How to avoid this?
Seems like a fun setting.
look at everything that is there.
do not put those things in your setting.
Make a good game and let the minutia of the maps fade.
Study geology and plate tectonics
>>46490760
Make sure not to use mountains, forests, bodies of water, landmasses, or nations in your setting. Also make it a grimderp shades of black setting because good guys are cliche but bad guys are just cool.
>>46490760
Avoiding cliché is easy. Try to come up with some ideas for something. Keep doing it. all the ideas that come to you easily, all your first ideas, will be be clichéd rubbish. That's why they occurred to you first, because you've already seen them before a thousand times. You thought of them first because they were obvious. So all you have to do is keep coming up with more ideas, until you run out of clichés and start coming up with more original stuff. That's what "thinking outside the box" is. Not just accepting the obvious ideas that occur to first and stopping there, but continuing the process of generating ideas until you actually start coming up with new ones as opposed to merely regurgitating stuff you've already seen somewhere else.
>>46490760
There is nothing wrong with cliches (and rpg tropes), they provide a way to set the tone and establish conventions that everyone is familiar with. The best thing you can do is use as many or as few as will serve the campaign. The worst thing you could do is dismiss or subvert every cliche in a reactionary way because somebody on /tg/ told you they were bad.
Like anything else, they are tools in the wise gm's toolkit.
Someone post the one that's just Europe rotated 90 degrees
>>46490876
Yeah, there should be literally nothing in your setting at all. It's all been done before so why bother.
Do not run from it. Embrace it.
>>46492000
Trips of truth.
One thing that might help is not trying to write out the whole campaign world at once. Let it develop as your players interact with. Or start in the Kingdom of Generica and slowly make it weirder, or put it next door to the Kingdom of Psychedelic Mushroom Tiger Shamans
There's a reason that LotR started out in the Shire, a land of quaint farming villages that would have been comfortingly familiar to Tolkien's readers.
>>46490760
Sit at home and do literally nothing since everything has been done before.
>>46490992
>Avoiding cliché is easy
>troll logic
So is flying a Chinese jet fighter:
Just aim at the ground and miss.
Detail is the difference between generic and original. Put in enough details and anything will ook original. Try to take details from multiple different inspirations; for instance, instead of making a country that is basically just Britain, make Britain, but with France's revolutionary history and then give it the Italian language and culture.
Another way to avoid genericness is to make things interconnect. Tie each nation to its neighbors; for naval powers, tie them to faraway lands. Adjacent regions are going to have long histories of conflict, of trade, of cultural or ethnic ties, et cetera. Consider that most royal families of Europe were actually related, and it wasn't unheard of for one dynasty to have members on multiple thrones. Giving each land in a setting ties to other countries makes the setting look thought-out and planned, even if you're going as generic as adapting real-world countries or fantasy staples.
>>46493046
>Kingdom of Psychedelic Mushroom Tiger Shamans.
im adding this to my setting
>>46495949
This desu
>>46490760
Start by not using a goddamn continent as the setting of your campaign if you're unable to fill it with original places. Think small scale.
Nobody has any complaint about unoriginal city maps besides "what's the deal with thieves' guilds?"
Find your inspiration from real life history or sc-fi rather than Tolkien. Still possible to for that, but much harder.
>>46490862
My nigga. I start the world by figuring out the tectonics. Tons of details flow naturally from that. From there you always keep the environment in mind when building.
>>46497283
Talk about starting from the ground up.
>>46490862
THIS
So many fantasy maps are cringeworthy as fuck with their utterly random placement of geological features like mountains.
If you can place where fault lines, mountains, major rivers, and large bodies of water go everything else stems from that naturally. National boundaries tend to follow geological features like rivers or mountain ranges, though these are sometimes subject to change from things like wars - still, these are often the dividing lines between culturally distinctive regions. This should also inform general climate patterns, and from climate you can naturally figure out where large agricultural areas will go (well-irrigated plains with rivers near them in warmer environments). Remember that major cities are almost always near bodies of water, either on rivers or coastlines. Once you have those placed you can figure out political boundaries and trade routes quite naturally.
It sounds like a lot, but once you get used to thinking this way it's actually MUCH easier than randomly scattering shit across the map, because it tells you where things should go.
>>46497422
>National boundaries tend to follow geological features like rivers or mountain ranges, though these are sometimes subject to change from things like wars
Sidenote: Natural borders tend to be crooked and jagged because they follow terrain features. Politically-defined borders tend to be unnaturally straight (though not always, as a treaty could define a border for instance at a trench line in a war, or along a terrain feature). This distinction can help you generate historical notes, like if a territory was conquered in the past.
>>46490862
But my setting is a land resting upon the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a giant sea turtles swimming through the ether. The closest thing it has to plate tectonics is one of the elephants farting.
>>46490826
this map looks nice
>>46497536
determine how often does an elephant fart, how his fart affects the world it is carrying, determine how many times has the elephant farted during the world's history and according to that make the landscape of your world
if you work it out well enough, you world will look believable even though it ain't following conventional tectonics
four elephants are zero excuse
>>46494724
>Just aim at the ground and miss.
taht's how flying actually works
just read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
>>46493096
/thread
>>46497588
It's also orbital mechanics in a nutshell.
>>46497536
Such an original setting.
>>46497680
true that
>>46497536
Why?
>>46497729
For the purpose of making a Discworld joke.
