Picture your typical fantasy setting. It’s positively medieval. You’ve got your castles, towns and villages, your deep forests and rocky mountain peaks, your flowing rivers and oceans. Everything is green, the sky is blue, and people ride around on horses wearing armor and swearing fealty to a King, who rules over a small aristocracy and a mass of peasants. This has to be so familiar that it’s almost comforting, a Middle Ages that never was, with dragons and wizard towers and orcs skulking around in the forests. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a generic setting as much as any other, but this is a fantasy game: how about injecting a little more fantasy into your world?

So say you decide to be a little more original and creative about your setting. What could you do, where would you start? The easiest way to go is to pick a different culture or time period from our own history, and set your campaign there. All you need to do is a little online research, spend a little time with Wikipedia and Image Search, and you should quickly have enough original material to run a game with a completely different feel. Samurai in Japan, or Aztecs in the jungle, or Mongolians riding across the steppe; there’s no need to limit yourself to Medieval Europe. If you want to get even more trippy, you could mix two of those together: what is ancient Japan was neighbors with the Aztecs? Throw in some magic, monsters and dungeons, and you’re good to go.

The next step up is to not just look at our past for inspiration, but to start asking questions like: what would the world be like if I changed a fundamental law or two of reality? What if gravity was weaker in certain spots? What if fire acted like water, or clouds were solid enough to walk on? What if the sky was green, and rain was acidic? You take one of these questions, and run with it. So say you decide that yes, your sky is green, and rain is acidic and causes burn damage. How would that change the world? For one, rivers and oceans would be acidic too. People would need to purify water to drink it, or draw it from pure sources deep beneath the ground. Which would mean that something in the atmosphere, not water itself, was making the rain acidic. What could be causing this? How would people live, what would they wear? How important would weather mages be? What kind of landscape would result from being scoured by acid? A harsh wasteland? Would plants evolve to live in the acid, forming vast jungles of toxic vegetation? Would animals adapt?

Step by step you go following the logical chain of your idea, until you have a complete campaign setting. Remember, with magic you can make anything possible, so any possibility can be real. The trick into preventing it from becoming a surreal dream the players can’t connect with to a palpable, real setting is to be logical about the consequences. Medieval villages wouldn’t exist in the same way if acid rain fell from the skies. Walking into one would jar the players, as they would find it implausible.

For more ideas, look at the more fantastic of the fantasy novels, like Tracy Hicks and Margeret Weisman’s The Deathgate Cycle, where each book chronicles an adventure on a world dominated by one element. In the end, you have to ask yourself: when playing a game of fantasy and imagination, why limit yourself to a stereotypical Medieval Europe?

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Category: Entertainment
Keywords: fantasy setting,fantasy game,dragons,rp,rpg,role playing game,dming,d&d,dungeons, ad&d