If your game world or the simply setting you are worldbuilding deviates strongly from the norm set by R.E.H and Tolkien, then it's simply a show off, a blatant cry for attention "look how unique I am! oooo, my elves are sooo different! look how many different races I have!". No, you are not unique. You are being a cringe redditor. Keep fantasy normal or keep out.
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What is normal? Could you please place the summary in the picture on a scale from 10 being real life and 1 being a complete strawman.
Normal is what I like.
Based Elric the Necromancer and Dying Earth enjoyer.
This is B8t indeed.
I only enjoy fantasy that includes dreamtime dimensions and doppelgangers and magician being randomly incarnated from the souls of drowned people who break away from the body of the dreamtime gods who claimed and sheltered them for a while.
Wouldn't the current normal be Harry Potter and Twilight?
>Harry Potter and Twilight
>current
come on
Yeah, the current normal is anime
See the problem with your kind is that you take everything literally, you read necromancy and you instantly start thinking about World of Warcraft cringe shit, you read disguises as sheep god and you instantly think he literally transformed into a sheep etc etc
Go and spend some time in nature and contemplate you fricks
Does necromancy and sheep gods exist in nature?
So are you able to establish a scale that could be useful to anyone but you and place the example on it for me?
Projection
>you read disguises as sheep god and you instantly think he literally transformed into a sheep etc etc
How realistic a sheep costume did he have lying around? Also, WHY did he have such a realistic sheep costume lying around?
making a sheep costume is hard if you have sheep, just hollow one out and crawl in.
I don't feel that this is likely to end with you in someone's bed. At least not if you want them to be a willing participant. Which, if you're going through the trouble of trying to convince her that you're a sheep god instead of just wearing a mask, you probably do.
>What is normal
Just don't be weird, simple as
>that pic
Literally this fricking meme, verbatim:
Why the frick would you not just post the image?
I feel that fantasy needs to be - perversely enough - rooted in reality, for stuff to make sense. If you have a world where everyone lives on floating islands, and travel is largely conducted by teleportation, where every human has a form of innate time-travel, things are so fundamentally different from the human experience it's hard to relate.
For a fantasy setting to have a sense of verisimilitude, you have to start with what people would usually consider 'ordinary', and then go with all the supernatural elements that would have them go "Wow, that's pretty weird".
If the PCs meet a tentacle beast (for example), it should make sense for the characters to also go "What the frick is that?" instead of "Oh yeah, that's a Squirming Proton, it's perfectly normal in this neck of the woods, nothing to get worked up over."
humans have an innate time-travel power, it's called "sleep"
>If you have a world where everyone lives on floating islands, and travel is largely conducted by teleportation, where every human has a form of innate time-travel, things are so fundamentally different from the human experience it's hard to relate.
I dunno, except for the last that just sounds like Star Trek.
>He then sends Philip a vision of Ammon impregnating his wife and stamping his seal on her vegana
JUST LIKE MY JAPANESE ANIMES!
Bro he literally turned into a dragon to help them win a war
>What is normal?!??
Cringe.
I guarantee you don't get what Tolkein was trying to do. Go make your own autistic setting and stop molesting Hobbits with your moronic Gen X sensibilities.
I will stop molesting Hobbits when they lower than damned age of consent, anon. I've told you this a million times.
You are all replying to bait.
3/10 attempt at a bait thread. Overall presentation is an uninspired rehash of previous attempts with little in the way of specific arguments or actual attempts at goading any particular group of anons. The use of "cringe redditor" was a nice touch as the attempts at ridiculing OP for using said phrase will likely keep the thread live, as was attempting to use a vague definition of "Normal," but the lack of substance will nevertheless result in the decline of said thread within a few days, assuming the thread isn't pruned or this meta-commentary doesn't perpetuate it further.
>summary
>scale
>presentation
>uninspired
>rehash
>arguments
>substance
Probably you mental eunuchs are unable to understand fantasy at all. U have simply lost connection with life & nature itself. that u choose to converse purely in manmade concepts. its honestly sad sight to see. for you this is "bait" of course, but its exactly because of ppl like u we have what we have now.inclusive fantasy that lets every midget to jump sky high and shouting about how unique he is
Nah. I'd rather reject any notion of an argument you may have in favor of criticizing your grammar and spelling, and ignoring any attempt I could be making at any argument about the original topic in favor of long-winded and self-referential meta-commentary.
Ppl like u belong in the genre of a cyberpunk hellscape,where u can perfectly play out the role and function of soulless drones
Hah! Now that insult is the one thing you've written that I could almost call original or interesting. However, you've clearly misinterpreted the intent behind my posting method, which is to inflict as much second-hand shame and/or pity on anyone else who had the misfortune to view this thread. Am I really someone who would think like this, or am I merely using this persona as a poorly executed attempt at making some commentary on the state of things? Or is even that conjecture and this one just a shamefully autistic display of self-awareness without self-control, or a statement about such?
Im not joking or trolling in any way.
If your brain is working like this, where you need some kinda "proofs" or "arguments", then fantasy is simply not for you, you already lost.
Simple advice go to forest,start a campfire,sit on a stone or a stump and just contemplate for a while.
I think fantasy should be anything your imagine can conjure
Also kys
are Catgirls normal?
Cats are normal.
Girls are normal.
Makes sense to me.
I have two sisters, a toddler niece and a small army of Aunts and will contend any assertion that girls are normal.
Yes. Does anyone have that pic of Conan fighting all the tiger women?
This one?
That's the stuff, you're the MVP.
Make un-humans un-playable.
BEHOLD, A MAN!
The problem is that when people do try to be different they do so in only the most superficial way possibly while still functionally acting the same "normal."
What do you think fantasy means, OP?
I just run in the Fallen London setting and I'm pretty happy with it
Tolkien got pretty anime in the Silmarillion.
"Anime was a mistake. I wish I never made Ganker"- Jorge R. R. Tolkien
Nah. I'm gonna do what I want.
This stance is fundamentally the antithesis of fantasy.
Fantasy is at its most fun when people experiment and go wild, but it's easy to enter "show off" territory as a creative. I 100% agree with you there. People will spend a ludicrous amount of time building lore for their not-elves and their not-dwarves and all the delicate politics of their world that it becomes obvious they haven't spent much time at all creating an interesting narrative that actually make sense. The idea guy becomes the death of his own project when he can't stop adding ingredients mindlessly to the pot.
People are mad but I agree with this, if your setting is low on the fantasy elements then they stand out more when they do appear. If your world has dragons pulling carriages instead of horses then all you've done is made dragons mundane.
Basically this. It takes a lot of skill to go whole-hog with that sort of fantasy, and generally a fantasy setting is better received when it's not trying too hard. There's no shame in keeping things grounded and having cool creatures and wizards show up in your setting.
I don't care how cool your race that you created is. I'll still call them elves.
No. Simply photocopying the worldbuilding or Robert E Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien does not make you unique or special. It's simply posturing, a blatant cry for attention. "Oh, look at me! I'm doing it just like the Old Masters of Western Imperialism! I'm a true Gankerner unlike you fakers!" Wrong. You are a Reddit moderator with all the attitude and none of the power. Cease your feeble attempts at control, and begone from this board.
>2024
>literally claiming degenerate art
Look, homosexual, we all know where this is going. First it's "You should only attempt to imitate the curated list of classics I've decided represent the pinnacle of the medium." and next is "Your work will never be as good as the classics which you should be imitating. You're wasting your time making things and should instead spend all day being mad at the people in my head who ruined everything." This is, like, the thirtieth time we've done this, and no one's convinced anymore. You're a colossal moron and desperately need to have a nice day.
They hated him for telling the truth.
>ip count didn't go up
No, I'm just returning to the thread after people have spilled their beans over the OP. But yes, keep calmly refreshing the IP count, nonny.
Name one fantasy setting that deviates strongly from "the norm" and how the hell it manages to deviate from settings that include Atlantis, Tom Bombadil, alien spaceships, and the Cthulu mythos.
I don't think you need to take "the norm" so literally. I would say the issue is more people taking elves and being like "heh, MY elves are actually called derugur, and they have red skin and horns, and they come from a quasi authoritarian society similar to starship troopers!" and then not really doing anything interesting with it. It's deviating from normal elves for the sake of trying to be different. It's like dying your hair blue.
Trips: checked.
Detractor from reddit
: check.
Willfully ignorant
: check.
Quite literally every fantasy setting post-Inklings is not normal as OP has propositioned.
Elves are arrogant and prideful instead of humble and magnanimous; dwarves are the gold standard of masculinity instead of a failed forgery; orcs are taller than humans instead of cowards who attack in numbers; I could go on.
>every fantasy setting must be a carbon copy of tolkein
You complain about "my elves are different" but Tolkien himself was a "my elves are different"gay
Elves are small fey creatures that live in the woods that tempt children and women
Then Tolkien came around and decided "nah elves are tall angel analogies"
Picrel is a more truer elf than anything in Tolkien
Read his Faery book, Tolkien explained clearly why he hated the tiny cute elves - those little sh*t on their cute little flowers - and was autistically adamant about changing what people think about when they hear about Elves - which he did, the absolute madman.
Tolkien also believed fairies literally existed, so I don't think his opinion is entirely infallible.
So did the entire history of humanity prior to the cringe enlightenment
Dumb ignorant moron, how are you this clueless and still so confident in your moron take? You can be contrarian if you like, but at least be an educated one
it's Norse mythology
Álf became elf
>but Tolkien himself was a "my elves are different"gay
>Tolkien took elves from Norse mythology
I hate you people so God damn much. Elves and fairies in English literature were interchangeable terms for the entire medieval period, and they referred to people from the land of fairy. Fairy was a place, and the people from it were called either fairy or elves. They were wealthy and magical, and had complex and at time alien motivations or moralities, but were recognisable as people. You could marry them. You could have children with them. People could be ambiguously maybe a fairy or maybe not. It is a nationality. Linguists generally agree that the term fairy in English derives from the Latin half of the English language family tree from fata, for fate, via French, while elf derives from the Germanic half of the English family tree. This is why in more Norman influenced dialects such as the London dialect fairy quickly became more common terminology, while further north where Normanisms where much slower to catch on elf remained more common terminology. The two refer to the same beings. I have read medieval posts used them in the same sentence. Spenser (an early modern but an obsessive medievalist) wrote the longest poem in the English language where elves are people from fairy.
Read a fricking book instead of skimming Wikipedia summaries of mythology I thought you people were nerds. Tolkien knew this. His elves are fairies. I'm pretty sure in some works he uses fairy to refer to valinor.
Archaic depictions of the fae people consist in tall beautiful people with magical powers
This, even without that it's clear from archaic physical representation that elves and fairies were the same fricking thing
I want to go further
Schizo rant
It's long to explain but essentially it's aliens
Considering that essentially "magic" is how we defined misunderstood, by our ancient perspective, knowledge and technology, fairy, elves, gods (elves and gods were synonymous in nordic mythology), tengus are all derived from a cargo-cult-like remembrance and accounts of what we now identify as the pleiadans/nordic aliens
You have it backwards. Modern alien sightings are the post-Enlightenment era's attempts to rationalize encounters with the fey.
Based.
This, You can even say the same about canon Elder Scrolls elves and actual Tolkien ones vs anime tier fapbait elves.
Gnolls are fictional. There isn't anything in particular that they are. Every depiction of them is equally correct.
I disagree. Depicting gnolls as machines is less correct than depicting them as living creatures.
Why? What real gnoll are you comparing them to?
The living ones from D&D.
So no real gnolls then?
well?
>everything is equally correct!
R e t a r d.
Yes, there's a good reason why people tell wyvern vs dragon gays to go frick off.
>If your game world or the simply setting you are worldbuilding deviates strongly from the norm set by R.E.H and Tolkien, then it's simply a show off
It's not being boring. Before tolkuck ruined Fantasy by turning it into a boring, watered-down, samey swill, it had all sorts of weird shit. Actual myth and legend was far crazier than anything Tolkein could shit out.
>then it's simply a show off, a blatant cry for attention
It's a strike back against the homogenization of the fantasy genre, showing I'm not afraid to be genuinely creative instead of derivative of the most, bland, boring, snore-worthy fantasy possible.
>No, you are not unique.
I'm more unique than tolkuck clone setting 234623623409348098346.
>You are being a [buzzword] [buzzword]
Come back when you have a real argument instead of meaningless buzzwords and ad hominem.
>Keep fantasy normal or keep out.
I refuse to let such an underexplored genre as fantasy stagnate and become samey garbage because two old overrated homosexuals made popular shit. Besides, I thought Ganker hated popular, normal things? I thought normies were bad? Normies are the ones who see tolkein fantasy as real fantasy, if you don't want to be a normie then you have to beak away from it.
here
My pronouns are they/them btw
>Has to falseflag
>Muh culchure war
, stay and stay gone you massive homosexual. All of you homosexuals suck off rome and their homosexual nature, traps are gay and so are you.
No dwarves, no hobbits, elves are basically deerfolk /fauns from spyro, living silocone-based life forms made of rocks, creatures that come from the stars made up of the stuff of the universe that appear and adapt to their environment, living plant creatures that abhor resurrection magic
>also you should stop replying so seriously to bait.
Look I've got nothing better to do right now, my character is not suited to negotiation so I'm letting the guy whose is handle that for now.
Normies jerk off to Elder Scrolls, which is homosexual shit and exactly what fantasy shouldn't be. It's reddit.
>Normies jerk off to Elder Scrolls, which is homosexual shit and exactly what fantasy shouldn't be. It's reddit.
It's got elves, dwarves, and orcs. it's tolkein shit. And yes, they do jerk off to tolkein, because The homosexualry Realms in D&D are a clone of tolkuck and 5e is the most popular ttrpg.
elder scrolls is definitely not tolkien shit though it has the aesthetic appearance of one(thank you oblivitards)
>I'm more unique than tolkuck clone setting
proof?
also you should stop replying so seriously to bait.
>Before tolkuck ruined Fantasy by turning it into a boring, watered-down, samey swill, it had all sorts of weird shit. Actual myth and legend was far crazier than anything Tolkein could shit out.
I agree with this to a degree. Tolkien's biggest contribution to fantasy is legitimizing it in the face of Academia. No longer was fantasy just throw-away pulpy adventures in magazines or dime-store novels, now they were "classy". Although, this can mostly be attributed to the fact that of being an upper-class aristocrat of England, rather than his innate talents as a writer. He was certainly nowhere even remotely approachable to the levels of Tolstoy, H. Rider Haggard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Gaston Leroux.
A lot of Tolkien's "fantasy" had that traditionally british characteristic of restraint and stoicism. In particular, his interpersonal relationships with female characters in all of his writing feel particularly sterile, and it almost comes off as Tolkien not having a romantic bone in his body. The same can be said for the magical where it is shown in a very pragmatic and practical sense and there is very little whimsy or flare to any of the writing about it, making it feel decidedly un-magical. The closest he gets is Tom Bombadil, but that character is more a fetishistic tribute to the English tradition of singing (badly) at pubs while in a drunken stupor, translated into some sort of myth within the universe to give it more credence than it deserves.
I remember picking up his books multiple times and dropping them not even half-way through. There's just something viscerally repulsive about the way he writes.
I also forgot to mention the poetry...my god, the fricking poetry.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Road_Goes_Ever_On_(song)#The_Lord_of_the_Rings
Jesus, it's like I'm back in college reading that shit.
>leroux
anon, you could've crafted a better bait.
This is bait but I will bite. Tolkien made a great world that was very historically and biblically inspired fantasy. His background and interests no doubt created a fascinating world. However new things require iteration and refinement, it's a universal part of the creative process. If I wanted to make a new setting but only wanted to be inspired by Tolkien and REH then one will only make a diluted and worse version of that. The fantasy genera has had thousands of writers that took inspirations from many thousands of more works. To limit oneself to just those two is misguided.
For serious advise looking at history and mythology would be my go to for how to inspire a setting or fantasy idea. It is history and mythology that often inspired some of the greatest works of fantasy. Personally in my current game the area is inspired by the middle east and southern europe, an area I had little interest in before hand but reading and studying got me to form ideas of how to build the world.
Jesus you're really bad at baiting. sage btw.
>If your game world or the simply setting you are worldbuilding deviates strongly from the norm set by R.E.H and Tolkien, then it's simply a show off, a blatant cry for attention
Weird fantasy is a staple of the 70s I'd say, but died off due to people rather consoooming the latest tolkien knock-off. Also, your post is clearly a blatant cry for attention and you can have it lmao
What do you think fantasy means, OP?
Kys autist
>fantasy being fantastical is... LE BAD
Yes, moron.
Subverting tropes and going into autistic detail about everything doesn't make something more fantastical, you need a base line of normal for the fantasy parts to really feel fantastical.
I don't know if you've read the works of Howard & Tolkien (and their contemporaries), but they get far stranger than the "normal" fantasy setting tends to allow itself to get.
OP isn't smart enough to ever understand how strange Tolkien was. His norms were established by Tolkien knock-offs and he's never going to see past that.
One of the ballsiest things Tolkien did (IMO) is to create an olympian pantheon of super-nice super-Christian deities, but most people don't even see that because it's not (directly) in LoTR.
A lot of Tolkien's brilliance was just sheer cope over his own fractured cultural identity, just like Lovecraft's brilliance came from his xenophobia, and REH's brilliance came from his ongoing attempts to not kill himself.
>REH’s brilliance came from his ongoing attempts to not kill himself
This line is both one of the truest things I’ve ever seen on Ganker and one of the saddest.
Howard, you frick, thanks for fighting as hard as you did. Conan is the gift that keeps on giving.
That dinosaur is being censored
I'm kinda dense so I want clarifications.
> Tolkien's brilliance was just sheer cope over his own fractured cultural identity
Him being a Catholic Paganaboo?
> REH's brilliance came from his ongoing attempts to not kill himself.
He was suicidal before his mom died?
What parts of Conan come out of that?
Tolkien made an entire fantasy world that fit his catholic metaphisics, then included the non awful parts of paganism. This is why morons like varg claim he’s a pagan.
Tolkien imitators tend to not include the religious except for in cheap cardboard ways, presumably because they don’t believe in a god.
>Howard
Howard fought his whole life to justify the first question of philosophy - that is why not have a nice day. He wrote stories about people who wouldn’t, but himself succumed to suicide.
A tragedy, to be sure.
>it's simply a show off, a blatant cry for attention "look how unique I am! oooo, my elves are sooo different! look how many different races I have!
It’s true. anime-brain Peter Pans will cope though
>You are being a cringe redditor
I support OP's opinion.
I'd like only to add, that overdesign of setting may also be a sing or either bad taste or low experience (dm is a beginner).
I would add another thing: creating your own settings/modules, instead of just modifying existing setting/module for your needs is also a sign of inexperienced author.
things you don't like aren't over designed and your taste is bad.
"Fantasy should be normal" is up there for my absolute favorite sentences generated by this website.
ITT OP baits hard and nogames complain about people they've made up
The only consideration to make is how much of the setting information can be readily relayed and grasped by the players.
If your setting is so alien that the players are going to need to read an entire glossary about the world in order to properly roleplay as an average person within that world, then you simply have a setting that isn't suited to a tabletop game. To a degree you can explain elements as they arise during a game, but the players are going to need some way to ground themselves in the world so that they can actually make decisions.
Starting with a small scale often helps a lot with this, as if the players are from some backwater settlement, then any of the truly exotic aspects of the setting can be introduced more slowly. It's not impossible, it just requires more thought than simply telling your players that it's a generic medieval fantasy and having a lot of the worldbuilding already implied.
Just say that you hate actual fantasy. Seriously, this kind of sentiment comes off exactly like GRRM who basically admitted he hates or at least has little interest in fantasy and is only writing it because its popular and subsequently tainted it with the shit in his stories with people trying to ape that style.
>vague animal like noises
what? that's crazy
As an enjoyer of Tolkien-esque fantasy settings, I think b***hing about other people's settings having wacky bullshit in them is gay and moronic
You're not playing with them, why do you care
It's fantasy. It will be exactly whatever the frick I want.
nobody cares
what an absolutely abhorrent thread. if you're writing a fictional setting, guess what? You can write whatever the frick you want. Gnolls are actually little tree people and Dragons have 6 legs while a Wyvern walks on one really large leg.
As long as your setting is internally consistent and makes sense onto itself then who cares? Fiction isn't real you homosexuals.
Magic was real in Conan, as were demons, dragons, and horrors from other realities. Mudcore gays need to just shove their mudpies down their mudholes until they choke.