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Worlds of Design: Escaping Tolkien
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<blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 8095837" data-attributes="member: 6777454"><p>I believe I implied that quite clearly in my original post. You make a world that is completely alien with completely alien races that cannot be compared to the standard Tolkien races without really stretching things and.... congratulations, you've made something that no one is going to be able get a grasp on and everything beyond surface level is going to feel very bland.</p><p></p><p>People will just simply not be into it-- it will be very unpopular.</p><p></p><p>Do you really suppose that any publishing company goes-- "Wow! This fantasy world sold so few copies that we lost money on every book we published about it. That's how we know we made a completely new fantasy world the right way!!"</p><p></p><p>No-- obviously not. The fundamental measuring stick of whether you created a successful non-Tolkien-based fantasy world is precisely that it grips people enough that they obsess about it and then tell all their friends about it who are interested enough to buy it and tell their friends about it until it is becomes wildly popular. Even if you want to take finances out of it-- the number of people who love your setting is the only possible measuring stick for how well you have done.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Just Dungeons and Dragons? Because I have seen every official TSR and WotC published setting in the history of D&D and several homebrew attempts. If one wants to go "semi D&D" then there is Pathfinder and games like 13th Age and Dugeon World.</p><p></p><p>In gaming in general? WarHammer and WarCraft immediately spring to mind as extraordinarily successful franchises that have crossed into everything. I also spent quite a lot of time with Legend of Five Rings and, of course, nearly every Magic the Gathering set for a while has had its own world.</p><p></p><p>If I am going to take pure video game worlds into account, every main numbered Final Fantasy game and nearly every spin-off of that franchise have taken place in different settings except 11 and 14 and I have put at least 10 hours into all of them.</p><p>Then there is the Might & Magic series, the Wizardry series, the Eldar Scrolls series, the Gothic series, the Ultima series, the Dragon Age series-- haven't played every game in all of those series, but I have played a couple in each for a good while.</p><p>There are a few MMORPGs too-- EverQuest, Ashran's Call, Guild Wars.... and I am probably forgetting a dozen I tried for a week or so.</p><p></p><p>And if we were to get into movies, I could probably list off every last fantasy movie in the past 50 years as I have seen, in the very least, a synopsis of it.</p><p>And books?... We'd be here all day.</p><p></p><p>Point is that I have seen literally hundreds of unique fantasy worlds.</p><p></p><p>In the end I feel quite confident in stating that everything either just copies the Tolkien package and tweaks them a bit, it tries to reskin them and rename them but everyone knows what they really are, they create a bunch of animal-people races and/or they create something so inaccessible and alien that they end up feeling very skin-deep and often leave the world feeling a bit sci-fi. And if they solely do the third case, then the world ends up wildly unpopular and just fails.</p><p></p><p>So trying to sell me on that a world "did it right" based on it having crab-people? Yeah-- I am quite certain you have missed the point.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="GreenTengu, post: 8095837, member: 6777454"] I believe I implied that quite clearly in my original post. You make a world that is completely alien with completely alien races that cannot be compared to the standard Tolkien races without really stretching things and.... congratulations, you've made something that no one is going to be able get a grasp on and everything beyond surface level is going to feel very bland. People will just simply not be into it-- it will be very unpopular. Do you really suppose that any publishing company goes-- "Wow! This fantasy world sold so few copies that we lost money on every book we published about it. That's how we know we made a completely new fantasy world the right way!!" No-- obviously not. The fundamental measuring stick of whether you created a successful non-Tolkien-based fantasy world is precisely that it grips people enough that they obsess about it and then tell all their friends about it who are interested enough to buy it and tell their friends about it until it is becomes wildly popular. Even if you want to take finances out of it-- the number of people who love your setting is the only possible measuring stick for how well you have done. Just Dungeons and Dragons? Because I have seen every official TSR and WotC published setting in the history of D&D and several homebrew attempts. If one wants to go "semi D&D" then there is Pathfinder and games like 13th Age and Dugeon World. In gaming in general? WarHammer and WarCraft immediately spring to mind as extraordinarily successful franchises that have crossed into everything. I also spent quite a lot of time with Legend of Five Rings and, of course, nearly every Magic the Gathering set for a while has had its own world. If I am going to take pure video game worlds into account, every main numbered Final Fantasy game and nearly every spin-off of that franchise have taken place in different settings except 11 and 14 and I have put at least 10 hours into all of them. Then there is the Might & Magic series, the Wizardry series, the Eldar Scrolls series, the Gothic series, the Ultima series, the Dragon Age series-- haven't played every game in all of those series, but I have played a couple in each for a good while. There are a few MMORPGs too-- EverQuest, Ashran's Call, Guild Wars.... and I am probably forgetting a dozen I tried for a week or so. And if we were to get into movies, I could probably list off every last fantasy movie in the past 50 years as I have seen, in the very least, a synopsis of it. And books?... We'd be here all day. Point is that I have seen literally hundreds of unique fantasy worlds. In the end I feel quite confident in stating that everything either just copies the Tolkien package and tweaks them a bit, it tries to reskin them and rename them but everyone knows what they really are, they create a bunch of animal-people races and/or they create something so inaccessible and alien that they end up feeling very skin-deep and often leave the world feeling a bit sci-fi. And if they solely do the third case, then the world ends up wildly unpopular and just fails. So trying to sell me on that a world "did it right" based on it having crab-people? Yeah-- I am quite certain you have missed the point. [/QUOTE]
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