Fantasy worlds (Backgrounds)

[6mmfan]

Hi all

For years I have owned 6mm massed armies for fantasy and geared the armies towards Lord of the Rings. While I love the background of Tolkien, I find it doesn't really do it for me anymore as a gaming "period". I find there is a lack of wild and wonderful fantasy figures and races that appeal to me.

So my question is what other well known fantasy settings are there that have a strong background and a lots of different races and troop types. The most obvious is GW Warhammer/Warmaster (before AOS) but how about any others?

Thanks
Kieran

[Hobgoblin]

If you want a background that is both "kitchen sink" and mythically resonant, have a look at Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. It's set in the real world - in ninth-century England, to be precise - but mainly concerns the conflict between the elves (sinister and cruel in the best folkloric tradition) and the trolls (green-skinned and powerful). But they bring a whole wealth of other supernatural creatures into their war. Here's a description of the trolls:

"They were not quite as tall as men, but nigh twice or thrice as broad, with long arms like tree boughs and clawed splay feet. Their skin was green and cold and slippery, moving on their stone-hard flesh. Few of them had hair, and their great round heads, with the flat noses, huge fanged mouths, pointed ears, and eyes deep buried in their bony sockets, were like skulls. Their eyes were all black, pits of inky darkness and brooding horror."

It's very easy to think of suitable models for those.

The "kitchen sink" aspects include goblins, dwarfs and diverse other faerie tribes, and some global exotica:

"Then we have companies from distant lands, demons of Baikal, Shen of Cathay, imps of Moorish deserts ... Then are also stragglers who came alone or in little bands - werewolves, vampires, ghouls, that sort. And we have plenty of dwarf slaves, some of whom will fight in exchange for freedom - and they can handle iron"

"Against this host the elves stand alone. They may be able to scrape together a few odd goblins and dwarfs and whatnot else, but those scarcely count. They very best they can hope for is add from the Sidhe ..."

On top of that, human armies can be involved too - so you can work in whatever historicals you like (it'd be easy to find a place for the Rohirrim, I'd have thought). And as the wars of the trolls and the elves span many mortal lives, you aren't confined to the ninth century.

[Sunjester]

I'd second Hobgoblin on this, it gives you options for all kinds of races/monsters in various mixed up alliances. This is something I've been toying with for Dragon Rampant. In fact it's been at the back of my mind for years, but as I've already got huge LOTR armies I didn't fancy painting up more massive armies. DR is small enough to allow a whole range of warbands without breaking the bank.

It's also a great book as well.

[psullie]

Have a look at RuneQuest's Glorantha, lots of mythical stuff - mix of ancient and dark age cultures, and races. Bison cavalry, Dragonewts, elves, ducks, trolls and broo to name a few

[Hobgoblin]

Have a look at RuneQuest's Glorantha, lots of mythical stuff - mix of ancient and dark age cultures, and races. Bison cavalry, Dragonewts, elves, ducks, trolls and broo to name a few

That's an excellent suggestion. Glorantha is unparalleled for depth - and it achieves the rare feat of being able to harmonise a strong mythic resonance with out-and-out weirdness.

[Hobby Services]

For gaming worlds, take a look at the setting for the 13th Age RPG, lot of potential there if you're looking for something with a bit of a D&D feel.  For literary sources, try Glen Cook's Dread Empire and/or Black Company stories, both of which are good meat for wargaming.   

[Brummie]

Why not just combine a multitude of settings you like and splice it into your very own fantasy world(s)?

Personally I find it really difficult to stick to just a single fantasy setting. I love reading fantasy books, and playing computer games of such ilk as those world's become far more interactive (I'm currently playing through the Witcher series, and aside from those High Elves who live in some magical world, the other knownSentient races like normal Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits etc generally don't have the power to field standing armies, or like the Dryads they certainly don't fight in large open battles and prefer ambush/skirmishes).

Its like, Warhammer is cool, but the overbearing focus on the Empire and Chaos tends to run the whole setting into the ground. My biggest gripe also has to be the lack of varied Human cultures, with most of the more exotic types getting near zero attention or just being corralled into the 'servants of chaos' crap.

The Broken Sword sounds pretty interesting, I may have to look that up as a strong contender.

But my general inclination is to just formulate my "own" setting. Fantasy is fantasy after all, and their should be no limits to where it can go!

[Vermis]

Why not just combine a multitude of settings you like and splice it into your very own fantasy world(s)?

But my general inclination is to just formulate my "own" setting. Fantasy is fantasy after all, and their should be no limits to where it can go!

*coff*coff*

This topic reminds me that me own ideas have been twiddling their thumbs for a while.

[Khadrin Stonetooth]

Why not just use World of Greyhawk, Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms, there is quite a bit of background and many many races.

[6mmfan]

Thanks guys for all the suggestions and I will do some research.

The reason I want to use a an existing world is so it will appeal to others. Although I plan to provide all the figures (for 3-4 armies) I want it to be familiar  and use it to encourage others. I will probably use KOW rules but some other options are Warmaster and my favourite Chipco’s Fantasy Rules!3.

[Hobgoblin]

A general point that occurs to me is that a good setting for fantasy gaming tends to be different from a good setting for fantasy fiction. There are exceptions: Middle Earth or Westeros, but those are good for gaming because there's a lot of  military (pseudo-) history to draw on. You can, for example, hope to get the armies of Mordor right to some degree (no wolf-riders in the Third Age, as far as we know; they seem to be the preserve of Isengard and the Misty Mountains!). In that sense, they're more like historical settings.

But if you game in Middle Earth or Westeros, your forces are almost as restricted as a historical gamer's are. That offers certain satisfactions, but it curtails the modelling and painting options to a huge degree. There's a reason for that, though. Middle Earth and Westeros are far more successful as fictional settings than almost any "kitchen sink" fantasy world, with its unlikely abundance of competing humanoid species. In Middle Earth, you have Men, Elves, Hobbits, Dwarves, Orcs, Trolls, Ents and Stone Giants. The last two are very seldom seen; two of the rest are artificial species, and two others (Men and Hobbits) are branches of the same tree. In ASoIaF, you have humans, the Others, the Children of the Forest and giants. (I'm ignoring the undead in both settings.) Compare either of those with the Monster Manual. Too many intelligent, man-like species make for a crowded setting that's hard to stomach in a fantasy novel. On the other hand, it provides a wealth of modelling and painting opportunities for the gamer, as well as tabletop diversity.

You can see this in RPGs. Merp was always a bit dull. I can't imagine Westeros would be a great roleplaying setting either. Warhammer Fantasy RP, on the other hand, was compelling.

But even here, there's a distinction. RPGs a little more like fiction than wargames. That's why the Warhammer FRP world sat a little uneasily with the nominally identical Warhammer FB world. Comic green-skinned "goblinoids", drug-addled frog-men and armies of lizardmen are great fodder for a tabletop game, but don't fit that well with an atomospheric and carefully constructed RPG setting. So, they always seemed rather at odds with The Enemy Within, etc. Just look at the cover for WHFRP. It matches WHFB 3rd edition in tone - but the contents of the WHFRP book are very different, with their emphasis on cults and whispers of beastmen in forests and maybe just the glimpse of a hoof under a robe or the faint sound of scurrying beneath the streets ...

So in some ways, a fleshed-out setting might not even be desirable for a wargame. I think Warhammer Battle did it quite well in the first two editions - just enough sketched out to fire the imagination, but in a way that nothing could be contradicted by whatever players decided. A world, in other words, in which the Magnificent Sven, McDeath and Orc's Drift could all happily co-exist.

[Brummie]

I don't know if an abundance of critters makes necessarily for a crowded setting. Raymond E Feists Riftwar series had a lot of humanoid races that were spread out over a very large world. The usual suspects: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Goblins with the occasional appearance of the Undead tended to be on one end of the continent. Meanwhile there was mention of other sentient species on other side of said world, like Tiger men, then there is the appearance of creatures etc from other worlds.

In the Witcher series there are supposed to be a number of sentient creatures, but a good few of them can exist both in the physical and faerie worlds and thus aren't always competing for space with humans. Similar to Cthulhu where there are a number of sentient horrors that can kinda switch between realities. There is also that concept that the horrors that infest the world are relatively new; The Faerie world and the mortal world colliding in some cataclysmic event that is borderline apocalyptic.

Also it ought to be appreciated that some of these settings are meant to be HUGE which helps to fire the imagination and inject a bit of 'unknown' for players to work with whilst also setting up a bunch of base factions etc to start off from.

Warhammer's 'Old World' for instance is pretty damned huge, with the Empire and Bretonnia figuring into super state size by modern standards. So there are huge areas of land with not much in it that others could potentially reside in. Therefore I could imagine that huge tracts of the Empire/Bretonnia don't see much in the way of other monsters, whereas the further you go afield the more nasties you encounter.   

[tnjrp]

So my question is what other well known fantasy settings are there that have a strong background and a lots of different races and troop types

Here's one list of literary sources that mentions all I could think of off the top of my head (tho Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt didn't appear to be in the list) plus many more besides. Many are irrelevant or don't work as a war game setting but there are many that should -- at least if you can find miniatures for them, which may not be trivial.

ETA -- hmm, looks like I forgot to post the actual link.
http://www.arwz.com/zinearticlesTOPTEN6.php

And now that I look at it a second time, an omission that should've jumped out immediately is that of Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (the best fleshed-out subworld for war gaming thereof being Elric's world of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melnibon%C3%A9). I must have just assumed it must be there even tho I didn't see it at once.

[6mmfan]

Thanks again for the replies. I've decided to be completely unoriginal and go with GW's Old World background. As mentioned before i will play Chipco Fantasy Rules (if I can convince people to) or KOW. The armies lists will be for KOW and I've been tracking down info on what figures people use for KOW, coming from a GW WHFB/Warmaster world.

Cheers
Kieran