Rawwedge said:
Perhaps you simply feel that there is already far too much out there and there is nothing left to be done with the concept
Absolutely not the case.
The key factor is how open your players are to reinvention of core concepts. Many players
like the standard Tolkien-esque fantasy because they're most familiar with it. As one guy said in one of my gaming sessions when I introduced a new setting:
"I'm not going to memorize an encyclopedia."
And most settings are what I call "D&D cartoon settings". If you ever watched the old 1980s Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, the setting was whatever the kids happed to wander across. You could have a town with an evil wizard floating above it in a castle and absolutely nobody would notice two miles away! Kingdoms and baronies were just dropped here and there. All history revolved around events that happened a) hundreds of years ago or b) last week. And you know something? That's great. It means that players can just wander in and have a game.
What I generally see people doing is taking the D&D cartoon setting and making changes that are based not on culture but on character generation. So a setting's twist may be that elves don't like magic or that there are no halflings or that psionics are permitted. There isn't a real cultural jump though. You aren't really talking "setting" you're talking "character".
So where do I see room to grow?
Assuming your players are like most players, you have the opportunity to change one or two things, but not more than that. And I would suggest taking those one or two things and really running with them. If you change two dozen things it'll be hard to keep track of unless you're going to be writing a 256 page book for publication (and even then, I've noticed a lot of those books cheat and stick with game mechanics). Just pick one or two things that really interested you and go with it.
Some game settings (homebrew and published) can get a lot of mileage out of simply looking at the spells available in the core rules, determining how many spellcasters there are in a given population, and then extrapolating what kind of world this would create. How would True Resurrection change things? Would Wall of Iron eliminate the need for mining? With monsters putting humans so far down on the food chain, why aren't most people cattle? The Scarred Lands is a good example and to a lesser extent, Eberron.
For an example of taking one thing and running with it, look to Morningstar. There's some race changes in there, but the interesting part is the Canticle, a prophecy that the PCs
will eventually confront. Examples of portions of the Canticle are given as well as how to use prophecy in a game. Another good example (and some people will pound on me for including it this far down) is Midnight. It's a classic Tolkien setting with the twist being "what if Sauron won". I think there's a lot of unexplored territory here because most people take a twist on a game and then wander off and design a new feat or prestige class. If you have a twist, twist hard. On another messageboard I'm chatting with a guy whose premise is that humans are all but extinct in the game world. What I like is that he's spending a lot of time figuring how how that affects the other races and how having committed genocide affects them. Do they try to forget about it? Do they live in fear dreading that the same thing will be done to them? Do they simply pick a new race to castigate? Are they more likely to throw in with an Evil Overlord because he looks strong and they don't want the fate of the humans to fall on themselves? There's a lot to explore here beyond simple character generation.
Exploring other cultures is good too, just make sure you have a good grip on that culture. If you picked up everything you know about Japan from watching ninja movies, you probably should stay away from basing a culture on the Nipponese. But if you do know a lot about a culture, you can go in deep with it. Imagine a world where the nature loving elves are based on the Aztecs. No technology or metals for these nature hippies! Just good old fashioned obsidian and sacrifice! Nyambe is a 3.0 setting based on Africa and since so little has been done with African cultures it stands out. But there's so much history and culture in the real world to base a game on that you can pick a specific place and period and really bite down on it to create a unique setting. One area that is ripe for inspiration is the reign of Shaka Zulu in the early 19th century. Take the cultures, the rituals, the wars, and just substitute magic for technology and you'd have an amazing setting (and probably learn a thing or two in the process). To my mind, the best d20 example is Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved/Diamond Throne. He used India as an inspiration and really ran with it. Plus he got to use all that zany weaponry used in that region 500 years ago. Another one with a richer history is Glorantha, which looks at the transition from bronze age to iron age, the concept being that iron is better than bronze but doesn't work with magic. Cool stuff, and Glorantha's been around for a couple of decades now.
My personal take on fusion is that when you mix two or three genres/settings together is that you should make one of them Toliken-esque. This is so you don't completely alienate your players. ShadowRun hit this out of the park. It took Tolkien and dropped into cyberpunk. Good stuff. There's plenty of room to explore here as well. Personally, I've been hoping for years now to run a game where the PCs are from a hard-science future who get sucked in some kind of wormhole and plopped down in a fantasy world. Kind of like the 90s TV show
Earth2. They'd have all the wonderful gadgets to see them through the first few levels ... then they'd run out of ammo. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who thinks that's cool.
One thing I don't like about fusion though is that it rarely does a good job of exploring the in-between areas where two cultures meet. The Forgotten Realms is a culprit here and that's why I'd categorize the current version of the Forgotten Realms as a D&D cartoon setting. There's so much stuff in FR that stays in a particular location and doesn't move that it's silly, a product of the FR being a victim of its own success. What really happens when two cultures meet is that they cross-pollinate and ideas get swapped. Unfortunately in most settings everyone sticks to how their ancestors dressed a hundred years ago. Geeze, you could run a whole campaign based on the emergence of half-elves as a race, yet they're stuck being these humans with pointy ears. Star Trek aliens get more depth than half-elves. That's what happens when you add something and don't run with it, you get a D&D cartoon setting with what basically amount to Star Trek aliens. As for what's a good example of a blend, I'd go with Murchad's Legacy (disclaimer: I wrote it, beware of bias) what happens in Nation A has a direct consequence on Nation B, and if the players ignore it the game mechanics screw them ... the obvious problem being there's too much to keep track of.
Or ... and here's a crazy thought ... instead of writing a setting to suit the needs of the game, why not change the game to suit the needs of the setting? Change the entire premise of what an RPG is. Right now, the idea behind d20 is "killing monsters and taking their stuff". Hey, don't knock it. That's a lot of fun, it works, and it isn't pretentious. But what about a mystery? There are too many spells in d20 that flummox a good mystery, so rip out half of them and tone town the social skills to create a series of mysteries. Or go the other route and have the PCs control multiple low-level characters for a lot of tactical combat. You could base the game off of the D&D minatures system to create a mercenary style game.
There's a ton of stuff left to explore in game settings. I don't think we're done yet!
