Making Worlds Unique....

Caveat: I'm sure unique isn't quite the right word. But it'll do.

What do I mean, then? Mostly - uniqueness isn't always good. Really unique ideas will have people going "huh?" Example: A sci fi setting where the heroes are preventing an alien invasion using feel good music and time travel to the middle ages to retrieve artifacts lost by a previous team - which turns out to have been them - and they run the risk of meeting themselves and blowing up all of creation, which, according to their superiors, should be terrifying enough to convince the invaders to not invade or risk - literally - everything, but in order to do so they must destroy it and stop themselves form doing so, again if necessary. And since everything is here, they did, but the aliens are still invading so they didn't. And then add in some MIB types trying to protect time, a time travelling Homer writing the Iliad and a bunch of other stuff ... yeah, unique, but so is jumping off a building spray painted neon black and screaming "I sunk Atlantis!" in sanskrit while trying to do a triple gainer and half flip and drink a ceasar.

So, uniqueness is not all it's cracked up to be by any shot. Heck, there's, what, only 3 stories that get told? Being unique is more taking the normal and distorting it, or asking "what if?". But diffference. Ah, difference is what we want I think ... a world that has something that can be said to be it's own, to separate it from the many other settings, something you can sum up quickly. (Go ahead, pick a setting and try it. If the setting is any good, you can do it.)

So, you have the difference that gives the setting it's punch, what makes it stand out from the crowd. But that's not all (or even enough), so we get ot the heart of making a world different - alter the normal. For examples:

• a culture where everyone is raised communally and have no concept of family
• A matrilineal culture where men who dress up as women are considered women and can then run their own household, can only marry men etc.. Entirely a gender issue, no sexuality stuff involved.
• Barbarians with no concept of money at all invading civilisation to steal bird feathers to sacrifice to their gods because all the native ones died in a plague
• A city where people never speak for fear of offending the gods.
• A town where everyone dresses in bright colours to blind death

Little things, yeah, and best done if the PCs are all from a small town or new to the continent etc. (Gives you a lot more time to make stuff up and throw at them.) Confound PC (and player) ideas..... use culture. See what happens. Make players THINK.

Your mileage may vary.