It's all been done before: Memes vs. Borrowing

[Pacio49]

Okay, as a DM I've always preferred to grow my own worlds than to use a prefab setting. With that said, I've been around the block a time or two and my biggest fear is that the things I'm coming up with on my own end up looking a lot like some of the various devices employed by published sources. Sometimes, my world has preexisted, other times I have to wonder if I picked up a term in passing and it somehow wormed its way into my work subconsciously.

I'm always wondering whether it's a meme (an idea whose time has come and simply needs to be expressed, surfacing through several people at the same time), or if I'm actively borrowing. I can never tell, since I really take pains not to look through published settings unless I'm playing a character in them in another game. It irks me sometimes, because items that I'll spend a long time crafting and creating backstory on I will then find cropping up in a published resource.

Some examples from my current world (see The Tol Vehara Story Hour if you want a more in-depth explanation of history):

Blasted Lands and Taint. Granted, this has existed since Thomas Covenant series, and everywhere you look you find Wild Lands, or Blight, or Blasted Lands, etc. The thing that irks me is that I spent a while trying to make the concept workable, with havens that were islands of normalcy among the perverting influence of the Taint's miasma. Then, I happen to flip idly through a 3e Rokugan setting book (I forget which one, perhaps the core), and I find that yep... there's a similar setup there.

Diamond Throne. I haven't even looked into this one yet, but it's the phrase that sparked this thread for me. The old continent in my homebrew is a confederacy of cities with magical towers topped in crystal that looks like various gemstones. The lords of the cities take their name from the gem that their tower holds (Sapphire, Opal, etc.), and the overlord rules from the Diamond Throne. Now, a throne made of diamond isn't necessarily anything that hasn't been imagined before, but I'm cringing to think that it's part of something currently 'in play' from major published sources.


I'm curious to see whether or not other homebrewers find the same thing happening. I know where a few of my ideas come from, and I'm not ashamed to take inspiration from various sources and make it somehow my own, but I have to wonder whether the whole thing comes off as an eclectic trash heap or something with a fresh, unique flavor.

I guess I'll have to ask my players. Anyone else have this happen to them?

 

[VirgilCaine]

Some examples from my current world (see The Tol Vehara Story Hour if you want a more in-depth explanation of history):

Blasted Lands and Taint. Granted, this has existed since Thomas Covenant series, and everywhere you look you find Wild Lands, or Blight, or Blasted Lands, etc. The thing that irks me is that I spent a while trying to make the concept workable, with havens that were islands of normalcy among the perverting influence of the Taint's miasma. Then, I happen to flip idly through a 3e Rokugan setting book (I forget which one, perhaps the core), and I find that yep... there's a similar setup there.

Diamond Throne. I haven't even looked into this one yet, but it's the phrase that sparked this thread for me. The old continent in my homebrew is a confederacy of cities with magical towers topped in crystal that looks like various gemstones. The lords of the cities take their name from the gem that their tower holds (Sapphire, Opal, etc.), and the overlord rules from the Diamond Throne. Now, a throne made of diamond isn't necessarily anything that hasn't been imagined before, but I'm cringing to think that it's part of something currently 'in play' from major published sources.

...but I have to wonder whether the whole thing comes off as an eclectic trash heap or something with a fresh, unique flavor.

I did, kind of.
IIRC, I made a group of Renegade wizards that lived in a high mountain plateau with a lake
in it...Thay. Of course, they aren't much like Thay at all, but I do save the free stuff from the WotC FR website, but haven't really incorporated it into my homebrew yet, really.


As for your case, neither idea is terribly original or unique, but it doesn raise some annoying questions about your homebrew from players. "The Diamondthrone? Oh, you use that book" "No, I thought of this long before I ever heard of that book."

 

[S'mon]

People are always ripping off my ideas... the evil mages IMC were called the Red Wizards back in '86, before 1e FR was released. It'd be nice if authors didn't nick my ideas, but I try not to worry about it.

 

[mmadsen]

I'm always wondering whether it's a meme (an idea whose time has come and simply needs to be expressed, surfacing through several people at the same time), or if I'm actively borrowing.

That's not the definition of meme. From Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (where he coins the term):

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'​

 

[VirgilCaine]

People are always ripping off my ideas... the evil mages IMC were called the Red Wizards back in '86, before 1e FR was released. It'd be nice if authors didn't nick my ideas, but I try not to worry about it.

Thats even worse than the "Diamand Throne" thing!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Living through the Cold War pretty much guarantees the idea of a "blasted lands" is in your subconscious, since we were allegedly all going to end up living on one After They Finally Drop The Bomb.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Damn, but I do hate the term meme. The worst sort of academic Balkanizing. Not to mention a pretty poor conception.

Still, you're working within a certain genre. Other people are doing the same thing, there's going to be a lot of similarity and coincedence.

It would probably help you to look into published settings more often, there's a reason authors read a lot. The greater the level of contact the better the chance that you are responding as opposed to borrowing.

 

[RFisher]

People are always ripping off my ideas... the evil mages IMC were called the Red Wizards back in '86, before 1e FR was released. It'd be nice if authors didn't nick my ideas, but I try not to worry about it.

Weren't their "red wizards" in Nehwon?

Yes, there is nothing new under the Sun. When I was younger I was tormented by the fact that everything I seemed to create was derivative. Then I realized that the people I was derivative of were derivative of others. (Who were derivative of others, &c. ad nauseum.)

Even the works of the greatest among us were derivative. As Isaac Newton said, "If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."

For me, I suppose creativity is in the details. How the derivative elements are fitted together. The specific turns of phrase to describe them. The individual decisions I make as GM during the game.

More than that, though, GMing, for me, is ideally a practical task. If I manage to be creative in the pursuit of it, that's just gravy. Indeed, I'm constantly trying to make myself borrow more & not try to do it all on my own.

 

[S'mon]

Weren't their "red wizards" in Nehwon?

The Fire Wizards who follow the Red God of the East.

However... _my_ Red Wizards were actually based on/inspired by the necromancer Vonotar the Traitor in Lone Wolf Book 2 - Fire on the Water, by Joe Dever & Gary Chalk, complete with zombie-crewed death hulks raised from their watery graves. Their red cloaks stand out nicely against the black & rotting timbers.

 

[MonsterMash]

Yes, there is nothing new under the Sun. ...

Even the works of the greatest among us were derivative. As Isaac Newton said, "If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."

For me, I suppose creativity is in the details. How the derivative elements are fitted together. The specific turns of phrase to describe them. The individual decisions I make as GM during the game.

More than that, though, GMing, for me, is ideally a practical task. If I manage to be creative in the pursuit of it, that's just gravy. Indeed, I'm constantly trying to make myself borrow more & not try to do it all on my own.

That's how I see things these days, if I come up with an idea and realise that either it was something buried in my subconsious from before or someone else came up with it first I don't let that worry me, instead concentrate on getting things to work together the way I want them to.

With the blasted lands bit, I'm thinking back to Tolkien and the dead marshes or even the way the experience of the western front in WWI affected the arts.