>>224479
>partly because a lot of people either go too strange, creating entire wonky vocabularies of stupid sounding shit, or they don't go different enough, and you end up with a lot of "like-elves-but" type of shit.
These aren't necessarily different extremes. These are often the same extreme. People who think being harder to learn is what makes something an original setting, not a side effect of making an interesting setting. The actual extreme of having a legitimately very dense number of new concepts flying around necessarily requires lots of new vocabulary to handle those new concepts (you can lean on portmanteaus for things like 'deepspawn' to help, but that starts sounding really corny if there's a million of them) but coming up with proper names for things is the least of your worries. Your real problem is that filling in your audience to the point where they can properly understand the stakes is an immense undertaking.
Here's an example using history instead of fiction, because we all understand history, so I don't have to rely on your being familiar with an obscure but very, very weird bit of fantasy for the explanation to work. Imagine telling the story of the Cold War to someone from 1945. That's dead easy. The Soviet Union turns out to be dicks, proxy war replaces direct war because of nuclear weapons, and espionage and psy ops become way more important. You can set up the first two points in a single scene/chapter, and the third point is fairly easy to elaborate on such that people get the concept by the time you've reached the climax of a 25,000 word novella and need your audience to understand why it's so important that the microfilm doesn't fall into the hands of the Russians. You can sell a Cold War spy thriller to 1945 as science fiction, and people will get it. Because only a very small number of new things need to be explained.
Now imagine telling the story of the Cold War to a hunter-gatherer from 10,000 BC, for whom cities are unimaginable and permanent habitation of any kind is caveman sci-fi. If you try to toss him into a narrative about a microfilm containing nuclear secrets that will allow the Soviets to disarm the entire NATO arsenal and roll into West Germany with impunity, you are first going to have to explain to him the function of not only nuclear missiles and microfilm, but firearms, automobiles, what these cities everyone's driving around in are, why nobody ever has to go out and hunt dinner, etc. etc. Now, he doesn't need to know the science behind these things. It's fine if the extent of his knowledge of nuclear weapons is "it's a missile that flies through the sky across entire continents and vaporizes entire cities in a single moment." He doesn't need to know about atomic reactions. But he needs to know about missiles, cities, and continents. How are you going to drop all of that into the narrative horrendous info-dumping?
The answer most people will reach for first is to frame it in terms he's already familiar with. To describe the Soviets and the Americans as two very large tribes, the microfilm as a magic artifact which confers knowledge, the various cities as very large (but not necessarily permanent) encampments, and nuclear weapons as some kind of apocalyptic magical ritual. In other words, by drastically reducing the number of unfamiliar elements the hunter-gatherer has to contend with. So as a general rule, if you're making a game or book or whatever set in this bizarre magical world and you don't want to dedicate a decade of your life to taking the long option, your first task is to reduce the bizarreness wherever you can until you can explain everything important about the setting in Act I when you're setting the stakes, with maybe a few details coming out in Act II when you're raising the stakes, and nothing except perhaps interesting but irrelevant details being brought up in Act III when you're resolving the stakes. This means that if you have a people whose primary function is to serve as the antagonists' mooks, make them orcs. It doesn't matter how cool or interesting the dark empire built on the backs of slave armies driven by fungal infestation was, in the end their narrative function is served just as well by orcs and you have a lot more concepts to introduce and not nearly enough time to introduce them in, so just use orcs.
>cont