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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3569356" data-attributes="member: 18832">Don't read too much into it.The post to which I replied seemed to be making the wholly unexamined assumption that Tolkien's ideas defined the fantasy genre, and that not using those ideas was the same as doing a Western game or setting without cowboys and saloons.What I'm saying is this: Tolkien's ideas are not even close to being as fundamental to the fantasy genre as cowboys and saloons are to the Western genre. They're closer to much more specific and often-imitated tropes like, as I said, the Man With No Name - iconic of the Western, but hardly the sine qua non of the genre. There are plenty of real Westerns without that Clint Eastwood figure in them.The Man With No Name is also a useful analogy for Tolkien's tropes because - iconic as he is - he's also actually pretty new, dating from the "spaghetti Westerns" of the Sixties. While, like the majority of what Tolkien did, the Man With No Name is based upon elements recognisable in that which came before him, the idea was also something new and creative at the time. That's part of why Eastwood's character and Tolkien's ideas are so iconic to us now.The Western genre is a lot bigger than just the Man With No Name, though. Just as fantasy, including - perhaps especially - D&D, is a lot bigger than Tolkien.My secondary argument is that the iconic status of these ideas within their genres means that they've been imitated time and time again, to the point where, I contend, there's very little fertile ground for true creative use of those ideas left. I don't argue that no-one other than Leone could do the Man With No Name, or that no-one other than Tolkien can do elves, dark lords, and epic quests to save the world . . .. . . but I do argue that so many people have followed in their footsteps that there's less creative potential left in those ideas than in the broader, less iconic reaches of their respective genres. The only real creative possibility left in those ideas, in my opinion, involves really getting inside and exploring what they meant somehow - like Eastwood did in Deliverance - and, I'm sorry, but 99% of all the elven cultures in all the homebrew games out there aren't really getting inside Tolkien's ideas. They're just using well-worn paper-thin tropes because they're familiar and comfortable.I do think that, in general, there's more creative possibility in non-Tolkienesque (and, apropos of this thread, non-medieval) fantasy settings for D&D -  or other games, novels, films - simply because the other regions of the genre are less cluttered by iconic figures of the past and their imitators.This isn't to say that you can't be creative with Tolkien's tropes, or with a medieval setting. Just that the glut of similar projects out there makes me feel skeptical towards any given example.</blockquote>

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