How to make a setting feel like it's not a not!x setting?I recently got some of my friends into GURPS. They wanna play a fantasy setting for their first experience. I want to make sure the setting feels like it's own and doesn't feel like the characters are exploring not!europe or not!england. I've been told this was a bit of a problem in my previous pathfinder campaignHow do I make the setting feel like it's own thing without the players feeling like they are just going through the real world?
Organic development around set pieces.Pick a few interesting ideas, and then build up your world around them.Kings are determined by the size of their genitals? Okay, whatever.Royal outfits put the genitals on display and direct all attention towards them, and courtier fashion is likewise done in a similar way.Men with small genitals will likely take great effort in creating false phalluses, or doing shit like getting their dicks stung by bees in order to encourage swelling.Snake oil salesman selling dick pills will be everywhere, even despite royal decree to kill them on sight.Men with particularly small genitals will be treated like pariahs, and criminals will be emasculated.Women will think this whole thing is hilarious.
>>97167813Encourage your players to develop their backstory, and then extract your world from therein. This can help you get basic ideas from someone outside of yourself, which might not be so tinted by real-world historical notions.You can also take real-world historical notions and flip them on their head, if you can't help it. Or aggrandize them to the point of unrecognizability. You start recreating the feudal system? The feudal lords ARE the land, nature spirits with which farmers must commune and appease, perhaps through fae intermediaries or druids. Bathory was said to bathe in blood? Well, all nobles in your world do so, getting together in masked blood-pool parties. Alternatively, you can always take the easy route and find a not!x fantasy setting that you do enjoy, and just rip it off? Players rarely notice, and the second that they start interacting with things and you start improvising, it quickly becomes your own setting to play with.
>>97167813By being original and inspired.Maybe you aren't.
>>97167813Syncretize, syncretize, syncretize. If you have a kingdom that broadly follows the structure of the English monarchy, read the Popol Vuh and use that as a template for their mythohistorical origins. If you have a city inspired by Paris, research the original system of varna in India and divide the quarters up that way. Generally, mix and match places with little to do with one another. Make sure you put different ingredients in each region, but blend them thoroughly and you'll get something new. Then logically build on what you have and arrive somewhere consistent and distinct from any single real-world culture.
Study the past cultures of other regions. Trust me. It helps broaden your horizons on how to portray a functioning society far more.
>>97167813>feelThat's down to the sensory stimuli of your players, not strangers on the internet who'll never meet them.
>>97167813>horses are actually giant insects>the king is actually the grand patriarch or the voivode or something>knights are actually lightning servantsTheir imaginations will fill in the gaps and it'll no longer look "problematic"
>>97167813>They wanna play a fantasy setting for their first experience.>without the players feeling like they are just going through the real world?You can't be this stupid.Seriously.
>>97167813Try playing games for once.
>>97167813just make it a not!not!x setting, obviously.
>>97167813If they're not history nerds then historical accuracy will be far more alien than fantasy, so try that
>>97167813... make it its own thing and not just going through the real world?Are you autistic or something?
>>97167813Make it a not!x where x is a bit of media they are already familiar with, instead of a country.The simple fact that a lot of people obsessed with "originality" miss is that your players NEED a touchstone to inform their impressions of your setting. A game with no common touchstone is a game that is essentially unplayable, reducing the players to props that you invite to the table so that you can vomit LORE at them every time they try to do something that you say can't happen because of a fiction in-universe event 400 years ago that they didn't know about yet. England-but-[thing] is just as valid as The-Witcher-but-[thing], or Star-Wars-but-[thing]. You are not writing a book or directing a movie. You do not have a wealth of time to describe things or the tools of a visual medium to establish a lot of things non-intrusively. If your players are to be able to act in your world without you holding their hand, they need to have a vision in their head of that world that more or less matches yours, and that CAN'T HAPPEN if your world is too "unique" in its worldbuilding because that leaves them at a loss as to what to compare it to as a conceptual framework. Give them something that they can easily digest first, and then build your more unique elements on top of that. The players will always appreciate the convenience of understanding whats going on and what to expect over having a setting that is designed by someone TERRIFIED of being linked to a Tvtropes article.
make it england, why not just use the arthurian stories
>>97170836King Arthur isn't English, anon. Wrong country.
>>97171999>King Arthur isn't EnglishThen what country is it?
>>97174889Arthur is, canonically, Cymric (basically Welsh).
