Setting Thoughts

So I've been thinking about my setting recently and considering the ways that I might make it different than pretty much any other fantasy setting. I knew from the start I'd end up doing fantasy, it's really my 'thang' but it also seems to be everyone else's aswell and the swell of fantasy settings threatens to drown anything that doesn't have an original idea in it.

The problem is of course that you can't go out and just have an original idea and then clumsily attempt to bend a setting around it, it tends towards a one dimensional world entirely obsessed with this single idea. For me this ias the big pitfall I'm trying to avoid.

For my setting I've gone back to my academic roots and plundered them for delicious morsels to flavour my setting with. Recently I read 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham, not the best book I've ever read but one that had an idea I found delicious: A patriarchal church, alá Salem Puritanism, that is obsessed with the 'norm', a god wrought image of everything. If something deviates from the norm (ie it is deformed or a mutant) it must be destroyed. There are areas of what is basically 'bad country' where mutation is rife and it was this that gave me inspiration.

Consider the monsters of fantasy, strange creatures often with unnaturalm origins. In my setting I consider them to have been born in the places at the edge of the map where the knowledge of men has no foothold, where strange and unknown things happen and the imagination of humanity is projected into a space where it grows and becomes real. As such dragons and goblins exist but are a by-product of the human mind attempting to fill the empty space.

There are some fairly standard ways of preventing monsters from being created in these wilderness areas:

Kill Them: Send out an order of knights (or cadre of adventurers) periodically to find and slay these creatures and destroy their nesting grounds. This is a favourite of the patriarchal church.

Destroy their Habitat: As opposed to burning down where they live this is the idea of removing the uncertainty of these regions by mapping them completely to remove any doubt of what is there. A favourite of the College of Cartographers.

Breed a Cult of Disbelief: Proving to the populace, or making them believe an arguement, that such creatures are impossible in terms of dimension, dietary requirements and the like and as such do not exist. A favourite of the College of Educators.

I think there's plenty of meat here for adventures, monsters can exist anywhere that there is a 'forgotten' space for them (though this might not be common knowledge) and in my mind there are enough reasons to get the players involved in some good old fashioned adventuring. Now all I need to do is build the rest of the setting around it!