What do you need to create a setting as cool and expansive as Warhammer? (40k or Fantasy)
What do you need to create a setting as cool and expansive as Warhammer? (40k or Fantasy)
What do you need to create a setting as cool and expansive as Warhammer? (40k or Fantasy)
Imagination.
>as cool as
All the writers did was mash together all the things from comics, movies, and novels they liked and made a grimdark satire of those things.
Try taking in more media.
Then is time for some extensive reading of old books? Get it.
Any recommendations?
Robert E Howard (Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane... he has a lot of material and is good at writing)
Howards Phillips Lovecraft (Yog-Sothothery/Cthulhu cycle)
Clark Ashton Smith (Hyperborea, Cthulhu and Zothique cycles)
Frank Herbert (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune)
Dan Simmons (Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, Rise of Endymion)
Dmitry Glukhovsky (Metro 2033, 2034, 2035)
William Gibson (Neuromancer)
Alan E. Nourse (Bladerunner/Do androids dream of electric sheep)
Géza Gárdonyi (Slave of the Huns)
Tolkein (Lord of the Rings)
I haven't read Snow Crash, I heard it's good.
Snow Crash is worth reading but it isn't good. The descriptions of a darkly humorous ancap future make it worth staying through tedious lectures on babylonian history.
Not really. You're probably oversocialized when it comes to media consumption.
People say this like it's some cheap hack but ttg and wargaming especially are fundamentally about re-enactment. An "original" seting wouldn't have been as popular.
You need time, a lot of it
Time that will not be spent trying to create a cool gaming experience to your players.
I really think no one should strive to create a super inventive setting when DMing
Make a setting that is good enough so that your players care about it, but simple enough that no information goes to waste.
>only one person can work on any project and only on a single aspect of it
Imagine being so fricking lonely, you forget about the fact companies can hire people and team them up.
I'm assuming OP isnt a company.
You take a lot of existing ideas and slam them together until you have a Frankenstein monstrosity that eventually takes on a life of its own.
just take some mushrooms and watch dprk propaganda for a few hours
That could actually work.
Steal a lot from the most popular settings around, and then write a lot of fluff. Also have cool art. That should do the trick.
If you have to ask you never will.
Brain damage
Study history, people and try to make art from if. That is what people whom made Warhammer said, studying history and I kid you not trying to make your own spin based on the idea is it. Warhammer is just suberversion or expansion of ideas.
People talk about how it nicks ideas from Elric for example but if you read the story you see that .. Warhammer by now expanded and to extent improved on those ideas.
So ya study history, people and ideas, the read a lot.
Also be about leftie weirdo, you want cool ideas don't hang about people whom are opposite of trying new things.
>lets take 30 years war germany and make it grim
>lets take france and make it grim
>lets take slavs
>lets take orks and make them hooligans
>lets take high elves and merge them with atlantis
>lets take dark elves and put them into north america
>lets take vikings and make them even more metal
Nothing is high concept IQ 4000 stuff. You just take real world cultures people understand and recognize and give them an interesting spin
a willingness to plagiarize.
A lot of other people's ideas
>time
>sources for myths, folklore and history of humanity (legit ones from legit scientists and experts on the source materials) and studying those in the smallest of details
>experimenting with a variation of themes and giving those a neat spin when creating your stuff (along with subversions, playing those themes brutally straight and more)
>your imagination running wild
That's all. This is why Fantasy Battles is interesting and fun while AoS is unappealing to me due to it being a more straight-up very fantastic high fantasy thing when compared to WHFB's mix of high, low, dark fantasy themes that also include sword and sorcery and some other things too.
Warmachine already fully rivals both those settings anon
Legit if you love either 40k or fantasy and want a new world to get into warmachine is the closest you can get
Creativity, time, artists and money.
you have to be able to tell any story in it
then you have to tell a lot of the stories in it
like the stories that already exist just transposed over the world
it takes time, but they can be small, a hundred small stories a page each says a lot more for the world than 1 story of 100 pages
I've thought on this a bit. IMO
>Heart
You've got to genuinely love what you're doing. You got to love the math that goes behind game mechanics, you got to love players interacting with it and either elevating the game to peaks of entertainment, or break it over their knees with absurd frickery. You got to love it and the stuff that inspired you to make it. Speaking of
>a varied taste of inspiration
You cant just say "it's *well known and highly successful franchise everyone has heard of* but also *some other fricking thing*". You read through Oldhammer and Gygaxian DnD, and they reference or outright state dozens of different novels, comics, albums, artists, tv shows, movies, etc as obvious inspirations. This should tie into Heart, since the creativity can only really flow if you actually love and cant stop thinking about the things that inspire you. Dont think "oh, I need to take inspiration from the MCU since that's popular" or something.
>merge old with new
Warhammer was made by british nerds and punks in a time of great societal upheaval that was preceded by a time of great social upheaval, and before that it was total war. Same goes for D&D. These projects are influenced by their time, and by the past, and blends them together in a blend that is all but lost nowadays in our highly aggressive hug-box culture: a respect for the old, and a embrace of the new. So ideally this ties into varied taste of inspiration, where you're not only just looking at old shit from twenty or fifty years ago, you're also looking at new stuff you like.
Luck