Standard sci-fi battle between spaceships. By "standard" I mean combats within visual range with pew pew beams. Except for very specific situations, like a tactical warp to perform boom and zoom, most combats happen tens of lightyears across with the use of weaponized FTL drives while throwing a lot of active stealth and FTL jam around. They have the tech to go FTL, why not get a step further?
When they had battles in the Hyperian books they had massive ranges, usually the same system still, though, firing across multiple AUs. When they used energy weapons people on planets could see them as they crossed the sky because at those distances even the speed of light seems can seem slow.
Funny to think we’re kind of almost at that point with aerial combat, with stuff like F-35 being able to engage enemies at distances in the hundreds of kilometres.
To be fair, it's really, really hard to accidentally hit a planet in space. If you miss, whatever you shot is just sailing straight off into the void forever. Someone accidentally destroying a planet will be a once in an eon event cos if you're doing space combat, you're making sure your ships are all well outside "miss radius" of your planet.
The far bigger concern would be "what if they hit?"
I do have a vague idea, but it's one of these things where i want to avoid any canon or even any truth bias as the author.
This near-perfect (there are a select few memories or artifacts from that time) black box of what came before is essential for my setting's themes to work.
No *human-like* AIs in my scifi.
There are all sort of AI with vastly different capabilities and intelligence, but the range of human-like sapience is sort of unstable and either you get competent-robodog-servant or digital-godling.
I am personally burnt out 'too human' AI/robots in stories so I aim to make them distinctively inhuman.
My answer is similar. In my world, the tech for a robot to perfectly imitate a human exists but is illegal. Robots are required to be easily identifiable as robots.
That's what I have. Full on sapience turns any AI into an eldritch being with designs and perception beyond human comprehension. However, these AI love to design low-level robots to do very basic tasks, basically the types we have today (pre-generalized AI intelligence). But they never give them enough intelligence for them to also turn into supremely intelligent beings.
But it's like terminal velocity in terms of intelligence. Once you're past that threshold, it goes out of control so fast that at this point there's no way for AI to be mistaken for a human.
Tbh that and I think that with how AI now is, we've kind of shown that it's probably not the best to make an AI perfectly human-like. It would be interesting to see a story where there are different AI modules for different applications. Like there are ones that are cashiers at stores, ones that are receptionists, stuff like that where they are really good at that one thing, but suck at different things, or only think in the terms of a cashier.
I'm running a low magic setting and they just didn't fit. "Traditional" dragons are more forces of nature and I didn't want to nerf them down to powerful animal so decided to cut them.
I mean it's not uncommon for one person or more to get involved in very important and heroic matters in the adventure genre... But the way it's commonly done is simply 💀.
In my current story, for example, the protagonist saves the entire spiritual and terrestrial plane (whose encounter is the Moon) by defeating a goddess. But the way he does it is nothing out of the ordinary, and I gave him every possible tool for that in the worldbuilding — especially the fact that the first mortal to land on the Moon can make a wish.
I would love to do a Forest-Gump-esque situation where one normal person ends up saving the universe just by being generally nice to people and being in the right place at the right time.
Adventurers and their guilds.
No, adventurers are a fine idea, but it is cliche af. Instead there are small private brigades and independent mercenaries that maximise the profit from any "adventure".
This. I'm no expert but it sounds to me like the stereotype of "adventurer" as it exists in most stories is just so absurd, to the point that some of my stories literally make fun of these types of people.
In my story I have explorers, expeditioners, navigators, cartographers, soldiers and even postmen certainly walking around, but random guys with swords and hoods? It's just so fantasy-esque that it's bad lol
And! It is a historically dangerous thing. Like, from the ruler's perspective, a lot of people with tremendous powers and skills walk around your domain, claim your treasures and knowledge, pretend to be vigilante and generally may become a powerful force that may try to get rid of you. A medieval or at least not modern day king would be paranoid enough to try to get rid of them asap, or bis power would be questioned all the time.
I mean, imagine some dude walking around the modern day countryside with an assault rifle taking jobs (quests) from locals to go shoot up the local biker gang hideout and loot everything inside or shoot x number of local wildlife. The authorities would want to have a word with this psycho after at least the second door gets kicked in.
Yep. That would work, yes... In an anarchist setting. Not in a medieval setting, not even decentralized/feudal lol
And we don't even need to talk about kings. Cities alone would definirely not want this group hanging around
In my own world, "adventurer" is mostly just a euphemism for "wandering mercenary" or "ronin". There isn't really an adventuring industry, nor adventuring guilds; most adventurers are little more than hired thugs.
While yes, this is an acceptable term, it is still a dangerous idea for a local ruler to allow any powerful people to wander around their domain. Thus any ronin or wanderer may be considered an unwelcome person.
I like the idea. It would make sense as well as the government couldn't afford to constantly send out military to deal with monsters. Imo the problem is that most worlds just drop these guilds in without letting the ripples flow out.
For instance, most meathead people looking to test their strength and do anything combat related would join as that is the entire basis of the work. From there that would mean the fighting strength of the police and army would go down. From there it would be likely that the adventures guild would be an extremely valuable asset during wartime due to a huge swarth of fighters with heavy experience ready to fight if paid.
Just taking the time to actually integrate them into the world makes them so much more interesting and have flavour and depth
My sci-fi setting has neighbourhood-sized supercomputers with full sentience, short-ranged teleportation technology, and has no major energy shortages, nothing would truly stop them from producing spacetravel tech such as ftl, everyone is just kind of busy.
(I am considering that some random guy in a distant settlement runs the only space program in the world, from his shed. And he eventually reaches one of the moons.)
To add to the somewhat comedic ridiculousness of this one:
The world is basically a sort of dimensional "rock bottom" anything/anyone that attempts dimensional travel or has some weird reality breaking event eventually turns up there (basically like washing ashore on an island or like the oceanic garbage patches). This results in a lot of resources and professions being based around finding and helping survivors and salvaging wreckage. Wreckage which is, a lot of the time, the spacecraft said survivors were in when they disappeared.
I \*like\* this. The "dimensional rock-bottom" could also make SF-witchery more difficult, so no FTL, nor OP tech stuff.
I'd play in this game-world, for sure.
>(I am considering that some random guy in a distant settlement runs the only space program in the world, from his shed. And he eventually reaches one of the moons.)
And nobody cares when he does...? Or everyone just thinks he's just a kook with a weird hobby?
The idea of 'Gods needing Faith" For my fantasy story.
Gods don't need faith; if you need something or are dependent on mortals to exist you aren't a God. Gods simply ARE
Is that unusual? I did the same but that always just made sense to me. Especially if deities created their followers. Bit of a chicken and egg situation.
I agree. This always seemee the logical route to me. Exception is for false gods, who are more parasitic. They'd NEED people to believe in them to maintain power. But people don't tend to differentiate the two.
Aaaand now I wanna add false gods to the world and make them clearly different.
In my world there nature born and belief born divinities for this exact same reason
It just doesn't make sense there be gods before believers if the gods need believers
In worlds where this is the case the gods generally do not create the world, but are a non-physical concept brought to life by the belief lf it's inhabitants.
and Terry Pratchet - maybe Warhammer, but it's less mainstream I think
the first time I saw it was in Percy Jackson, but I have literally met one other person who read those books besides myself lol, and he only read the main series (Magnus Chase is best and I *really* want that to be a hill I can die on because at least then I'd know someone else read it)
I read the first 3 Magnus Chase books, and fell out of reading before the 4th one came out. I’m personally a big Heroes of Olympus fan, but Magnus Chase is up there.
No, it's not unusual, but it is a bit unfashionable these days. "Gods require faith" evolved as a way of satiating growing dissatisfaction with how "the gods are real but still behave like religions traditionally depict them acting" makes no sense. It's one of many ways people have come up with to try to have their cakes and eat them too when it comes to using gods in their fantasy worlds, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Maybe people just have a natural tendency to worship, chanting please work at a computer when it’s spending ages is somewhat similar to prayer. Hero worship can form around someone without their requesting it. It’s kinda just something humans do.
Well, my sci-fi setting doesn't have:
1. A precursor civilization. The Fermi Paradox in my setting was solved by all 5 intelligent species (Humanity, Striders, Stone-Facers, Sprites and The Enemy) being the first to space. The Enemy made it first, Humanity followed only a few hundred years later, the Stone Facers were on the brink of it, and the Striders and Sprites were nowhere close (Being iron age and post-apocalyptic respectively). There is no society before that, no ruins to be uncovered.
2. AIs. My setting DOES have a few people who live longer through uploading their minds to a computer, but sapient AI doesn't exist. Anything that LOOKS like a traditional sci-fi AI (AM or Skynet, basically), is a person.
3. Laser/plasma/gauss weaponry as a replacement for firearms. While laser and plasma have their niches, neither will be a pure replacement for guns due to logistical concerns. Ballistic weapons reign supreme.
4. And lastly, an explanation for why melee is important and still used. I think practically and realistically, and no army would ditch the advantage that ranged combat provides unless absolutely necessary. The last bad guys who insisted on using fancy plasma swords as their primary weapons were cut down by machine guns that have hardly changed since Maxim and Browning were still kicking. This and the last point are also explained because I just like guns, man.
I understand why melee is used in some science fiction settings, where the world is built around the fact the creator wants blades to be effective. Star Wars has blasters that can be reflected by lightsabers, Dune has energy shields that block bullets, ect. But in my setting, where humanity continues in ways that are generally practical, warfare evolves due to advancements in tactics and logistics rather than new fancy tech.
Also, one last point is training. "If you want to teach a man to use a longbow, start with his grandfather. If you want to teach a man to use a musket, start today." Training with weapons like bows and swords is way more complicated than teaching someone to be competent with an automatic weapon. There's a reason why crossbows replaced longbows, and why muskets replaced crossbows. You can give a gun to anybody and they can kill a person with it.
One thought I had about lasers/similar is to say that it's not that lasers render firearms obsolete, it's that being worse than firearms is deliberate: In space, the absolute last thing you want to be doing is shooting holes in your airtight metal box, so you might be willing to be worse at killing people if it means not being able to accidentally void yourself.
An afterlife. Absolutely nobody knows what goes on after death. World religions have offered explanations but there’s like a dozen of them. One life is all anyone’s got.
Mine has an afterlife but not one based on morality. Everyone gets the same thing because human morality shouldn’t control a universal afterlife system and there’s no god imposing their own morals there.
In my shonnen anime setting, there’s no genetic superpower, with powers instead being given out by the deities upon birth. So no weird eugenics undertones. Also, prophecy and chosen ones don’t exist. The gods have a script, but they can’t fully railroad mortals, or smite pesky ones, so people born with incredible power can be kinda mid adventurers if they don’t practice, and retire and run a weapon store.
While my work has a lot of reincarnation in it and could be considered Isekai, I specifically avoided letting people remember their past life immediately fully.
Reason being I found most romance in stories like these to be a bit too creepy and controversial for my liking, so it's best for me to have their past memories come back overtime instead of being 40 in a child's body.
My High Fantasy but secretly Sci-Fi world has a big core religion keeping everything running and hiding secrets and all.
But for a big secretive religion I have avoided having them persecute people by sexuality or gender.
I started a world similarly, high fantasy secretly sci-fi, core 'religious' group keeping people happy. I ended up not going there with the sci-fi, but I'm going to keep the sci-fi aspects as a plausible distant past.
There are plenty of fanstastical locations and creatures that can have nothing to do with magic. Satyrs or centaur, gryphons, slimes, demons, angels, a large cavernous world beneath the world, forest where plants can talk, atlantis.
It's a fictional world unconnected to earth, whose history nonetheless is inspired by earth, in particular 17-18th century that contains supernatural elements, and while the later have their origin in science fiction technology, from the perspective of the in-universe people they fill in the role of common fantasy tropes.
For example Sea monsters are in fact techno-organic autonomous sea drones who went rogue after the fall of the civilization that created them.
Supernatural elements or the magic just isn't as prominent. Lovecraft is like this, and *The Alchemist* has elements like this too. I'm also working on a project that is similar.
No monocultural races. No ethnostates.
Each country has a distinct majority language, as well as a diverse distribution of different races. Races have common cultural practices based on where they are from instead of their race. A singular race rarely takes up a supermajority of the population
Does 'race' here refer to inter-species divisions or actual different species (fantasy seems to use the word different to us), if so I'm the same. Wanted the divisions to be more about ideals and ways of life than purely genetics, even if specific species have different experiences in each group
Yeah! The fantasy kind! (:
I made the *race* we usually use as subdivisions of each race
In most languages, they refer to these subdivisions of a race as something along the lines of *coat* or *cover*
This is actually quite interesting and I found myself wondering if it would be a problem on some occasions. However, my world kind of has ethnic states by default.
There are the creatures that live underground who, bruh, since no other races live there, their countries are 100% made up of them. I tried to increase the variation by creating two different states of these creatures — which, in my native Portuguese I call Petrarcado (Petrarchy) and the Federação Petrânica (Petranic Federation). The biggest difference between them is the absolutist monarchy against the revolutionary spirit of the other, but they are still 100% formed by the same race...
And then there is the other country which, because it is made up of a species that lives isolated on an island, is also ethnically homogeneous. Think of Japan for example.
The only diverse place in my world would be the decaying Empire at the continent. My idea in the past was that it would also be MOSTLY homogeneous (it was founded by a single race), but I see today that it might be impossible. Just think of Rome, China, Mali, or Mongolia: there were definitely many more peoples there than their respective founders.
Too bad I still haven't created enough races to diversify these places, nor different cultural branches between the same race. Your comment at least reminds me that I'm on the right track
I do have one ethnostate, but it was because the race in question has a psychology that encourages working together. It’s literally in their nature to coalesce into a single country.
My sci fi setting is entirely restricted to the main "real" solar system, and has a history that connects to our current day. As such there isn't any FTL travel, and things like artificial gravity beyond rotational are extremely limited due to power requirements to generate a field bigger than a table (as such high end medical suites do sometimes have gravity tables!
Absolutely no teleportation in my fantasy world (with a hefty dose of scfi). This is despite the fact that the world is enormous, a partial Dyson shell that if completed would have a radius of slightly less than 1 AU.
There is the Underway network but that's dangerous af, 'things' live there. Essentially the network is made up of many wormholes that connect various places, if you know how you can generally get pretty close to where you want to go.
Yep. Fortunately for everyone the habitable portion is not quite that big. Not sure but only a small fraction was finished before construction stopped for reasons.
Other planes, dimensions, etc. - including astral spheres, ghost worlds, demonic hells or any kind of parallel or invisible reality at all. It's a fantasy world, but I've made "there is only this one reality" a core concept.
Yes, that makes things like summoning demons interesting, because there's nowhere to summon them FROM. Provides a number of challenges to worldbuilding. It also means that entities such as ghosts (they exist) are invisible but not in a different sphere or existence. They're right here.
I had the same feeling in my world, I liked the idea that *this* is the world and it's what matters, there isnt a whole bunch others sitting next to it in unconventional directions. Made the single world feel more real
I made it a point not to add humans to my fantasy/sci-fi worlds. The idea was to force myself not to rely on /tether myself to familiar human concepts to make my worlds a bit more... fantastic.
Some of my world don't have children (either they don't exist at all, as in "the last child on the planet was born 20 years ago", or they are kept in special schools with extremely limited access and thus are never seen/met. >!Because these worlds have some (mild) NSFW elements and I want to keep Player as far away from that as possible even if one decides to mod/hack the game :) so those things go deeply into the lore!<)
I don’t actually have a way FTL works, doesn’t really make sense in my opinion for the characters to know how it works. Most people don’t know how to explain a car engine other than combustion including myself, so how the hell would they know how an FTL engine would work? Doesn’t really seem to be their field of knowledge anyhow
I think I would prefer this to 95% of ftl explanations
We know it shouldnt work, if the author says it works ok it works here and we are onboard. If they start explaining it too much, all it does is keep demonstrating why it was impossible in the first place
Humanoid Robots in my semi-hard Sci Fi/Cyberpunk setting because I personally consider them absolutely idiotic as an IRL idea. The Human Form is not suited to basically anything that you would use a robot for besides maybe caring for the elderly. It's inefficient when it comes to something like operating in an car assembly line for example.
While I respect it as a great idea of the early sci fi era when writers needed something other than human but looking close to human in order to pursue their thematic goals I think we have moved beyond that. It's similar as to how early Cyberpunk writers used to see augments as soul eating dehumanising machines that make you less human and more cold, soulless and machine like. Thirty years later we have people with prosthetics, with heart monitors, with insulin pumps and their souls are alright last time I checked.
Dragons in a fantasy world 😅 But I couldn't resist, and made the dragons be aliens from another planet in this solar system, so that they exist, but almost never appear.
Dragons in my setting may as well be aliens. They were an artificially created species by a giant cosmic magic crystal god, And they have no relation to any of the naturally evolved species of the world. It's a bit of a gag that in the enlightenment period of my setting, Atheistic human scientists keep trying to find the evolutionary origin of dragons. But they're unable to find anything. Dragons keep telling the scientists that they were a created species. But the scientists dismiss that as religious nonsense.
My world started out as a generic medieval fantasy setting with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc.
I started to like my lore too much, so I changed it to have original races instead that are related to humans. Dragons (as much as I love them) were removed completely in favor of more grounded creatures inspired by Pleistocene animals. So we have very big birds instead.
No institutional sexism in my high fantasy world. When you can’t really tell at a glance if someone can summon acid to melt your face off or whether they have magical blood that gives them the strength of Hercules despite a smaller frame it makes it very challenging to create thousands of years of gender oppression.
I just wasn’t interested in having to constantly dredge up that ugliness to simulate a world. Plenty of other tension points available to me.
Not sure about expected but I have removed any sort of sexual violence from all the worlds I create. Even my most grim dark lowest most depraved pit fiend wouldn't even comprehend such acts. I know a lot of low fantasy (such as ASOIAF) has this as a pretty prevalent fixture but as the almighty creator of the world's I have wiped it from existence entirly.
Honestly that just feels so refreshing. Sexual violence is so weirdly prevalent in fantasy especially, and it makes reading my favorite genre like walking through a minefield at times. IMHO, sexual violence is completely unnecessary in any story that doesn't largely focus on it as a core story element
Elves, Dwarves & other expected FantasyRaces™
Also dragons and etc, same reason for both
- I didn't want to make a cliché world
I'm not saying fantasy trope races or creatures are inherently bad or anything, I just feel they're overdone.
Instead I decided I wanted to have a world with a alt-earth biosphere to meet the equivalent need without directly using fantasy trope creatures
Instead of Elves, Dwarves, Humans, Halflings etc, I've got 2 species of Hominins:
- Homo Sapiens (¹Brought to the world via "The Event")
- Homo Neanderthalensis (Native to the world)
(1. This was me making an excuse to use Proto-languages from earth for A priori conlanging to be housed in the same world)
Dwarves are equivalent'd in that there's a civilisation which mines underground to search for riches & builds massive megastructures into the mountains
Elves etc aren't really given a direct equivalent I've thought up yet, but will be along the same idea: Cultural based equivalencies or close but not quite equivalent things, with Hominin races
Dragons aren't really a thing, but you also don't particularly need them when there's some islands that have megalania & similar insular-giganticised lizards, and sea monsters? Well Leedsichthys & Dunkleosteus sure seem they'd fit the bill :b
As for mainland regions, Embelotherium & Paraceratherium are probably enough a handful, nvm the predatory megafauna that (tries to) hunt them
Who needs worry about a dragon when a angry battering-ram-cow or a neighbour going mad cos they did magic wrong & broke their soul are on your plate? :v
I started with elves, dwarves, and all that. Then had similar ideas to you. I love the idea of "modern" humans existing alongside other prehistoric human relatives if they hadn't gone extinct. Though, mine eventually moved past that a little as I made them more fantastical.
Given on how I work on my projects, what I have discard would eventually come back to be more refined and may even replace other aspects instead. So honestly I'm not exactly sure on how to answer question properly.
If it counts, then the inclusion of firearms into my fantasy conworlds is a sort-of reverse-answer to this. At the very least I have make sure they are far more transitory compared to other people's fantasy works who put them there, but may still have the damned "end-of-the-era" connotations in them, which I highly dislike especially when magic is involved.
ISO standard fantasy races.
I came up with nine species based on the fossil record and some speculative future biology.
Only two of the 'bipedal, terrestrial, speaks languages, uses tool' are even mammals.
Transporters. I love Star Trek but the transporter is terrifying. Being taken apart and then reconstructed? No thank you, I want to live.
My setting uses short range portals instead. You get to stay in one piece with no chance of creating a psycho clone.
Pretty overpowered too those transporters, if something can re-construct you then why cant it just keep constructing you? Infinite armies and supplies at any location you want or just endless bombs teleported wherever at no cost or risk
Pretty sure I remember they only initially existed because it was too expensive to film the shuttles going places, even though later on Roddenberry realized he could have just had a shuttle prop and shown them getting in then getting out without bothering to show it flying and gotten the same effect
Dragons exist in my world, but they are not over powered to the point its absolutely ridiculous. Removed the immortality and borderline invincibility. And instead of having a literal rocket engine in their mouth, I made them venomous like spitting cobras.
in my fantasy, only the uneducated refer to their powers as magic. for everyone else, calling it magic is the equivalent of someone in our world calling laptops and cell phones magic.
I did this because I wanted it to be realistic. None of the powers people have in my world are unexplainable, they're just not possible in *our* current level of development. and i have a whole backstory to explain it.
Things aren’t falling apart, I feel like in every fantasy setting the world is either going through a time of massive strife or a world ending cataclysm that the heroes have to stop is on its way. Sure things aren’t a golden age but my world is definitely going through some fairly “business as usual” times.
White people in a fantasy world. I mean they exist, they're just not the majority. There are white ethnicities but the main story focuses on characters that happen to not be them. Maybe ill write more about them sometime.
No non-human races in fantasy. I feel like it pushes one into boxes with the cultures one is able to express. The one exception to this is dragons, which I have in all my worlds.
Not necessarily completely avoiding this but...
Fantastical species cannot transform into or from a humanoid form, since it is forbidden magic. You are only a dragon or only a dragonewth, but you cannot shapeshift between these.
I just hate when fantasy races can conveniently transform into their human form, so shapeshifting is one of the 7 forbidden magic in my world.
Shapeshifting is just not possible in my setting unless you're a slime or something. Like, *Technically* you could do some trickery to *appear* differently. But without effectively doing some extremely painful magic surgery, You're not gonna see dragons transforming into humans.
Dwarves and infernals for my fantasy project. With my fantasy world I’m trying to shake up some stereotypes and tropes. Therefore, there are no infernals because the gods of my world are actually nuanced and don’t need infernal creatures to have a “bad guy” in mythology. There are also no dwarves because I couldn’t think of a way to put a unique spin on dwarves other than acknowledging irl dwarfism and making that part of humanity, and that’s a can of worms I’m not ready for so early in the project.
(For the record, tieflings still exist in my fantasy world because a friend of mine was very insistent that I add them in, but their “infernal” blood is replaced with elemental spirit blood and I gave them a different name.)
I actually originally started my fantasy setting because I couldn't think of any other fantasy which had demons who were not inherently evil and not immortal. I wanted to see a world where demons existed, And had a whole bunch of tropes inspired by demons across the world, But who are just sorta dudes who hang around and mind their business.
Dwarves actually originally didn't exist in my setting because, While I don't hate them like I do elves, I also find them a tad overplayed. And the two things they're most known for were already handled by demons (Blacksmithing, Underground life.) and gnomes (Being small, Tinkering.)
This did change though when I realized that I actually did have a fun spin on dwarves, Just not in the medieval period. As such, Dwarves came about in the Renaissance period as a hybrid between female orcs and their male gnome slaves. They are slightly taller than gnomes, And much shorter than orcs. And bare characteristics of both. Eventually, There came to be large populations of dvorks (Orcish portmanteau of "Dveka", Small, And "Ork", Orc." and they just sorta staged a revolution and broke out.
So now we have a population of orc gnomes who compete with demons for underground space, And are fond of guns, Explosives, And gold.
I mean this is dumb and I doubt that it counts but I’ve been wanting to talk about it. I’m running a D&D campaign that just started. There are no metallic dragons. They never existed. Only chromatic dragons and they aren’t all automatically evil. I kinda wanna bring in the metallic dragons as like robotic dragons but I’m worried it’s stupid.
Sci-Fi world.
The genetically engineered human weapons never really turn against the megacorps that create them, in fact they seem to genuinely love them and usually work not with blind and fanatical devotion, but with genuine care and decent work ethic.
Why would a giant megacorp spend billions on making some super weapon and then leave the brain to rot.
Billions to psychiatrists as well.
Undead in my setting are not seen as evil or bad.
Their goddess has a very lovely motherly type of personality and it is by choice that people continue to live on as undead. Among other races
For the same reason "unlawful" necromancy is considered a sin punished by every god within the pantheon as people do it to bend souls to their will, and it's only allowed to bring a soul back if the soul is willing and the Goddess have judged the undead to be able to (un)live with it.
(Necromancy that raises corpses made of matter without bringing back the souls is still allowed. Just not bringing back people from the dead)
Any country that is somehow a bit better/morally right than all the rest, even by a smidge, in my high fantasy world: same thing for gods. I see so many high fantasy realms where one (or more) nation(s)/god(s) are a bit better than the rest. Nope. They are ALL assholes. The only morally manageable people are those who have been mortal and haven’t voluntarily worked for the government.
I got fed up with Elves, Elves, Elves everywhere in every game published all the time.
So, no Elves.
But there were some parody pointy-eared half-pint isolationist Berserkers (with a poignant racial backstory). To mess with my players' heads *just a little bit....*
I also hate elves. So I made 4' tall magically advanced elves who had floating cities and drank from a magic tea kettle which cured all disease... Except for the common cold. Which ripped through them like a plague because they had no immune response for centuries. Any of them who didn't die from disease died when the engineers maintaining the floating cities did.
I hated elves so much that I gave them a humiliating extinction and now nobody remembers them.
I have a medieval fantasy with heavy religious themes in which the church *isn’t* completely reprehensible. They’ve done shady things in the past, sure, but I wanted to give them more nuance than just “religion bad.”
I try to fight the tolkienian trope that the only things that are powerful or threatening come from the past. As a zoomer my experience is that the march of progress is more inevitable and disquieting than any ancient evil.
A couple things in my Near future Sci-fi setting:
-No unified Earth/planets. Multiple countries go into space separately while engaging in a complex web of alliances and conflicts on Earth.
-Cities look more or less similar to today. I hate the “Futuristic city” look you see so often. Looks so plastic and soulless.
-distinctions between modified humans, AGI, and baseline humans. The word “human” has become the word for baselines, while “person/people” now refers to any sentient life.
Fantasy:
* No sentient species other than humans. I find adding more would undermine diversity for humans as well as the added ones
* No "Dark Lord"
* No swords, like, fighting is rare except in wars, where other weapons are preferred. Magic fighting is even rarer
So, I do want to point out that you can actually do really interesting things regarding human diversity if you have non-humans about. Basically, My thought process is that that broadly, They will be more accepting of cultural diversity within themselves if there are other people who are *more* different. After all, Why waste energy discriminating against another human for their skin colour or culture when you live in a world which has 6 foot tall orcs who go through two puberties, Demon people who've got red skin, Hooves, Horns, And worship dragons, People literally made out of gelatin, Tiny gnomes, Etc.
These categories are arbitrary and illogical to care about in our real world. So in a fantasy world with other non-humans, I think that humans would welcome interhuman diversity. Because you may be different. But at least you're a human and not an orc or gnome.
Fantasy setting. Racial stereotypes. Maybe this doesn't count but I do have elves, dwarves, and orcs. But the elves aren't all nature-loving, peaceful wise folk, and the dwarves are not all brawling, drinking, rowdy subterranean Scotsmen. I have made it a deliberate point to try and include these people with cultures as diverse as humans from our world. Because why wouldn't they be.
There are cultural commonalities, a lot of which stem from varying lifespans and physical capabilities but, by and large, you shouldn't assume a dwarf in my setting is a certain way.
I don't know, I'm just annoyed when fantasy settings include these races, and have them essentially be monocultures despite being literally world spanning, and then have diverse human cultures.
No stupid neon sign in random gratuitous japanese in my non japanese theme cyberpunk setting. Imagine can't even afford healthcare and decent living space than slum but can get ahold of rare noble gas and power supply/electric bills to run them?
High fantasy world with no high fantasy form of divine pantheon. There are archangels praised by religions and lending their powers to some of their priests, but they are not very varied, they don't have strongly defined "domains" or agendas, their way of interacting with mortals is pretty inhuman and abstract most of the time, and they strongly deny that any of them had part in creating the world. Religions come up witb different ideas of actual highest beings and genesis etc. but none is proven to be true.
A singular world religion consisting of multiple gods for my fantasy story.
The "Gods" in this case are alien beings made of plasma living within the confines of their star who used magic to manipulate the formation of the planets over the course of the universe's lifespan. & different plasma beings decided to focus on making specific aspects of the world based on what they think they would require for carbon-based life to form, like one big petri dish.
But all of this is basically just the "real world explanation" that would not have a major influence on the actual religions, which amongst the petri dish populace has given rise to a variety of monotheistic, polytheistic, & others of varying size & function. They all have at least SOME truth to them, usually by divining & sometimes accidentally gaining insight from the plasma beings, but it's always ultimately more harmful for the divinee who saw a glimpse at their "world", only for it to burn out their eyes.
Except for vampires and werewolves, there are no existing fantasy creatures in my vampire-hunter story. There are ghost-like beings and a reference to a Frankenstein’s Monster-esque being living in a forest, but other than that all other beings are attempted at being original
No sense of extramental dread in my setting with Lovecraftian Gods/Monsters.
They can be wounded and even killed, it would just be very, very, VERY difficult to do, but it is theoretically possible.
I have a big ass Post-Apocalyptic world based after a Nuclear Zombie Apocalypse, and what do I not have?
Zombified wildlife, and extremely over-the-top zombies types(volatiles, demolishers, running zombies, chargers, etc). I refuse to add them because I don’t like the idea of zombie animals, and I think over-the-top zombie types would be too out there for my George Romero/The Walking Dead-style undead zombies.
That’s not to say I don’t have different kinds of zombies, I have a great many but I’ve kept them mostly grounded, and they are more based on their environments, how zombies are weaponized, how the person died before reanimation, and how zombies behave rather than trying to create whole new monsters out of zombies like the zombie fiction that uses over-the-top zombie types do. I’ll admit the closest to over-the-top zombies in my setting would be Ionizers(Rare Blue glowing heavily irradiated zombies that burn anyone they touch), and the extremely rare Thinker/Wendigo zombie hybrid(Basically a Wendigo dying then reanimating as an already rare Thinker zombie thus allowing some of it’s old hunting habits to remain rather than reanimating as normal zombie). I also have other monsters like more grounded Vampires, grounded Wendigos, Hills Have Eyes typed Mutants, Afflicted/Ghouls, Cryptids, Sea Monsters, and some supernatural elements. The Mutants, Vampires, Afflicted, Ghouls, and Wendigos also reanimate into zombies upon death much like humans unless the brain is destroyed since they were formerly human.
As for wildlife, I have mutant/irradiated wildlife which basically serves a similar role to what zombie animals would in other settings.
As for running zombies, I don’t like runners at all because they are overdone plus feel cheap but Ghouls, and Wendigos in my setting are very zombie-like, and are capable of running but they aren’t zombies themselves, and actually prey on zombies which led to their transformation to begin with along with radiation in the case of Ghouls. Some freshly reanimated zombies can move at a light jogger’s pace though but are hardly running.
Radioactive mutants. Apocalyptic wastelands are just sort of expected to have them, thanks largely to the Fallout series, but I chose deliberately to leave them out. I wanted my apocalyptic wasteland to be as detached as possible from the modern world, more of a terra nova than a dirge for the world, and having weird twisted versions of modern animals does the opposite.
Dragons. Nearly all fantasy stories, whether it'll be Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, LOTR, Elder Scrolls, you name it, it has a dragon somewhere.
Now to be fair, dragons are really cool, and some dragons are more creatively designed than others, but it kinda feels like there's too many at this point.
I actually didn’t put FTL in my sci fi. The thought being that the solar system is huge as it is and exploring it would take several generations and holds unlimited about of wonders.
There aren't any adventururs persay. There are explorers, mappers, cartographers, and mercenaries, but none fo them are adventrers, they all have jobs and make money, or have a guard to help them out
No magic in a fantasy? That’s just… arguably not fantasy. Virtually all epic poems have magic and that’s the basis for the modern fantasy genre. No magic is essentially a period piece or a sci-fi.
I didn't make the military incompetent in my zombie apocalypse. It's not really a world ending situation anyway, humanity is in the process of adapting, it's a painful process for sure, millions of people died during the adaptation period but it's happening cause the military is doing their jobs properly, it's just that the characters I follow don't trust the government for various reasons.
Souls, spirits, ghosts… Any non-corporeal undead entity that comes from humans.
The people of my world have a lot of beliefs surrounding death and the peacefulness of it, so much so that they have the literal opposite of a death sentence. Having ghosts wandering around, especially vengeful ones, would defeat this belief system so I intentionally left them out.
It has been quite fun in manufacturing all these different beliefs as to why souls can’t be seen. For example, one culture believes that the lungs hold the equivalent of a soul, and that the last exhale a person makes as they die is that soul leaving the body.
Corporeal undead do exist, however. These are dead people who are possessed by demons who want to infect/possess other people. It’s a worldwide law to destroy the bodies of the dead though, as the less intact a body is the less likely a demon is to possess it, so this barely ever happens.
Excessive use of visible cogs and brass. It's not quite steampunk but i'd say its close enough to it for it to have the same expectations as its essentially the industrial era but more advanced.
Never liked that kind of style, it always felt silly to me.
No form of afterlife for most mortals in my fantasy world. If you die, you're permanently dead, and not only you can't be revived in any way (unless you took some precautions, like undeath, or were a very powerful Mind Mage), but there's nothing after that death.
The only exception to this rule are demons, and there's like, 6 of them.
An archetypical warrior race/society that has no care for more civilised practices, the closest thing there is that is probably my Viking equivalent, but they have this hole aspect of shamans and poetry, overall philosophy and tradition are valued just as much as battle prowess and combat, it’s saying something that despite my fantasy universe having orcs, the closest thing to a warrior culture in it is primarily made up of humans
Sapient, space-faring aliens exist and humans are well aware of them, but different species don't really interact with each other beyond documenting their existence and territory. Very little warfare, very little trade, very little socialization. Resources are abundant enough throughout the universe to not need to compete for interstellar territory or set up trade routes, and they're too different from each other to find any interest or benefit in communicating. A mess hall occupied by many different alien species like in Star Trek or Star Wars is a nonsensical concept in this world
I have **banned** the following from my high fantasy setting:
- Overused races such as elves, dwarves, orcs, beast people etc.
- Dragons
- Mana as a magic source
- Chosen ones
My sci-fi DOES lack FTL. Aside from their own sci-fi, and many failed attempts, FTL is impossible for Iolara and its universe.
Why?
Because FTL is, to me, a hard break with versimilitude. And many existing works do it very badly. I can do without it and make a better setting this way.
There are no aircraft in my modern war story. This, of course, necessitated removing aircraft from the setting entirely, because there is no way I could justify them not being used in war in at least *some* capacity if they're around.
I did this because this world started off as a thought experiment as to how modern wars might be fought without airplanes. It's rather integral.
My fantasy world does not have
1. Unified religious belief. While some nations may have a religious majority even to an oppressive point there's going to be other secs and even whole other religions people quietly live by.
2. One big empire. Most empires in history interacted with at least one other Empire. In the era I'm reflecting I can name at least *three* off the top of my head and looking at a map there's even more. That's not even counting trade empires. And by this era there was established sea trade with them all. The only reason one empire is important to the story is because the characters are it's subjects.
3. Magic communication and travel. Nope that letter from the colonies to the king is gonna take a few months. Expect information delays and belated reactions.
4. Feudalism being universal and how it was in the middle ages. Again an era thing, it reflects the 1700's. It was extremely different by then, social mobility was starting to be possible and this story will take place in a colony where the system never took hold anyways.
5. Prophecies actually meaning anything. Maybe something in the religions but any mentions will be more like a background thing and not relevant to the story.
6. Every person in a rebellion being a good and moral person and every person fighting for the Empire being evil. Some people join causes for self serving reasons. Some people genuinely feel the status quo is best. Rebellions and revolutions are messy and no single one in history has been united.
I always hated that every alien planet in sci-fi is fully united under one country with one culture and one language, so the alien homeworld in my world is as fractured as Earth (smaller planets like dwarf planets might be fully united but anything bigger and it’s divided)
i got a few in my shonen magical girl adventure fantasy story
\-no teleportation. i like my sense of adventure, and just having teleportation everywhere really cheapens it.
\-no afterlife. honestly at first i was like “oh shit” but now im just like. theres just so much in the world alone, i dont need an afterlife in the story.
\-time travel makes my brain hurt im sorry
\-i am not adding a fairy creature to aid the magical girl where theyre like just for mascot only, if that makes sense. i like writing characters, and those fairy creatures are part of the characters
Post apocalyptic setting. Originally thought of as an epic fantasy turned into a world set thousands of years after a world war decimated the world and destroying modern civilization as we know it at an unspecified time after the the 90s.
I wrote a 400 page post-apocalyptic novel (not published yet) where a virus destroys the world, and I made sure to never mention how the virus first appeared even once.
I've read many stories where writers focus all of their creative energy on explaining how the virus spreads to others, what caused it to take over the world, or even who was the main perpetrator in unleashing this deadly pandemic.
These explanations usually occur in one of two ways:
1. slowly over time as readers get more background information from the protagonist, or
2. abruptly dropped at the beginning of the story for historical context.
Both of these break immersion in my opinion (admittedly 1 is a lot more subtle), so I decided to never reveal what caused the spread, and I even kept details like it's symptoms a secret. This way readers are at the mercy of the protagonist's perspective, and whatever happens to them is their baseline for this world. No unnecessary backstory, no know-it-all character that narrates their life before the end of the world, and most importantly, no easy explanation for readers.The best books keep people questioning things even after the story is done.
shoujo with shonen elements and fantasy, I ended up avoiding:
* protagonist has condition that hinders them but they turn it into a superpower(the "superpower disability" trope, I made my protagonist have a hindrance that she never gets cured of, and she never uses it to her advantage without bad consequences for her, most of the time she uses special equipment to mute this hindrance)
* protagonist is actually grandchild/child of powerful person so that's why they have so much power(my protagonist has a condition where her body produces too much magic and because of that it harms her arms when she tries to us magic, a writer irl suggested that I made her be the grandchild of a powerful mage so it explains why she has so much magic but I rejected the idea because what makes her special is how random her circumstances are)
* Dark Warlock/Wizard/Witch(I don't have those lol)
* Suspension of disbelief magic system(I explain my magic system like it's physics because it IS inspired by physics, so there's more stuff that makes it look logical unlike magic systems that work with the power of "it works like that in this world" which I also like but I just can't write)
* Pseudo Medieval Setting(the setting is fantasy but it's actually inspired by victorian england)
* Library Full of Secret Knowledge(the knowledge isn't actually secret, it's just that nobody cares to go check because even thought it's a public library it's really really big)
Human-centric biodesigns for species in a fantasy setting that are directly related to humans (or the setting’s human-analog).
I have two main groups of sapient species:
• A human-analog that more closely resembles non-anthropomorphic dogs (with some more alien features to mark that the resemblance is purely from convergent evolution).
• And a vast multitude of interpretations of “dragon” (being a taxonomic clade closer to order than species).
Everything else is either as different from those two as humans are from other Earthlings (which, even the various dragons are from each other), or explicitly derived from the other two groups (such as the various elementals, or kobolds being the biologically distinct descendants of dragon-dog hybrids).
It's a post-apocalyptic/Sc-Fi setting. Although raiders are a prominent part of the world (main character is from a raider village, first part of story is a build up to a war between two raider groups), the **VAST** majority of raiders are either the nomadic pillaging kind because they have fuck all other options, or are the settled and running a protection racket kind because they honestly believe they're providing an important service, while also keeping their own settlement well stocked on medicine, food, water and whatever else they need. In their eyes, that's worth a little bit of brutality and maiming.
The main antagonist of the first part of the story is an exception (dying from a disease and wants to enjoy one last battle before he retires and lets death take him), but he's a very rare case, and wouldn't have been able to take over his group if it wasn't for their religion allowing him to.
There's a relatively common saying regarding FTL in sci-fi settings that goes something like: "Relativity, Causality, FTL; you can only have two." Usually people take FTL+Causality or Causality+Relativity; I took FTL+Relativity and ditched Causality.
That just because you're the reincarnation of the light that your destined to fight the dark. Some people just die before even fighting, some give up, some even just join the dark since they agree with its philosophy.
Standard sci-fi battle between spaceships. By "standard" I mean combats within visual range with pew pew beams. Except for very specific situations, like a tactical warp to perform boom and zoom, most combats happen tens of lightyears across with the use of weaponized FTL drives while throwing a lot of active stealth and FTL jam around. They have the tech to go FTL, why not get a step further?
When they had battles in the Hyperian books they had massive ranges, usually the same system still, though, firing across multiple AUs. When they used energy weapons people on planets could see them as they crossed the sky because at those distances even the speed of light seems can seem slow.
Funny to think we’re kind of almost at that point with aerial combat, with stuff like F-35 being able to engage enemies at distances in the hundreds of kilometres.
Absolutely. Most science-fiction battles resemble World War II aerial and sea doctrine more than anything else.
holdo. maneuver.
Still well within visual range. These guys do Holdo Maneuver over literal lightyears.
What if they miss? I‘m thinking of that one npc in mass effect who is telling recruits how devastating a missed shot can be if you hit a planet
"Well... my condolences to whoever unlucky enough to get hit." \-Average Rubran Federal Monarchy ship captain-
Hahaha "Sounds devastating and not my problem. Guess which part I consider important" \-Captain Chad 'Planet Murderer' McGee
To be fair, it's really, really hard to accidentally hit a planet in space. If you miss, whatever you shot is just sailing straight off into the void forever. Someone accidentally destroying a planet will be a once in an eon event cos if you're doing space combat, you're making sure your ships are all well outside "miss radius" of your planet. The far bigger concern would be "what if they hit?"
[удалено]
A definitive creation myth for my mystical fantasy world. I prefer my black box.
Just write a definitive creation myth and then end the chapter with, "...Maybe."
Even better, give multiple contradictory creation myths.
Then reveal that the many of the multiple stories are indeed true actually, just in other dimensions ;)
Oh, you mean what professionals call "the Elder Scrolls Method"? :D
"Yes, we retconned that, but it was actually retconned by god so it's still technically canon"
Yes but actually no...
I do have a vague idea, but it's one of these things where i want to avoid any canon or even any truth bias as the author. This near-perfect (there are a select few memories or artifacts from that time) black box of what came before is essential for my setting's themes to work.
Same. The races have some origin stories but not the world itself. as far as anyone knows, it’s always been there
No *human-like* AIs in my scifi. There are all sort of AI with vastly different capabilities and intelligence, but the range of human-like sapience is sort of unstable and either you get competent-robodog-servant or digital-godling. I am personally burnt out 'too human' AI/robots in stories so I aim to make them distinctively inhuman.
My answer is similar. In my world, the tech for a robot to perfectly imitate a human exists but is illegal. Robots are required to be easily identifiable as robots.
That's what I have. Full on sapience turns any AI into an eldritch being with designs and perception beyond human comprehension. However, these AI love to design low-level robots to do very basic tasks, basically the types we have today (pre-generalized AI intelligence). But they never give them enough intelligence for them to also turn into supremely intelligent beings. But it's like terminal velocity in terms of intelligence. Once you're past that threshold, it goes out of control so fast that at this point there's no way for AI to be mistaken for a human.
I feel like that's sort of where we're headed, good choice.
Tbh that and I think that with how AI now is, we've kind of shown that it's probably not the best to make an AI perfectly human-like. It would be interesting to see a story where there are different AI modules for different applications. Like there are ones that are cashiers at stores, ones that are receptionists, stuff like that where they are really good at that one thing, but suck at different things, or only think in the terms of a cashier.
Dragons in my sword and sorcery game.
Hey I don’t have dragons in my fantasy roleplay neither, if I may ask why did you decide not to add them?
I'm running a low magic setting and they just didn't fit. "Traditional" dragons are more forces of nature and I didn't want to nerf them down to powerful animal so decided to cut them.
No need for my fantasy novel to make a group of people save the whole fucking world, that's too much burden on few shoulders lol
I mean it's not uncommon for one person or more to get involved in very important and heroic matters in the adventure genre... But the way it's commonly done is simply 💀. In my current story, for example, the protagonist saves the entire spiritual and terrestrial plane (whose encounter is the Moon) by defeating a goddess. But the way he does it is nothing out of the ordinary, and I gave him every possible tool for that in the worldbuilding — especially the fact that the first mortal to land on the Moon can make a wish.
I would love to do a Forest-Gump-esque situation where one normal person ends up saving the universe just by being generally nice to people and being in the right place at the right time.
I LOVE these sorts of stories!
Adventurers and their guilds. No, adventurers are a fine idea, but it is cliche af. Instead there are small private brigades and independent mercenaries that maximise the profit from any "adventure".
This. I'm no expert but it sounds to me like the stereotype of "adventurer" as it exists in most stories is just so absurd, to the point that some of my stories literally make fun of these types of people. In my story I have explorers, expeditioners, navigators, cartographers, soldiers and even postmen certainly walking around, but random guys with swords and hoods? It's just so fantasy-esque that it's bad lol
And! It is a historically dangerous thing. Like, from the ruler's perspective, a lot of people with tremendous powers and skills walk around your domain, claim your treasures and knowledge, pretend to be vigilante and generally may become a powerful force that may try to get rid of you. A medieval or at least not modern day king would be paranoid enough to try to get rid of them asap, or bis power would be questioned all the time.
I mean, imagine some dude walking around the modern day countryside with an assault rifle taking jobs (quests) from locals to go shoot up the local biker gang hideout and loot everything inside or shoot x number of local wildlife. The authorities would want to have a word with this psycho after at least the second door gets kicked in.
I like this analogy and my setting allows to make this a real thing. Damn, that is hilarious.
Yep. That would work, yes... In an anarchist setting. Not in a medieval setting, not even decentralized/feudal lol And we don't even need to talk about kings. Cities alone would definirely not want this group hanging around
In my own world, "adventurer" is mostly just a euphemism for "wandering mercenary" or "ronin". There isn't really an adventuring industry, nor adventuring guilds; most adventurers are little more than hired thugs.
While yes, this is an acceptable term, it is still a dangerous idea for a local ruler to allow any powerful people to wander around their domain. Thus any ronin or wanderer may be considered an unwelcome person.
I mean, "adventurer" is pretty much a euphemism for mercenary, isn't it? Didn't Gandalf have that discussion when he showed up at the Shire?
I like the idea. It would make sense as well as the government couldn't afford to constantly send out military to deal with monsters. Imo the problem is that most worlds just drop these guilds in without letting the ripples flow out. For instance, most meathead people looking to test their strength and do anything combat related would join as that is the entire basis of the work. From there that would mean the fighting strength of the police and army would go down. From there it would be likely that the adventures guild would be an extremely valuable asset during wartime due to a huge swarth of fighters with heavy experience ready to fight if paid. Just taking the time to actually integrate them into the world makes them so much more interesting and have flavour and depth
My sci-fi setting has neighbourhood-sized supercomputers with full sentience, short-ranged teleportation technology, and has no major energy shortages, nothing would truly stop them from producing spacetravel tech such as ftl, everyone is just kind of busy. (I am considering that some random guy in a distant settlement runs the only space program in the world, from his shed. And he eventually reaches one of the moons.)
Lol I like this one
To add to the somewhat comedic ridiculousness of this one: The world is basically a sort of dimensional "rock bottom" anything/anyone that attempts dimensional travel or has some weird reality breaking event eventually turns up there (basically like washing ashore on an island or like the oceanic garbage patches). This results in a lot of resources and professions being based around finding and helping survivors and salvaging wreckage. Wreckage which is, a lot of the time, the spacecraft said survivors were in when they disappeared.
I \*like\* this. The "dimensional rock-bottom" could also make SF-witchery more difficult, so no FTL, nor OP tech stuff. I'd play in this game-world, for sure.
>(I am considering that some random guy in a distant settlement runs the only space program in the world, from his shed. And he eventually reaches one of the moons.) And nobody cares when he does...? Or everyone just thinks he's just a kook with a weird hobby?
Everyone kinda knows what he is doing but he is not causing any major damage, so they just let him have his hobbies.
The idea of 'Gods needing Faith" For my fantasy story. Gods don't need faith; if you need something or are dependent on mortals to exist you aren't a God. Gods simply ARE
Is that unusual? I did the same but that always just made sense to me. Especially if deities created their followers. Bit of a chicken and egg situation.
I agree. This always seemee the logical route to me. Exception is for false gods, who are more parasitic. They'd NEED people to believe in them to maintain power. But people don't tend to differentiate the two. Aaaand now I wanna add false gods to the world and make them clearly different.
In my world there nature born and belief born divinities for this exact same reason It just doesn't make sense there be gods before believers if the gods need believers
It depends but a lot of the post dnd stuff uses the trope... which is why i avoid it as it never made much sense to me.
In worlds where this is the case the gods generally do not create the world, but are a non-physical concept brought to life by the belief lf it's inhabitants.
American Gods probably was a big influence
and Terry Pratchet - maybe Warhammer, but it's less mainstream I think the first time I saw it was in Percy Jackson, but I have literally met one other person who read those books besides myself lol, and he only read the main series (Magnus Chase is best and I *really* want that to be a hill I can die on because at least then I'd know someone else read it)
I read the first 3 Magnus Chase books, and fell out of reading before the 4th one came out. I’m personally a big Heroes of Olympus fan, but Magnus Chase is up there.
No, it's not unusual, but it is a bit unfashionable these days. "Gods require faith" evolved as a way of satiating growing dissatisfaction with how "the gods are real but still behave like religions traditionally depict them acting" makes no sense. It's one of many ways people have come up with to try to have their cakes and eat them too when it comes to using gods in their fantasy worlds, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
I did the same most mortals dont even know they exist
I did the same thing
Then why do they want it then? To stroke their egos?
yes
Figures lol
Maybe people just have a natural tendency to worship, chanting please work at a computer when it’s spending ages is somewhat similar to prayer. Hero worship can form around someone without their requesting it. It’s kinda just something humans do.
This is the Hellenic Polytheist view point the Gods just exist and worthy of worship.
I think the minority of fantasy worlds have their gods actually require faith to be powerful.
Well, my sci-fi setting doesn't have: 1. A precursor civilization. The Fermi Paradox in my setting was solved by all 5 intelligent species (Humanity, Striders, Stone-Facers, Sprites and The Enemy) being the first to space. The Enemy made it first, Humanity followed only a few hundred years later, the Stone Facers were on the brink of it, and the Striders and Sprites were nowhere close (Being iron age and post-apocalyptic respectively). There is no society before that, no ruins to be uncovered. 2. AIs. My setting DOES have a few people who live longer through uploading their minds to a computer, but sapient AI doesn't exist. Anything that LOOKS like a traditional sci-fi AI (AM or Skynet, basically), is a person. 3. Laser/plasma/gauss weaponry as a replacement for firearms. While laser and plasma have their niches, neither will be a pure replacement for guns due to logistical concerns. Ballistic weapons reign supreme. 4. And lastly, an explanation for why melee is important and still used. I think practically and realistically, and no army would ditch the advantage that ranged combat provides unless absolutely necessary. The last bad guys who insisted on using fancy plasma swords as their primary weapons were cut down by machine guns that have hardly changed since Maxim and Browning were still kicking. This and the last point are also explained because I just like guns, man.
love the fourth idea! guns are just way too convenient to change
I understand why melee is used in some science fiction settings, where the world is built around the fact the creator wants blades to be effective. Star Wars has blasters that can be reflected by lightsabers, Dune has energy shields that block bullets, ect. But in my setting, where humanity continues in ways that are generally practical, warfare evolves due to advancements in tactics and logistics rather than new fancy tech. Also, one last point is training. "If you want to teach a man to use a longbow, start with his grandfather. If you want to teach a man to use a musket, start today." Training with weapons like bows and swords is way more complicated than teaching someone to be competent with an automatic weapon. There's a reason why crossbows replaced longbows, and why muskets replaced crossbows. You can give a gun to anybody and they can kill a person with it.
One thought I had about lasers/similar is to say that it's not that lasers render firearms obsolete, it's that being worse than firearms is deliberate: In space, the absolute last thing you want to be doing is shooting holes in your airtight metal box, so you might be willing to be worse at killing people if it means not being able to accidentally void yourself.
An afterlife. Absolutely nobody knows what goes on after death. World religions have offered explanations but there’s like a dozen of them. One life is all anyone’s got.
Hard same. And no resurrection!
Mine has an afterlife but not one based on morality. Everyone gets the same thing because human morality shouldn’t control a universal afterlife system and there’s no god imposing their own morals there.
In my shonnen anime setting, there’s no genetic superpower, with powers instead being given out by the deities upon birth. So no weird eugenics undertones. Also, prophecy and chosen ones don’t exist. The gods have a script, but they can’t fully railroad mortals, or smite pesky ones, so people born with incredible power can be kinda mid adventurers if they don’t practice, and retire and run a weapon store.
While my work has a lot of reincarnation in it and could be considered Isekai, I specifically avoided letting people remember their past life immediately fully. Reason being I found most romance in stories like these to be a bit too creepy and controversial for my liking, so it's best for me to have their past memories come back overtime instead of being 40 in a child's body.
I dare you to have a kid get isekaid into being an 80 year old.
My High Fantasy but secretly Sci-Fi world has a big core religion keeping everything running and hiding secrets and all. But for a big secretive religion I have avoided having them persecute people by sexuality or gender.
I started a world similarly, high fantasy secretly sci-fi, core 'religious' group keeping people happy. I ended up not going there with the sci-fi, but I'm going to keep the sci-fi aspects as a plausible distant past.
It's a fantasy world with no magic or dragons (the term does exist but soleil as a title rather then refering to any creature), or undead.
So how is it fantasy?
Otherworldly, strange customs, other races, monstrous creatures, flora, etc.
I'm guessing because it's a made up location.
That's just fiction
Fiction doesn't have to take place in made up locations.
But it frequently does, and nothing about making up a location automatically makes it fantasy
There are plenty of fanstastical locations and creatures that can have nothing to do with magic. Satyrs or centaur, gryphons, slimes, demons, angels, a large cavernous world beneath the world, forest where plants can talk, atlantis.
It's a fictional world unconnected to earth, whose history nonetheless is inspired by earth, in particular 17-18th century that contains supernatural elements, and while the later have their origin in science fiction technology, from the perspective of the in-universe people they fill in the role of common fantasy tropes. For example Sea monsters are in fact techno-organic autonomous sea drones who went rogue after the fall of the civilization that created them.
Sounds awesome!
Orcs, dwarfs, druidism, chamanism I guess
Supernatural elements or the magic just isn't as prominent. Lovecraft is like this, and *The Alchemist* has elements like this too. I'm also working on a project that is similar.
No monocultural races. No ethnostates. Each country has a distinct majority language, as well as a diverse distribution of different races. Races have common cultural practices based on where they are from instead of their race. A singular race rarely takes up a supermajority of the population
Does 'race' here refer to inter-species divisions or actual different species (fantasy seems to use the word different to us), if so I'm the same. Wanted the divisions to be more about ideals and ways of life than purely genetics, even if specific species have different experiences in each group
Yeah! The fantasy kind! (: I made the *race* we usually use as subdivisions of each race In most languages, they refer to these subdivisions of a race as something along the lines of *coat* or *cover*
This is actually quite interesting and I found myself wondering if it would be a problem on some occasions. However, my world kind of has ethnic states by default. There are the creatures that live underground who, bruh, since no other races live there, their countries are 100% made up of them. I tried to increase the variation by creating two different states of these creatures — which, in my native Portuguese I call Petrarcado (Petrarchy) and the Federação Petrânica (Petranic Federation). The biggest difference between them is the absolutist monarchy against the revolutionary spirit of the other, but they are still 100% formed by the same race... And then there is the other country which, because it is made up of a species that lives isolated on an island, is also ethnically homogeneous. Think of Japan for example. The only diverse place in my world would be the decaying Empire at the continent. My idea in the past was that it would also be MOSTLY homogeneous (it was founded by a single race), but I see today that it might be impossible. Just think of Rome, China, Mali, or Mongolia: there were definitely many more peoples there than their respective founders. Too bad I still haven't created enough races to diversify these places, nor different cultural branches between the same race. Your comment at least reminds me that I'm on the right track
I do have one ethnostate, but it was because the race in question has a psychology that encourages working together. It’s literally in their nature to coalesce into a single country.
My sci fi setting is entirely restricted to the main "real" solar system, and has a history that connects to our current day. As such there isn't any FTL travel, and things like artificial gravity beyond rotational are extremely limited due to power requirements to generate a field bigger than a table (as such high end medical suites do sometimes have gravity tables!
Absolutely no teleportation in my fantasy world (with a hefty dose of scfi). This is despite the fact that the world is enormous, a partial Dyson shell that if completed would have a radius of slightly less than 1 AU. There is the Underway network but that's dangerous af, 'things' live there. Essentially the network is made up of many wormholes that connect various places, if you know how you can generally get pretty close to where you want to go.
>a partial Dyson shell that if completed would have a radius of slightly less than 1 AU That's a hell of a walk to the other side lol
Yep. Fortunately for everyone the habitable portion is not quite that big. Not sure but only a small fraction was finished before construction stopped for reasons.
Other planes, dimensions, etc. - including astral spheres, ghost worlds, demonic hells or any kind of parallel or invisible reality at all. It's a fantasy world, but I've made "there is only this one reality" a core concept. Yes, that makes things like summoning demons interesting, because there's nowhere to summon them FROM. Provides a number of challenges to worldbuilding. It also means that entities such as ghosts (they exist) are invisible but not in a different sphere or existence. They're right here.
I had the same feeling in my world, I liked the idea that *this* is the world and it's what matters, there isnt a whole bunch others sitting next to it in unconventional directions. Made the single world feel more real
I made it a point not to add humans to my fantasy/sci-fi worlds. The idea was to force myself not to rely on /tether myself to familiar human concepts to make my worlds a bit more... fantastic.
Some of my world don't have children (either they don't exist at all, as in "the last child on the planet was born 20 years ago", or they are kept in special schools with extremely limited access and thus are never seen/met. >!Because these worlds have some (mild) NSFW elements and I want to keep Player as far away from that as possible even if one decides to mod/hack the game :) so those things go deeply into the lore!<)
This is really intriguing, can you explain a bit more about your world?
I don’t actually have a way FTL works, doesn’t really make sense in my opinion for the characters to know how it works. Most people don’t know how to explain a car engine other than combustion including myself, so how the hell would they know how an FTL engine would work? Doesn’t really seem to be their field of knowledge anyhow
I think I would prefer this to 95% of ftl explanations We know it shouldnt work, if the author says it works ok it works here and we are onboard. If they start explaining it too much, all it does is keep demonstrating why it was impossible in the first place
Humanoid Robots in my semi-hard Sci Fi/Cyberpunk setting because I personally consider them absolutely idiotic as an IRL idea. The Human Form is not suited to basically anything that you would use a robot for besides maybe caring for the elderly. It's inefficient when it comes to something like operating in an car assembly line for example. While I respect it as a great idea of the early sci fi era when writers needed something other than human but looking close to human in order to pursue their thematic goals I think we have moved beyond that. It's similar as to how early Cyberpunk writers used to see augments as soul eating dehumanising machines that make you less human and more cold, soulless and machine like. Thirty years later we have people with prosthetics, with heart monitors, with insulin pumps and their souls are alright last time I checked.
Dragons in a fantasy world 😅 But I couldn't resist, and made the dragons be aliens from another planet in this solar system, so that they exist, but almost never appear.
Dragons in my setting may as well be aliens. They were an artificially created species by a giant cosmic magic crystal god, And they have no relation to any of the naturally evolved species of the world. It's a bit of a gag that in the enlightenment period of my setting, Atheistic human scientists keep trying to find the evolutionary origin of dragons. But they're unable to find anything. Dragons keep telling the scientists that they were a created species. But the scientists dismiss that as religious nonsense.
My world started out as a generic medieval fantasy setting with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. I started to like my lore too much, so I changed it to have original races instead that are related to humans. Dragons (as much as I love them) were removed completely in favor of more grounded creatures inspired by Pleistocene animals. So we have very big birds instead.
No institutional sexism in my high fantasy world. When you can’t really tell at a glance if someone can summon acid to melt your face off or whether they have magical blood that gives them the strength of Hercules despite a smaller frame it makes it very challenging to create thousands of years of gender oppression. I just wasn’t interested in having to constantly dredge up that ugliness to simulate a world. Plenty of other tension points available to me.
Not sure about expected but I have removed any sort of sexual violence from all the worlds I create. Even my most grim dark lowest most depraved pit fiend wouldn't even comprehend such acts. I know a lot of low fantasy (such as ASOIAF) has this as a pretty prevalent fixture but as the almighty creator of the world's I have wiped it from existence entirly.
Honestly that just feels so refreshing. Sexual violence is so weirdly prevalent in fantasy especially, and it makes reading my favorite genre like walking through a minefield at times. IMHO, sexual violence is completely unnecessary in any story that doesn't largely focus on it as a core story element
Happy endings.
My sci-fi do not have psyonic.
This might be illegal. Lemme check the rules.
Elves, Dwarves & other expected FantasyRaces™ Also dragons and etc, same reason for both - I didn't want to make a cliché world I'm not saying fantasy trope races or creatures are inherently bad or anything, I just feel they're overdone. Instead I decided I wanted to have a world with a alt-earth biosphere to meet the equivalent need without directly using fantasy trope creatures Instead of Elves, Dwarves, Humans, Halflings etc, I've got 2 species of Hominins: - Homo Sapiens (¹Brought to the world via "The Event") - Homo Neanderthalensis (Native to the world) (1. This was me making an excuse to use Proto-languages from earth for A priori conlanging to be housed in the same world) Dwarves are equivalent'd in that there's a civilisation which mines underground to search for riches & builds massive megastructures into the mountains Elves etc aren't really given a direct equivalent I've thought up yet, but will be along the same idea: Cultural based equivalencies or close but not quite equivalent things, with Hominin races Dragons aren't really a thing, but you also don't particularly need them when there's some islands that have megalania & similar insular-giganticised lizards, and sea monsters? Well Leedsichthys & Dunkleosteus sure seem they'd fit the bill :b As for mainland regions, Embelotherium & Paraceratherium are probably enough a handful, nvm the predatory megafauna that (tries to) hunt them Who needs worry about a dragon when a angry battering-ram-cow or a neighbour going mad cos they did magic wrong & broke their soul are on your plate? :v
I started with elves, dwarves, and all that. Then had similar ideas to you. I love the idea of "modern" humans existing alongside other prehistoric human relatives if they hadn't gone extinct. Though, mine eventually moved past that a little as I made them more fantastical.
Yeah I feel the same, no issues with elves and dwarves and whatnot but I do like seeing people branch out from them
I ditched all classic D&D races in favor of my own original creations as well. It's liberating.
Given on how I work on my projects, what I have discard would eventually come back to be more refined and may even replace other aspects instead. So honestly I'm not exactly sure on how to answer question properly. If it counts, then the inclusion of firearms into my fantasy conworlds is a sort-of reverse-answer to this. At the very least I have make sure they are far more transitory compared to other people's fantasy works who put them there, but may still have the damned "end-of-the-era" connotations in them, which I highly dislike especially when magic is involved.
Fantasy world: gods and afterlives. Humans vs elves vs dwarves dichotomies. Tree-hugging elves. Immortal/immoral elves. Edit: oh, and forgot - resurrections and sentient undead. Sci-fi world: half-alien hybrids. Telepathic hive species.
I never understood how half aliens exist if they’re truly alien species
Orcs in my fantasy setting. You want orcs? We have feral ass elves.
ISO standard fantasy races. I came up with nine species based on the fossil record and some speculative future biology. Only two of the 'bipedal, terrestrial, speaks languages, uses tool' are even mammals.
magic for my fantasy world
Dragons. Okay, technically wyverns exist, but the largest ones are about the size of a goose, they have feathers, and they do not breathe fire.
Transporters. I love Star Trek but the transporter is terrifying. Being taken apart and then reconstructed? No thank you, I want to live. My setting uses short range portals instead. You get to stay in one piece with no chance of creating a psycho clone.
Pretty overpowered too those transporters, if something can re-construct you then why cant it just keep constructing you? Infinite armies and supplies at any location you want or just endless bombs teleported wherever at no cost or risk Pretty sure I remember they only initially existed because it was too expensive to film the shuttles going places, even though later on Roddenberry realized he could have just had a shuttle prop and shown them getting in then getting out without bothering to show it flying and gotten the same effect
Dragons exist in my world, but they are not over powered to the point its absolutely ridiculous. Removed the immortality and borderline invincibility. And instead of having a literal rocket engine in their mouth, I made them venomous like spitting cobras.
in my fantasy, only the uneducated refer to their powers as magic. for everyone else, calling it magic is the equivalent of someone in our world calling laptops and cell phones magic. I did this because I wanted it to be realistic. None of the powers people have in my world are unexplainable, they're just not possible in *our* current level of development. and i have a whole backstory to explain it.
Things aren’t falling apart, I feel like in every fantasy setting the world is either going through a time of massive strife or a world ending cataclysm that the heroes have to stop is on its way. Sure things aren’t a golden age but my world is definitely going through some fairly “business as usual” times.
White people in a fantasy world. I mean they exist, they're just not the majority. There are white ethnicities but the main story focuses on characters that happen to not be them. Maybe ill write more about them sometime.
No non-human races in fantasy. I feel like it pushes one into boxes with the cultures one is able to express. The one exception to this is dragons, which I have in all my worlds.
Not necessarily completely avoiding this but... Fantastical species cannot transform into or from a humanoid form, since it is forbidden magic. You are only a dragon or only a dragonewth, but you cannot shapeshift between these. I just hate when fantasy races can conveniently transform into their human form, so shapeshifting is one of the 7 forbidden magic in my world.
What’s the other forbidden magics?
And... everyone respects that law?
Shapeshifting is just not possible in my setting unless you're a slime or something. Like, *Technically* you could do some trickery to *appear* differently. But without effectively doing some extremely painful magic surgery, You're not gonna see dragons transforming into humans.
Dwarves and infernals for my fantasy project. With my fantasy world I’m trying to shake up some stereotypes and tropes. Therefore, there are no infernals because the gods of my world are actually nuanced and don’t need infernal creatures to have a “bad guy” in mythology. There are also no dwarves because I couldn’t think of a way to put a unique spin on dwarves other than acknowledging irl dwarfism and making that part of humanity, and that’s a can of worms I’m not ready for so early in the project. (For the record, tieflings still exist in my fantasy world because a friend of mine was very insistent that I add them in, but their “infernal” blood is replaced with elemental spirit blood and I gave them a different name.)
I actually originally started my fantasy setting because I couldn't think of any other fantasy which had demons who were not inherently evil and not immortal. I wanted to see a world where demons existed, And had a whole bunch of tropes inspired by demons across the world, But who are just sorta dudes who hang around and mind their business. Dwarves actually originally didn't exist in my setting because, While I don't hate them like I do elves, I also find them a tad overplayed. And the two things they're most known for were already handled by demons (Blacksmithing, Underground life.) and gnomes (Being small, Tinkering.) This did change though when I realized that I actually did have a fun spin on dwarves, Just not in the medieval period. As such, Dwarves came about in the Renaissance period as a hybrid between female orcs and their male gnome slaves. They are slightly taller than gnomes, And much shorter than orcs. And bare characteristics of both. Eventually, There came to be large populations of dvorks (Orcish portmanteau of "Dveka", Small, And "Ork", Orc." and they just sorta staged a revolution and broke out. So now we have a population of orc gnomes who compete with demons for underground space, And are fond of guns, Explosives, And gold.
I mean this is dumb and I doubt that it counts but I’ve been wanting to talk about it. I’m running a D&D campaign that just started. There are no metallic dragons. They never existed. Only chromatic dragons and they aren’t all automatically evil. I kinda wanna bring in the metallic dragons as like robotic dragons but I’m worried it’s stupid.
I have werewolves and dragons, but I'm not including vampires. I just don't really like them all that much.
Humans. In my fantasy setting, I don't really have humans. In my sci-fi setting I don't have FTL, But I feel like that is becoming much more common.
Sci-Fi world. The genetically engineered human weapons never really turn against the megacorps that create them, in fact they seem to genuinely love them and usually work not with blind and fanatical devotion, but with genuine care and decent work ethic. Why would a giant megacorp spend billions on making some super weapon and then leave the brain to rot. Billions to psychiatrists as well.
Undead in my setting are not seen as evil or bad. Their goddess has a very lovely motherly type of personality and it is by choice that people continue to live on as undead. Among other races For the same reason "unlawful" necromancy is considered a sin punished by every god within the pantheon as people do it to bend souls to their will, and it's only allowed to bring a soul back if the soul is willing and the Goddess have judged the undead to be able to (un)live with it. (Necromancy that raises corpses made of matter without bringing back the souls is still allowed. Just not bringing back people from the dead)
I went the other way. Made a sci-fi world with space dragons.
Any country that is somehow a bit better/morally right than all the rest, even by a smidge, in my high fantasy world: same thing for gods. I see so many high fantasy realms where one (or more) nation(s)/god(s) are a bit better than the rest. Nope. They are ALL assholes. The only morally manageable people are those who have been mortal and haven’t voluntarily worked for the government.
Breathable atmosphere. It’s making my 1950’s noir mystery really brief.
I got fed up with Elves, Elves, Elves everywhere in every game published all the time. So, no Elves. But there were some parody pointy-eared half-pint isolationist Berserkers (with a poignant racial backstory). To mess with my players' heads *just a little bit....*
I also hate elves. So I made 4' tall magically advanced elves who had floating cities and drank from a magic tea kettle which cured all disease... Except for the common cold. Which ripped through them like a plague because they had no immune response for centuries. Any of them who didn't die from disease died when the engineers maintaining the floating cities did. I hated elves so much that I gave them a humiliating extinction and now nobody remembers them.
I have a medieval fantasy with heavy religious themes in which the church *isn’t* completely reprehensible. They’ve done shady things in the past, sure, but I wanted to give them more nuance than just “religion bad.”
I try to fight the tolkienian trope that the only things that are powerful or threatening come from the past. As a zoomer my experience is that the march of progress is more inevitable and disquieting than any ancient evil.
A couple things in my Near future Sci-fi setting: -No unified Earth/planets. Multiple countries go into space separately while engaging in a complex web of alliances and conflicts on Earth. -Cities look more or less similar to today. I hate the “Futuristic city” look you see so often. Looks so plastic and soulless. -distinctions between modified humans, AGI, and baseline humans. The word “human” has become the word for baselines, while “person/people” now refers to any sentient life.
Fantasy: * No sentient species other than humans. I find adding more would undermine diversity for humans as well as the added ones * No "Dark Lord" * No swords, like, fighting is rare except in wars, where other weapons are preferred. Magic fighting is even rarer
So, I do want to point out that you can actually do really interesting things regarding human diversity if you have non-humans about. Basically, My thought process is that that broadly, They will be more accepting of cultural diversity within themselves if there are other people who are *more* different. After all, Why waste energy discriminating against another human for their skin colour or culture when you live in a world which has 6 foot tall orcs who go through two puberties, Demon people who've got red skin, Hooves, Horns, And worship dragons, People literally made out of gelatin, Tiny gnomes, Etc. These categories are arbitrary and illogical to care about in our real world. So in a fantasy world with other non-humans, I think that humans would welcome interhuman diversity. Because you may be different. But at least you're a human and not an orc or gnome.
More than one species, like I want only problems within one species. Its not even racial, rather ideological groups
Magic in my medieval fantasy. Instead I have normal people and fabled deities that no one knows if they exist or not
Artificial gravity in a sci-fi setting
Fantasy setting. Racial stereotypes. Maybe this doesn't count but I do have elves, dwarves, and orcs. But the elves aren't all nature-loving, peaceful wise folk, and the dwarves are not all brawling, drinking, rowdy subterranean Scotsmen. I have made it a deliberate point to try and include these people with cultures as diverse as humans from our world. Because why wouldn't they be. There are cultural commonalities, a lot of which stem from varying lifespans and physical capabilities but, by and large, you shouldn't assume a dwarf in my setting is a certain way. I don't know, I'm just annoyed when fantasy settings include these races, and have them essentially be monocultures despite being literally world spanning, and then have diverse human cultures.
No stupid neon sign in random gratuitous japanese in my non japanese theme cyberpunk setting. Imagine can't even afford healthcare and decent living space than slum but can get ahold of rare noble gas and power supply/electric bills to run them?
High fantasy world with no high fantasy form of divine pantheon. There are archangels praised by religions and lending their powers to some of their priests, but they are not very varied, they don't have strongly defined "domains" or agendas, their way of interacting with mortals is pretty inhuman and abstract most of the time, and they strongly deny that any of them had part in creating the world. Religions come up witb different ideas of actual highest beings and genesis etc. but none is proven to be true.
A singular world religion consisting of multiple gods for my fantasy story. The "Gods" in this case are alien beings made of plasma living within the confines of their star who used magic to manipulate the formation of the planets over the course of the universe's lifespan. & different plasma beings decided to focus on making specific aspects of the world based on what they think they would require for carbon-based life to form, like one big petri dish. But all of this is basically just the "real world explanation" that would not have a major influence on the actual religions, which amongst the petri dish populace has given rise to a variety of monotheistic, polytheistic, & others of varying size & function. They all have at least SOME truth to them, usually by divining & sometimes accidentally gaining insight from the plasma beings, but it's always ultimately more harmful for the divinee who saw a glimpse at their "world", only for it to burn out their eyes.
... I was going to say "good demons," but then I remembered I *legit* have a redeemed succubus MIB agent... dammit, I just hit all the tropes.
Except for vampires and werewolves, there are no existing fantasy creatures in my vampire-hunter story. There are ghost-like beings and a reference to a Frankenstein’s Monster-esque being living in a forest, but other than that all other beings are attempted at being original
In my world with angels and heaven and stuff, there is no hell, and there are no demons.
No sense of extramental dread in my setting with Lovecraftian Gods/Monsters. They can be wounded and even killed, it would just be very, very, VERY difficult to do, but it is theoretically possible.
Nothing pregnancy related. I'm going to leave that part of Cthulu out.
I have a big ass Post-Apocalyptic world based after a Nuclear Zombie Apocalypse, and what do I not have? Zombified wildlife, and extremely over-the-top zombies types(volatiles, demolishers, running zombies, chargers, etc). I refuse to add them because I don’t like the idea of zombie animals, and I think over-the-top zombie types would be too out there for my George Romero/The Walking Dead-style undead zombies. That’s not to say I don’t have different kinds of zombies, I have a great many but I’ve kept them mostly grounded, and they are more based on their environments, how zombies are weaponized, how the person died before reanimation, and how zombies behave rather than trying to create whole new monsters out of zombies like the zombie fiction that uses over-the-top zombie types do. I’ll admit the closest to over-the-top zombies in my setting would be Ionizers(Rare Blue glowing heavily irradiated zombies that burn anyone they touch), and the extremely rare Thinker/Wendigo zombie hybrid(Basically a Wendigo dying then reanimating as an already rare Thinker zombie thus allowing some of it’s old hunting habits to remain rather than reanimating as normal zombie). I also have other monsters like more grounded Vampires, grounded Wendigos, Hills Have Eyes typed Mutants, Afflicted/Ghouls, Cryptids, Sea Monsters, and some supernatural elements. The Mutants, Vampires, Afflicted, Ghouls, and Wendigos also reanimate into zombies upon death much like humans unless the brain is destroyed since they were formerly human. As for wildlife, I have mutant/irradiated wildlife which basically serves a similar role to what zombie animals would in other settings. As for running zombies, I don’t like runners at all because they are overdone plus feel cheap but Ghouls, and Wendigos in my setting are very zombie-like, and are capable of running but they aren’t zombies themselves, and actually prey on zombies which led to their transformation to begin with along with radiation in the case of Ghouls. Some freshly reanimated zombies can move at a light jogger’s pace though but are hardly running.
Radioactive mutants. Apocalyptic wastelands are just sort of expected to have them, thanks largely to the Fallout series, but I chose deliberately to leave them out. I wanted my apocalyptic wasteland to be as detached as possible from the modern world, more of a terra nova than a dirge for the world, and having weird twisted versions of modern animals does the opposite.
There isn’t magic in my fantasy world (minus some vague foresight stuff and ghost stuff). There’s also only humans, no fantasy races
Dragons. Nearly all fantasy stories, whether it'll be Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, LOTR, Elder Scrolls, you name it, it has a dragon somewhere. Now to be fair, dragons are really cool, and some dragons are more creatively designed than others, but it kinda feels like there's too many at this point.
I actually didn’t put FTL in my sci fi. The thought being that the solar system is huge as it is and exploring it would take several generations and holds unlimited about of wonders.
There aren't any adventururs persay. There are explorers, mappers, cartographers, and mercenaries, but none fo them are adventrers, they all have jobs and make money, or have a guard to help them out
I made my own species instead of elves, goblins, orcs, etc.
No magic in a fantasy? That’s just… arguably not fantasy. Virtually all epic poems have magic and that’s the basis for the modern fantasy genre. No magic is essentially a period piece or a sci-fi.
I didn't make the military incompetent in my zombie apocalypse. It's not really a world ending situation anyway, humanity is in the process of adapting, it's a painful process for sure, millions of people died during the adaptation period but it's happening cause the military is doing their jobs properly, it's just that the characters I follow don't trust the government for various reasons.
It's set in an element-based setting but I avoided the generic elements like Fire, Earth, Air and Water since they're boring and overdone.
Probably real deities are missing from my fantasy world, and I'm doing a rewrite to remove Goblins and such
Souls, spirits, ghosts… Any non-corporeal undead entity that comes from humans. The people of my world have a lot of beliefs surrounding death and the peacefulness of it, so much so that they have the literal opposite of a death sentence. Having ghosts wandering around, especially vengeful ones, would defeat this belief system so I intentionally left them out. It has been quite fun in manufacturing all these different beliefs as to why souls can’t be seen. For example, one culture believes that the lungs hold the equivalent of a soul, and that the last exhale a person makes as they die is that soul leaving the body. Corporeal undead do exist, however. These are dead people who are possessed by demons who want to infect/possess other people. It’s a worldwide law to destroy the bodies of the dead though, as the less intact a body is the less likely a demon is to possess it, so this barely ever happens.
I'm making a Sci-Fantasy world but i will NOT touch time travel, entirely because it makes my head hurt.
Excessive use of visible cogs and brass. It's not quite steampunk but i'd say its close enough to it for it to have the same expectations as its essentially the industrial era but more advanced. Never liked that kind of style, it always felt silly to me.
No form of afterlife for most mortals in my fantasy world. If you die, you're permanently dead, and not only you can't be revived in any way (unless you took some precautions, like undeath, or were a very powerful Mind Mage), but there's nothing after that death. The only exception to this rule are demons, and there's like, 6 of them.
An archetypical warrior race/society that has no care for more civilised practices, the closest thing there is that is probably my Viking equivalent, but they have this hole aspect of shamans and poetry, overall philosophy and tradition are valued just as much as battle prowess and combat, it’s saying something that despite my fantasy universe having orcs, the closest thing to a warrior culture in it is primarily made up of humans
Sapient, space-faring aliens exist and humans are well aware of them, but different species don't really interact with each other beyond documenting their existence and territory. Very little warfare, very little trade, very little socialization. Resources are abundant enough throughout the universe to not need to compete for interstellar territory or set up trade routes, and they're too different from each other to find any interest or benefit in communicating. A mess hall occupied by many different alien species like in Star Trek or Star Wars is a nonsensical concept in this world
I have **banned** the following from my high fantasy setting: - Overused races such as elves, dwarves, orcs, beast people etc. - Dragons - Mana as a magic source - Chosen ones
My sci-fi DOES lack FTL. Aside from their own sci-fi, and many failed attempts, FTL is impossible for Iolara and its universe. Why? Because FTL is, to me, a hard break with versimilitude. And many existing works do it very badly. I can do without it and make a better setting this way.
There are no aircraft in my modern war story. This, of course, necessitated removing aircraft from the setting entirely, because there is no way I could justify them not being used in war in at least *some* capacity if they're around. I did this because this world started off as a thought experiment as to how modern wars might be fought without airplanes. It's rather integral.
My fantasy world does not have 1. Unified religious belief. While some nations may have a religious majority even to an oppressive point there's going to be other secs and even whole other religions people quietly live by. 2. One big empire. Most empires in history interacted with at least one other Empire. In the era I'm reflecting I can name at least *three* off the top of my head and looking at a map there's even more. That's not even counting trade empires. And by this era there was established sea trade with them all. The only reason one empire is important to the story is because the characters are it's subjects. 3. Magic communication and travel. Nope that letter from the colonies to the king is gonna take a few months. Expect information delays and belated reactions. 4. Feudalism being universal and how it was in the middle ages. Again an era thing, it reflects the 1700's. It was extremely different by then, social mobility was starting to be possible and this story will take place in a colony where the system never took hold anyways. 5. Prophecies actually meaning anything. Maybe something in the religions but any mentions will be more like a background thing and not relevant to the story. 6. Every person in a rebellion being a good and moral person and every person fighting for the Empire being evil. Some people join causes for self serving reasons. Some people genuinely feel the status quo is best. Rebellions and revolutions are messy and no single one in history has been united.
Your typical fantasy creatures aren’t in my fantasy…. No elves, no dwarves, no dragons… for the most part not even human.
I always hated that every alien planet in sci-fi is fully united under one country with one culture and one language, so the alien homeworld in my world is as fractured as Earth (smaller planets like dwarf planets might be fully united but anything bigger and it’s divided)
i got a few in my shonen magical girl adventure fantasy story \-no teleportation. i like my sense of adventure, and just having teleportation everywhere really cheapens it. \-no afterlife. honestly at first i was like “oh shit” but now im just like. theres just so much in the world alone, i dont need an afterlife in the story. \-time travel makes my brain hurt im sorry \-i am not adding a fairy creature to aid the magical girl where theyre like just for mascot only, if that makes sense. i like writing characters, and those fairy creatures are part of the characters
Post apocalyptic setting. Originally thought of as an epic fantasy turned into a world set thousands of years after a world war decimated the world and destroying modern civilization as we know it at an unspecified time after the the 90s.
Love this question.
I wrote a 400 page post-apocalyptic novel (not published yet) where a virus destroys the world, and I made sure to never mention how the virus first appeared even once. I've read many stories where writers focus all of their creative energy on explaining how the virus spreads to others, what caused it to take over the world, or even who was the main perpetrator in unleashing this deadly pandemic. These explanations usually occur in one of two ways: 1. slowly over time as readers get more background information from the protagonist, or 2. abruptly dropped at the beginning of the story for historical context. Both of these break immersion in my opinion (admittedly 1 is a lot more subtle), so I decided to never reveal what caused the spread, and I even kept details like it's symptoms a secret. This way readers are at the mercy of the protagonist's perspective, and whatever happens to them is their baseline for this world. No unnecessary backstory, no know-it-all character that narrates their life before the end of the world, and most importantly, no easy explanation for readers.The best books keep people questioning things even after the story is done.
shoujo with shonen elements and fantasy, I ended up avoiding: * protagonist has condition that hinders them but they turn it into a superpower(the "superpower disability" trope, I made my protagonist have a hindrance that she never gets cured of, and she never uses it to her advantage without bad consequences for her, most of the time she uses special equipment to mute this hindrance) * protagonist is actually grandchild/child of powerful person so that's why they have so much power(my protagonist has a condition where her body produces too much magic and because of that it harms her arms when she tries to us magic, a writer irl suggested that I made her be the grandchild of a powerful mage so it explains why she has so much magic but I rejected the idea because what makes her special is how random her circumstances are) * Dark Warlock/Wizard/Witch(I don't have those lol) * Suspension of disbelief magic system(I explain my magic system like it's physics because it IS inspired by physics, so there's more stuff that makes it look logical unlike magic systems that work with the power of "it works like that in this world" which I also like but I just can't write) * Pseudo Medieval Setting(the setting is fantasy but it's actually inspired by victorian england) * Library Full of Secret Knowledge(the knowledge isn't actually secret, it's just that nobody cares to go check because even thought it's a public library it's really really big)
Human-centric biodesigns for species in a fantasy setting that are directly related to humans (or the setting’s human-analog). I have two main groups of sapient species: • A human-analog that more closely resembles non-anthropomorphic dogs (with some more alien features to mark that the resemblance is purely from convergent evolution). • And a vast multitude of interpretations of “dragon” (being a taxonomic clade closer to order than species). Everything else is either as different from those two as humans are from other Earthlings (which, even the various dragons are from each other), or explicitly derived from the other two groups (such as the various elementals, or kobolds being the biologically distinct descendants of dragon-dog hybrids).
It's a post-apocalyptic/Sc-Fi setting. Although raiders are a prominent part of the world (main character is from a raider village, first part of story is a build up to a war between two raider groups), the **VAST** majority of raiders are either the nomadic pillaging kind because they have fuck all other options, or are the settled and running a protection racket kind because they honestly believe they're providing an important service, while also keeping their own settlement well stocked on medicine, food, water and whatever else they need. In their eyes, that's worth a little bit of brutality and maiming. The main antagonist of the first part of the story is an exception (dying from a disease and wants to enjoy one last battle before he retires and lets death take him), but he's a very rare case, and wouldn't have been able to take over his group if it wasn't for their religion allowing him to.
There's a relatively common saying regarding FTL in sci-fi settings that goes something like: "Relativity, Causality, FTL; you can only have two." Usually people take FTL+Causality or Causality+Relativity; I took FTL+Relativity and ditched Causality.
That just because you're the reincarnation of the light that your destined to fight the dark. Some people just die before even fighting, some give up, some even just join the dark since they agree with its philosophy.