What’s sad is that there are tons and tons of really interesting and diverse cultures within Europe bristling with unique aesthetics and vibes that could work as wonderful inspiration for fantasy, but it seems people just slide back into a generic blend of England and France c. 1400 but without any of the interesting politics, complex societal structure, etc.
Just the Aesthetics 
: 
When I went and did some world building for a hypothetical fantasy setting over discord a while back during a slow, boring day with cool vampire nation where humans and vampires co-exist in symbiotic harmony, because the nation’s like a safe haven for humans practicing dark magics to their fullest desire in exchange for paying a blood tithe.
Meanwhile the [big human nation] in this was more analogous to the Holy Roman Empire with its (often dysfunctional) politics and structure, balancing the crown with the faith while placating the Electors whenever a new Emperor is crowned.
Nobility is formed out of land owning peasants who amassed enough wealth to buy out their neighbours and act as land lords renting out the land for others to work, but it’s not tied down to generational debt. Virtually any land owning peasant could rise to prominence and be granted noble status for their wealth, but in practice it didn’t happen that often once things settled down. The Crown is the ultimate owner of the land, and the land owners in turn pay their tribute to the Crown either through tax from their earnings of their land rent, or by personnel like troops to maintain their property right. Rich merchants, while influential, were not granted noble status due to that right being tied to land ownership despite some merchant “lords” garnering more political pull than real land owning nobles.
Impoverished nobles often volunteered themselves to fight for the Crown to help their family’s economic status, or sometimes they’d pool resources together with other impoverished nobles to hire a knight as their collective champion. Castles and forts were all owned by the Crown and whoever was the Lord of the Castle did so as the Crown’s deputy; their title wasn’t hereditary*, though the heir of the noble could make a bid to the Crown as to why they’d be a good successor per their merit. The Swedish crown imposed this on the Finnish nobility to avoid any single noble amassing too much power (looking at Klaus Fleming) and instead secure loyalty to the crown.
*Unless you literally built the castle by yourself, but you since did it on the Crown’s land, you’re still obligated to pay your tax in the form of troops or gold.
Personally found northern/eastern European models more interesting than the copy paste England/France c. 1400 fantasy society we’ve seen done to death.
That’s some wonderful stuff there! I do appreciate people that think out political systems beyond “King… nobles? Peasants. Yes.” - or leave things so muddled and contradictory that trying to decipher it becomes impossible (like Stormwind/The Alliance for example).
In writing my own fantasy setting I’ve found that writing up political and religious systems to ultimately be the most satisfying - to me they are an excellent way to explore cultures and a world, and you can provide little windows into the mindset of different cultures and ultimately create characters that have a strong sense of connection to the world at large. (Most of my stuff is designed around being used for roleplay than specifically fiction itself, so I tend to go into more depth.)
The closest I ever get to writing a coherent setting is usually somewhere like Europe or America in the aftermath of climate change, usually with an emphasis on how people misunderstand and invent history for the purpose of finding meaning.
I’ve been accused of writing a fictionalised anprim manifesto a lot
Yeah they always go for the most boring elements of european history and tend to ignore all the ways europe was really really weird.
What I’m saying is give me more dog saints and dragon men having dream fights over who gets rained on.
show me a fantasy setting based on weird european medieval art
https://listverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/10a-violent-bunnies.jpg
Largely same, yeah. I like building up things like magic, culture and religion (which often go hand in hand) and how they’ve shaped the history of the respective peoples as a result.
My thought for orcs was that they’re a naturally very isolated and peaceful tribal society living in a highly remote mountain valley from rest of the world which as led to a nearly alien worldview as they’ve essentially developed separate from rest of the world in almost complete isolation. Their understanding of the world is completely different and even clashing to rest of the cultures, which raises the question of who has the right idea of it – the cultures that value scholastic education, or the race that lives in harmony with the land. The only way in and out are a few narrow and dangerous to travel mountain passes, so there’s not a lot of cultural exchange back and forth between them short of the most dedicated royal anthropologists and scholars seeking to understand.
Any orc who has violated their clan laws is instantly exiled, their name taken from them which is considered the same as spiritual death. So the rest of the world has a really skewed view on orcs due to their only exposure being their exiled criminals wearing descriptive names like Feral that they’ve been branded after losing their ancestral name – they believe in a cycle of rebirth, adopting names they believe reflects their past life and ancestry. Taking that away from an orc is seen as the death of their soul and severing the cycle of rebirth. Exiled orcs are colloquially known as the Soulless in their language.
I’m just always inspired by Wales and the Welsh - lots and lots of wonderful myths and just a stunning language and culture. The Mabinogion is where I get inspiration for my stranger ideas, but also the ideas that the Welsh saw themselves as successors to the Romans to some degree, or at least inheritors of Roman traditions and titles. Notions of what a fantasy race consider to be the ideal are always fun to slip in, and Rome in many ways was idealised.
I am a Rome/Byzantium (yes, I know, they are the same thing) fan and the fantasy world I´m building is in many ways based on Migration era (except people are not fleeing from dudes on horses but rather elves whose empire got nuked with vessels of dead god which drove them all into magically alttered murderous mad monsters) and its aftermath.
I overall love more urban societies rather than classic “castles with nobles, villages with peasants” quasi-medieval setting. There´s so much fun one can have with cities compared to castles and with political systems of such societies. Bureaucratic empires, merchant republics, city states and so on.
Or even kingdoms of people who invaded the empire and carved their own realms out of it, forming their own culture which is mix of their previous customs and those of their subjects.
And lots of magic systems, gods and religions since that´s always a lot of fun.
hit me with some bronze age fantasy
yeah glorantha is a cool setting
ain’t that just the feywild
the most i can offer is neolithic fantasy where the enemy is sedentary agriculture until humanity is forced into it by a magical apocalypse
Tyranny is a really cool game with a bronze age fantasy setting
Overgrowth?
Dug the setting+plot.
Really didn’t care for the gameplay.
Same! But those things were enough to keep me going.
If WoW is based on Christianity then Goldshire and the Jade Witches finally make sense. Thanks Blizzard. Pls bring the Apocalypse soon. Tyvm
what an absolute cringe of a post
Drakan did nothing wrong