Adding Tropes to a Setting

[Jürgen Hubert]

(Crossposted from ENWorld, as I figured this might interest you folks as well.)

When creating Urbis, I made the deliberate design decision to use a large number of elements that readers might be familiar with - parallels to Real World history, societies and cultures, as well as common tropes (even cliches) of fantasy and other fiction (including gaming in general and D&D in particular). The reason for this was that Urbis has some fairly strange and unusual concepts at its core for a D&D setting - its culture is based on 19th century Europe instead of the usual medieval paradigm, it has extremely large city-states (sometimes with populations ranging into the millions of people), limited mass production of magic items is possible, and so forth. Thus, anything that players are likely to be familiar with will also make it easier for them to understand and "get into" the setting.

And recently, I found a brilliant resource for this which I really wish I had found earlier - the TV Tropes Wiki. Despite its name, it has gathered common tropes not just from television, but also movies, novels, comics and other kinds of fiction and dissected them and listed a large number of examples.

This is perfect for my purposes, as readers will immediately understand them when they are found in the wiki - or, if they are subverted, serve to make the setting more unique and interesting while still being recognizeable.

I have spend some time gathering a list of interesting tropes which I plan to add to the setting (some of them already exist within the setting - in this case, I will try to find new ways of using them. Here is my current list:


A House Divided - Danaan's Hope
Ancient Conspiracy - Flamekeepers
Arranged Marriage - Irda
Artifacts of Doom - Eridan
Attack Of The Killer Whatever - The Hive
Back From The Dead - Zirvash the Undying
Balance Between Good And Evil - Guardians of Balance (login required)
Baraar Of The Bizarre - Taris
Bedlam House - Kurova
Black Box
Bottomless Pits
Brother Sister Incest
Buried Alive
Campbell Country
Church Millitant
Creepy Child
Crystal Spires and Togas
Dangerous Sixteenth Birthday
Documentary of Lies
Drowning Pit
Dystopia
Everything Trying To Kill You
Freak Lab Accident
Grimmification
If Jesus Then Aliens
I Love Nuclear Power
Inn Between The Worlds
Invisible Man
King Arthur
Knight Templar
Last Dance With Mary Jane
Lava Pit
Lovecraft Country
Man Eating Plant
Messianic Archetype
Moral Dissonance
Mordor
No OSHA Compliance
No Plans No Prototype No Backup
No Sex Allowed
Plant Aliens
Quicksand Sucks
Rage Against The Heavens
Recurring Traveller
Sealed Room In The Middle Of Nowhere
Shark Pool
Smite Me Oh Mighty Smiter
So Bad It's Horrible
The Little Shop That Wasnt There Yesterday
The Virus
Torture Cellar
Urban Legend
Values Dissonance
Very Loosely Based On A True Story
Wax Museum Morgue
Weirdness Magnet
What Happened To Mommy
What You See Is What You Get
With Great Power Comes Great Insanity

Whenever I can think of a way of using a certain trope for the setting, I will post it to this thread and mark the appropriate entry in the list. If you have any suggestions for using specific tropes listed here - or if you think that other tropes from the wiki might be worth including as well - please don't hesitate to tell me.

I hope that other world-builders will find this thread useful in filling out their own settings as well.

[beejazz]

Weirdness magnet:

Someone (bonus points if it's a PC) is a one-way portal to another universe. This character either summons or becomes a creature from an otherwise inaccessible universe, and can't necessarily control when this happens (you can make stress a factor, or give saves, maybe).

FLCL, meet fantasy setting.

[the_taken]

FLCL, meet fantasy setting.

Been trying to DM like this. Can't get enough sessions.

[Jürgen Hubert]

A few comments I've made on individual entries:

A House Divided - Danaan's Hope

The description of this trope reminded me strongly of disaster movies - when the crisis breaks out, everyone starts arguing about what to do until Our Heroes (i.e. the PCs) inspire them to act jointly. So I thought of a location that would be conductive to "natural disasters", and the Eternal Storm region seemed like the obvious choice. The rest practically wrote itself.

Ancient Conspiracy - Flamekeepers

Urbis already has no shortage of conspiracies, yet I didn't want a new conspiracy to become as all-powerful as the Illuminati and their ilk are claimed to be in such stories. Thus, my thoughts wandered to alien conspiracies that desire the space humans claim as their own, and remembered the Martians of Well's War of the Worlds. I inverted the scenario - in this case, the aliens dwell in the depths of the world, instead of beyond it - and looked for logical places where they might surface. The joint dwarven/gnomish realm of Gol Algor was the logical choice, since it already had lots of volcanoes, and the Flamekeepers, who worship these beings, were created as the "demihuman" face for these entities.

Both of the next two entries were for the Desert of Thunder, a parched region with large cities ruled by blue dragon overlords.

Arranged Marriage - Irda

While I could have focused on a single arranged marriage, I decided that was too limited for the scope of Urbis. After all, countless arranged marriages happen all the time in this world, so why should a single arranged marriage be worthy of notice?

On the other hand, a vast city where a dragon decides on all marriages according to some strange rules that only she knows has a certain appeal...

Artifacts of Doom - Eridan

I didn't just want my Artifact of Doom to be a cheap knockoff of Tolkien's One Ring - so I went for a cheap knockoff of the Ring of the Nibelung instead. But it made sense - the dragons were at war with a large empire over a thousand years ago, and so it made sense that that empire was desperate for something that would stop them. An artifact ring which made the owner extremely paranoid and wrathful just about fit the bill. By serendipitous circumstance, this fitted in very well with the origin story of the dragonborn for Urbis which I had come up with.

Attack Of The Killer Whatever - The Hive

Attacks by very unusual creatures or objects might work well for short adventures (I'm the guy who once used Alchemical Killer Zombie Chicken(TM) as enemies for the introductory adventure of a campaign...), but I intended to do something a bit more plausible here.

Attacks by ants work well for that purpose, but I wanted to make them a bit threatening by making theirs an expanding threat - one that no one yet knows how to stop because no one has found any genuine vulnerability of the Hive.

Back From The Dead - Zirvash the Undying

Resurrection in all its forms is so well-established in D&D that I've actually taken it into account in setting design and lampshaded it here. So I tried something different, and remembered stories of people cursed to live forever, never finding rest. This fit in well into the background story of the Norfjell Wastes - a region which needed to be developed further anyway.

Balance Between Good And Evil - Guardians of Balance (login required)

I was always a bit suspicious of claims that a balance between Good and Evil is supposed to be a "good thing" in certain setting. You can consider this entry to be my personal subversion of the concept.

Baraar Of The Bizarre - Taris

Again a locale related to the blue dragons of the Desert of Thunder. After all, all dragons want to acquire more items for their hoard - so a black market where thieves from the rest of the world could sell their wares would be useful for them to have nearby. Keeping the city where it is located in outside of their own territory gives them a layer of deniability - and also makes sure that no single dragon can control it.

Bedlam House - Kurova

My "sample city" of Dartmouth already had two mental asylums, which I figured was plenty - so I decided to build an entire city around the concept instead. And mental asylums are a staple of Victorian horror fiction, so I set it within the region dedicated to emulating such fiction.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Black Box - Armand

This ties in nicely with my entry for the Flamekeepers above. And, of course, it resembles a classical cargo cult - with the exception that ordinary cargo cults were lucky when their prayers were unanswered.

Bottomless Pits - The Cloud Pillar

Inverted because I already had something similar in the setting. I asked myself: "What's the defining element of a pit? Well, that you fall into it." Having a stable tornado to "fall into" would have a similar effect. True, it's not terribly original, but it never hurts to have some spectacular scenery in a setting IMO...

Brother Sister Incest - The Inverted Circle (login required)

Fairly squicky, but then again it would be hard to do this without squick. It gets the more disturbing the more you think about what these people must do to get a steady stream of sacrifices of the "appropriate type"...

Buried Alive - Karmak

At first I thought about some kind of serial killer or other group who'd bury others alive out of malice or religious reasons. But then I thought: "Wait, this is a fantasy reason. What if there is a purely practical reason for burying people alive?"

[Thanuir]

Phil Menard has been posting on the use of tropes in roleplaying (particularly running a game). There is likely to be some overlap with setting building. Link: http://chattydm.net/category/tropes/.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Campbell Country - Seventhford

Well, maybe I can do this a bit more evocatively some day, but for now this'll have to do.

Church Millitant - Temple Knights

A bit of a subversion - I wanted to avoid the "all militant church warriors must be jerks" syndrome...

Creepy Child - Princess's Men

This was perfect for fleshing out the "example city" of Dartmouth a bit, and it provides some nice cognitive dissonance - who'd expect an organization of hardened criminals to be led by a little girl?

However, I am worried whether I spelled "Princess's" right...

Crystal Spires and Togas - Tamaras

I probably should improve the writing a bit at some point, but at the moment I'm too tired to think of something better. Having some crystal elves building their own space ark seems like an interesting idea, but maybe I can think of something else when I've slept it over...