Reinventing fantasy cliches

[haakon1]

As to what the Goblins trade: mine have a whole swathe of goods to choose from. I'm slightly Obsessive - Compulsive when I world design and I've included trade goods for all the different tribal areas. The merchants trade (barter, no coin) stuff from area to area, effectively providing a transport service. They are also the most technologically advanced of the races in the races in the Borderlands. They make the best bronze and brass tools and weapons.

WHich segues nicely into why these Humanoids are on the fringes of civilisation: they don't have iron and that makes a difference when it comes to wars with the Humies who do have iron. Over all the Borderlands are just poorer than the Human Kingdoms it borders. (This also lets me use that old western cliche of trading weapons to the natives.)

My goblins are already using iron and steel weapons, but I usually describe them as half value -- old and very used. Makes sense if they only know how to make bronze themselves.

But who are the goblins selling bronze objects to? Other humanoids, or the actual humans? If humans, why are they buying it? Rust monster problem so they need arms and armor, or is it art (interesting idea) or the goblins are making non-adventuring items like cutlery and lanterns and so on?

 

[haakon1]

There's just bringing in more non-European elements into an existing setting. I'm not up to date with everything happening in Living Greyhawk but there is a lot more info. nowadays about non-European based cultures. The Touv are (IIRC) Aztec. There's more Baklunish (ie: Middle Eastern) setting info. than there used to be as well. And by treating them as more than just enemies there's so much more potential.

I think the Touv are more like Africans. But part of the fun in Greyhawk is that the races in the game don't fit the races in our world. (Kinda like James Earl Jones having blue eyes in "Conan the Barbarian".) So, as a DM you get to interpret and mix however you like. For me, it's:
Suloise = northern Europeans = English + Norse + Finns, which is a natural combo in looks, but odd in medieval stereotypes, and has some interesting language issues
Oeridian = southern Europeans = Holy Roman Empire = Germany, French, Italian, Spanish, and/or Roman in whatever combination I feel like
Flannae = original inhabitants = American Indians, yes, but also Irish/druidic, and Swiss (because they have the Cantons of Perrenland), and Sumerian (because it's really old)
Baklunish = easterners = not so much Arab (because it's played) as Greek, Hungarian, Turkish, Central Asia, and Mongol

When you start mixing up Swiss/American Indian/Irish and Greek/Turk/Mongols, you get some non-cliched cultures.

BTW, everybody who does Greyhawk does stuff like this. It has ideas imbedded, but it doesn't beat you over the head with references to the real world.

 

[haakon1]

Chosen Ones (I love this as a plural)

This reminds me. Instead of a sole Chosen One, you can do everyone in the party is a Chosen One. I played in a campaign like this -- one character from each PHB race, each with a different class, destined and bound together by fate to stop the BBEG. I was the half-orc assassin.

That's a bit of a cliche ("The Dirty Dozen"), but perhaps not as much as a single Chosen One? Or perhaps the Long Ranger is more original in D&D?

 

[haakon1]

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.

Right, but the one problem I notice in my DMing is I can get go caught up in complicated plots within plots in the back story that players lose the plot . . . mysterious bad guys are cool, but I think you need to let the PC's figure it out within a few adventures. Or at least give them stuff to kill mindlessly once in a while.

Also, "everybody works for the BBEG", while giving them baddies motivation, is a fairly uninteresting conclusion to a web of secrets. It's kind of like if the answer to "Lost" is "They were dead all along." In that case, who cares?

We could all do worse than to watch from Babylon 5 and Stargate SG-1 for ideas on episodic adventure stories, and what ratio of "main plot" versus "random stuff to kill" to have.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

Here's a Chosen One inversion.

Introduce a capable person to the party. Have the Powers That Be attach the Chosen One to the party, and the party must protect the Chosen One as he goes on his pilgrimage. He's the one that will save the world, the prophecies say. Oh, he only has a fraction of his eventual power now, but in the end, he will rival the gods. Have the Chosen One outshine the party in an early encounter, make the Chosen One seem like a Mary Sue DMPC.

Then, halfway through the adventure session, far from civilization, kill him.

Maybe he's done in by a lucky arrow. Maybe he falls overboard. Maybe he catches a cold. But he dies. Guess he's not the world's savior, after all.

Now what?

 

[Desdichado]

Not everything has to tie to the "greater mythos", I agree. And I've certainly adopted Raymond Chandler's advice to running games; he said "when in doubt, have someone with a gun knock down the door" or something to that effect. Throwing throwaway villains at the PCs just to keep the game moving isn't a bad idea.

Although I do like to have at least something more than "because they're mean" behind it.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Interesting thread - it touches on a number of issues I have thought about intensely when developing Urbis. In fact, there's a whole thread on this board where I list a huge number of tropes and attempt to add all of them to the setting in various ways...

But on to some more specific comments in this thread, and how they relate to Urbis.

So how would I go about making a game about drow that isn't cliche?

Well, here's how I did drow in Urbis. You be the judge if it is or isn't cliche.

First of all, I need to explain how eladrins fit into Urbis. Basically, eladrins are "noble elves" - elves from specific family lines who are blessed with the powers of the realm of Faerie through a special ritual shortly after birth. As a result, they get fey powers and extended life spans.

Now some elves got resentful of the fact that the noble houses kept all those blessings to themselves - and so they turned to some of the darker powers of Faerie for help. Those entities taught them another ritual, which turned their children into drow - oh, and this ritual requires the sacrifice of a sapient being.

The children of drow start out as "normal" elves with fair skin, just like the children of eladrins, so the ritual needs to be redone for each new generation. Thanks to that sacrifice requirement, drow culture is generally pretty nasty - but individual drow do not necessarily have to be evil (besides, while human and eladrin sacrifices are preferred, sacrificing a kobold, orc, or similar being will do just as well - and what's the life of a supposedly evil and inferior race against giving one's child special powers and extended life spans? You decide...)

This setup also has some interesting consequences for a certain elven kingdom where the ruling eladrins became (a) infertile with each other and other elves and (b) lost the right to do the eladrin ritual. Let's just say that a lot of people in this nation are giving the drow ritual serious thoughts...

If hobgoblins and other goblinoids are lawful by nature, and as capabable individually as a human, why are they always on the fringes of society as "savage humanoids?"

Not in Urbis. Mind you, hobgoblins aren't really liked by most humans, but few wouldn't call them a "civilized species"...

For my part, many magic-related cliches seem to come from the failure to think about the role magic plays in the world. I don't mind magic that's mysterious or based on concepts that make quantum physics look like Sesame Street (I honestly prefer this). But in cases when magic is analogous to technology, it's hard to imagine why people still have medieval standards of living. A corollary to that is the idea of magic and technology being innately incompatible. An idea I have is that rather than having magic undermining technology (or vice versa), magic allows technology to flourish to a point where nanotechnology looks primitive in comparison.

Well, Urbis is currently going through a magical industrial revolution, and its society has more in common with the Victorian Age than the middle ages...

Other inverted tropes in Urbis (apart from the Meji Restoration Elves I mentioned earlier):

- Dwarfish boat people
- An outer plane that's both Good- and Death-aligned.
- An Evil Empire where killing off the leader might actually make things worse.

And a whole lot of other stuff I'm to lazy to list at the moment.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Haakon1 wrote:
But who are the goblins selling bronze objects to? Other humanoids, or the actual humans?

They buy and sell among the various humanoid tribes. There is some trade of other goods (Salt, spices, rarities and oddities, bitumen) with humans but that mostly goes through Bugbear hands. My Bugbear culture borrows from Malay culture of the Indonesian archipelago: many petty kingdoms, a strong sea-going impulse, the beginnings of trade with "civilised" races (ie the European styled humans) as per the early colonisation period.

I should point out my Borderlands are about 1 million sq. miles. Plenty of room for many tribes and cultures, with room for additional stuff I may want to throw in along the way (random encounters!)

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Something that all the contributors to this thread seem to agree on is that by giving more details you can avoid cliches. More background for a tribe/NPC/event makes it a better experience for the players when they get up close to it, although at a greater distance less detail is necessary. (Thanks Teplin for the focus/depth of field analogy.)

So a question to be asked is: how much detail is right? I'd say it depends on how much detail your players want.

I think Jurgen has hinted at a good answer to this with his Eladrin/Drow rituals. Knowing where elf babies come from (I paraphrase loosely ) might be unnecessary detail, unless it leads to plots for the players. ANd a group of here-to-fore benevolent Eladrin desperate for children at any cost has certainly got plot potential.

So the right amount of detail is the amount that gets the plot and/or players going. I'm lucky in that my players really like to get involved in the game world. It provides me with both the challenge of creating something to interest them and then the satisfaction of having done so and getting told "that was great!" (I love my players.)

PS: I must admit to getting overly caught up in the over-arching plot at times. I think I shall use Hobo's/Raymond Chandler's advice in the future.

 

[Brimshack]

I'd say that one variable has to do with focus. The same level of detail that can make a game can also break it, and one deciding factor will be where the players want their attention focused. If your players are trying to plan on a battle to come, taking the time to tell them the color of the carpet on the floor is going to be irritating to them at best. If they are prepped to investigate of a crime, then that same information along with a few dozen other comparable bits - a couple of which prove significant in time - will be just the thing.

I also find that pacing of clues really helps. If you can plant information in one game that will become important 3-5 games on down the road, and if the players are still busy enough thinking about other things, then you can create that moment when they kick themselves and realize they should have put 2 and 2 together all along. Once the players get used to the idea that seemingly irrelevant things may prove useful in the long run, I think they will be far patient with the trivia.