Reinventing fantasy cliches

[Woas]

People hunt vampires because when you drink their blood it grants eternal life. Not because they are a menace to society.

Something like that? Or is that a reverse cliche and thus a cliche itself?

 

[Desdichado]

I'm a big fan of the idea that execution is way more important than innovation. Well-done cliches are vastly more entertaining than something that's not cliched but which is poorly executed and leaves the players wandering around wondering what to do, or is just flat out not compelling.

In fact, to some extent, the cliches are what fans of the genre expect; if you go too far afield, they don't identify your stuff with the genre and they're either 1) not interested in the first place, or 2) unable to follow what you're trying to get at.

Are we talking about settings here? I'm not sure in what respect this question was asked. Novels? Adventures? Settings? Movies? Something else?

In any case, I think the same basic ground rules apply; rather than make everything alien and different, employ cliches well, and only make a few elements buck the expectations. A few things that are cliche-breakers, amongst a setting that otherwise feels familiar is much more likely to be successful than something that's completely new and unfamiliar. Make sure that your audience has some baseline assumptions from which they can depart, or they won't feel connected to your work and probably won't get it or like it.

My "least cliched" fantasy setting, for example, is different in that it borrows well-known conventions and "cliches" from a number of other genres and mashes them together. It's not truly new, but the specific combination of elements is. That way, the players of my game knew what to expect from the different elements. When they were in the city, they knew to expect a gritty, dark, amoral, Charles Dickens-esque landscape with Mafia-like organizations running the show, and thoroughly corrupt officials. Nothing new there, although maybe not exactly as they expected from fantasy. When they went out of town, they found a lot of small, insular groups threatened by larger armed groups; kinda a Sergio Leone vision of the frontier. The world itself was harsh and full of alien life-forms, but it still had a very Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom-like feel to it in that regard. Overall, there was a strong H. P. Lovecraft-like horror vibe, and my plots read like rejected Robert Ludlum drafts that included occult elements.

I'd like to think that the feel was not cliched, but I'm also honest enough to realize that really all I did was pull cliches from a number of genres that typically don't play in the same sandbox and threw them all together into a kind of RPG gumbo. Because it used this type of managed cliches, the players weren't ever completely lost and unfamiliar with what to expect, but because they hadn't ever seen these genre conventions combined like this, they thought the experience was fresh and exciting at the same time.

 

[Umbran]

One can argue that "reinventing a cliche" and "derivative" are morally equivalent...

Be that as it may, if you'd like to see a goodly bout of fantasy re-invention, I suggest you look to the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. The author outright admits that the series was an attempt to take Tolkien, and reinvent it with the less black-and-white sensibilities of later decades.

 

[Afrodyte]

DarkKestral,

Thank you for staying on topic.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

In regards to clichés there's a very good discussion about fantasy race archtypes going on over at the WotC 4E boards:

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?p=15545175&posted=1#post15545175

 

[haakon1]

Cliches are cliche because they work.

Nod. My dad's an English professor, and there's an old joke among them, about the student who complained Shakespeare is a hack because he uses so many cliches . . .

 

[Starman]

Be that as it may, if you'd like to see a goodly bout of fantasy re-invention, I suggest you look to the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. The author outright admits that the series was an attempt to take Tolkien, and reinvent it with the less black-and-white sensibilities of later decades.

And an excellent series it turned out to be.

 

[DarkKestral]

One interesting way of using cliches is to take one from a genre where it IS completely mined out and put it into a different genre where it is much less familiar.

Take for instance Serenity/Firefly; this is basically the western cliche recast as Sci-Fi. Or the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, which are murder mysteries set in medieval England, and which have spawned a whole new genre of historical detective fiction that now has more than fifty active writers.

The same can profitably be done with Fantasy. Simply take principals/cliches from Sci-Fi (or other genres) and apply them to sword and sorcery.

Actually, that is a common source of sword n' sorcery cliches. Science Fiction and Fantasy are always digging in the other's pockets. They're basically the same genre, in some respects. Plus, the fanbase for one tends to be the fanbase for the other, so if a trope becomes common in one, it will get recognized elsewhere.

So I'd pull some themes from outside F&SF, or the general class of "speculative fiction," which is a class that includes both fantasy and sci-fi, in order to get maximum effect, rather than just transport tropes from one side to the other.

Some of the best detective stories I've seen were science fiction. Likewise some of the best science fiction stories had a significant component that was a detective story. They succeeded because stuck to the basic questions addressed by science fiction and fantasy and used the interplay of the genres to good effect. But in genres with a lot of interplay, like say fantasy and scifi, that interplay loses some impact, and itself is a cliche. That said, there are some very good novels that focus on that interplay (Heinlein's Glory Road for example) but at this point, it's somewhat expected, though not as much in RPGs as elsewhere, but the recurring popularity of such material in games set in "modern" settings and the long-term survival of Shadowrun and White Wolf's WoD shows that's common enough for players (and many players add such elements into their more classically D&D games... there's even a famous AD&D module with the theme of a crashed spaceship with robots as the "dungeon" to be explored.) that it's not reliable. It can be a great idea though, but you'll need to really play up the "science fiction" nature of the elements and constrast them with the fantastic setting. However, look at all of the story hours here that combine both genres liberally, and it quickly becomes apparent that if it's not made out to look unusual relative to the overall setting, it blends together to where you can't recognize the source for anything.

So there are a few elements of genre fiction other than fantasy fiction that are so totally blended into fantasy RPGs that players don't always notice: detective fiction, horror fiction, pulp fiction, and science fiction. Historical fiction is sometimes a common additional element, but if you look at the bulk of D&D's rules material and the basic necessities of RPG plotting, those four stand out as the basics.

So you need to look to the portions of those that aren't common if you want maximum effect. Film Noir-style plotting and thematic elements are unusual in RPGs, which is one reason I think Eberron does so well; Eberron is full of noir elements and touches on a genre previously left fairly open to new interpretations while sticking solidly to the fantasy milieu of D&D. Savage Worlds does the same for pulp action and fantasy, as does Eberron.

So I'd also say that trying to do the same will probably be a good idea; like Hobo, I figure that the most original settings often rely on a lot of classic elements that have some archetypical staying power, but then twist the archetypes to present a new vision of an old theme. As it was noted in the linked thread, the elves of Aerenal in Eberron are best viewed as a vision and a deconstruction of an elder, static race likely to be sowing the seeds of it's own extinction. A race whose primarily outlook is to the past and who has the power to literally raise the dead from their graves to aid them is likely to utilize necromancy heavily. It's also why I think modern literature is now going through a process of deconstruction so rapid that by the time one deconstruction ends, the next deconstruction of the genre has begun. In some respects, that process has been the case for ages, as the first modern novel is itself a deconstruction of earlier tales, and is a tale of tilting at windmills and the willing delusion of chivalry.

 

[Rechan]

Good discussion thusfar. A specific example that occurs to me as I write this expeditiously on a break:

Elves are nature-loving hippies. Elves are highly magical.

This is the cliche. So how do we explain it in a manner that allows us to keep Elves as Hippies, but make it feel different? Elves are mainly seen as fey (or fey-like, but not Pure fey). What's something else that's connected to nature and magic?

The elves are plants. Green, eat by rooting themselves in the soil, grow weak without proper exposure to the sun, etc. This gives them a specific reason to be tied to nature, because they are part of nature. These plant elves are in tune with druidic magics, because it had a hand in their genesis.

Take for instance Serenity/Firefly; this is basically the western cliche recast as Sci-Fi.

At the same time, one must tred carefully lest you take it too far or make it too obvious. For instance, if you go so far as to have The Space Sheriff who goes into The Space Tavern to get himself some Space Whiskey, because he just came from putting Space Justice to some Space Varments rustling up Space Cattle.

 

[tzor]

A criticism often levied at the fantasy genre is that a lot of it is derivative and cliche.

I don’t think you want to eliminate clichés but I think you need to consider them as cards in your hand or as moves you make in chess. It is the context and use of the clichés that keep the game exciting and fresh. Properly used clichés can allow players to focus on the key elements in the plot which might either not be a cliché or might be a rarely encountered one.

In one sense a DM’s plot is a lot like a chess game (ignoring the fact that a role playing game is a cooperative experience typically the DM will have a number of plots up his or her sleeve and the idea to keep the game fresh is to make it as though it becomes fresh and exciting for the players) and the cliché is one of may possible moves. The trick is not in the use of the cliché itself but to avoid having the cliché become obvious one after the other as though the whole thing is predictable.

Consider the old cliché of “You meet at an inn.” Now consider the second old cliché of “You meet someone at an inn.” So far we have a standard opening gambit of a plot chess move. The trick is to slip in variety of the plot. What if the person the party meets wasn’t looking for the party? What if the person the party meets was supposed to be a trap for some other party? Duck … Duck … Penguin! (Were you expecting Goose?) Without some clichés the plot becomes a session of paranoia, but with them they become comfort zones where the players can relax long enough to be caught with a surprise in the plot.

This is why inverted clichés don’t in and of themselves work. They in fact become clichés. The urban elf and the good drow are all literally done to death. That isn’t to say that the inverted cliché can’t be used, but like the cards in your cliché deck they are just like any other.