Tolkien Killed My Homebrew

You can have mideval Europe in your game and not have it feel like Tolkien; Pendragon does a good job of this. It's very much of a Camelot RPG.

You can also change certain aspects of the game to have it model fantasy archetypes in a different light. Tolkien's elves are noble, fair, wise, and graceful. But if elves are connected to Faerie, which they are in many myths, then elves become malicious, vindictive, spiteful and mischevious. In a celtic game, that's how I'd run elves. Removing races is also a good way to go. Do you not want orcs to be powerful, but rather wretched creatures? Remove the orc and half-orc races, and call Goblins "Orcs" and there you are.

Also, the lack of an extraordinarily powerful Evil will make your setting seem less of a Sauron look alike contest. Have your villians be just people; powerful, influential, but just people. And people only out for their own self-interest, instead of World Domination.

Thirdly, the presence of a Church, or several Churches, will make your setting seem much less Tolkienesque. Organized religions were downplayed in the books, even though the whole story is heavy with overtones; but the world does lack a centralized religious organization.
 

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D&D is equally, if not moreso, indebted to swords-and-sorcery such as Howard's Hyperborea, Leiber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, Poul Anderson's Anglo Saxon inspired romances, and of course Vance's Dying Earth. If you want to turn a D&D game around, focus on those elements. Rather than on ultimate evils, populate your world with hundreds of sinister, deadly things lurking just under the surface of the world. Indulge in deliberate anachronism, in the fashion of Howard's Hyperborea, and go ahead and use that Crusades era technology, or throw in full plate, or lorica segmentata... or go for a Japanese feudal look.

One reason Tolkien's hand is so felt, I think, was his amazing ability to take history, myth, and storytelling, and bring them into balance. His work has a sense of authenticity. Simply because his example was so compelling, any other Western European inspired fantasy is going to echo, comment on, or react to Tolkien.

But that presence is not the kiss of death on originality. An entire fandom of people exists who still debate viewpoints on Middle Earth itself. Changing a few elements, even minor ones, is enough, if you approach the problem with a Tolkien-like seriousness: what does this mean for my characters? It is enough, I think, to be "another" ME.

Just don't be "another Krynn. "
 


Snoweel said:
What's a n**** to do?

Nymph? You're a nymph?!

(I mean, what else is 5 letters and starts wtih an "N"?)
C, -- Nifft

PS: Your best defense against Tolkein is to steal from more modern authors, and then give your own spin to their tropes. JRRT had a distinct lack of extinction-level astrophysical events, but they make for stories as dramatic as any war against overwhelming forces of darkness. Just as an example.
 

I, too, balked at the idea of D&D as the Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game.

So, I just tossed out anything that resembled Middle Earth.

There are no elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, or halflings in my homebrew.

My dragons do not talk, nor do they covet gold. They have the mental capacity of the velociraptors from Jurrasic Park - clever predators, but nothing more.

I do have a BBEG who wants to conquer/destroy the world, but he is just as much Satan as Sauron.

In fact, I stripped so many D&Disms out of my homebrew that it is more like d20 Fantasy than true D&D, but that's just how my tastes are running currently.
 

Aeric said:
I, too, balked at the idea of D&D as the Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game.

So, I just tossed out anything that resembled Middle Earth.

There are no elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, or halflings in my homebrew.

My dragons do not talk, nor do they covet gold. They have the mental capacity of the velociraptors from Jurrasic Park - clever predators, but nothing more.

I do have a BBEG who wants to conquer/destroy the world, but he is just as much Satan as Sauron.

In fact, I stripped so many D&Disms out of my homebrew that it is more like d20 Fantasy than true D&D, but that's just how my tastes are running currently.

Sounds like you are playing Conan:)
 

Myself, I found the best way to beat Tolkien was to do two things:

  1. Make a homebrew which whores off of his work :D
  2. Make a homebrew that throws out ever Tolkienism and keeps everything including the kitchen sink and the neighbors dog.

I have a main homebrew, Ascension: Paths of Power which is #1. It takes Europe in 1050 CE with liberal Tolkienisms and harnesses the assumption that every myth, legend and religious story is truth. It's a very dark, gritty world, and The onw which I've been developing for years now.

The other is yet-unnamed and has everything from evil, psionic dwarves (the only kind!) to orc demon-binding necormancers to swashbuckling catfolk. It's a more light-hearted, straight-up D&D world, and one in which I have a lot of fun with anything that suits my whims.

No idea if this will help me, but works for me :)

cheers,
--N
 
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Hey, sometimes, the standard-fantasy influences sparks the innovation.

Some years back, I was tinkering further with my homebrew for a new campaign. It had a lot of the standard elements: dwarves, elves, etc. I had a pantheon of nine gods, arranged like a wheel, originally based on the alignments, but that changed over time to something not entirely alignment based.

I assigned a race to each god, so I had to add extra PC races to fill out the ranks. For the god of cold and death, I chose the goblin. There was a need to fill a high-Wisdom niche in the list of PCs, so I modified the goblin to get a Wisdom bonus. When I showed the resulting set to my players, they commented that they couldn't imagine a wise goblin.

Then I thought, why call it a goblin? And once it's not called a goblin, why make it act like a goblin?

So, I redid the race, and came up with a twisted, crone-like race called the Wizened. I imagined a race kinda like Gollum, kinda like hags, but not completely like anything else out there. Then I redid the other races. Dwarves became the Grachen, a people apparently made of stone. Elves became the Amborae, a beautiful, carefree race descended from flowers, and had flowers growing naturally on them. Humans became the High Ones, tall, regal, and paragons of skill. The new races were similar enough to be familiar, but different enough so that the standard tropes need not remain on them.

The players loved the new races. Furthermore, they pulled the new races in ways I never imagined. One Wizened character became a child-like but ruthless ranger who rode a velociraptor. The party's brawler and ladies' man was a Grachen. The group's "Beardaxe the Stereotypical Dwarf" was a High One samurai (who came up with the Caliphate of Dikama, a Turkish/Celtic/Japanese nation that was a blast!). It's been great working with the players to grow the campaign world in new, flavorful ways!

So, that's my advice. Don't go hating Tolkein, but identify what specifically about Tolkein is causing you trouble, then change it to suit your fancy. Still, make it recognizable enough that it's easy for your players to grasp. Don't make the "you'll know how to play this character after reading Volume III" game, but the "you'll know how to play this character after reading these couple of paragraphs" game. If you can say something like, "It's like standard D&D, but with beastmen and wizards in flying cities," then the players will naturally take the game in cool directions outside of stock fantasy just by virtue of giving them something new to play with.
 


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