Best Fantasy Universe, A poll for geeks

Note this poll is fantasy, not sci-fi.

D&D in fact contains various parallel worlds, but for simplicity I have lumped them together as one option.

Tough tough call for me but in the end I'd take Middle Earth. The Warhammer world is set-up in such a way that you have 15 factions endlessly at war with each other. In that sense it does its job. There is some great background detail on various warhammer races, but taken as a whole the fluff does make for a setting that is rather grim and nihilistic.

Middle Earth is an environment of rich depths, one where everything has a history and a purpose, and one that spawned the other fantasy settings that followed. It also created an iconic set of characters in the form of The Fellowship. Think of rangers and you think of Aragorn, think of wood elves and you think of Legolas with his bow, think of wizards and its going to be either Merlin or Gandalf.

This post has been edited by Craze_b0i on Jul 27 2011, 09:24 PM

theo is gonna be disappointed you have not included discworld.

for myself definately middel earth, although sometimes fantasy is not the proper word for tolkiens scribblings as he relied heavily on historical sources.

I fancy Warhamemr the most. But Tolkien is a really close second ^^

//Svarten

Come on own up, who voted for WoW?

I suppose they have put a lot of thought in to it. It’s just not for me. It gets silly when you have Orc's that no longer want to fight.

I do like the Gnomes though but probably because I put so much time and effort in to Wizbix Rotaswatch, Gnome Mage. Personally I preferred the world of Everquest. People were always fighting to save the WoW world from imminent destruction, which kind of makes all the other quests insignificant. At least Everquest it was a continual struggle of the different gods and races but no where near on the level of Warhammer. I once saw two gods materialise in a forest and slug it out. It was a GM run scenraio. We had to support our respective god. Ours won and the wood was then turned in to some Demon infested warped place. Another was two giants that slugged it out. I won gold for supporting the winner. Unfortunatly we all jumped in and killed him too. The GM overseeing it told us all off, all in character of course! Akanon was also my favourite city in any of those online games. Al that ticking and tocking of the clock work gadgets. The ability to target "too talls" who came in to use the bank - they couldnt fight back as they were crawling to get in! I still dream about the place at night. hah.

I like the Warhammer world and that’s what I voted for. It is a tad over the top though. But its variation is what is key for me. Yes their maybe constant struggle and they make out that it is on the brink of cataclysm but the images that I think of are more mundane; how the average empire farmer would view the world etc and try to imagine that the big gribblies are a lot more rare. Perhaps it is because it reminds me of the Fighting Fantasy world, they seemed very similar and I spent a lot of my child hood reading those books and pondering over the bestiary and maps.

Tolkien of course should get an honouree vote as he started it all of with an amazing world. I just prefer a fantasy world where each side isn’t necessarily good or evil and his world very much takes on the good vs. evil analogy. The back stories are amazing though. And his concept of wizards and magic are great. I prefer Warhammer Orc’s though. Much harder, much more fun. Comic? Yeah maybe a little but it’s not supposed to be taken too seriously.

This post has been edited by Snikpik on Jul 28 2011, 07:49 AM

Aww...yeah!

But Warhammer. I love it.

Theo

Well I voted Middle Earth, but for nearly 10 years I had Warcraft in my bloodstream. I started on Warcraft 2, graduated to Warcraft 3, then went back to Warcraft 2. Of course the gameplay was the best part but I really enjoyed the narrative behind all the campaigns and special characters. I even wrote some fan fiction. I never made the transition to WOW however, by that point I simply didn't want to invest the necessary spare-time on yet another game.

I thought they did some interesting things with the background. In WC3 for example you find that the orcs were not naturally evil but had been cursed by demons who infected them with Blood Rage, and much of the orc campaign in WC3 is about the orcs trying to free themselves from that curse. By contrast in the human campaign you play a prince who starts off more-or-less fighting for good but is gradually corrputed to the point where he betrays his own people.

Simply put there are just too many skulls in Warhammer, I think GW has gone to far far with the whole religious zealot/gothic grimdark genre. However the game is awesome and the models are cool

Middle Earth gets my vote

This post has been edited by Skartooth The Third on Jul 28 2011, 05:08 PM

I hear this a lot but I just dont see it myself.

I like Middle Earth better because it works as an adapting, changing fantasy universe that reads more like history than the rest, where as WoW, Warhammer etc all suffer from the same problem that noone can actually win without ending the game completely (sigh, I just lost btw), and so anything you write ultimately has to end in the status quo, and nothing really happens. Sure a character might die here or there, a city might fall or a land be ravaged, but in the end a new character appears, the city gets rebuilt and the land recaptured and BAM, we're back to the start. LOTR has its conflicts through the ages and the books are finished, then there are games based on those books. Warhammer and WoW have books based on the game, so without risking killing the hobby for good (read, being big fat chickens!) and actually having something happen they, well, dont. WoW is worse for it because its a repeatable game, you can kill generic big boss #26134 >9000 times but he'll still respawn eventually. Still love the Warhammer fluff (and lets face it, its a lot easier to read than the Silmarillion!), I just hate that it cant really go anywhere!

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