I had no desire to make my setting publishable or unique. It's too much work to really fill in all the details of the world for the purpose of gaming, much less publish it. It's purpose was to accommodate any published material or home-brew material I wanted to include in a framework that I felt made sense. Thus, it's definitely not a trope world where a small number of key ideas sell the world, but a more traditional kitchen sink environment where I've really only thrown a few things out of the kitchen sink (notably orcs). Rather than being defined by its tropes, I'd like to think the world of Korrel is defined by its coherence.
1) It's an intensely animistic world were small spirits dwell in almost every environment. It is the world of Grimm's Fairy tales, where things can go bump in the night, fairies live in garden and wood, fairy godmothers are real, princes can be turned into frogs, and third sons of millers can inherit kingdoms.
2) It's a world of deep and frightening mystery, where ancient half-forgotten civilizations lie hidden in taboo regions, secrets man was not meant to know are hidden in lost tomes, and experimental magic threatens the health and sanity of anyone that fails to respect it. It's a world of strange radiations, mad scientists, and things beyond comprehension that see people as mere food.
3) It's a world of deep historical grounding, where social and government structures don't mimic those of the modern world, where race, ethnicity and class matter intensely to most people, where there are old wounds and grudges between peoples, and cultures rather alien to mainstream Western thinking thrive. Indeed, if anything, it's a world where things are rather more diverse than they ever were in reality, because instead of one race of people (humanity), or a bunch of Star Trek aliens as humans with bumps on their forehead, you have seven different races each with their own distinctive biology and emotional framework. It's a world where superstitions are mostly true, ritual has physical power, and Plato's ideas can become reified in his metaphorical cave and come off his shadowed wall in a very real way.