Reinventing fantasy cliches

[roguerouge]

Villain-Hero Co-dependency

What are some things you have done or plan to do in your campaign settings to turn cliche fantasy elements into something more interesting?

Well, in one campaign, I took the BBEG with the personal grudge and gave it a twist. The PCs had defeated his plan to infect zoo animals with a plague, loose said animals in the city, then sell the cure. As a BBEG, he got away because the party barbarian couldn't remember the BBEG's name while being grilled by the cops. So not only did his plan fail, and he had to flee his disappointed superiors, he didn't even get the notoriety. A few adventures later, the PCs fall into his trap, and finally get into his HQ, which has his name written in the blood of innocents on every surface. He had used every last scrap of his resources to kill the PCs or, at the very least, make sure that his name would never be forgotten....

 

[Evilhalfling]

The Chosen One.
Oooh just had a thought. Might just be me but I always tend to think of 'The Chosen One' as referring to a good guy. But isn't the BBEG, sitting in his/her castle of black basalt and trying to bring darkness and misery to the world every bit as Chosen as the Young Woman/Man who, with a fraction of the resources and experience, will inevitably thwart them?

*cough* anikin. Bring balance to the force indeed. I wonder if I can do it better...

I have run one chosen one plotline - for a player who really enjoys a little extra limelight.
He was the messiah of the halflings. A race famed for gypsy-like wandering and thievery.
This was not the focus of he campaign, although by midcampaign there was normally a problem with the halflings that he needed to spend a few minutes adressing any time they were in civilization. The one time he was called to a "test of the gods" to prove his status, he declined, woried that he was not ready. He was killed by the BBEG before the end of the game.

A hundred years later the halflings have split into two groups, one believes in the PC, and follow his example "Live within the laws of the land" and "treat other races as you would a halfling." There is a reason that the halflings in my world can fall into the blackest evil. Not believing that others are really "people" is a great justification for atrocity.

 

[Desdichado]

The whole Chosen One routine is common in movies and books, but it seems particularly poorly suited to roleplaying games. Is that a common theme in y'all's RPGs? I've actually never seen it in a game.

 

[apoptosis]

The whole Chosen One routine is common in movies and books, but it seems particularly poorly suited to roleplaying games. Is that a common theme in y'all's RPGs? I've actually never seen it in a game.

I did once. They were supposed to kill a demonic crocodile but instead they worshiped it and one of the characters became its prophet while the rest followed him. He became the chosen one of the Crocodile god. From this the campaign really began.

 

[Desdichado]

I know what you are going for Hobo; kind of like what Palladium did with Wolfen (upright bipedal wolf-men) where they basically had a civilisation that was a massive threat to humans because they were just so damn ............organised.

Maybe; I'm not familiar with the Wolfen. Again; maybe splitting hairs, but I'm not saying that they're successful because they're so organized, merely that they are said to be well-organized and militaristic and yet are always portrayed as squalid, second-class foes, not really a force to be reckoned with, like a human kingdom would be, for example.

I've got my hobgoblins quite militarized (that's the part that borrows most from Nazi Germany) but I'm otherwise not trying to portray them as substantially different than if they were a human nation.

 

[The_Warlock]

Where the sub-races *really* become an issue, is when they assign cultural-specific traits as 'racial' traits. Elves aren't *born* with a familiarity with bows and swords, and if it's an Aerenal Elf from Eberron, it might be scimitars, and if it's a deep woods elf who isn't big on the metalworking, it might be spears and bows, etc, etc. Dwarves aren't *born* hating goblinoids, and a city-dwelling dwarf, raised by merchant parents in a human city, might have never *seen* a goblinoid, let alone spent years studying how to best bonk them with a warhammer.

All of these cultural specific things, IMO, should not be racial traits, but *options,* that could be swapped out. Sort of like a free 'Regional Feat,' a la the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, with a few specific variants. 'Jungle Dwarves' from Chult might not know bupkiss about stonecunning or craft (metalworking), but might have other 'racial' familiarities, such as with Survival or Climb or Knowledge (nature).

On that note, especially in RPGs, it is interesting when the base rules or mechanics help break up such racial tropes into racial and cultural splits. As a suggestion, if you haven't looked at it, take a gander at HARP (by Iron Crown). One of the things they do is break up racial mods from cultural mods in character creation. In the end, the list of potential cultural mods is broad, and somewhat stereotypical in design, but it does provide a starting step in actually thinking about how to complete the cultural concepts of a say, Underground Dwelling Humans, or Plains Nomad Dwarves.

In the end, you as a gamemaster or player have to extend the initial concept to make a living breathing culture without it simply being a bad Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial (You got dwarves in my swamp! You got swamp on my dwarves! Mmm, two great tastes that...")

But trying to ID the "genetic" vs "environmental" modifiers on a given race can often make it quite simple to break out of game-based racial molds.

 

[Teplin]

I'm wondering if the problem here is less the overuse of familiar elements and more the vagueness with which they are used. You need to have some familiar elements for the players to rely on, or the game becomes very difficult to run. It's useful to be able to assume a tech level, a landscape, a rough geography, standard monarchy government, and so on, unless you want to spend hours and hours on scene setting and describing background.*

The problem with doing this is if these elements end up being critical, you need to be able to get into more depth. If it suddenly becomes really really important as to why orcs are attacking, you need to be able to say why. A real, actual reason, that makes sense.

Elements that start off as a convenience end up as a cliche' when something that should be specific ends up being general. Orcs attacking because they are generically agressive and evil is a cliche'. Orcs attacking because they are loyal to an evil ruler who is accepting pay from shadowy conspirators to wage war is a specific.

The problem comes when you don't know really know how or why something works in your gameworld. If have plots involving the royal sucesssion you need to already know who inherits if various people die in various orders. If you want players to interact with elven culture, you need a firm idea of why elven culture is the way it is. Something more than 'they really really like trees' for no obvious reason.

I'm not sure using cliches are really a problem. The problem comes when they are used, not as background, but as shorthand for detailing the parts of the gameworld the players are experiencing up close. It's ok for distant landmarks to be fuzzy, but if they are still fuzzy close up, then people will just assume the details. And those details will never surprise them, and they'll start to regard them as over-familiar, and cliched.


*There are ways to mitigate this problem. Use a detailed setting that everyone is familiar with, run a long campaign so that everyone becomes familiar with the specifics of the setting, or get your players to design parts of the setting so that they are already familiar with it before the game starts.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm wondering if the problem here is less the overuse of familiar elements and more the vagueness with which they are used. You need to have some familiar elements for the players to rely on, or the game becomes very difficult to run. It's useful to be able to assume a tech level, a landscape, a rough geography, standard monarchy government, and so on, unless you want to spend hours and hours on scene setting and describing background.

Yes. Exactly my earlier point; too much deviation from the expected norm just leads to 1) confused players who don't grok the setting, or 2) long-winded exposition so the players can grok the setting; but now your game is dull and boring because of all the exposition.

At the same time, if everything is just "fantasy default', exactly as the cliched vision has always been, your setting and game will be pretty dull as well.

It's important to be judicious in reinventing cliches and not get carried away. I think the best way to do it is find a couple important ones and change those around to make the game interesting, and leave as much as possible of the rest of the assumptions your players will likely have completely alone. Let them have some common ground from which to approach the game, or they'll probably flounder through your setting before eventually giving up.

Your other point—because I'm a cocky bastard—I'm also going to call reiterating something I said earlier; good execution trumps innovation every day. Orcs attacking because they're mean and evil is bad execution. Elves attacking because they're mean and evil is innovative (sorta, I guess) but bad execution. Either one attacking because of political machination and conspiracy within the group being attacked is better execution. I'd rather have orcs attacking for a good reason than something more interesting attacking for a poor one, because at the end of the day, why they're attacking and the story behind it is likely to be much more interesting than who's good vs. who's bad in your game.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Here is my take on the "Elven Island Paradise on the Western Ocean".

But really, Urbis is full of inverted tropes...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

BTW, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the TV Tropes Wiki yet.

Warning: Don't visit this site if you have anything else to do today!