Setting Aesthetics

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How it works. And if you're thinking there's only like five original settings in the world, you're absolutely right.

Worldbuilding can be hard. If you're creating a story that isn't already set on Earth at some point in history, you'll have to come up with a lot of different things on your own. And not just the names of places and what transpired, or what kind of culture each different people has, but also the more subtle parts of a setting that include tone and visual aesthetics.

That's why a lot of fictional worlds tend to cleave to a particular setting aesthetic, an amalgamation of different ideas that can loosely be thought of as setting genres. These are not hard and fast rules, as some different aesthetics may blend into one another, but they tend to stick primarily to one type of aesthetic. These terms can be applied across literature, movies, games, etc.

Fantasy

  • High Fantasy - The default type of setting for most fantasy settings. Magic is commonplace, as is anything we normally associate with fairy tales and mythology. High Fantasy tends to be a bit more upbeat, as many civilizations tend to exist quite comfortably (apart from the odd dragon or zombie attack). Big focus on cosmological conflicts, namely Good vs. Evil.

Examples: Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, Age of Sigmar for a particularly High Fantasy.

  • Low Fantasy - The dark and gritty counterpart to High Fantasy. Not necessarily Grimdark, although life does tend to be harsher. The biggest exemplar of Low Fantasy is Conan the Barbarian; magic is uncommon but very powerful, political strife is more commonplace, and violence is the norm.

Examples: Conan the Barbarian, Game of Thrones

  • Heroic Fantasy - Intermediary point between High & Low Fantasy; High Fantasy backdrops and upbeat take on the world, but Low Fantasy-esque focus on Your Dudes. Grittier and more grimdark examples do exist - Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Roleplay are technically Heroic Fantasy.

Examples: Dungeons & Dragons, Exalted

Examples: Eberron, Planescape, Iron Kingdoms

Examples: Masque of the Red Death, Castle Falkenstein, Unhallowed Metropolis

  • Dark Fantasy - Grimdark or Horror take on your standard fantasy world.

Examples: Warhammer Fantasy

  • Modern Fantasy - An alternate take on Urban Fantasy, where you have a fantasy world that's developed magic and/or technology until it's reached a semblance of the modern world. Or at least a historical/futuristic analogue to our world.

Examples: Arcanum (fantasy analogue to Victorian England), Shadowrun (fantasy world gone cyberpunk)

  • Weird Western - Either a Western version of Urban Fantasy, or a fantasy world that has Western themes.

Examples: Deadlands, Horizons: Spellslinger

Sci-Fi

  • Cyberpunk - The original of the "punk" genres. If you've ever seen The Matrix, that's pretty much Cyberpunk in a nutshell, although Blade Runner is probably a more classic example. Dystopian urban environments and highly advanced technology is commonplace, as are dark, brooding heroes wearing black trench coats and megacorporations which have more power than any government. High tech, low life.

Examples: The Matrix, Cyberpunk 2020, Blade Runner, Shadowrun

  • Steampunk - One of the first derivatives of Cyberpunk, at least in name only. In actuality, the aesthetic draws quite a bit from the works of Jules Verne, which takes place in Victorian times and features more advanced versions of the steam-powered technology of the day.

Examples: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Warmachine

  • Dieselpunk - A darker and grittier version of Steampunk set between the World Wars. Tyranny and warfare is commonplace, as are machines capable of deadly efficiency. Typically features nazis in one way or another, sometimes as the winning side of WW2.

Examples: Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Bioshock, Wolfenstein The New Order

  • Atompunk - The name applied to anything inspired by the science fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s. Space exploration is the norm, and technology is mostly based on what was slowly beginning to emerge at the time that we would now take for granted (such as video chat, portable phones, robots capable of walking) or else has proven to be wildly impractical if not impossible (Jetpacks, flying cars, ray guns, robots capable of independent thought).

Examples: Buck Rogers, Fallout, Star Trek The Original Series, too many 1950s movies to count

  • Biopunk - Setting which revolves around use of biotechnology and DNA manipulation. Other than that, it isn't really set in stone what the rest of the aesthetics might look like. Some might look modern, some might look futuristic, some might look historical.

Examples: Bioshock, Resident Evil

  • Nanopunk - Setting about nanotechnology. Can often overlap a lot with cyberpunk with it's themes but use of nanotechnology is what sets it apart. While a cyberpunk setting would have cyborgs with cybernetic implants, a nanopunk setting would instead have people with nanomachines inside them.

Examples: Crysis, Metal Gear Solid (1,2 and 4), Deus Ex (First two games only, rest are cyberpunk)

  • Clockpunk - Steampunk's older brother, borrowing its aesthetics from the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Examples: Deadlands, Dragonmech, Mechanus, Mage: The Ascension, Unknown Armies

  • Space Opera - The grand-daddy of Sci-Fi, Space Opera features a multitude of worlds, races and technology that play loose and fast with the science part for the sake of a wide, bright adventure in SPAAAAACE! Space Operas are filled with larger-than-life characters, space-nations loosely based on different earth societies and great, galaxy-saving adventures, though it can easily be zoomed in to a planet- or even a party-focused story if needed. Can be split into three sub-settings: Hard sci-fi which tries to be as scientifically accurate as possible, soft sci-fi where technology works by it's own in-universe rules and science fantasy, which features stuff which is supernatural even by the rules of it's own universe.

Examples: Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer 40000, Mass Effect, Twilight Imperium, Cosmic Encounter

  • Decopunk - A noblebright version of dieselpunk. Art deco everywhere, hence the name. Not a particularly common aesthetic however.
  • Solarpunk - The most noblebright punk of them all. An utopia for all environmentalists, this setting features a world driven primarily through use of renewable energy and people live harmoniously with nature.

History

Sometimes worldbuilding doesn't have to go into fantasy or sci-fi. Instead, you could also simply make a world inspired by real history. Some might find this pointless, believing that if they are making a story in a medieval setting for example but with no fantasy or sci-fi elements, why not simply set the story in the real medieval period rather than a fictional world? Well the answer to this is simple: Making a story in the real middle ages needs to be historically accurate and making it so requires lots of research into the period. On top of this, making your own world also allows for you to come up with all the fluff yourself, something real world historical settings inherently do not allow for, even if you go for alternate history, you must still account for everything from before the point of divergence and are also limited to the geography of Earth. So if you just want to tell tales of knightly heroism or clashes of empires without fantasy or sci-fi elements but also without feeling constrained by having to make it fit in with real history, making a fictional world based on these settings might be the thing for you.

Other

Examples: Dragonmech, Dragonstar, Spelljammer, Numenera, RIFTS, Shadowrun, Warhammer 40,000, Starfinder. arguably Star Wars.

  • Lovecraftian: A type of horror setting that is either directly based on or inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, especially the Cthulhu Mythos. The main concepts revolve around monsters and deities whose mere existence is so horrible that knowledge or direct perception of them drives people insane, and feature copious amounts of existential dread.

Example: Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green

Example: The Dark Tower, Deadlands

  • Space Western - Western elements in a science fiction or Space Opera setting.

Examples: Firefly, Borderlands, The Mandalorian, Star Trek was originally pitched as such but doesn't really fit the modern definition

  • Magitek - Magic has either replaced technology or been assimilated into it. Clarkes third law turned on it's head.

Examples: Eberron, Deadlands, Rifts, Iron Kingdoms, Exalted, Hollow World

  • Urban Fantasy - Our world, but with magic and/or science fiction added to it. Considered by many the "easiest" sort of setting to get into by casuals & normies. Can be further seasoned with many other aesthetics.

Examples: D20 Modern, Mutants & Masterminds, World of Darkness, Dark Matter

  • Weird Wars - Urban Fantasy meets war stories, when one of our world's wars gets magical and/or super-science added to it.

Examples: Pinnacle Games' lines of the same name, Wolfenstein, Call of Cthulhu, GURPS

  • Isekai - Your dudes come from the real world, but have been sent to a fantasy (or, more rarely, sci-fi) land.
  • Post-Apocalyptic - The world ended, and now it's time for adventure! Expect rusted metal, moral ambiguity, relatively high-tech, mutants and lots, lots of sand. Can effectively be divided into three sub-settings: in post-apocalypse, the apocalypse happened fairly recently and as such people are mostly just concerned with simple survival. In post-post-apocalypse, a lot of time has passed since the apocalypse and people have started to rebuild civilization, though it is definitely still a work in progress. In post-post-post-apocalypse, the apocalypse is a distant memory and the world has largely recovered from it.

Examples: Fallout, Mad Max. Commonly combined with sci-fi, but also sometimes with medieval stuff.

  • Alternate History - One event in history went differently than in our timeline and this change caused the events past that point to be wildly different from our timeline. What if Rome didn't collapse and survived to the 21st century? What if Nobunagas ambition was realized and after conquering Japan, he went on to successfuly conquer Korea and China? Germany winning WW2 is a particularly popular one. Alternate history can effectively work with anything from real world history, fantasy settings to sci-fi settings but it's usually based on real world history. Alternate history based on real world history does have a tendency to feature sci-fi elements however.

Examples: Command & Conquer: Red Alert, The Man in the High Castle, Wolfenstein The New Order

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