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[SalmonGod]

The Children of Hurin. Incest and suicide on the Middle Earth.

Probably my favorite Tolkien book. Not just because of the dark stuff.
Honestly, I hope one day that DF will be able to play out Turin's life in adventurer mode. It's a great hero story, in the vein of the old Greek (and similar) tales. It captures that essence far better than any other fantasy I can think of at the moment.

Agreed.  It is the quintessential fantasy epic for me.

[Thundrim]

Tolkien had real experience with gritty surroundings, and the foulness of war. So when there is beauty, it is contrasted to the dark places in a way that authors that barely have encountered more than dead insects, and brown flowers, hardly can relate to. Good luck with all these fancy new ideas of original new ways to put things, this Dwarf will settle for solid familiarity, where quality lies within the fabric of the material, not some lofty new artsy-fartsy way to present things, in some scrambling effort to dress age old ideas in new clothes. Too many Elfs on these forums, with all sorts of outlandish ideas. Quality must come from within, not by changing the appearance of everything, and pretend it is different. Grumblemumbletreehuggerspaintedbluemybeard. 

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[G-Flex]

Good luck with all these fancy new ideas of original new ways to put things, this Dwarf will settle for solid familiarity, where quality lies within the fabric of the material, not some lofty new artsy-fartsy way to present things, in some scrambling effort to dress age old ideas in new clothes. Too many Elfs on these forums, with all sorts of outlandish ideas. Quality must come from within, not by changing the appearance of everything, and pretend it is different. Grumblemumbletreehuggerspaintedbluemybeard. 

I can't tell how much of this is serious, but... seriously? Why do you assume that new material can only be "new" in some incredibly superficial sense?

[Thundrim]

I can't tell how much of this is serious, but... seriously? Why do you assume that new material can only be "new" in some incredibly superficial sense?

The old material was once new, and the new material gets old in turn. Literature reflect changes in society, politics, culture and language. This is not a measure of freshness, it is a measure of how the present is reflected back into writing. Combine this with an unwillingness to accept the connection to what has gone before, and "new" ideas ends up disjointed and temporal. Superficial in the sense that many contemporary ideas cannot stand the test of time, unless they acknowledge that everything new must eventually grow old, and as such you must be able to relate it to that which has come before, before it can have a place in the future yet-to-be. If you can bridge the old and the new, you have come up with something that is not superficial. You have made something ageless. As for the rest, it will be forgotten, but for a few that likes to dig up things destined to obscurity. In that sense new material ends up superficial, from the perspective of time itself. Not necessarily as a failure in a contemporary timeframe.

That, and for all the changes taking part around us, the basic elements of the mind lag behind in a physiological sense, so that fundamental desires for story elements and plot devices follow deep patterns. New stories take the place of old ones, but serve the same purpose. There might be extra layers present in order to device new twists and turns, but that does not change the basic content within. And without that basic content, the storytelling more than often ends up as an empty shell, drowned in the effort to tell the story in "new" ways.

All this talk is thirsty work, you know. Will take some time to take out the dryness of that mouthful!

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[Sutremaine]

And, well, who read all that, let alone the next ten pages I'd need for you to properly understand these guys?

I did. I can't think what else about them would be so important that you could write ten pages on it, but they seem pretty easy to get a handle on. Farm, train dodging, ambushing (assuming it works in fortress mode outside of active hunters), and sling skills. The tree thing has no in-game relevance as trees are just big blocks of choppable stuff right now (that's the dwarven default for you ), but if it did then you'd be clearing out a tree next to another tree instead of clear-cutting an area. If they can't build drawbridges, have a guard animal at the beginning of a long path into the fortress and have lizards on permanent standby to put up blocking walls.

Workshops would need to be created for them in order to work wood for the reed mat items, but that's no big deal. Randomly generated noble positions should both be self-evident in title and have easy raw access, because noble positions are far more complicated than the game makes them appear.

[Indricotherium]

Truth.

The depth of his works really comes to the surface when you recall the author's life. The Noldor seem like a simple tale about heroism leading to folly, but think; a high and noble race follows their king across the sea to do war in a vast continent against an evil foe, the orcs, who were once elves but became corrupted. In the process, the Noldor themselves suffer terribly, things don't go as planned, their champions are slain and the enemy has powers (dragons, balrogs) beyond their might. The war pretty well falls apart and eventually they begin to return home. But isn't it telling to consider what happened in Tolkien's lifetime? Raised in middle-class English morality, inspired by Victorian culture, joins the Army to fight the Kaiser and his invasion of France, everything goes to hell, the Germans have artillery and gas and machine guns, and although they finally win the whole thing is bittersweet and their greatness is lost in muddy fields across a foreign soil. And no doubt he learned the Germans were just like him, once.

"We were all orcs in the trenches." - J.R.R.T.

It isn't fairy-tale morality. It's a warning for the Noldor, whenever they return to Arda.

Not to mention he lost many of his friends in the trenches. Not friends he made in the army, thought I suppose he made some, but pre-war friends. In the army of the time units often were all from the same town, village or county. Many of the men in them knew each other for years before the war.

EDIT: And coincidentally I just finished The Last Ringbearer. It has its issues but I enjoyed it a lot.

[GotIt_00]

Interesting discussion here. DF seems extremely derivative. That's what gives this game its playability.

It starts with 7 dwarves. 7 work-loving dwarves. Hi-ho! Hi-ho... you know the rest of that tune.

[Crioca]

People seem to have failed to make a distinction between originality in setting and originality in the work itself. You can have a work, a story, that uses all the cliché fantasy settings, but still have an original and engaging story notwithstanding.

Elves, dwarves, all of these things that make up the "classic" fantasy setting are tropes. They're common devices and like any device they can be used properly or improperly. If you're going to evaluate a work honestly, you need to delve past the initial reaction of "Oh gods, he's included tree loving elves with longbows" and ask "But has he done it well?"

[G-Flex]

People seem to have failed to make a distinction between originality in setting and originality in the work itself. You can have a work, a story, that uses all the cliché fantasy settings, but still have an original and engaging story notwithstanding.

This is very true. On the other hand, setting is often a pretty important tool, so sometimes originality there is warranted as well.

You just can't make any generalizations one way or the other, really. It depends on what the work is trying to accomplish, and how.

[SalmonGod]

It depends on what the author wants to accomplish, and how setting can be used towards that end.  If the goals of the story don't rely much on setting, for instance if they're completely character-centric, then setting doesn't matter much.  It can be incredibly generic or outlandish window dressing for entertainment.  It doesn't matter.  If it's something more like a genre deconstruction, then you want to take as generic a setting as possible, but alter the flavor... or see how the rules of the genre apply to a completely different setting.  Or perhaps the conflict of the story completely revolves around character vs environment in a completely original setting with interesting rules of survival.  There really isn't any right or wrong way, it's just how thoughtfully things are used to serve a purpose, as Crioca and G-Flex said.  The whole discussion about pros and cons of original settings is pretty silly, because it will always be different for any story.