>Hey man check out my new setting I have [Historical Civilization] [Tolkien race]
What are some settings that don't follow this formula?
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>Hey man check out my new setting I have [Historical Civilization] [Tolkien race]
Mad Max?
A lot of cyberpunk ones, for starters.
In cyberpunk dystopias, ethnic identity has long been annihilated by globohomosexual corpo identity, and while they sometimes (though rarely, usually it's all just humans) have tolkien races like Shadowrun, often times they don't or they only superficially resemble them in some capacities, for instance Carbon Pink's elves are actually just human nepo-babies with a frickton of sensory, appearance, lifespan, and security performance enhancing augmentations, created as part of the earliest societal genetic modifications endeavors the E.L.F program, Extension of Life Functions. Executive elves were bred primarily to keep corporation leadership as stable as possible, while the undercity elves were bred to work underground data centers for the Web, and require as little generational retraining as possible.
Is it still an elf? Technically, but the flavor is phenomenally different, and any cultural divide that occurs between races is due more to social class or actual biological differences than Tolkien or tacking on random ethnicities.
And honestly, you can extend that further out on the timeline. DUNE is basically post-cyberpunk, only technically has one alien species, the worm, everyone else is a human that's just adapted to a specific world they settled on or genetically engineered themselves, often to replace (banned after an uprising, hence why it's POST cyberpunk) AI.
>Globohomo
>Carbon Pink
Carbon Pink is one of the only settings where you could reasonably have a corporation named Globohomo
I dunno maybe do your own fricking research and let us know, you mushbrained feedme.
>I dunno maybe do your own fricking research and let us know, you mushbrained feedme.
If you don't know, you can just choose not to respond.
you're looking for Reddit.
Why don't you tell us one first anon?
What are the chances of coming up with a fantasy civilization that doesn't resemble anything we already historically had? What are the chances of designing a truly unique fantasy race that's never been seen before? And most importantly, why would you need to do that? It just looks like trying to be different just because. Anything we come up with will inevitably be a mix of different sources we came in contact with, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Races and civilizations can be original, however they have to mean something.
Elves, dwarves, shit like that, they all have various cultural connotations, "roles" that they play, values they provide and these ones specifically have hundreds of years of that roughly similar meaning given to them.
Elves are the tall, graceful and successful 'superior human' that is wise and learned and magical and (thanks to Tolkein) is in touch with nature and good traditional values like chivalry and nobility.
Dwarves represent the values of tradition, greed, ambition and strength. They're the short men that through strength of arms and heart achieve great things.
If you want new races, that a player can get into without reading a book on why they're interesting, you need to tie them to these kinds of nebulous meanings, qualities and natures perspectives from a human perspective.
Taking inspiration from mythological sources is a good idea, as any creature within has to have these cultural roles and meanings.
EG.
>Janumians.
>A race of multi-headed folk with vaguely reptilian qualities, they typically stand 6 foot at the shoulder, with necks that may be two to four foot long. Their skin may be scaly in places.
>Each head is slightly smaller than human heads, and their species typically grows a new head for every new, significant environment or situation they find themselves in.
>The loss of a head is not lethal, but can be crippling, and may see one or two heads grow back, in response to regaining the information, and avoiding the same events occurring.
>They don't need to sleep all at once, but they will become exhausted after two days without a proper rest cycle for the body.
>Individual heads may seem one-dimensional or unintelligent, and they are known to argue between each other, but through working together they can prove to be startlingly cunning and intelligent creatures, and are naturally gifted statesmen, politicians, speakers and diplomats.
neither of those races had those connotations until tolkien.
dwarves in particular were little shitheads that behaved like the modern take on goblins but with more crafting.
You're right and wrong. Elves were considered beautiful and extremely intelligent, but also they ate people and saw Humans much like a hunter of farmer would view cows or deer. They were also "off" in their beauty. Uncanny valley stuff. Tolkien just added the angelic connotations.
Dwarves... Depend. As there is no such thing as "Norse" myth, because Icelanders and Norwegians and the Farose believe differently, not to mention Germanic as a whole, there are, to my knowledge, at least two origins of Dwarves. Probably more. The first is that they were maggots on Ymir's flesh. The second is that they are Elves that were cursed, stripped of their beauty, and cursed to never see the light of day. That's why sometimes they're also called Dark Elves, though that exact word, Svartalfr, was used later to describe a different type of Elf. Either way, they are often characterized as shorter, uglier, allergic to sun, kidnap women to rape and have kids, but also they are gracious hosts, give gifts to friends, and, while cranky, are pretty friendly to anyone they consider friend. Tolkien added the jovial drinking, mining, and his iwn version of the origins. The exiled Elves might actually be a mythological version, warning, and takes on the exile punishment that was pretty popular. These people did often band together and made their own towns, and they did kidnap, so I can see it.
So... Yea, you're correct, just I don't know if I'd call them Goblins, except for the rape and kidnapping. They're not exactly tribal, nor generally dumb.
Well first you have to be God.
THUNDARR
mine
Pretty much any and all European-made games.
They genuinely can't understand the point of Drows so they almost never use them, and dwarves are often indistinguishable from kobolds because their languages treat them as synonyms.
I am glad that we are at the point were we don't consider the british isles as europe any more.
But you are still wrong. Pic-rel is from a swedish one.
Inspired by American games don't count.
See Dofus, Wakfu, the Witcher games, and Bionicle, and more. They break with so many conventions and if you ask the players they're flabbergasted that there's a "conventional" way of doing things. Which is odd considerin how autistic they are in other things.
Mine. I don’t do race-as-culture, for starters, and every regional culture is based on a mix of a minimum of three wildly different historical cultures. I’ve also largely eschewed the Tolkien races, with the exception of dwarves.
Jim your humans are just dark age anglos
Who the frick is Jim?
>he dosen't know.
Correct, that’s why I asked.
Though I can correct you and say that humans in my setting definitely aren’t anglos of any era, since—in addition to not having a race-based culture at all—the markers that humans bring to the cultures they’re part of is typically sub-Saharan in origin.
>What are some settings that don't follow this formula?
The Bionicle setting.
Gondwana
Any anthropocentric setting like Runequest
Are you counting humans like yourself as a Tolkien race?
Ar Tonelico.
unironically the league of legends setting.
That game's setting really has no historical inspiration?
Historical? Not really, unless you count "The civilization in the desert is really old and likes tombs" as historical inspiration.
Aesthetically it does take clear inspiration from real world cultures in several places, like Shurima being obviously Egyptian, and Ionia being obviously inspired by a lot of east asian stuff, but even then there's still places whose style is difficult to map back to a real world equivalent, like Demacia and Noxus, and the places that do have obvious influences are not just expies of their real world inspirations.
My Little Pony
As someone whose family is from Whitman County, Washington, I know for a fact that is not true.
>horses are a tolkein race as much as men are
Apple-loosa gets its name from Appaloosa horses, in turn via the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho. The focus on the Apple industry is from the Okanogan region which is nearby, in Washington and BC.
I mean sure the show draws some comparisons to IRL places but it's a far cry from shit like "Ancient Greece but with Dwarves" or "China but with Elves" that OP was likely getting sick of. Also while horses exist in Tolkien last I checked they weren't the ones running the kingdoms of men. That's to say nothing of the fact there's also a lot of focus on races that'd be considered bestial if not downright monstrous in other settings such as gryphons, minotaurs, dragons, and changelings.
My setting.
Mine, I have [historical civilization][non-tolkein race]. For example, native american velociraptor people