Elves and Dwarves Don't Define Fantasy

[TurkeyProphet]

Seems to me that most fantasy just steals things from mythology and then sets the world in the era that those myths would have been big.

Instead of bringing medieval European mythology to the modern world which wouldn't work that well because it would seem really goofy (elves and such only work in fantasy worlds because they fit in to that world. Walking down the street and seeing a goblin cleaning windows would just seem too comedic).

The solution is to explore other mythologies. I don't think I have ever seen a game set in India and they have a whole bunch of crazy creatures we don't see much of. It would be awesome riding around on a tiger and having to fight some 8 armed elephant God all the while in the exotic setting of India. It would also be fantastic to see some colour in a game!

From that idea there are lots of things they could do. Some kind of fantasy game set in Africa. Instead of the standard short sword you get to play as a zulu warrior or from a series of different tribes. Or Aboriginal Australians to fight yowies. Or Aztecs. Or Native Americans. I'd love to play a fantasy game set in the South Pacific where you go from island to island fighting different creatures on every island.

 

[Valanthe]

You know, this article made me think about an old Westwood game (RIP) called Nox, where you literally were an average Joe, American nobody who gets (quite literally) dropped into this fantastical world and thus gets you sent on this grand adventure you know nothing about. It was criticized for being a fancily dressed Diablo clone, but for some reason that game has stuck in my mind for this many years, and perhaps that was why. by giving you a Jack Nobody, it really let you identify with the protagonist and his desire to see his girlfriend and her delicious cooking again.

 

[surg3n]

Evochron Mercenary is a great game, it's complicated but well worth learning how to play. Also, it's about as indi as a game can get, part of a series that has been going on for years, developed mostly by a solo developer. Support your local old-school indi developer .

 

[Wolfgod]

Just to throw some ideas into this that i just bounced in. Lets take another look at random S**t of the world? throw in a slendermen race, or how about inanimate objects? as hard as that might seem to be to imagine the random crap we humans come up with is always there. How about some mushroom people specializing in poison and healing? or maybe a being made out of light? and for weapons, how about a scissor weapon? can be use as blunt but also cut off limbs? use a umbrella! or i for one would love to see STAFFS come in as a weapon. And im talking quarter staffs, not magic staffs. give me a stick of wood to thwack a enemy with while they flail to get in my range. hell bring in whips (beyond castlevania you dont really see its use)
the key to finding new and unique styles, characters, and weapons is to simply take a look at life. one of my potentially favorite saying is "truth is often stranger then fiction"

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Good points, Yahtzee. I suppose a bit of variety and fantasy games would be a nice change of pace...

 

[Marc Pearce]

Generally speaking my idea of fantasy is classed as anything the can be drawn from a skewed idea of reality. This does mean even that every game out there is in its own way a fantasy game as you are put yourself into someone elses shoes be it an athlete, a soldier, a disturbed young women, or even an idealised version of your self.

Society, the media and more so now the games industry are trying to box the idea of fantasy as it being only about fantastic creature and tall pointy eared dudes and squat bearded people but the truth most if not all things we do in the name of fun is in part touched by fantasy from reading, gaming, and sports. Because who hasn't dreamed of do things as a different you.

 

[snave]

Nox did the backstory to #1 incredibly well back in the day. The player character was literally some white trash guy in a trailer park who had the magical MacGuffin atop is TV as an ornament before getting sucked into the dimension from whence it came. And classes took the role of races.

Space steampunk... not sure if it counts but the Kinect Themepark did that up until a week ago (4D Live Park). Shame about the CEO of that venture. Also shame about the game portion being horribly broken in design and... Kinect.

 

[Elberik]

I'll bet that that the reason there are no dwarves in the Elder Scrolls is that it would have been too difficult. All the races are anatomically the same give or take a few inches in height & maybe a tail. But dwarves are often proportioned differently & the difference in height would have meant that the developers would have had to make a completely new model.

 

[Gunjester]

The problem with the trade off between preset fantasy and original fantasy is that preset has the familiarity, but nothing is new and it's like going through the motions.
BUT
Original fantasy has that issue of "Learn a new language as you play"(as Yahtzee put it)which is what Yahtzee complained about in the Amalur review.

Now Amalur was horrible about this because it managed to have both issues with it in its setting.
Personally I stand with Yahtzee on the idea though. Contemporary fantasy is kind of a lost art, I haven't even played one since Folklore. And every time I see a steampunk game, I become intrigued, though I haven't tried to buy any of them since I made the mistake of getting Damnation.
Nonetheless I've wanted a good steampunk game merely because I have yet to play one I enjoyed much. But would also love to be a averagejoe or college student or somethign who gets sucked into the worlds of fantasy.

 

[Anodos]

Considering that Tolkien himself ripped off the ancient texts he spent his professional life studying, I'd hardly say that copying is new. I wouldn't even strictly call it a problem. Creativity thrives on finding new ways to use existing material. If something is done well, it's done well. If it's clumsy or lacks a fresh perspective, then it's clumsy and lacks a fresh perspective.

YMMV on that. Tolkien didn't merely 'rip off' Norse mythology. He took the ideas and norms of Scandinavian mythology, combined it with his knowledge of Catholic mythology and morality, then brought in ideas alluding to or inspired by myths, stories and epic legends such as the fall of Atlantis, Shakespeare's MacBeth and John Milton's Paradise lost, pasting them into an entire continet he'd created that combined elements of Saxon-era Britain, Roman-era Italy, and Victorian-era England.

In short, he took a whole bunch of inspirtaions and ideas, and fused them into something new and unseen. Which sadly cannot be said for the legions of copycats who decided to simply re-write Middle Earth, but with more sex and racism added.

Writers such as Clive Barker and Nail Gaiman show that it is possible to not write fantasy fiction that doesn't borrow from Tolkien. Fantasy is not defined by orcs and trolls. It is defined by how willing you are to allow your imagination to take flight and soar.

*cough*
Kalevala

the Lord of the Rings prequel

 

[Torchiest]

"this one incredibly shit game I played once on the Amiga that was based on the Space 1889 pen and paper RPG setting"

Oh my god, I bought that game, and I fucking HATED it. One of the worst games I ever bought, and really depressing since I was just a kid with no money back then. The concept looked phenomenal, but the execution was godawful bad. I'd love to see someone make a better go at that concept.

 

[Caffeine_Bombed]

Dunno if it's been mentioned, but Rogue Galaxy had a big ol' wooden ship in space =)

 

[Warachia]

Nox was a pretty awesome and funny fantasy RPG that fits that "contemporary" idea like a glove. Your character is more or less a low income trailer park guy who gets sucked into his TV (I think) by an evil sorceress from the world of Nox. You then fall from the sky and into a Zeppelin (think WoW style) with a crazy captain who becomes a bit of a guide for the rest of the game.

And then for the second idea, well sadly not many games are like that, but I'd like to highlight the His Dark Materials saga, aka "The Amber Spyglass", "The Golden Compass", and "The Subtle Knife" which are basically exactly that idea. More or less a modern world but completely fantastical.

Hey, somebody else who remembers Nox, a real shame it never got any sort of sequels, and nobody (that I can remember) did anything similar.
For the second idea, people really don't like using steampunk in space because they like explaining how things work, although one way I can think of has kinda been done before: Anybody who played Baldurs' gate 2 will remember the giant planar sphere in the slums area, you could cobble together an idea that uses the same concept, instead of space (or it could be space still) it floats through dimensions using a combination of magic and steampunk, and if that makes it the magic version of doctor who, all the better.

 

[Lyvric]

I'd play a pudding with legs. I wonder what the stats on that would be like....

 

[Vorduul]

I'll start by saying that I created an account (finally) in response to this article, and it was no small coincidence to have 'fairy tale' as my captcha.

Yahtzee is wrong, but there are several elements in this article worth discussing. Before getting to the more fascinating ones, I think the misperception serving as the article's theme needs to be addressed: namely, that Elves and Dwarves define fantasy (although they shouldn't or don't need to). One needn't look far to find exceptions: jRPGs have been mentioned, and they are legion; games such as Nox or Savage Empire (the Ultima Universe) feature fish-out-of-water fantasy; even with limited experience in D&D games such as Baldur's Gate II or dungeon crawlers like Diablo II I see clear departures from anything Tolkienesque beyond the most fundamental archetypes and the occasional lazy ripoff; any game centering on werewolves, vampires, mummies, zombies, battle magic, or heaven/hell. A cursory glance at one of the (laughable) 'Top 50 rpgs of all time' lists available on the net shows how uncommon a Tolkienesque game is.

That brings me to the first interesting topic: archetypes. Most games with storylines focusing on one or more individuals feature an archetypal 'hero's journey' of the kind discussed in Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces.'

1) The Call to Adventure
2) Refusal of the Call
3) Supernatural Aid
4) The Crossing of the First Threshold
5) Belly of the Whale
6) The Road of Trials
7) The Meeting with the Goddess
8) Woman as Temptress
9) Atonement with the Father
10) Apotheosis
11) The Ultimate Boon
12) Refusal of the Return
13) The Magic Flight
14) Rescue from Without
15) The Crossing of the Return Threshold
16) Master of Two Worlds
17) Freedom to Live

Because many of these archetypal steps are present in the Lord of the Rings, it's easy to find parallels with other works which invariably borrow from the same pattern. Star Wars, for instance, was written by George Lucas with the archetypal journey in mind. We can see a parallel between any party-based RPG and the Fellowship of the Ring AND Robin Hood's band of merry men and so on and so forth going back through literature to Jason and the Argonauts and beyond. There are only so many ways to present a story that leave it still recognizable as a story and not a post-modernist jumble of trivia without a point.

The second point of interest is in elves and dwarves, which, as has been pointed out, form a sub-genre of fantasy by themselves. Both elves and dwarves derive from Northern European folklore, appearing in a wide number of stories in Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, and elsewhere. Traditionally, dwarves are rugged, small people who covet wealth and live in holes in the ground. Elves, unlike the Tolkien versions, are much smaller than humans, although they, too, possess magical powers. They belong to a fae kingdom with fairies and pixies and nixies and so on, and frequently cause mischief (sometimes deadly). For a non-Tolkien treatment, Alice in Wonderland serves indirectly but with spiritual accuracy.

Given that these creatures predate Tolkien in folklore by a millennium and more, it's really of no surprise that they tend to pop up in modern fiction independent of Tolkien. Harry Potter, for instance, references fae creatures on several occasions, yet bears little resemblance to the Lord of the Rings.

Having given it some consideration, I'm actually hard-pressed to come up with more than a few game titles (and a few more book titles/series) that borrow liberally from the Lord of the Rings. These tend to be popular, and that may explain their over-representation in Yahtzee's perception, but they are not nearly a majority. Warcraft was originally a human vs. orcs game which borrows little from Tolkien besides humans being heroes who fight orcish villains. Sword of Shannara is a direct ripoff of the Lord of the Rings, while other lengthy book series, such as the Wheel of Time borrow from it heavily. Many also draw from the same pool which Tolkien drew from, netting similar results.

tl;dr : Yahtzee is wrong, although there are themes in Tolkien that are both European and archetypal (in all cultures) which have found their way into many books/games/movies since the Lord of the Rings was published.

 

[greyseven]

Yeah, the elves/dwarfs formula is just so overdone.

 

[Joriss]

Steampunk in space sound pretty damn awesome.

Final fantasy IX did pretty fine with the sort-of-steampunk-feel to it, a bit. That was also a pretty damn awesome rpg

 

[lysanderprophet]

The way I see it, there are some very good reasons to stick with elves and dwarves in fantasy, just as there are some very good reasons to keep electricity working in much the same way in science fiction. If you keep batteries and generators from the real world, and just say they work on a new physical principle that lets them be essentially improved versions of what we already have, then you don't have to spend your whole game explaining an alternative electonic theory (which would be very tedious unless that's what your book is about). You can focus instead on the awesome new ideas that started you writing in the first place.

Similarly, if you replace elves, dwarves, goblins and humans with Flish'nir, Garblees, Undermen and De'unies then you have to establish those four cultures for yourself. Nobody has any idea what you're talking about to start with, and therefore it's going to take your players several hours to figure out what is normal.

Now, all this is well and good if your new races are somehow better than the old ones, if the new stuff you're bringing in is actually integral to the story, but if what you really want to talk about is a great civil war and an intriguing magical artifact then there's no real reason to change the rest of it.

At some point, it becomes an issue of language. If you can say what you need to with the concepts your audience already understands, why would you go out of your way to exchange them for a new set you have to explain?

Except that the language seems to be saying the same thing over and over.

In other words, I see your point about not necessarily having to change the races/milieu of a fantasy landscape?-a common world-grammar can be useful, to be sure. But the problem is that nobody seems to be using these tropes for anything beyond the standard derivative fantasy plot, i.e. "great civil war," "intriguing magical artifact" etc (which I find to be mind-crushingly boring). If elves are always airy-fairy folk and dwarves are always grumpy underground people, there's only so much to be done with them, yes? In other words, it's not so much the races themselves that are the issue?it's the stereotypical ways in which they interact with the world.

Furthermore, if you read up a little bit, you'll find it's not that difficult to introduce new and unusual races into fantasy settings, often with excellent results. People have already mentioned China Miéville a few times on here, and I'll add my voice to the pile?-his "xenian" races, as he calls them, are utterly fantastic, wildly original creations that he introduces with ease and which feel miles beyond the drab, tired tradition of elves and dwarves. (Not to mention his monsters rule too.)

And even if elves and dwarves are still in the picture, I think there's always something you can do with them to make them more interesting than their cliché epic fantasy counterparts. At the risk of sounding like I'm horn-tooting, I'm currently DMing a 3.5 D&D campaign set in my own universe, in which the elves are scruffy, fast-talking working-class types and dwarves are garrulous, frog-like creatures who cast spells by eating stones and worship a giant interdimensional centipede. (You read that right.)

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

Oh Yahtzee you beautiful-faced spoony mishap! You have been away for far too long from the green and pleasant land! Dixons no longer exists as a shop in the UK! It was rebranded as Currys.Digital and serves as a smaller version of it big brother! A Currys express if you were...

Although they are still owned by Dixons Retail, who are now just the umbrella corp that own Currys and PC World and many others...! Gone are they days where you can walk into your local Dixons for your electronic needs....! :/

Dixons... you shall be missed!

 

[ikoian]

Frankly, I always got the impression that marketers for these games just use the term "fantasy" to avoid calling the game what it really is, JRR Tolken fan fiction.