should have unfamiliar rules that the heroes have to learn about by committing faux pas. So on a that level, I think originality gives the game purpose. At the same time, people do need consistency. If vampires are immune to staking in your setting, it takes something out of it for me as a player.

[mujadaddy]

^ Sure, but those societies are days/weeks/months travel away (if not planar jaunts). Setting up "normal" first allows for the contrast to be deeper when those differences are encountered. And "normal" doesn't have to be explained at length.

[Tody Shelfungus]

This discussion is something that I have thought a lot about but in some ways different than what is here.

What I believe is just as the differences, which create the societies, races, classes, and campaign areas are as necessary as the familiarities. The familiarities bind together both your campaigns, your players and gamer society as a whole.

I started playing D&D not long after the AD&D Dungeonmaster Guide copyright. I even bought the first run that had certain items left out.

I am still at heart a 1st edition, DM.

It took me About a decade to put together an understanding of the why's of first edition. You might find it interesting that G. Gygax once said AD&D was not an advanced game it was a game for advanced players.

If you dig deep enough you realize that you first job as a DM, after protect the constitutional principle of Fun. Is to teach the community system to beginners.

It was part of First Edition design that a player you were teaching to play, could stand up walk out, and without to much trouble sit at another table and play.

This was normally done by creating a part of your campaign, for the beginners and those advanced players belonging to the Rules school. They as much as said if you didn't Follow the RAW you weren't playing D&D. But there was another time you were not playing D&D as a DM, if you had advanced players of the Guidelines school and you never left the Community systems you had Stopped Playing D&D.

The point is as a First edition DM, I am still required to teach the community systems. when I take a party with a Guidelines player from the community RAW, to another "Translation is totally up to the discretion of the DM except for the survival of the Character."

The familiarity makes it possible to take the Rules school player into another system, with the guidelines player and expose one to a new set of physical rules and the other just something new to each there own.
The familiarity of elf allows one to go from one community system to another and still know who you are.

[ladubois]

Indeed. I'd also like to point out that this isn't a binary thing. Both uniqueness and familiarity work best when they are used to complement and accentuate each other, rather trying to use one or the other on its own.

[Coidzor]

Making it your own and doing it well is generally more important than either complete originality or complete familiarity, I believe.

That said, if you can do that and have either a new spin or take on old themes or come up with a new theme that fits with the familiar taken in a new direction, that can help with maximizing one's execution.

[Yora]

There are no original ideas. There are only original ways of connecting old ideas. And there is an infinite number of those.

[Grey Watcher]

This reminds me of an attempt at a campaign setting I tried years and years ago. The part that was most memorable was what I came up with for the Orcs. They were exactly what and where the players would normally expect: a Proud Warrior Race (TM), living in hostile, barren wastelands, surviving by raiding, and not getting along with the PC races. What I enjoyed, was giving them a reason for being there beyond "they're dumb and can't manage any better" or "the Gods just arranged it that way".

[Knaight]

The biggest issue I take is that almost every advice thread says that you should completely dump the standard races. To me, this a) creates a lot of work for both the GM and players, trying to reconcile their assumptions from core with the new setting, and b) undermines the traditions of D&D. There's a reason the core races - most of them, anyway - have stood the test of time: people know them, and they like them.

Some people like them. Some of us are really sick of them, and while I generally avoid that issue by just having humans, there are other solutions. The standard pseudo-tolkenien slate isn't the only familiar grouping, and it's been so heavily used that it's gotten dull for a number of people, myself included. So, if you want familiar, why not pull from something like the mythology surrounding Atlantis? Why not pull from animal-people in folklore? I'm actually running something deliberately generic right now to introduce new players into more generic games than I usually do, and I still ended up pulling mostly from depictions of Atlantis and the more typical amphibious fantasy creatures than anything else, because I just couldn't bring myself to deal with elves and dwarves and such forth again.

[kardillamo]

Some people like them. Some of us are really sick of them, and while I generally avoid that issue by just having humans, there are other solutions. The standard pseudo-tolkenien slate isn't the only familiar grouping, and it's been so heavily used that it's gotten dull for a number of people, myself included. So, if you want familiar, why not pull from something like the mythology surrounding Atlantis? Why not pull from animal-people in folklore? I'm actually running something deliberately generic right now to introduce new players into more generic games than I usually do, and I still ended up pulling mostly from depictions of Atlantis and the more typical amphibious fantasy creatures than anything else, because I just couldn't bring myself to deal with elves and dwarves and such forth again.

This is actually the exact reason I started building my world in the first place. I really didn't like the way the core races in games interacted, behaved, or were fluffed in general and wanted something that fit for me. So I pulled from Buddhism, The Druids, and a little bit from other mythologies too, throwing in far more dichotomies and dualities to make it interesting.

My players don't mind, I've provided them with exactly what they need to know to build characters and interact with the world. I think that's kind of what helps with worldbuilding and games, we can shape our worlds around our players actions more instead of having them as empty pawns in this predetermined world.

[Nifft]

There are a number of ways to make a unique setting which is demonstrably not FR nor Golarion nor Greyhawk, without doing much work to change monsters.


Keep what, change why. For example: Goblins ride Worgs and hate humans. They sneak around, trying to kill people. They behave in all ways like the Goblin entry in the MM of your favorite edition, except... they don't have "non-combat females" nor young. They don't reproduce sexually. They reproduce by piling humanoid corpses inside a faerie mushroom circle, so the sprites and pixies which would normally awaken in the flowers around the faerie circle are instead bloated, rotting toadstools which disgorge more goblins. They're corrupted Fey, tainted by the necrotic energies released by rotting Humanoid flesh into being evil Humanoids.


Monster Palette. Simply picking & choosing which monsters are relevant in your campaign world makes your world significantly different from the generic kitchen-sink settings. Some examples:

- Undead Overlords: Steal a setting idea from Vampire: the Masquerade, and have urban society shaped by vampires which treat the citizens of their city as their "herd". Maybe they self-regulate their numbersin order to ensure a plentiful blood supply, which involves a careful balancing act. The oldest ones might be terrible sorcerers of vast power. Adventurers don't make their homes in major cities because they don't want to attract the attention of urban vampire overlords.

- Wyrmfall: 100 years ago, the Council of Wyrms fractured, and the world's peace was shattered by the fury of the First Wyrm War. The losers of that conflict paid tribute to the winners for roughly 70 years, but secretly built (and bred) even more horrific weapons of war, culminating in Wyrm War 2, a decade-long conflict which saw the release of necromantic horrors and diabolical pacts that would never have been allowed by the Council. WW2 never formally ended, but after 10 years there weren't enough dragons left to actively continue the conflict. The game starts 20 years after that decade. This is a post-apocalypse setting where a new generation of humanoids are slowly claiming power from the Great Dragon Lords that mostly destroyed each other. That's why there are ruins, traps, and piles of treasure waiting to be claimed.

- Angels & Aberrations: In this setting, magic is either from Nature (Dragons, Druids, Elementals, Fey) or from Outside (Arcane magic, Cleric spells). "Gods" are alien (and may be inherently inimical to humanity, or not) -- they are inhuman in an axiomatic way, where as Aberrations are alien in a chaotic way. This setting is not about good vs. evil so much as it is about threading the needle between the extremes of anti-life Law and anti-life Chaos.


PC Race Palette. Throw away elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes. Pick a new & different palette of racial choices for PCs (and for enemy nations). Some examples:

- Titan Slayers: Fleeing from their doomed homeworld, an entire nation of humanity found a new home on a world which was previously dominated by giants, by the time-honored method of killing a bunch of giants and taking their land. Now the humans of the southern continent have a tenuous armistice with the giants of the northern continent, but they continuously train and build to fight the inevitable giant threat.

• Human
• Half-Giant (XPH)
• Goliath
• Warforged (including Juggernauts)
• Shadar-Kai (humans tainted by the shadow of travel through the void between worlds; they qualify for Shadowcraft Mage).

- Transhuman Transmutation: This is a world in which humans have made various attempts at self-improvement or even immortality, and none worked perfectly, but some became "races" in their own right.

• Human
• Tiefling
• Elan (XPH)
• Necropolitan
• Mojh (from Arcana Evolved)
• Changeling
• Dralasite (from Star Frontiers)

Transformative feats like the [Aberration] and [Draconic] are a good fit for this setting.

- Wyrmfall's Legacy: The world used to be humans and dragons, with occasional half-dragon champions. Then the Great War prompted an arms race among the draconic sorcerer-kings. The "weapons" of this war included the creation of intelligent races, like Kobolds, but also near-mindless (un)living weapons to kill a specific enemy dragon -- like Trolls, Iron Golems, and Shadows.

• Human
• Kobold
• Spellscale
• Dragonborn
• Mongrelfolk
• Minotaur & other magical hybrids which might be one-off creations

- Humans Are Jerks: This is an on-its-head setting where human is NOT a character race, and in fact humans are the primary setting antagonists: burning down forests, draining wetlands, setting up polluting mines in previously pristine hills, herding cattle across the plains where people hunt, etc.

• Elf & Orc ("humans please stop raping our women")
• Kobold
• Goblin / Hobgoblin / Bugbear
• Lizardfolk (& Poisondusk etc.)