Desdichado
Hero
There's an old thread at RPG.net with pretty much this same topic that has recently been revived that got me thinking about this again. I also pulled up a similar thread we had here at one point, but it's probably been long enough we can have this discussion again.
What traditional fantasy conventions have you simply gotten tired of and removed from your homebrew worlds? Here's a few that I tossed from my current homebrew:
What traditional fantasy conventions have you simply gotten tired of and removed from your homebrew worlds? Here's a few that I tossed from my current homebrew:
- No demihuman races; at least not ones that in any way resemble elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, etc. Everybody on my setting is human. Or, at most, they're a breed of human that's gone through many generations of selective breeding by former slave-owning non-humans, so they're genetically human, but may be fairly divergent physically from a standard human; much like a chihuahua is quite a bit different from a St. Bernard or a Great Dane.
- What's up with the New Age, egalitarian quasi-medieval social structures and technologies all the time? My setting features a totalitarian city-state as the main arena for the campaign so far, and the PCs are freelancers on the payroll of the local "Gestapo" outfit. The setting features a number of clockwork and steampowered gadgets, ala Iron Kingdoms and firearms aren't exactly common, but they're hardly unknown. Most of the "peasants" work in iron mines, coal mines or factories rather than the fields.
- Magic is a wondrous and useful tool. Eh, sorta. In my campaign setting, we use the d20 Call of Cthulhu magic, including Sanity. Magic can save your life in a pinch, but unless you're already insane, you tend to avoid it for the most part.
- There's no legendary golden age of heroes in my setting. In the past, humanity was in the thrall of back-breaking slavery. Before that is pretty much legendary; no one has any hard and fast knowledge of that time, but it's still darker and grimmer than the Golden Age of Heroes myth. Some prehistoric cataclysm literally broke the world, and legend has it that it was the use of foul magics and humanity's hubris that led to that disaster, the following centuries of slavery.
- The setting as a whole is relatively agnostic. In fact, the gods that the church preaches are a fairly amoral lot, and the people are generally distrustful of them anyway. Kinda like Conan and the Cimmerian gods, which he claims have little use for mortals. No "Chosen of Mystra" or, prophecied Golden Child, or anything of the kind on my world.
- In fact, in general, I'd say my world looks a lot more towards Sword & Sorcery and Weird Tales conventions rather than Tolkien-esque fantasy conventions anyway. Kinda a horror/fantasy blend, with a fair dollop of steampunk thrown in as well.
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