Other than vaguely European medieval fantasy...

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

Somebody hit Umbran with XP for me, please.

Done.

 

[Aeolius]

...my eye is wandering away from European medieval fantasy and looking for something more exotic... to mix cowboys and indians, pirates, sabertooths, Arabian Nights, and ancient horrors slumbering in nameless cities under the shifting sands.

I suppose it would come as no surprise that I might humbly suggest an undersea setting? It’s easy to mix genres, when you place players in a setting that is both familiar and yet unfamiliar. Within the framework of the realm of liquid space, you can easily add pirates (of the surface and subaqueous varieties), cowboys and indians (in the form of amphibious races invading the deepwater realm of the abyssal zone), prehistoric beasties (megalodons, anyone?), Arabian Nights might be translated into an Atlantean feel, and tentacley critters in sunken cities are sort of a given.

 

[Pig Champion]

You could approach a setting like an essay. Write a thesis statement and then prove how your setting (peoples, cities, ecology, terrain etc) supports that thesis statement. Then you have focused bones to build up from. I've tried it a few times and found the end result to be quite different from other methods.

Another method I use is mixing pop-culture together. Joss Whedon meets Toho and you get a city built on a gateway to hell that worships a monster pantheon who routinely attacks the city when displeased.

I ran the latter with my PC's playing gods from other settings (pelor, sune etc) having them cure the city of it's ills from top to bottom before slaying the monstrous pantheon and supplanting them as gods of a brave new world.

It was really fun.

 

[RangerWickett]

For a long time, I've called my setting an equal parts mixture of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, H. P. Lovecraft, Sergio Leone and Charles Dickens, with game set-ups and adventures that feel like recycled Robert Ludlum plots. As my setting has evolved, I've minimized some of the urban dystopia and the alien-world natures of it, and I'd now describe it as a hybrid of the Hyborian Age, Sergio Leone, Rafael Sabatini, Pirates of the Caribbean, Clan of the Cave Bear, and The Mummy.

This wild amalgamation makes my heart all aflutter. Alas, I must spread some dignitas around....

 

[Barastrondo]

D&D only?

Let's see, I'll run an Al-Qadimish Arabian fantasy game at the drop of a hat. My longest-running one was a test for 3e, involving the destined children of a tribe of desert nomads, very "children of the Free People vs. the corrupt armies of a decadent city-state." I'm dying to try a more Sinbad-inspired game about corsairs at some point as well, with the ship as a home base and the possibility for more episodic play as the players take on the day's "away team" to account for shifting characters.

I've done the pseudo-Viking thing, too; played in one, run one. Neither one involved longships, oddly enough, but rather more fantastic Norse-esque cultures with elves who herd snow spiders and white-furred bugbears and the like.

Right now I'm running something very Gormenghast-inspired by way of Labyrinth, Poe and maybe touches of B4: The Lost City. Immense city, mostly empty, peculiar inhabitants who have been isolated from the rest of the world gathered into "guild-clans" and bizarre noble houses. The players are on the side of Civilization vs. Chaos, but civilization is so weird and baroque and faintly hollow that it's a very different feel for a game. The city is the entirety of their world, huge and hollow and with strange things wriggling through the cracks. It still has swords rather than guns, but I'd say the range of aesthetics goes far past the medieval.

I've got a hankering to try a game mostly inspired by mythic China, too. One part Dynasty Warriors, one part Barry Hughart, complete with me forcing players to watch things like John Woo's Red Cliff before we start.

I guess the big thing is that I see all of these as taking place in the same world. If you zoom back, it looks like a fairly generic fantasy world, but the zooming in is what really makes the place sing.

 

[Jack7]

Don't know if this is the type of thing you're looking for at all, or not. But here goes.

In this setting I run a Byzantine Roman/Greek/Mixed Group. On occasion I also run an African and an Asian/Asia Minor Group. This setting is semi-historical. It is our world circa 800 AD, and consists of humans and animals only. Although on occasion it gets invaded by monsters from outside our world or by creatures from outside our world. It is not a Western European setting or game, as I suspect you might mean by saying vaguely European. Though it does have some Western European characters who are immigrants from the West.

This setting is nothing like Europe or the West as the world is completely devoid of all humans except on one little sanctuary island (where there are less than 300 humans and they are mostly sterile) that they call the Isle of Wight. Otherwise it's all Elves, Dwarves, Giants, and monsters and their cultures are not like human cultures and their magic is nothing like human magic (as a matter of fact humans don't have magic). This world is mythological and high fantasy. It has a non-human team.

This setting, which I'm just constructing is all islands (except at the poles) and will have vastly different types of cultures, governments, religions, supernatural forces, and even different types of magic. This world will be more like pulp fantasy. There won't be any cultures like Western Europe though. Not really. the players won't start out with new characters, but with characters from the other worlds, but their abilities and classes will be different.

These three worlds are separate, but interrelated, and you can get from one world to another, but it is difficult to do so. The first two worlds are identical geographically, but totally different in population groups, languages, cultures, etc. and as regards plant and animal and insect life. They also have somewhat different geologies.

The last world is all islands, and contains humans, elves, dwarves, giants, monsters, etc. It has a mixture of monsters, plant life and animal life from our world and from the second world.

Don't know how or if that will help you, maybe it will give you some ideas.

I don't really know though if you're looking to start a whole new setting or world, trim away some of what you have, change it around, add onto it, or break it into separate pieces. I guess you need to decide what approach you're gonna or wanna take in that respect. Before you can decide how you wanna proceed.

 

[pawsplay]

For a long time, I've called my setting an equal parts mixture of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, H. P. Lovecraft, Sergio Leone and Charles Dickens, with game set-ups and adventures that feel like recycled Robert Ludlum plots. As my setting has evolved, I've minimized some of the urban dystopia and the alien-world natures of it, and I'd now describe it as a hybrid of the Hyborian Age, Sergio Leone, Rafael Sabatini, Pirates of the Caribbean, Clan of the Cave Bear, and The Mummy.

Reminds me in some aspects of Talislanta, a sort of Barsoom-meets-Wonderland-plus-Lyonesse. If you've never heard of it before, try to find a copy of the OOP Maelstrom Storytelling (not to be confused with various other things called Maelstrom), a surreal, multi-genre fantasy game that mixes metaphysics, pulp action, and gonzo visuals, like slaver ships crewed by alien crabmen.

 

[Zelligars Apprentice]

We are currently playing a game set in a fantasy version of early colonial South America. One of the colonizing powers is (of all things) a Marxist-communist Germanic people. Naturally, there are ruins of an old, far more advanced civilization on the New Continent. The natives, on some level, revere and worship these ancient people (and, as you might expect, hate the colonizers). Of course, the magic of these ancients also twisted the biology of the place, and that is where all the weird monsters (that us adventurers get to fight) come from.

Now, if you are looking for a world with massive layers of detail and back-story that is NOTHING like medieval Western Europe, you can't beat Tekumel.

 

[Wik]

I did a mesopotamian themed game, which channeled a lot of Dark sun and a fair amount of the old "Zothique" stuff by Clark Ashton Smith. That was pretty fun.

My current campaign is a combination of post-apocalyptic Rome mixed with some pacific northwest native beliefs, all done in a "what would happen if Rome grew up in the Pacific Northwest" sort of vibe.

 

[Desdichado]

D&D only?

No, I don't think so. Secondary world type fantasy, but that doesn't have to be D&D. I've been houseruling my d20 so much that I don't think it could fairly be called D&D anymore anyway.

I think my games would run well with WFRP or Savage Worlds as the system, too.