Is anyone running an original setting?

[temnix]

These forums are for AD&D, so there is Dragonlance here, Ravenloft and other official settings. Also some unofficial modifications. But I know people here have played elsewhere and with different rules, so you may know an answer to this: do you know anyone running a game, with any rules system, in a completely original world? Not a post-apocalyptic, not a zombie invasion, not space opera, not AD&D-type fantasy. Not any kind of imitation. With elements from this or that, maybe, but something the GM has made up himself and that has unusual concepts?

[Haahque]

"Completely Original" Is a rather vague concept. Would the campaign that I ran for my group years ago that was based in Takashaki and it's bordering countries that I all made up completely original? Takashaki had heavy influences from Rome and United States, the bordering countries had heavy influences from Medieval England, Ancient Egypt, Feudal Japan and lazy sailors, while the whole world had heavy influences from Feudal Japan (which I advertised as the main setting for the campaign) and typical Fantasy D&D. One of Takashaki's enemies is a disgruntled group of orcs who they betrayed, so the orcs ran off to a vast forest and took up hiding, ambushing Takashaki patrols that dare enter. Takashaki had an army with an elite force of Samurai and an elite force of spell-turning monks, as well as a healthy detachment of ninjas for reconnaissance and assassination, including one Pedal ninja who kept the party on edge up until just before the final dungeon, where they went to a burial-chamber trap gauntlet inspired by what I thought pyramids would have if they were built by powerful (and insane) mages.

Or perhaps the campaign that one of my friends made up that we've been playing since then, where everyone drives around in cars, but handguns haven't been created, so there's vehicle combat using miniguns, but the most effective method is often to teleport into your enemy's car and stab them to death with a sword, then use the weapons on their car as you wish. He's also created new countries with influences from various countries from history, although he may have combined influences more then I did, and has a storyline involving a girl being possessed by a goddess who (probably) came across from a different dimension, and a fair number of other creatures who came across from the dimension that hate her. However the most powerful people refuse to acknowledge that there's a goddess floating around in a different country gathering the ultimate powers, and instead wage their petty wars for revenge and power. In this campaign we've fought enemies ranging from dragons made of pure lava, to cyborgs and tanks, to knights in shining armour, to angels.

[temnix]

There are original elements in both. Especially the thing with teleporting inside people's cars. There is some originality everywhere. And influences too. But what I had in mind is something like "The Dragons of Pern," where it's about telepathic bonding with dragons and life-destroying Threads, or "Earthsea," where it's about True Names (started out that way, at any rate), or "Hiero's Journey," where everything is collected by telepathy, but in a different way, or "Battlestar Galactica" with cylons, or - since we started talking about cars - "Mad Max II".

This is actually a good example. When they shot Mel Gibson in "Road Warrior" back in - what was it, 1984? - it was ground-breaking. Since then it has spawned off the Fallouts and eventually a whole "post-apocalyptic genre," and not long ago they thought they could make another Mad Max with bigger baggies and more dust. And it was derivative by definition, the style has been done to death, but that doesn't make the original less brilliant. But understand me correctly, I'm not asking where I can find a game "set in" one of these original books or movies that game companies later turned out like a glove, spelled out what's in them and invited people to be characters there. It's the opposite - I'm looking for some game master who isn't setting his players "in" anything pre-made, but who is doing more than just pulling together bits of mass culture, too. Someone who has his own thing going, and you can't easily tell what it is or categorize it.