The fantasy genre boasts an incredible amount of diversity, offering a wide variety of settings, tones, and character arcs. In fact, fantasy may even stand as the most diverse genre on the market, but that hasn’t stopped countless books, movies, and TV shows from retreading the same ground. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if more storytellers turned to Dungeons and Dragons and The Elder Scrolls for inspiration, the genre would look even better.
All fantasy has its quirks. In any world with deep lore and long descriptions, there’s bound to be something strange that adds a bit of flair to the world at large. For a classic example, fantasy buffs just need to look at The Lord of the Rings, where the game of golf was invented by Bandobras Took, a hobbit tall enough to ride a real horse, knocking the head off the orc Golfimbul into a rabbit hole.
It’s weird, and it’s one of the more entertaining tidbits found in Tolkien’s work. Even just that bit about golf, no more than a few lines in a book, has helped inspire the direction of Dungeons and Dragons as well as The Elder Scrolls franchise, because the two boast some of the strangest, most striking lore of any fantasy franchise out there currently. That oddity helps seperate them from even some of the most noteworthy fiction ever published.
It’s hard to nail down exactly what makes Dungeons and Dragons special because of how heavily it relies on those that are playing it. Each group is going to have its own quirks, settings, characters, and world, each ripe with subtle – and major – differences that make a campaign feel unique. The only limit to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign is the group’s collective imagination, and frequently, that imagination can run a little wild.
For the most part, Dungeons and Dragons’ weirdest aspects are the creatures that inhabit the world, at least where official content is concerned. The creatures that pepper the world, decorating the Monster Manual from the front cover all the way through to the back, given Dungeons and Dragons flair that other fantasy properties simply don’t. Just look at the Gibbering Mother, Flumph, or the iconic Gelatinous Cube.
Dungeon Masters that let their imaginations run wild, incorporating even the strangest elements into a well-constructed world, will likely find themselves creating stories rivaling even the most popular fantasy stories. Weird campaigns don’t need to bombard players with strange event after a strange event, but incorporating flamboyant wizards that fly around in a giant magic shoe can make even a simple campaign feel unique.
The typical fantasy tropes can make an appearance, of course, and some campaigns put a heavy influence on experiencing set pieces found in other media. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of retreading the ground that others have already been too. Dungeons and Dragons is indicative of what weird fantasy can achieve because there are truly no limits to it. That’s why shows like Dimension 20 so successful.
For lore that’s set in stone, The Elder Scrolls offers some of the strangest fantasy out there. That isn’t always clear, as playing through Skyrim and Oblivion only offers glimpses at how strange the franchise can be. Oblivion‘s setting is even often criticized for leaning to heavily into normal fantasy tropes, offering the typical woodlands and plains that are present in countless other games, movies, and books. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it pales in comparison to Morrowind‘s world.
Perhaps even more so than just the world, there are tidbits of lore scattered throughout the Elder Scrolls’ mythos that make it feel radically different from anything else out there. Take the “Underground Express” of Black Marsh, for example. While an underground transport system is already strange enough in the confines of a fantasy setting, the Underground Express takes this a step further.
Basically, the Underground Express is a tunnel system created by Rootworms, a system that Black Marsh’s native Argonians use to travel quickly, doing so by entering a Rootworm’s stomach through their “breathing holes.” Like a lot of interesting Elder Scrolls lore, it’s something fans have to read in in-game books to learn, but it adds flair to the world that few other games are capable of replicating.
The Underground Express isn’t alone in Elder Scrolls lore, either. There are countless other examples that underline just how strange the franchise’s lore is, and just how special it makes the world feel. There’s a broad range there, too, from Imga, great apes that view High Elves as their superiors and try to emulate them, to the simple fact that Dragons use words to breathe fire and rain down destruction.
Other fantasy can still accomplish a lot, and stories will always have some sort of unique element that separates them from everything out there. Plus, fans are always going to find something that sticks out to them, something that makes a story click based on their own personal experiences and biases. Not all fantasy needs to be weird, because there will always be someone out there that wants a fantasy world like the ones presented to them thus far.
However, introducing those elements in smaller ways can be the best of both worlds, which both The Elder Scrolls and Dungeons and Dragons do elegantly. And yes, there’s plenty of other weird fantasy out there, but few properties can claim to have risen to the level of the popularity that those two have. There will likely be even more to come in the future, too, assuming more franchises lean into the absurdity fantasy worlds offer.
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