As a GM with a Homebrew world, I feel there is a lot of pressure to come up with "unique" and "novel" ideas for the setting. But the reality is that it is really, really hard to come up with something totally new. If I could do that regularly, I would be an award-winning novelist !
What I find I am good at, and what a lot of other GM's I've met excel at as well, is making great use of tropes. Just in case there is anyone reading who doesn't know what a trope is (although I suspect most of you do), it's a stereotype which will be familiar to it's audience. The wicked witch with a wart on the end of her nose, the spooky snow-shrouded castle where the vampire lives, the knight in shining armour off to rescue a damsel in distress.
All of these tropes can be used in-game as a kind of shorthand to describe a setting or NPC. It is a great way to implant a mental image in your players, knowing that they will all be picturing more or less the same thing. It has the advantage that you can describe the trope in a few words, and then focus on what is special or different about it. You can describe the knight in shining armour, but what makes him stand out is that his armour is a glistening metallic red, with fresh blood oozing from it's joints. The witch fits the trope perfectly, but why is her familiar in the form of a very small dryad ?
A really great GM can twist things further. Describing the trope, and any points of difference from the norm is just the start. The real question for the players becomes "is this just the trope as expected, or is something totally unexpected going to happen ?" It's about whether the trope is just a trope, or if it is just a deception hiding something very un-trope-like indeed.
I ran a whole adventure like this a little while ago. The players brief was that they were to go to a town occupied by a hostile power and assassinate the governor, in the hope that it would enable the citizenry to rise in revolt. For quite a while, they sneaked around town, making contact with the local resistance, causing trouble for the tyrannical occupiers, and generally following the "accepted" kind of activities that a storyline like this requires. When most of the garrison left town in a hurry, they took it (at first) as a GM-scripted opportunity to start the battle to liberate the town.
It was only a day or two later when isolated survivors arrived back with tales of something awful, followed by a horizon darkened by a massive horde of undead monsters that they realised something had just flipped. They worked out for themselves that mission now was just to survive, to get out and evacuate as many friendly civilians as possible. Holding off the Crawling Apocalypse on the dockside as panicked survivors tried to board a ship was a truly epic combat in a campaign that had totally thrown a curve-ball at them !
So what do you think ? Are tropes a useful tool, or are they just a lazy option that should be avoided ? Do settings and NPC's deserve to be fully detailed or is it okay to throw in a trope and keep the narrative moving ?
(PS... my first post here.... please be gentle !)