Generic Fantasy is Well Designed for Conflict
As I've been writing a non-Tolkien fantasy setting for Runecycle I've begun to understand why generic fantasy settings are the way they are. I have a slightly odd way of writing the setting, as I think about the things in the setting as tools to facilitate adventure. Generic fantasy settings are perfectly built for conflict. Here's what I mean:
- Dangerous animals and monsters can be anything and found anywhere.
- There are good gods directing good players to do good things and evil gods just making problems because that is what they do.
- There are all kinds of magical beings that can cause all manner of magical problems from demons to fairies to angels.
- Most people are at least a little desperate, creating great grounds for both heroes and villains.
- There are intelligent species of many kinds, and some are hostile to humans, creating easy conditions for conflict.
- There are other dimensions, which just by existing create problems.
And that's just the ones I could come up with off the top of my head.
As I've been working on my own world I've struggled to actually come up with adventure ideas. I think this is why. Because I have a fantasy game where you do fantasy things it's harder to make things work when there aren't all of these inherent conflicts built into the setting. When I made the choice to not have intelligent nonhuman species in the game I shut out one easy conflict (emphasis on easy). When I chose to leave the gods out for the most part I lost another driving force of evil (I'm bringing that back a bit). I've not written any other dimensions yet, which locks me out of otherworldly evils.
It's not that you need these things to write a good setting. But it has been interesting to basically stumble into the fantasy tropes again by trying to design a setting for adventure. Quite many times I've thought to myself "man, this would be so much easier if I had goblins."
