World shape? Cube worlds? Flat worlds?

Worlds where the sun is really a flaming chariot driven by pegasi?

Worlds where mountains are the bones of a dead god slain to make the universe?

Worlds where the ocean is really a portal into another world?

Worlds where wandering womb is very much real?

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2023, 12:55:44 AM
World shape? Cube worlds? Flat worlds?

Worlds where the sun is really a flaming chariot driven by pegasi?

Worlds where mountains are the bones of a dead god slain to make the universe?

Worlds where the ocean is really a portal into another world?

Worlds where wandering womb is very much real?

I don't like weirdness just to be weird. But I also don't like conforming to Tolkien-esque sameness of so many RPG fantasy worlds. I like using a variety of fantasy fiction as my inspirations, and I often like throwing in twists. When using D&D, it's hard to get away from the Tolkien-esque elements baked into D&D, but I like having a twist on them. My last three D&D campaign settings were:

(1) A fantasy world loosely based on Incan myth and history, with a good-aligned empire guided by the sun god, but still using standard D&D elements.

(2) A reversed Greyhawk, where the good-aligned races were orcs, goblins, etc. - and the evil races were humans, elves, and dwarves. It was still about fighting evil monsters and protecting civilization, though.

(3) Faerun, but it was being destroyed by a just-started dragon apocalypse. A plague of dragons suddenly spread over the surface of the world, forcing the survivors to retreat underground. So the PCs were going into dungeons, and trying to clear them out and make a safe place to live there. Gold was meaningless, but food and water were important, and they had a group of NPC survivors they were shepherding.

I've also had a recent game in the setting of the novel "The Bone Orchard" - a 19th-century-esque fantasy world with psychic powers. I previously had one in the fairy-tale-esque world of the novel "Uprooted" by Naomi Novik.

The short answer is not very weird.

I like my games grounded and realistic.  It makes it easier when your real world intuition works correctly in the game.  It makes the game experience seem more real.  And it helps me to care more about what happens.

The weird stuff that goes into my worlds is just what's necessary for the premise of the game.  If it's about fighting monsters with magic, there will be monsters and magic.  If it's about exploring flying islands zipping around the the stratosphere with flying ships and a pirate theme, then those will be there.  (That's one I actually did.)  If it's about the ocean being a gate to another world and interacting with that, then that will happen.  But if not, the ocean is just the ocean. 

If it's entirely up to me, not weird at all. My favourite "setting" is historical, with no magic or fantastical elements.

Otherwise, as grounded as possible.

My world is default weird in the sense of periodic floating islands in the sky, giant volcanos filled with a mile-wide lava sea (with massive fortress of evil on an island in the middle), massive underdark-ish caverns, giant waterfalls, places of endless storms, fog, winter, day or night, ruined megacities eaten up by forests, indestructible spires older than history with no entrances that rise past the atmosphere into the heavens.

A few times I've gone really weird in a campaign by having the world and its moon orbit inside a Dyson sphere where the stars in the sky are the cities of the "gods" on the sphere's surface and "dimensional travel" is actually just a long range teleportation to someplace on the surface of the sphere.

When I go that route The Outer Darkness where the demons are trapped is the endless expanse beyond the Dyson sphere; the dead outer planets in a black sky where all the stars have gone out and only the infrared glow of the sphere's surface provides any illumination or warmth.

Most times I run it though space is just ordinary space (and no one can reach it) and the otherworlds are as unknowable as Heaven and Hell in the real world (they have a whole cosmological model of the otherworlds, but it's as "real" as the "Nine Realms" or Dante's Divine Comedy's depictions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

I like my worlds very weird but also very consistent. I don't use weirdness in the sense of expectations always changing, but I love creating strange expectations that the players can experience and use.

I like weird.

But weird gets old.

If everything is weird, nothing is.

In practice, in my current campaign I let the PCs be cat-people and they are so weird by themselves (in a mostly human world) that it detracts a bit from the fun.

In my next campaign I think I`m going all-human, so when they meet an elf they can find it weird.

Also, I avoid orcs at all costs. For some reason, I find them the epitome of anti-weird, they give me "we are in D&D Disneyland" vibe. Haflings too.

Quote from: Zalman on December 09, 2023, 08:50:19 AM
I like my worlds very weird but also very consistent. I don't use weirdness in the sense of expectations always changing, but I love creating strange expectations that the players can experience and use.

Ninaj'ed by this. I have to agree - CONSISTENCY is key.

I like the majority of the world relatively "normal" so that when I make some weird places they have sort of an impact. I like to keep the weirdness in distant hard to reach places so that it actually sounds fantastical when the locals talk about such things as myths. If these weird things were just plopped all over the place then they they would just be the accepted normal in the world. Deep within the savage jungle, in the mountains of the frozen North, and beneath the depths of the far ocean. These are the places where true weirdness are to be found. Adventurers may discover some of these mythic locations but will they survive to tell the tale?

Grounded grey and gritty for me.  Over the top stuff loses me pretty fast.

In general, I like my fantasy worlds to be fairly normal. I want the backdrop to be just a backdrop, and the world-building is only ever regional at best.

I've discovered I really like starting out with a village, and building out from there.

I don't want the world-mythology to be big and intrusive and on a global scale. I find that's where a lot of fantasy breaks down.

I'm thinking of Harry Potter in particular. Once the story ventured outside of Hogwarts everything turned to crap, and the ending was a disappointment. I think the story should have ended with Harry and company simply graduating from Hogwarts, after defeating Voldemort of course. Trying to make the story cover all of the wizarding world sent it careening off-genre into some kind of weird magical political thriller.

Trying to cram the Book of Revelations into Narnia was similarly problematic.

Making the mythology big, and having a global metaplot tends to make the play characters and the area they inhabit insignificant.

I have played in campaigns that ended with the party basically sacrificing themselves to give a +1 to some NPC, and that sucked.

Also, I don't want the whole game to be a quest for the ultra-McGuffin that will save the world. It's been done to death.

Quote from: jhkim on December 09, 2023, 02:24:42 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2023, 12:55:44 AM
World shape? Cube worlds? Flat worlds?

Worlds where the sun is really a flaming chariot driven by pegasi?

Worlds where mountains are the bones of a dead god slain to make the universe?

Worlds where the ocean is really a portal into another world?

Worlds where wandering womb is very much real?

I don't like weirdness just to be weird. But I also don't like conforming to Tolkien-esque sameness of so many RPG fantasy worlds. I like using a variety of fantasy fiction as my inspirations, and I often like throwing in twists. When using D&D, it's hard to get away from the Tolkien-esque elements baked into D&D, but I like having a twist on them. My last three D&D campaign settings were:

(1) A fantasy world loosely based on Incan myth and history, with a good-aligned empire guided by the sun god, but still using standard D&D elements.

(2) A reversed Greyhawk, where the good-aligned races were orcs, goblins, etc. - and the evil races were humans, elves, and dwarves. It was still about fighting evil monsters and protecting civilization, though.

(3) Faerun, but it was being destroyed by a just-started dragon apocalypse. A plague of dragons suddenly spread over the surface of the world, forcing the survivors to retreat underground. So the PCs were going into dungeons, and trying to clear them out and make a safe place to live there. Gold was meaningless, but food and water were important, and they had a group of NPC survivors they were shepherding.

I've also had a recent game in the setting of the novel "The Bone Orchard" - a 19th-century-esque fantasy world with psychic powers. I previously had one in the fairy-tale-esque world of the novel "Uprooted" by Naomi Novik.

This, with a comment about what sort of weirdness I like.

I like the "weirdness" to be more of how the world responds to the PCs. I call it gonzo, but it isn't the gonzo RPGPundit or Venger Satanis seem to mean. Some examples...

The PCs were exploring a keep and not finding anything. Coincidentally, right in front of the spyhole for the bad guys, one of the party shouted "Yooohooo! Cave Catering! Anyone home?" So I rolled, and had the orcs behind the spyhole respond.

Another time, I had a MacGuffin hidden away in the second level of a caverns. The top level was inhabited by warring orcs and goblins. They were at war because someone was making them think the other was causing problems. (PCs didn't know this until much later.) They ended up deciding that the goblin leader's daughter and the orc leader's son had a Romeo/Juliet thing going, and the PCs decided to hook them up and make peace. I can't remember if the offspring's relationship was something I determined beforehand or during the game.

A time it did not happen was our Traveller game. My wife's Aslan was talking to a psychic tree. He had decided the tree was sapient and certain other things unique to this Aslan. The GM said it would have been awesome at that point for a face to appear and talk to him. I would have rolled for the tree's reaction and done that, regardless of the source book.

I would say that it's a careful balancing act. Monte Cook is full of creativity, but all his projects eventually crash, burn and get forgotten. Planescape, Invisible Sun, Numenera, Ptolus, etc. You need enough familiar elements to feel "grounded", but you need enough originality to feel fresh and novel. J.K. Rowling managed to achieve this. Her wizards are very stereotypical with pointy hats, wands, flying broomsticks, etc. but she adds in enough new and creative things to feel fresh and novel. Achieving this requires carefully managing your doubts and restraints. You need to let yourself go to overcome your imposed limits, but not go so far that you cross into fever dream territory.

Something along the general feel of, The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings / Conan / Cthulhu genres; but with a few more Magic Users, of different levels and types.  I don't want everyone to be using Magic, but it should be sprinkled throughout the entire setting.  A greater variety of Monsters, too.  Gotta give the warriors some interesting foes and challenges.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2023, 12:55:44 AM
World shape? Cube worlds? Flat worlds?

Worlds where the sun is really a flaming chariot driven by pegasi?

Worlds where mountains are the bones of a dead god slain to make the universe?

Worlds where the ocean is really a portal into another world?

Worlds where wandering womb is very much real?

Worlds that are weird, but for scientifically plausible reasons.

Case in point, the campaign setting for my current Traveller game is within a supernova shell nebula. In a full sector of sixteen subsectors and about six hundred mainworlds, most of them have been sterilized. The ozone layers have been destroyed and UV radiation from their own primary stars did most of it, but even along the outer corners furthest away from the supernova center most of the species on those worlds are now extinct.

And this is 300,000 years after the event.

But I do mostly science fiction.

For fantasy, I'll try for a good baseline because too many weird parts and you get an isekai setting if you are lucky and Lovecraftian Horror if you are unlucky. Weird should be a spice added for taste and not a main ingredient.