The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Elemental_ElfHere's an experiment: what are the first 3 words and/or images that come to mind when I say "Fantasy"?

I'm going for images, rather than words.

One is an excessively "well-proportioned" man or woman wearing little or no clothing doing battle with some kind of monster and/or a gang of hapless mooks. To imagine the kind of person I see as the centrepiece of this image, look at a Boris Vallejo painting...

The second is of a tall, relatively slender figure, wearing overly elaborate, probably magical armour standing illuminated by the light of the giant glowing crystal behind them, possibly also with glowing eyes or glowing runes etched on their armour.

The final image is of a forest where everything kind of... runs together. I find this one very hard to describe, but it's unlike any forest I've seen in the real world, either firsthand or otherwise. Lots of moss and creepers and... yeah just... "magic forest" sums it up, I suppose.

There are lots of other things that come to mind, too, but those are, I think, the strongest three mental images.

Quote from: DrizztrocksAnd if there's anything I learned from this thread is that you can not put flavors on settings. Unless it is gumdrop land.

:band:

The problem here is that "vanilla" is being so fluidly defined. A better question, certainly a more meaningful one to campaign builders, would be, what tropes bore you in a setting.

Quote from: Scholaras to books, I've bought them because they were hyped (eragon, locke lamora), because they're part of a series (gaunt's ghosts) or because i liked the premise (dark tower). i've been seldom disappointed.

Mmmm, I've had a lot of the opposite result.  The rules I gave you were born out of a long and annoying process.  My tastes just aren't like so many other people.

Plus I have this thing about popular media: the way people describe it when the like can make my skin crawl.

Quote from: SteerpikeI certainly agree with Ishmayl that Greyhawk and Eberron aren't considered dystopian by most standards and definitions of the worlds, and I definitely disagree with you that those worlds are "about to fall apart."  There are tensions and problems, but those worlds are relatively stable, not nearly as saturated with evil/destruction/dystopian elements as most classic dystopias.  People in those worlds are not as a rule miserable or depraved or horrendously opressed, for the most part.  Will you at least concede that even if you consider these worlds dystopian in some sense that dystopias lie on a spectrum, and that they're on the "lighter" end of that?

There not dystopian.  I was just being stubborn.  Don't waste time hating me for it, I already hate myself.

I do view them as 'falling apart', though: every tension and/or problem and/or problem that could happen in the future (e.g. a secret group that may try to take over) seems to me like a point at which the world is starting to break.  Enough of these and they add up to 'falling apart'.

Quote from: SteerpikeSometimes you puzzle me, Silvercat.  I get that you're uncomfortable with depictions of evil and ickiness and dark stuff in games and fiction: it's not your cup of tea.  Cool, fine, I respect that.  But what settings do you like?  For example, I would have pegged you as someone who could appreciate Eberron, because of the pulp elements, but you count it as a dystopia, a type of world that to my understanding you find pretty repulsive, not merely as a world itself (dystopias are meant to be repulsive) but in the sense that you wouldn't want to play a game in a dystopian world or read about a dystopia.  Using such a broad definition of dystopia - a world with lots of problems in it - what worlds are there out there that you enjoy?  I don't mean what type of worlds are out there that you enjoy, I mean what actual settings (like Faerun, Eberron, etc?), either in gaming or in fiction?.

It's got a lot to do with this feeling I have whenever I'm presented with (most) conflict (and/or darkness, in case they aren't always the same thing): I keep thinking someone is trying to show me something but they're being subtle about it.  I don't do well with subtle, in fact I stink at it.  So giving me conflict is giving me a puzzle which I feel like I'm expected to figure out but which I can't, and I get confused and frustrated.  And then multiply that by the large number of conflicts in most settings and it just seems to me like a morass.
(If you want to discuss it, though, I have several objections to Eberron that don't have to do with how light or dark its tone is.)

So what do I like in a setting?  Non-complexity.  I don't want to have to read in to anything.  And I need problems presented to me one at a time and having reasonably easy solutions.

As to exactly which settings I've found that I like'¦'¦'¦'¦it's getting late, so I'll have to tell you later.

Quote from: Elemental_ElfHere's an experiment: what are the first 3 words and/or images that come to mind when I say "Fantasy"?

A motley band of swordsmen of all different humanoid species kick in the door of a room, kill everyone inside and take their stuff.

An omnipotent dreamer messes around with a world just for the fun of it.

Everything is so glowy and covered in sparkles that you can't see what the hell is going on.

Quote from: Elemental_ElfHere's an experiment: what are the first 3 words and/or images that come to mind when I say "Fantasy"?

Great, majestic beasts.

Mages throwing around glowing shapes.

Sweeping vistas of huge cliffs, probably on a coast, possibly featuring a multi-leveled city of brick and stone with an impressive castle at the back.

Quote from: SilvercatMoonpaw

Quote from: brainfaceJust because your contents original and awesome (i'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it is) doesn't mean it's gonna be read or commented on (i haven't because I only read these meta threads :P). I don't think it's meaningful to assume lack of comment means your setting isn't original, and the lack of comments doesn't mean your setting isn't good or worthwhile.

Do you happen to know what will get read?  Because I don't consider that my work's bad just because no one reads it, I just have to consider whether it's worth my time to write it down.  If no one wants to comment on it that's fine, but I don't see any other practical reason to write it out.

Put a link in your sig? Bump it to the front page? Give it an evocative title (maybe in the form of a question or something humorous... "Why is there a dragon in my living room?"). People won't know right off the bat whether the setting will interest them based on a place name. "Eberron" on these boards would sink to the bottom of the forum for months at a time between updates by its author. "Metal Earth" (saw this on another board) piqued my interest immediately. Oh, and if its relevant mention it in meta or other threads. There was that one setting in the alternate elements thread that looked really good. I don't know that I gave feedback, but it got me to read it.

You don't have to be a pompous braggart, but you do need to get people to click on the link to your setting. As others have said: Sell it.

Three words?
Knight. Dragon. Wizard.

Quote from: SteerpikeHeh this kind of reminds me of indie music somehow.  I was thinking of Eberron and whether Eberron could be called vanilla.  On the one hand, it's not really post-Tolkienian.  On the other, many people seem to be concieving of vanilla as: "typical, standard, default; popular."  If Eberron supercedes Greyhawk as the "standard" 9or most popular) roleplaying setting, does it not itself become vanilla?  And isn't that ironic, in that part of the appeal of Eberron (at least for many) is that it deliberately strays from and works against well-worn or "vanilla" tropes?  It's like indie music that becomes popular and therefore mainstream: no longer indie anymore.

Oh, Eberron used lots of stock tropes from the start. It's just that they weren't the classical fantasy stock tropes, which makes it fairly unusual for fantasy settings and thus cannot be counted as a "vanilla" fantasy setting.

It's tropes primarily come from the pulps, with a dash of Noir thrown in. They are still very recognizable by most people and thus it is easy to get into the proper spirit of the setting - it's just that the combination of tropes used is unusual.

In my opinion, it's not necessary to try to come up with something entirely new for a setting for it to be "refreshing" - all that needs to be done is to mix up tropes that hadn't been associated with each other before. Shadowrun mixed the tropes of the fantasy and cyberpunk genre, which nobody had done before - making it something unique and interesting (at least, at the time). And my own Urbis tries to mix all the usual tropes of "vanilla fantasy" with the tropes of 19th century fiction.

Quote from: SilvercatMoonpawAs to exactly which settings I've found that I like'¦'¦'¦'¦it's getting late, so I'll have to tell you later.

Well now back to trying to answer this:

The only published RPG settings that have really worked completely for me have been related: "Teenagers from Outer Space" and "Star Riders", the latter of which is actually a semi-supplement for the former.  Both draw on Saturday morning cartoons and comedic animé to produce the sort of gonzo universe you find in something like Hitchhiker's Guide.

Moving away from that you have "RPG settings that were generally okay, although generally boring".  They include:
Uresia, Grave of Heaven: Animé fantasy.  Tries to be funny sometimes, sometimes tries to be sort of horrific, mostly falls down on being an interesting setting.
Conan, Barbarians of Lemuria: Both the same sort of "sword and sorcery basic" settings, they don't present themselves as being all that dark despite their grittiness (admittedly I haven't actually read either one more than samples).
San Angelo: A superhero setting with very little superhero-related stuff actually presented.  Manages to avoid creating the "1,000 enemies who all want to take over/destroy the world" or "we hate supers" environment that other superhero settings get into.
Monte Cook's Diamond Throne: Despite the fact that the Arcana Evolved book puts up a possible future conflict between the giants and the returned dragons the place has a very intact world for a fantasy setting.

For media settings:
Lots of things Disney: Tailspin, Darkwing Duck, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, and their TV spinoff from Aladdin.
Early 90s version of TMNT cartoon.
A few animé dealing with aliens coming to Earth (most of which I can't remember the names of all that well), including one where you had a seemingly modern Japan integrated into the trope "great galactic civilization" and had aliens living there but without any change in the way the place looked or really acted.