Does it bug anyone how massively uncreative even the most creative fantasy writers seem to be. Most fantasy worlds are thinly veiled Earths. They have 12 Months, 1 Moon, and 7 Day weeks. They have normal length days, European Weather, and even when they have non-human races Humans always outnumber the non-humans and shape the society. No one ever bothers to give rich and myriad cultures to non-humans or think up creative gods. it's always "Elves are woodland folk" and "Dwarves are rough miners" and "Gnomes are silly tinkerers" and "Half-Orcs are big and brutish". The gods are always the same fantasy 20 or the same olympian 12.
Sure, there are things that shouldn't be changed: the basics (skills, stats, equipment, domains, spells). But what happens if you make the god of Death and Light the head of the Pantheon... and evil. What happens if you make Elves barbaric and Orcs Miners and Dwarves tinkerers and Gnomes the largest part of the population and humans a bunch of hippies who hug trees all day? What happens if they change the weapons mix so some exotics aren't and some normals are. What happens if the culture doesn't use months at all, the planet is a moon, and the day is 84 hours long, with only 6 hours of darkness every day?
Where is the real creativity?
Don't get me wrong. I understand that people are most comfortable with things they are familiar with, but seriously, somethings have become so set in stone as to be cliched to the point of insanity. If you say that three days pass, does it matter how long they were? If you say 10 weeks passed, does it matter to the flow of the story if those weeks had 5 days or 8? The Honor Harrington books present a star system with three different planets, all with different length years and days, all with different numbers of months, and it makes not the tiniest difference to the narative... but it does provide background richness. With RPG source matterial being essentially nothing but background information and plot hooks, why stay rooted in convention when the breaking of convention is where all true genius, all true creativity lies. While I do like Crimson Throne's background information as a setting, what struck me more than how good it was was how good it could have been had they pushed the envelope just a little more. I had much the same reaction to Eberron and Dark Sun. The last time I was impressed by the boundary pushing of RPG creators or traditional fantasy writers was when I first read the Krynn books and was presented with Kenders instead of Gnomes and Minotaurs as people.
Fantasylandia is a great place. JRR made it that way. So why does it seem like no one has really innovated there in the last 75 years? I'm not kidding. Wizards of the Coasts owns Dungeons and Dragons. Magic the Gathering has some very interesting cultures and settings. Do any of them appear at all in D&D products? Not at all. No rich goblin culture, no metallic worlds, no fighting Craw Wurms. The only thing that appears in both settings are Loxodons. Seriously. It's a waste of potential, a waste of oportunity.
And Pathfinder seems perfectly happy to continue the trend. They tweak where they could innovate, crawl where they could soar. It makes me sad. I am greatful they make such nice products, and the tweakage is good. D&D is an excellent RPG, for all its miriad faults, and Pathfinder continues that excellence, but why can't they try to go a little further? Ah well.
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