Ed_Laprade
Adventurer
Original Runequest. Which just goes to show that there's nothing new under the sun.Rechan said:
Reinventing fantasy cliches
Kmart Kommando
First Post
I read Tolkien, and hated it. I read Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, pure awesome. Actually, pure Awesome, with the capital A.Umbran said:
In my Iron Heroes game, the evil Nazi elves (of my reworked-for-IH Eberron) are based on the evil elves of that trilogy. My players were practically panicking when the Nazi elf ninjas hit them.
GammaPaladin
First Post
I always loved watching Joss Whedon's shows, because he would deliberately set up a cliche, and then hit a punchline by suddenly deviating from it.
Like the scene in Firefly where the crew comes to rescue Captain Reynolds, and they burst in on him fighting the evil guy's big right hand man, and Zoe tells the others, "This is something the Captain has to do for himself", which of course, has any viewer groaning at the obvious cliche. Until the captain says "No it's not!" in a rather frantic voice and you laugh.
Cliches can be useful things... They're easy targets for lampooning.
Of course, if you're going for a more somber tone, that won't work out so well.
Like the scene in Firefly where the crew comes to rescue Captain Reynolds, and they burst in on him fighting the evil guy's big right hand man, and Zoe tells the others, "This is something the Captain has to do for himself", which of course, has any viewer groaning at the obvious cliche. Until the captain says "No it's not!" in a rather frantic voice and you laugh.
Cliches can be useful things... They're easy targets for lampooning.
Of course, if you're going for a more somber tone, that won't work out so well.
I loved that series as well. Have you tried Guy Gavriel Kay's "Fionavar Tapestry"? It's the other epic fantasy work I tend to recommend to people. Funny thing is it starts with a horrible cliche, but is a wonderful series anyway. The books are "The Summer Tree", "The Wandering Fire", and "The Darkest Road", I think. Unless I forgot one.
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InVinoVeritas
Adventurer
Rechan said:
Yup, I did this, and took it a step further:
The drow are fungus. They think and operate as long-reaching, long-timeline planners, carefully sticking to the shadows until they crop up everywhere, all at once. Eradicate them, and they are still there, invisible, until they appear again.
The Amborae (elves) had bright colors, and sprouted flowers and vines in their hair. The Entamborae (drow) had dark colors, and grew mushrooms and thorns in their hair.
I redid the races as nine new races, all of them based off well-known races, but with a twist. Humans were the High Men, who wandered among the other races as a regal and capable race all its own. Similarly, the Low Men were a wretched offshoot that were small and hid in the shadows of the other races. Dwarves became Grachen, a race made of stone. Goblins were the Wizened, wise bog-dwellers that were one part Gollum, one part Crone. Orcs were the Strakhan, a violent people who took their power from the stars (their eyes glowed as stars, and were actually accomplished astrologers, as well). Gnomes became Cherboncles, three-eyed Laputans. Then, I introduced the Beastlings, an animalistic race.
Worked well. My players took the cliches in brand new directions, without having to ask tons of questions about what worked and how.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
The vs Elves setting depicts sdwarfs as they exist in the real world (a physically handicapped human), Elves are members of a insect-like hivemind, Dark Elves are former members of that hivemind who broke willfully broke away from it, and creatures such as Troll, Ogres, Zombies, Doppelgangers, etc are all magically altered Elves bred for specifically war, espionage, assassination, and so forth.
Elves (as a race) are Good in the eyes of Elves, but Evil in the eyes of Dark Elves and other sentient races. Dark Elves (as a race) are Good in the eyes of Dark Elves and Humans, but Evil in the eyes of Elves. Humans are on the brink of being erased from history on the Elven continent. While these tenets (unlike those mentioned earlier) are just reversals of common cliches, they aren't cliches in and of themselves (in order for something to qualify as a cliche, it must be very commonplace).
The world itself has printing presses, firearms, and other atypical technology in High Fantasy settings. There are a few cliches in place (e.g., zombies have to be hit in the head to put them down permanantly) but, for the most part, vs Elves is built on ground-up reimaginings of old ideas done in ways that, simply, haven't seen much (if any) play elsewhere.
Elves (as a race) are Good in the eyes of Elves, but Evil in the eyes of Dark Elves and other sentient races. Dark Elves (as a race) are Good in the eyes of Dark Elves and Humans, but Evil in the eyes of Elves. Humans are on the brink of being erased from history on the Elven continent. While these tenets (unlike those mentioned earlier) are just reversals of common cliches, they aren't cliches in and of themselves (in order for something to qualify as a cliche, it must be very commonplace).
The world itself has printing presses, firearms, and other atypical technology in High Fantasy settings. There are a few cliches in place (e.g., zombies have to be hit in the head to put them down permanantly) but, for the most part, vs Elves is built on ground-up reimaginings of old ideas done in ways that, simply, haven't seen much (if any) play elsewhere.
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Cliche works well when you need a shortcut. Avoiding cliche requires creativity (and the time to create, of course). Re-inventing can be fun. Dwarves in a modern setting as a biker gang, for instance keeps a cliche, but 'imports' it into your current context.
The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark needed no explanation as to why they needed to not get their hands on this powerful artifact. Everybody hates them and they are the bad guys. No problem, right? Well, it worked in that context because the whole set up was the '30s serial style story action hero thing.
We assume the Orcs are the bad guys in the same way. Yes, of course, there are some orcs that are decent but part of what makes fantasy a fantasy is that you never have to fret about the morality of ambushing a troop of sleeping orcs. The suspension of disbelief must happen here, too for without it, the fantasy cliches will die.
I feel that amping up the cliche to the maximum and getting the characters to partake in it is the best way to get beyond it. When they have their own way of doing things, the cliche will shift to fit them. For instance...
I've currently got a Human Fem Bar/Drd, a Goblin Male Ranger/Goblin Paragon, and a Half-elf Fem Bard trying to get a stolen but recovered Dwarven family heirloom to a Dwarven citadel while trying to outrace the orc army about to lay seige to it. The Barbarian's tribe will harrass the army so as to not allow them to settle in and the dwarves will counter attack. The Barbarian has to get to her tribe and the heirloom's family will certainly be grateful and during the counter attack, they will hack their way through the orcs and deliver the PCs to the tribe. Totally macho, tough-as-nails, grim dwarves, savage barbarians and vicious orcs a plenty. Crank the bad-a$$ery up!
How the players handle the cliches and the overboard macho war imagery I'm going to throw at them will be what it is. But it will give us all a glimpse into what and who their characters are and the kinds of things that will interest them in the future... which is the real goal of continuing a campaign anyway, right?
The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark needed no explanation as to why they needed to not get their hands on this powerful artifact. Everybody hates them and they are the bad guys. No problem, right? Well, it worked in that context because the whole set up was the '30s serial style story action hero thing.
We assume the Orcs are the bad guys in the same way. Yes, of course, there are some orcs that are decent but part of what makes fantasy a fantasy is that you never have to fret about the morality of ambushing a troop of sleeping orcs. The suspension of disbelief must happen here, too for without it, the fantasy cliches will die.
I feel that amping up the cliche to the maximum and getting the characters to partake in it is the best way to get beyond it. When they have their own way of doing things, the cliche will shift to fit them. For instance...
I've currently got a Human Fem Bar/Drd, a Goblin Male Ranger/Goblin Paragon, and a Half-elf Fem Bard trying to get a stolen but recovered Dwarven family heirloom to a Dwarven citadel while trying to outrace the orc army about to lay seige to it. The Barbarian's tribe will harrass the army so as to not allow them to settle in and the dwarves will counter attack. The Barbarian has to get to her tribe and the heirloom's family will certainly be grateful and during the counter attack, they will hack their way through the orcs and deliver the PCs to the tribe. Totally macho, tough-as-nails, grim dwarves, savage barbarians and vicious orcs a plenty. Crank the bad-a$$ery up!
How the players handle the cliches and the overboard macho war imagery I'm going to throw at them will be what it is. But it will give us all a glimpse into what and who their characters are and the kinds of things that will interest them in the future... which is the real goal of continuing a campaign anyway, right?
CruelSummerLord
First Post
Afrodyte said:
One way I make cliches seem less, well, cliched is to dig deeper and offer greater details and depth to a given trope. For instance:
-Portraying kobolds as wretches who are perpetually whining to themselves about the supposed wrongs inflicted on them by others, while simultaneously planning horrific revenges on their enemies, thus trapping the kobolds in an endless cycle of grudges and defeats that they perpetrate on themselves...
-Taking your standard "good" or "evil" religions and adding greater intellectual depth to them, extrapolating general philosophies on life from a god's portfolio, and what ethical/moral beliefs could logically spring from it...
-Fleshing out otherwise faceless NPCs by giving them little personalize habits, whether it's a passion for wood sculpture, a talent for playing the pipe organ, or a disdain for white wine...
-Finding innovative ways to present otherwise standard material, by showing it in the form of a letter, the journal of an expedition, an organizational charter, or what have you...
-Making up new details that otherwise fit the race's "character", such as detailing how the hobgoblins love epic poetry in the style of The Illiad, fitting the hobgoblin race's military character...
Digging deeper and adding in more fluff that might otherwise seem superfluous can add a lot of depth to otherwise cardboard races and NPCs. I've also found that books of pure fluff, that otherwise minimize the crunch and look less like a rulebook, also do more to heighten the illusion and strengthen the sense of disbelief, and make it seem less like another standard catalogue of game material.
Of course, I've done some out-and-out subversions too...
-Elves are as magically wise and nature-loving as they've been portrayed to be, but they are not fallen from grace, or declining from a Golden Age; they've been utterly incapable of marshalling their arcane knowledge into great world power, being divided from the very beginning due to the arrogance and stupidity of the elven gods. However, there are signs appearing that the elven Golden Age is coming []NOW[], and that it's going to change the setting in a big way in the future...
-Dragons are not the powerful be-all and end-all of arcane or divine might. They formed from the emotions and passions of the supposedly "lesser" races, and vastly overestimate their importance to the world at large and their power in general. Dragons are, in fact, much []weaker[] than generally supposed.
-Full-fledged drow armies, led by no less than 13 priestesses of Lolth, get their heads handed to them by a force of goblins who outsmart and outfight them, with a goblin king that slays all thirteen priestesses one after another in a series of single combats.
Who says drow are invincible?
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
In truth, I find it a more challenging creative exercise to find fresh spins for old ideas, rather than reinvent the wheel. If you like Tekumel, great, but I'll stick to Greyhawk, thank you very much.
Things I'm doing, have done, or am considering doing:
1) Planty Elves? I'm doing that now, but making them true Fey (ditto the other 2 "elf" races in my current campaign) and adding a touch of Minbari/Trill to it. If killed, they may be ressurected simply by replanting their core pod, which holds all of their memories...
2) I've also used elves the way Michael Moorcock recast them as his Melniboneans. IOW, they are truly in touch with magic like no other race, but their decadent, world-spanning, slavery practicing empire is in decline, with humanity emerging from their shadow.
3) More fun with elves- I've recast the war between Drow and the Surface elves in terms of the American Civil War, with the Drow playing the role of the South. The brutality of the Reconstruction Era was transformed into the events that actually drove the Drow underground.
4) Still more fun with elves: The elves are actually the aliens we know in pop culture as "Greys," especially the taller kind you'd see in Close Encounters. Their ship crashed, and is currently under an earthen mound- their mastery of multidimensional physics and hyperdrive/stasis technology distorts time & space, leading their guests- and the occasional test subject- to misperceive time's passage...or even emerge from the impossibly vast domain others call "Underhill" many decades later than when they entered it. Their holographic technology disguises their true nature.
4) Dwarves as a race of native elementals, sort of like diminuative Stonechildren. Dwarves are carved from stone and given life via a religious ceremony. Type of stone dictates the racial traits of the particular dwarf, and as "masterwork items," they can actually be directly enchanted like magic items...
5) I had an idea to use Warforged as Gnome-tech mecha (the Juggernaught ones, at least), but further refined them to be Inheritors- my FRPG equivalent to Daleks that house the psyches of psionically gifted Dwarves whose race was otherwise exterminated.
6) Inspired by Tarzan stories; by Charles Coleman Finley's series of short stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine (republished as The Prodigal Troll) about Maggot- a human raised by trolls; by Captain Carrot, a human raised by dwarves in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld novels; by Will Farrell's human raised by North Pole Elves comedy Elf- treating certain racial characteristics as societal ones, making "Half-" races a mere term of convenience (and occasionally of insult) for changelings & foundlings who were raised by races other than their own.
1) Planty Elves? I'm doing that now, but making them true Fey (ditto the other 2 "elf" races in my current campaign) and adding a touch of Minbari/Trill to it. If killed, they may be ressurected simply by replanting their core pod, which holds all of their memories...
2) I've also used elves the way Michael Moorcock recast them as his Melniboneans. IOW, they are truly in touch with magic like no other race, but their decadent, world-spanning, slavery practicing empire is in decline, with humanity emerging from their shadow.
3) More fun with elves- I've recast the war between Drow and the Surface elves in terms of the American Civil War, with the Drow playing the role of the South. The brutality of the Reconstruction Era was transformed into the events that actually drove the Drow underground.
4) Still more fun with elves: The elves are actually the aliens we know in pop culture as "Greys," especially the taller kind you'd see in Close Encounters. Their ship crashed, and is currently under an earthen mound- their mastery of multidimensional physics and hyperdrive/stasis technology distorts time & space, leading their guests- and the occasional test subject- to misperceive time's passage...or even emerge from the impossibly vast domain others call "Underhill" many decades later than when they entered it. Their holographic technology disguises their true nature.
4) Dwarves as a race of native elementals, sort of like diminuative Stonechildren. Dwarves are carved from stone and given life via a religious ceremony. Type of stone dictates the racial traits of the particular dwarf, and as "masterwork items," they can actually be directly enchanted like magic items...
5) I had an idea to use Warforged as Gnome-tech mecha (the Juggernaught ones, at least), but further refined them to be Inheritors- my FRPG equivalent to Daleks that house the psyches of psionically gifted Dwarves whose race was otherwise exterminated.
6) Inspired by Tarzan stories; by Charles Coleman Finley's series of short stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine (republished as The Prodigal Troll) about Maggot- a human raised by trolls; by Captain Carrot, a human raised by dwarves in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld novels; by Will Farrell's human raised by North Pole Elves comedy Elf- treating certain racial characteristics as societal ones, making "Half-" races a mere term of convenience (and occasionally of insult) for changelings & foundlings who were raised by races other than their own.
DrunkonDuty
he/him
One way to avoid cliches is to treat individuals as individuals rather than merely examples of a Platonic "Race."
- my current campaign the Dwarven PCs are going to be going to war with the Frost Giants soon. They've met many of the Frost Giants now and even like some of them. But the war will happen (DM fiat can be such a bitch ) and this will make the war that much more sad. My Frost Giants are living the cliche: Loud, boastful, war-like, drunken brawlers who wear hats with horns on them. But I've given enough of them individual characteristics, made them people, that the Frost Giants as a whole take on more depth.
- I have a campaign background I work on now and then (may never see the light of play). The idea is for it to be a Humanoid campaign. Orcs, Gobbos, etc. To put a twist on the Humanoid cliches I've broken the races down by tribes and given the tribes certain individual characteristics. For instance 1 Orc tribe is the classic band of vicious marauders. Another Orc tribe is the epitomy of the Noble Savage. By juxtaposing them I hope make the cliches more interesting.
-Same campaign I've got a tribe of Goblins who are merchants of the entrepid Marco Polo variety. Their mule caravans brave all the corners of the Borderlands* trading goods back and forth. Some are honest merchants (within reason, I mean business is business), some are just con artists. Another tribe who are warg-riding Gobbos but who have much closer bonds with the wolves, including limited shape changing.
*Yes there is a keep. It has a castellan. Gobbos are not welcome there even if they claim to be honest merchants. Actually, this is another good example where I played with a well known DnD cliche. I mixed this old fave with a cliche from the history of colonisation: The castellan is keen to prove himself a successful administrator so as to further his career when he goes back to the capital. He is planning to set up a human colony in the Borderlands. "Pushing back the borders!" And stiff cheddar to the humanoids who already live there. He is not a a bad man but he doesn't think humanoids count as people.
cheers all,
Glen
- my current campaign the Dwarven PCs are going to be going to war with the Frost Giants soon. They've met many of the Frost Giants now and even like some of them. But the war will happen (DM fiat can be such a bitch
) and this will make the war that much more sad. My Frost Giants are living the cliche: Loud, boastful, war-like, drunken brawlers who wear hats with horns on them. But I've given enough of them individual characteristics, made them people, that the Frost Giants as a whole take on more depth.- I have a campaign background I work on now and then (may never see the light of play). The idea is for it to be a Humanoid campaign. Orcs, Gobbos, etc. To put a twist on the Humanoid cliches I've broken the races down by tribes and given the tribes certain individual characteristics. For instance 1 Orc tribe is the classic band of vicious marauders. Another Orc tribe is the epitomy of the Noble Savage. By juxtaposing them I hope make the cliches more interesting.
-Same campaign I've got a tribe of Goblins who are merchants of the entrepid Marco Polo variety. Their mule caravans brave all the corners of the Borderlands* trading goods back and forth. Some are honest merchants (within reason, I mean business is business), some are just con artists. Another tribe who are warg-riding Gobbos but who have much closer bonds with the wolves, including limited shape changing.
*Yes there is a keep. It has a castellan. Gobbos are not welcome there even if they claim to be honest merchants. Actually, this is another good example where I played with a well known DnD cliche. I mixed this old fave with a cliche from the history of colonisation: The castellan is keen to prove himself a successful administrator so as to further his career when he goes back to the capital. He is planning to set up a human colony in the Borderlands. "Pushing back the borders!" And stiff cheddar to the humanoids who already live there. He is not a a bad man but he doesn't think humanoids count as people.
cheers all,
Glen
