Vanilla Realms and Strawberry Fields

[teitan]

I notice a lot of people calling the Forgotten Realms "vanilla". What makes the Realms so "vanilla"?

My own theory is that it is the standar by which all settings are judged. Often I see fans comparing material based on their love or hate of the FOrgotten Realms as in "this is not like the Realms because Drow are nowhere to be seen" or "Cool they did this just like the Realms" blah blah blah.

I personally love the Realms as a game line (I can do without the novels myself) and don't think of them as Vanilla in anyway except in the sense that they have been for a long time and established the standard.

I also think that the Scarred Lands are on the way to setting the new standard in Fantasy Roleplaying and is quickly becoming the default standard D20 setting. The stuff is just crisp and fresh. Very innovative. LOL Broken record, I know.

Anyway...

Teitan

 

[jollyninja]

it's just another case of people not wanting to be seen as sheep. heaven forbid they actually like something popular. just like the guy in high school who claimed not to like music because it was to commercial. i hate things because they suck, not because other people have chosen them as their favorite thing. what they fail to realise is that weither they like it or not, at least a part of their campaign world is probably derivative of something in FR or at least similar by coincidence. i do not know how many times i have seen someone who hates FR have a guy who is strikingly similar to elminster in his campaign world. i just laugh.

those of you who have legitimate reasons for not liking FR please do not take the previous paragraph as an attack. there are many of you here, i just dislike people who say they hate something just to be different when they are completely ignorant on the subject.

with a world that huge, there is little that's not covered. i guess when you mix a bit of everything together in a huge pot, some people think it tastes like vanilla. i would have suspected chicken but what do i know?

 

[S'mon]

it's just another case of people not wanting to be seen as sheep. heaven forbid they actually like something popular. just like the guy in high school who claimed not to like music because it was to commercial. i hate things because they suck, not because other people have chosen them as their favorite thing. what they fail to realise is that weither they like it or not, at least a part of their campaign world is probably derivative of something in FR or at least similar by coincidence. i do not know how many times i have seen someone who hates FR have a guy who is strikingly similar to elminster in his campaign world. i just laugh.

This is why I hate the Realms - to be accused of 'copying' a character as unoriginal as Elminster would be infuriating, when Elminster is such a knock-off of Gandalf, who in turn is a prettified version of Odin-the-Wanderer and all those other wise-old-men with beards from European mythology. The Realms comes across to me as unoriginal even by gamewolrd standards, yet its popularity means that people who know of little else use it as the standard to measure others by. I shudder to think of someone accusing Elric of being a Drizzt clone...

Eg I have a group of evil wizards in my game called the Red Wizards, Hel-worshipping necromancers - they existed well before the FR were ever published, yet I just know people will assume I copied the (obvious) name...

 

[Bonedagger]

I can remember having read in a QA from one of the designers of BG 2 (The computer game) that the reason why there wasn't any pointy hats for the PC's was that one of the criteria Ed Greenwood had given them was that only Elminister would be allowed to wear a pointy hat.

Kind of like a guy trying to take credit for a stolen idea.

Edit: They must have made a compromise though for I can remember one of the NPC other than Elminister wearing a pointy hat. But since they didn't have that many paperdolls in the start it would seem like a reasonable thing to do.... I'll try and see if I can find a link.

Edit 2: No. No link. Oh well. To long ago.

 

[laiyna]

I think it would be wrong to say that I hated FR. But there are a few things I defently considerd bad, and a lot of things are straight copies from other settings and mythologies.

The things I like:
1) Town lay out and the loads of political information thats present.
2) The way that it looks towards magic. (if I want to play high magic this is cool)
3) Recogisable for starting players that you are in a fantasy world and not in a historical world

Things I do not like:
1) Bad writen Novels, every starting writer makes first 5 novels for FR who otherwise never would sell if it did not have the FR label put to it.
2) Bad characters with little real dept and just a collection of powers that makes them "difrent"
3) Drow (do I need to say more?)
4) Bad Copy of a Bad Copy of famous work.... (Not very original the "special" stuff)
5) The gods & avatars

lai

 

[Numion]

I shudder to think of someone accusing Elric of being a Drizzt clone...

I've read good Elric books and good Drizzt books (homeland trilogy). I've also read boring Elric and Drizzt books.

I don't shudder at the thought of Elric being a Drizzt clone; I shudder at the boring Elric books that aren't made any better because Elric was before Drizzt.

To put it short, both characters should be judged on their own 'merits', regardless of who came first.

 

[Tsyr]

When I refer to a setting as "vanilla", I don't mean that it's become a standard by which all others are judged. Far from it.

Vanilla, to me, and I think to a lot of people, basicly equates to "Nothing new here". Greyhawk, Kalamar, Forgotten Realms, and to a lesser extent Dragonlance are all examples of vanilla fantasy campaign settings.

Why?

They all are basicly a "tried and true" formula with few innovations... Elves live a long time, like natures, are reclusive... Dwarves live mostly underground and are mostly blacksmiths... Halflings are fun-loving... Humans are the cockroach of the earth ( ), there are the standard chromatic dragons in their standard roles (Like I said, Dragonlance is borderline)... It takes place in a setting that resembles no area of earths history exactly, but rather mushes together several periods (Dark ages all the way through the rennisanse)... etc etc. Basicly it's a formula that hasn't changed overmuch since tolkien. You can to to a bookstore and find a ton of novels that feature a setting that you can practicly only tell apart by town and god names. Things like that. That is what _I_ mean when I call something Vanilla.

So what campaign settings out there break that mold, in my eyes? Rokugan, Dark Sun, Dragonstar, Spelljammer, Spycraft, Deadlands, Weird Wars, Ravenloft, Shadowrun, Rifts, World of Darkness (Although with as many world of darkness wannabees as there are now, we may start having a problem there too)...

Nothing WRONG with Vanilla in the slightest... Heck, my homebrew isn't TERRIBLY innovative, really... And I love Greyhawk and Kalamar dearly... and Dragonlance... (My hatred of the realms is not tied in with it's vanilla-ness)... It's just a term applied to something.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Vanilla to me is 'out of the box' - means no add-ons, no mods, no specials. It is up to you to either add them or buy them, it is up to you to make something out of it.

Does this apply to Forgotten Realms? In a way, because it is rather plain fantasy and you do have to work at giving it a personality.

 

[teitan]

I stil have a hard time understanding this vanilla thing. Greyhawk is vastly different than Tolkien and people still call it vanilla. Greyhawk is all about the balance and shades of grey. The Realms being vanilla according to the above definitions doesn't make much sense either. How can something that has been around for years and was one of the first still be vanilla and unoriginal. That just screams "what the hey" to me.

William Gibson was the first Cyberpunk author, does that make his work "vanilla" since there are so many Cyberpunk writers now? Is Tolkien vanilla even though he is the originator of modern fantasy in the DnD vein?

If the above definitions are an indication of what vanilla means then I will stick by my original assertion of the word. The Realms are insulted by virtue of being the first. They have become vanilla because they are so heavily played out that people are just burnt on it. I just started.

Jason

 

[EricNoah]

"Sometimes all it takes for me to drop an enthusiasm is the knowledge that someone I think commonplace has picked it up." -- Joseph Epstein, from Snobbery: The American Version.