The Campaign Builder's Guild

In another thread I mentioned a certain question that started bugging me, and I now thought is best moved elsewhere. Namely, why are many campaign and fantasy settings virtually "Earth 2.0" - either out-right being an ancient/modified/corrupted Earth, or taking so heavily from it that it might as well be just called that.

In essence, it started with Tolkien himself. It is said Arda was meant to be Earth in ancient times and if you look close enough to shapes of continents on the greater maps (ones stretching outside Middle-Earth itself), you can barely recognise the shapes and locations. And then other fantasy creators followed - including Forgotten Realms which is to this day one of the most popular D&D settings. And as can be seen sometimes on these boards, the campaign creators here do fall for that too sometimes. Now the question: why? Why are so many settings virtually "Earth 2.0"?

As for me and Olam, it's because it started from an idea of developing a setting around ancient Greece and its myths, and then it spread to include more areas, originally based on myths of other lands and peoples. Only then I realised that lifting whole nations and lands straight out of real world is just boring and started mixing it up, mixing together elements of different eras and nations in one piece. I still strive to make Olam unique and different - make it so you can still recognise familiar elements, but as a greater whole, you see an original mixture of them.
Still, if you looked at the sketch map I keep on my desk, you would probably clearly recognise both Americas, Africa and maybe even deduce the remaining pieces are supposed to be Europe and Asia, even though I really deformed them. This "Earth 2.0" geography is a leftover from where Olam began.

So, why do campaign creators make Earths 2.0? Why do you?

I think it's impossible to escape some parallels with something-or-other from the real world in a fantasy setting, whether it's as obvious as just going "This setting is a fantasy version of historical culture x, with elements of historical cultures y and z" or something more subtle and/or less conscious.

I mean, complete bonkers-gone-mad Alien with a capital WTF fantasy is a nice ideal, but as humans who inhabit the real world, we do need at least a few familiar elements to be able relate to a setting properly. I think that's especially the case as a player rather than a GM. If you're running a setting - especially if you made it - you can sometimes really get into the otherness of it, but when creating a character it's nice to be able to start from a familiar(ish) concept or two and then expand upon it/them. I mean, take my character in Steerpike's CE game, Vetter. I'd like to think he's not exactly a stereotypical character, but each of the elements that make him up is quite straightforward and relatable. He's a fox-person, and while we don't have them in the real world, we do have foxes, and legends/fiction of animal-human hybrids. He's an alcoholic, an all-too-real phenomenon. He's an ex-drug-addict, again, we have those in our world. He has a demon-claw grafted onto one arm where he lost his natural claw - freaky, maybe, but we have legends/fiction of demons, we have prosthetic replacements for lost limbs, it's still something we can comprehend.

The point I'm probably trying to make is that even when the overall package seems outlandish, the elements that make it up are probably familiar to us in some way, so there maybe isn't as huge a leap as there seems to be between that and having the overall package itself be familiar, with the differences in the details. Or something.

And that's exactly what I mentioned I'm doing currently with cultures in Olam - taking separate pieces of existing cultures, and brewing a unique connoction out of them.
My concern lies more with settings that copy a really lot from Earth - so much that you can tell easily what is what, just lifted plain from real world.

I get what you're saying but I can't really think of any settings that do this without adding some kind of spin to things. Kind of what I was saying about the outlandish whole that is built out of familiar parts being not too far removed from the familiar whole built from outlandish parts.
I mean, even something like REH's Hyborian age, where every nation has a real-world analogue, is really its own beast with its own unique feel, despite using very obviously real-world-derived cultures/ethnicities as a kind of cardboard-cutout shorthand.
This kind of setting, along with other kinds of "vanilla" fantasy settings, can actually work very well as the basis for a kind of behind-the-scenes-dark-forces-are-at-work game, with the very familiarity or mundanity existing in order to be undermined by the cthulhoid monstrosities/undead abominations/chaos degenerates/pre-human serpent volk/whatever when they are inevitably encountered.
And then there are the kind of settings that go "in this setting we take the myths and history of real-world culture x, have a dialogue with them, and build a fictional world or nation or whatever based on them" which I think often ends up being very evocative and interesting, even if it is unashamedly lifted from culture x.

EDIT: Just realised I actually haven't answered the second question you asked, which is why I myself make Earth 2.0 settings. Well, the short answer is that I don't, but there are definitely elements I use, especially in my current setting (still needs a name damn it!), that are lifted from history, if reshaped somewhat to suit my needs - I am after all a fantasist, and historical accuracy and realism beyond the kind of internal consistency required for suspension of disbelief are of no real interest to me in terms of world-building.
And I'm afraid I can't really give you a good answer. There is, obviously, the stuff I've already mentioned about familiarity, and I think it is very useful at times to be able to, during play, be like "yeah these guys look kinda like vikings" or whatever, because my players will have a whole load of mental images of what vikings are like, rather than an entirely invented culture, which they will have no previously formed mental images of. There is also the rule of cool, in that when I first made that bit of the setting I was thinking "yeah, vikings (or whoever) are badass."
Also, if I have an empire to the south of my barbarian-type regions, around the edges of a temperate sea, with a disciplined professional army and a central authority in a metropolis revered by its citizens, it's basically roman, right? So I call them Severim instead of Romans and I have their core troops be cavalry/mounted infantry rather than heavy inf and I make their fashion and architecture a bit different and I base their names more on later romance languages than Latin names but yeah... they're still recognisably pretty Roman, and that's cool because again, it's a nice short-hand for those guys in the south with the big central-government-type-empire and whacky ideas about "civilisation"

I think it's much easier to understand a setting when there are familiar things, whether they are blatant or not. The setting Tekumel is an Ok example of this, because, while it does take from earth's history, it takes from less known history (at least to, I'm guessing, our predominately Western forum) such as Pre-Columbian America, Southeast Asia, and Africa (Egyptians aside). It's a great setting, but it's work to get into it: it's more like reading history than reading a story.

Basing things on real-world examples gives out imaginations somthing to cling on to and makes the road a lot easier to understand the general ideas about something.

EDIT: I also believe that human history is the greatest story ever written, so I see history more as a story than hard cold fact.

Quote from: KalontasSo, why do campaign creators make Earths 2.0? Why do you?

Because Earth 1.0 just won't cut it? Using the real world, or even a lightly fantasized myths-are-true version of it, as a setting will inevitably impose specific limits on what can be done with it, on what kind of stories you can tell and on what sort of characters you can create.

By taking the step from Earth 1.0 to Earth 2.0 you basically give yourself a licence to mess with things to your heart's content. You still retain the advantage of having familiar, readily recognizable milieu and archetypes at your disposal, whilst having the freedom to discard any elements you may not like, or introduce truly outlandish new elements as needed. Your hands will be tied neither by the baggage of the real world, nor by the self-imposed requisite of completely divorcing your work from said baggage (a source of headaches for those trying to craft "truly alien" settings.)

It's probably important to realize that every idea has some origin. Creativity is more about breaking down elements and combining the pieces than it is about making up new pieces. (there are entire philosophical essays on this)

So whether one strives to avoid relating the setting to the real world or revels in it, all elements will invariably have some connection to the world we know.

We can also drag the suspension of disbelief into the picture, since maintaining it is part of what makes a great setting. Disassociate something too much from what we know and can relate to and it becomes too distant, too fantastical, too unbelievable. This is why settings have familiar points and elements scattered throughout.

The above might be a little too general an approach to this particular "problem", since an Earth 2.0 is modelled directly on earth (i.e. it is more than just a few scattered elements of familiarity).
A lot of the most obvious Earth 2.0's will be "What if?" settings. As in, "what if one important moment in history/human development was changed" or "what if this thing was here at this time". These are of course all about exploring how a world (our world) might have turned out given very different circumstances. Many of them exist as a cross between full-fledged settings and thought experiments. I feel this is a valid premise for world-building, even though the groundwork is often laid out for you.

Then there are settings which are like our world but fantasized or mixed up a bit - slightly distorted. Or have regions that draw heavily upon real-world regions. What makes or breaks this kind of setting is whether they are taking inspiration from their source material, using it to build their own  similar region or whether they are transplanting the source material into the setting and then moving things around a bit.
The latter ends up in some kind of setting-equivalent version of the Uncanny Valley; as the proportion of lifted material increases the setting becomes more and more relatable until it breaches some imaginary point and suddenly becomes too close to reality.   

The writer has to maintain a balance between inspiration and plagiarization.

I think the key is to take time and deconstruct a real world source and only take what you need. For example, if you want a great Empire or Republic, that doesn't mean they have to have legion, have gladiatorial games, be great engineers, or wear togas. If you go that far, then it's obvious what the builders alluding to. You have to be sneaky in your use of the real world.

Quote from: Señor Leetz
I think the key is to take time and deconstruct a real world source and only take what you need. For example, if you want a great Empire or Republic, that doesn't mean they have to have legion, have gladiatorial games, be great engineers, or wear togas. If you go that far, then it's obvious what the builders alluding to. You have to be sneaky in your use of the real world.

I also feel that you shouldn't try to avoid tropes completely. Mostly because that's impossible. If you want to purposefully pull from a real world culture for something that's perfectly fine. It's also ok if you want to just create something out of whole cloth. Just realize that creating something new won't avoid the tropes. We are human and humans automatically make use of the familiar in storytelling because the entire point of a story is to evoke certain feelings in the listener/reader and draw them in. Something totally alien won't do this and the person won't be drawn to the story. This is why even very alien things like the Cthulhu mythos or Steerpike's Tempter/CE games examine things from the human side of things. It's never from the unknowable alien being's point of view, it's from the point of very human (even if physically nonhuman) characters. Every setting will have a little Earth 2.0 in it (actually I think I'd more properly label it Human 2.0) you can no more escape it than escape being human. In the end though it shouldn't matter, the quality of the story isn't in the originality but in the telling itself. A good storyteller can spin a wonderful setting garment out of mundane elf fantasy cloth just as easily as a poor storyteller can spin a shoddy work out of the most obscure world.

Quote from: Nomadic
In the end though it shouldn't matter, the quality of the story isn't in the originality but in the telling itself. A good storyteller can spin a wonderful setting garment out of mundane elf fantasy cloth just as easily as a poor storyteller can spin a shoddy work out of the most obscure world.

Agree 110%.

http://wrathofzombie.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/transforming-the-earth-for-your-campaign-setting/ is relevant.

I'm making my world a fantasy-future Earth because the idea was cool. I could have just started wholesale, and there is a point when I could just toss in a new map and remove all the future Earth business, but I find the construct to be a good limiter and birther of ideas.

In the grand scheme of things, the less new assumptions you make your players/readers buy into, the easier they have immersing themselves into the setting. Earth 2.0, or even Earth 1.1's and all measures in between, are easier to understand.