Ydars said:
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.