"Fantasy Wargaming: I'm Tired of Seeing..." Topic

What things have become too cliche in fantasy miniature wargaming?

Skimpy armor.

Cartoony orcs.

A journey from innocence to experience. Oh. In gaming? It's all kind of cliche isn't it?

Things I don't have time to paint.

Stupid Orcs/Goblins

Lizard men-need Dragon men not large Dragons

Barbarian skimpy armor-need more Visi-Ostro Goth types

Not enough horse cavalry

Not enough Yeomanry support figures

More Game of Thrones not Lord of the Rings

Need SG1 wizard-blasted and arrow pin cushioned corpses to put near portals/gates.:)

GREEN

Surprised nobodies mentioned the oversized weapons yet. Is that a product of casting in resin or plastic figures? I seem to have read somewhere that plastic and resin would make realistic weapons very fragile so the blades bulked out and so did the hafts.

Everything that has to be epic and constantly over the top.

This was already (recently) discussed, then made into a poll topic, then discussed some more.

Elves.
Don't like any of those pansies.

Anachronism. I dislike when we make massive quantum leaps in technology, ethics, and/or politics because this or that capability would be "cool" in an alien setting.

Pastiche armies / races based on sort of a 'received wisdom', so your elves resemble most other people's view on them which probably trace back to JRRT, ditto dwarves, orcs.

Then throw in undead because fantasy must have undead. Etc.

And over-sized weapons.

Regards

David F BRown

Hot chicks in chainmail bikinis! Nice to look at but just plain silly.

Skulls. Not the fashion accessory you might think.

Cricket bat swords and axes the size of a car door.

90% of anything to do with elves and dwarves.

Basically, anything Games Workshop.

Green, green , green, green and more Green. I could die tomorrow a happy man if I never see another fricken green orc.

I want pig faced orcs back. Not the giant ogres they have become.

The problem with everyone's dislike of fantasy tropes is if you ditch all of them then no one reconizes the material. Just go to Jack Vances Dying Earth stories if you want the tropes to disappear. It is not very hard but you ha e to be willing to be creative and find an audience that is receptive to game with. That last part is not so easy

Interestingly, the author of Frostgrave this week mentioned 'The Dying Earth' in a discussion of influences.

For me, the issue of cliches is about rehashing an increasingly tired version of a very limited number of sources. It's about knowing Robert E. Howard (but not Clark Ashton Smith or C.L. Moore), and then only Conan, and that the comic book version. It's about evoking Tolkien's elves without knowing Poul Anderson's version. It's about taking a work of fantastic imagination, but not having any of that yourself.

I'm tired of GW Warhammer-style orcs and goblins. The LotR ones are nice, if small (goblins all, for 28mm!) And brown or amber skin, I am sick of green orks and goblins too.

I'm tired of tinker gnomes and goblins. This is fantasy, jot late 18th century anarchists.

Just go to Jack Vances Dying Earth stories if you want the tropes to disappear.

Sure, but who is doing that in miniature wargaming?

Penguin catapults.

The problem with fantasy is that there is very little original fantasy nowadays that is not influenced by Tolkien.
Up to the end of the 1970's LOTR was one of many successful fantasy books on the market, each with their own worlds.As LOTR got more and more successful it seems nearly every 2nd book coming out had some sort of orcs and elves in them. Where is the fantasy(Imagination) in that?
Our games are the same. Cliche orcs, elves, dwarves etc
I also do Middle Earth wargaming but if i was not doing Tolkien i think i would try to do a collection without the cliche races.
If you look in the very early GW cataloges and other early miniature manufactures (check the solegends.com Website) they used to make all sorts of weird and wonderful things, but as GW got more successful it was more profitable to concentrate only on the "classic" Fantasy races and the less popular weirder stuff disapeared.

Half-Painted crap.

Unfinished Terrain.

a too high price tag

Cartoony orcs and Goblins

I've just been reading some stuff about the history of fantasy publishing from the '60s onwards. The Lord of the Rings was a huge commercial hit in the US in the sixties, but publishers had a hard time getting that audience to buy much of anything else – even though it was the era of Moorcock and Conan pastiches and the Ballantyne classic reprints and the sublime Ursula K. LeGuin.

So they decided that 'More Tolkien' was the answer, even if it wasn't real Tolkien. And, although critics and writers and even the people who published it thought it was terrible, 'The Sword of Shannara' by Terry Brooks sold in huge numbers, and even worse Tolkien knock-offs followed.

There's a lot of fantasy out there without orcs and elves. The obviously successful example is GRR Martin. I'd mention Joe Abercrombie, Max Gladstone and Paul S. Kemp as my current favourites.

Deus ex machina resolutions. I could mention half a dozen from Tolkien alone without breaking a sweat. "Eagles!"

Nobody poops.

link

I'm fine with Tolkienesque fantasy, and while I like pig-faced orcs, and would love to make an army of them, I am quite happy with GW's take on Orcs.
Hmmm, Norse Dwarves…yeah I'd like to see dark age dwarves.
Mediterranean fantasy armies would be awesome…

Magic. Too much magic. Everybody's got magic. Magic should be cumbersome, rare, and very expensive. And unpredictable. But everybody's got magic users, magic rings, magic swords, magic goats, magic chickens…

Too much magic.

Not enough non-European fantasy. It's getting better (particularly Chinese), but more could be out there. It's partly due to a lack of fiction, but there's more African-esque fantasy fiction out now than every before (not all of it is good though).

I recognize I'm probably an outlier in my enthusiasm for taking fantasy from different cultures and looking to game it.

D&D knock offs

Swords of Shannara. I believe a film is immanent.

imdb.com/title/tt1051220

God. That irritated me at the time, but like a lot of people I guess, I was looking to see if anything would fill that Tolkien fix I craved. Another one was Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Read them all upto part six and enjoyed them. But I know which books I'll re and re-read.

Capt Flash, SGMM sells Norse dwarves and they are mighty fine.

I have lots of second-hand green (and Blue!) skinned Ral Partha Goblins/Orcs.

I just group them together and say, "Tribe 'X' paints their skins prior to battle [to induce frenzy chemically, asking their "god" for aid, status… pick a reason…]," then paint the others various shades of brown tones.

Other than weird skin color which I can hand wave away I guess Chain Mail Bikinis and cartoon looking creatures would be my bitch. "Bad Guys" should look like rough hard cases not laugh or eye-roll inducing clowns. Women are generally smarter then men so proper protection should be present on non-bondage pandering figures (oops, did I say that?) as a rule.

I have no problem with "Tolkienian" looking armies since the stereotypes preceded 1937. That doesn't mean I don't have forest dwelling "Green" Dwarfs or the usual Black Powder/Axe and Mace/Steam Power trope Dwarf armies (I figure I will keep somewhere between 400 and 500 dwarfs after I down size the figures for retirement.) It just means that I define (and re-define) what the figures represent from game to game.

Edit: I can always carve down over-sized weapons if it irritates me enough…

You can count me among the number that does not like the cartoony orcs, goblins, dwarves, etc. It really turned me away from fantasy back in the late 80's when that style seemed to become the industry standard I much preferred the Tom Meier sculpts from the 1979 Ral Partha range.

Some of the hyper-detailed sculpting that is prevalent now, though great works of art and nice for competition and display painters, is a bit of a waste when it becomes an invisible blur at normal table ranges.

What has drawn me back into fantasy again is the rise of so many great and 'old school' 15mm ranges – Khurasan, Splintered Light, Copplestone, etc

Kropotkin303, that was always just an excuse, there is no benefit I have found (they are just as fragile, if not more so due to sticking out further) to having bigger weapons.

So everyone hates ripping off Tolkien for the nth time, but still want orcs that look the same? Compared with all the D&D clone orcs we keep seeing, GW orcs look original.

Cherno – that's not a thing.

Fantasy Gun Control.

Chainmail bikinis when a girl could do much better with a leather leotard. Especially with a hard round cover over the cleavage to avoid things going in.

"Women are generally smarter then men so proper protection should be present on non-bondage pandering figures (oops, did I say that?) as a rule."
Yes, you did. Trouble is, this argument has little impact when you consider that, around my way, real-life women constantly wear bikinis deliberately designed to appear slovenly to a psychotic level, to the seaside whereupon they will lay in the sun until their skin turns into crackling. And then go play in a sea full of sea jellies.

"Some of the hyper-detailed sculpting that is prevalent now, though great works of art and nice for competition and display painters, is a bit of a waste when it becomes an invisible blur at normal table ranges."
That's nothing. When it's all so fine it can be lost under just one layer of primer…
Or when it's so detailed you can't work out how the character is supposed to move in their ornate outfit…

Giant hominids which only pay lip-service to the square-cube law, with handwavium/nonsensoleum mix being the only reasoning for these things, which are often not represented in the artwork or miniatures.

If you don't want things to be green, why don't you just grab a brush and crack open a paint jar?

@ Bashytubits- Thanks! I'll take a look.
As for goblin colors, I'll be painting my GW Night Goblins as flesh colored Wood Elves. Earth tone robes…

Magic that fries all electrical technology in the area, even if the spell/power in use doesn't affect technology at all; or worse, when any technology stops working or fails catastrophically when confronted with magic with a completely unrelated purpose. Technology just being things that work by known physical means, as if a fantasy world's swords, armour, stone buildings etc. weren't technology, should logically mean that no clothing, structure, armour etc. should be able to exist there if magic is present (an inconsistency most glaring in the Dresden Files, where Harry learns to take the battery out of his phone so he doesn't have to buy a new one every time he uses magic, but a necromancer uses the subwoofer in his car audio as part of a zombie animation spell…). Magic and technology are somehow opposing forces, where really one isn't even a force in a literal sense, only a concept; yet they are often shown as physically conflicting forces, eg. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura, where a wizard simply looking at a steam engines' controls will automatically cause a catastrophic failure, and a scientist picking up a magic sword will cause all the magic to drain out.

Skeletons that don't look like they could possibly have fitted inside the creature they purport to be the remains of.

Fewer elves, more dwarves!

Chainmail bikinis are on the top of my list, but it does get better. Oversized swords and such are also a bit naff, but can be tolerated if the overall sculpt is cool.

Anything that divorces fantasy settings entirely from history and/or makes it too contemporary. Especially the following subsets of that phenomenon:
• Skimpy armor (e.g. chainmail bikinis)

• Spikey armor (e.g. every Pathfinder image … ever)

• Bright-green-skinned cartoonish orcs, goblins &tc. (e.g. fantasy models from that game that was just cancelled at that obscure that one UK based firm).

• Oversized weapons (e.g. Final Fantasy VII and 98.75% of video-game RPGs since then)

• Magic made Mundane (i.e. magic so common it is used everywhere (e.g. the toilet empties into a magical gate and the furnace is powered by a perpetual fireball))

• Overplayed multi-speciesism (i.e. a fantasy world without bigotry (e.g. the party consists of a half-orc, an elf, a dwarf, a satyr, and a half-Cthulhu-thing-with-tentacles-for-a-mouth. Nobody bats an eye when they sit down at the bar in an isolated rural village.))

• Underplayed species differences (i.e. any race can play any class & behave in any way. (e.g. the party contains a half-orc & a dwarf, both are wizards and they're romantically involved. Nobody bats an eye as they walk down the street holding hands. Of course no one would be uncouth enough to say anything. If they did the elf-samurai in the party would challenge that person to a duel, which is why the satyr-monk in the party keeps his big mouth shut.))

• Overly mixed genres (i.e. Fantasy-Historical-Sci-fi (e.g. The GM: "As you walk toward the village you see oxen pulling plows in the surrounding fields. Once you arrive at the local branch of "Blasters ᴙ Us" and enter you can view the local blacksmith at forge making photon pistols. Just as you are entering the shop you a Pixie telegram boy is handing one of the apprentices an envelope. [Everyone roll perception] You hear a strange noise outside and look up to the sky only to see a bright red Vickers-McDonnell-Douglas Triplane (Mk III India Pattern) with a Viking at the controls dogfighting an Amazon-Witch on her broomstick. The Viking seems to be winning when suddenly his Maxim-Gatling-Laser jams. You see him rummage around in the cockpit and he pulls a magic wand. As he takes aim he stops suddenly; The Viking's face turns grim and then, just as his horned helmet falls from his head, you see an alien burst forth from his chest. The Amazon wastes no time and severs the tail plane's hydraulic lines with her sword. The singularity powering plane must have lost containment because the plane and Viking are instantly crushed by massive gravimetric forces. [Everyone roll perception, again] You recognize the sword as Excalibur!"

The player of the half-orc: "That's Excalibur, I'd bet my Nobel Prize on it! We've got to tell Kaiser Lincoln about this!"

The player of the dwarf: "No, poopsie-woopsykins. We have to get that sword before Ivan the Terrible & Baba Yaga find out. If the Czar & Czarina get it first it will mean victory for Chaos. He might even use it to bring back Cthulhu! If we hurry back to where we parked the starship we just might be able to catch up with her."

The player of the elf: "While they're arguing I'm going to try to hack into the control system of that broom using my cell phone.

The GM: Ooh, that's going to be tough. Your cell phone is UNIX based and that broom uses IBM DOS. I'm going to have to assess a -5 penalty to the roll.")

Being a "young producer" and agreeing with the most important points named in the post, i would like to share some links of fantasy content that is being produced by my "micro company".. a fantasy world clearly inspired in historical civilizations & mythologies, not staying in the classical "european-like" elf, orcs humans and dwarfs plus the so many overly used creatures..

2D art (being updated as new art is done):

link

3D art + miniatures (1 character of each usable faction of the fantasy world)

1) link

2) link

3) link

So, stay faithfull! ahah there is some good "out of the box" content to come in the next months and years!

People complaining about what other people like. If you don't like it, don't buy it.