Artistic liberties in your settings or lore?
>changes you make to traditional fantasy that completely warp the genre, and could maybe even be argued as profane
I'm curios as to what /tg/ has to share on the subject. Tell me about the quirks or homebrews that exist in your setting that go against the traditional.
An example of mine is that there is only one language. Everyone speaks the same language and unless you're just uneducated or sheltered you could understand anyone and everyone.
>>48307965
Define traditional fantasy.
>>48307977
Let's go with games like Pathfinder or D&D.
Probably should have elaborated, anon, my bad.
>>48307965
Player characters in my games are almost always regular people easily overwhelmed by large numbers of NPCs. They're also punished for acting like retards.
>>48308076
I like that.
I had a player run into a room full of enemies once and when he was beaten to a pulp his argument was, "But I'm the hero?!"
>>48308094
>hero
Gotta love players who think they deserve to be special.
>>48308076
Gotta be careful with that line of thinking though. Some level of acting outside of the norm is to be expected of fantasy settings for a reason, being that it doesn't work without it. If you dump on your players whenever they try to do something cool or unusual, eventually you just get this:
>'Okay, my regular person PC goes back to his potato farm.'
>'To do what?'
>'Farm potatoes.'
>'Why?'
>'Because whenever I try to do anything interesting you piss on me from a great height.'
Which actually happened in one of the campaigns I was playing in. The GM was one of those 'REALISTIC CONSEQUENCES!!!' types, which translated to PCs being arrested by guards if they tried to get information from a mobster via intimidation, being executed for pick-pocketing the keys to a dilapidated water mill, and being told to fuck off when offering expertise to help investigate a murder that occurred in an inn.
>>48307965
Wizards have to choose a school of specialize in. As they progress in power, their "mana" evolves in such a way that it specializes at casting these kinds of spells, however as a result they can't cast spells above level 1 in other schools of magic.
With sorcerors and witches and other such classes, they have to convince me the spells they want to learn somehow fit with the "theme" of their bloodline, patron, or whatever the source of their magical powers is.
This goes a loooong way to fixing the "wizards can make the entire party useless because they can do everything on their own" problem.
>>48307965
The setting I'm running now is deliberately de-Tolkienized and de-D&D-ified in certain specific ways.
• Rampant steampunkery and guns everywhere
• No planes, heavens, hells, angels, demons, or clerical magic (there are "gods", but they're powerful physical beings who live in the world and don't really have worshipers)
• Non-human races based more on English folklore than modern genre fantasy, so you have "dwarfs" in the Rumpelstiltskin/hi-ho hi-ho sense, Fair Folk, "Goblin Market" goblins, Oz-style gnomes, and bruiser ogres that are rather Fezzik-esque
>>48308002
>actual humility from someone on 4chan
you know those bulls that look like they're on roids because some genetic fuckup makes them grow 2x the normal amount of muscle mass?there's humans like that in my setting.
>>48308191
I have completely changed how magic works in my setting too; all to fix the same problems you wanted to mend.
I require wizards in my world to use catalysts in order to do magic. Said catalyst then has to have very elaborate and complex runes that do specific things. This allows me to as a DM to contain my magic users by simply disarming them of their catalysts. Most of my magic using NPCs and a few of my players who caught on just get tattoos of the configuration on their body and use themselves as the catalyst. However, if they're captured for crimes, these tattoos are burned.
I think it works, and none of my players have had an issue, so I stick to it.
>>48308281
You can already do this in regular DnD/Pathfinder simply by targeting a wizard's component pouch or spellbook with Sunder or Disarm...
Also, letting characters with a win button keep the win button simply because it can be disarmed doesn't really stop it from being a win button.
>>48308255
....
...
tell me more
>>48308358
big
baragrills
>>48308281
Depending on the system used, I could break that pretty easily.
>>48307965
Elves, orcs, gnomes, dwarves, some humans, and halflings aren't native to the plane.
Most humans are partial descendants of giants.
The apocalypse happens every ~1000 years, keeping the population in stasis and explaining why nobody's advanced beyond a medieval understanding of the world. This is seen as a necessary limiter on magic- every time Wish's non-generic form is used by a mortal, it throws up enough chaotic backlash to cause a cataclysm. Basically, the more magic gets used, the more unstable things get, and when the 'days of ruin' take their millennial run, magic pretty much turns into the Warp.
>Traditional demihumans are replaced with people born from hulders, trolls, or cursed by faries into rabbit-folk, are fairly rare in a population of mainly humans
>Classes are fighter, thief, skald, sorcerer (with illusionist spell list), and druid
>Dungeons are very uncommon but the wilderness is fraught with danger
>Monsters are almost always freakish abominations or horrific fey
>Currency isn't measured in gold pieces, most of the time you'll be bartering goods
>Runic magic is available to all classes, but you must be blessed with the knowledge of the rune first to be able to create it
For a not!Viking OSR game I'm planning on running, though I'm bastardizing a lot of scandinavian folklore to add stuff for the novelty/fun of it.
