I know I've let this one sit in the inbox for like, three weeks. It's just a hard one to answer.
I've read a decent little bit of pulp fantasy now, here and there, trying to get a better grip on the genre overall (also I guess as a bit of a guilty pleasure and curiosity). One thing that comes to mind is Nine Princes in Amber, the start of a series that others recommended the rest of and oh. Oh wow. No, I won't be doing that, thank you. No. It's not a bad setting, it's just... too encompassing? From Amber, the nine princes (and their sisters who I guess just can't even vie for the throne wow how imaginative given the premise I said facetiously) can just manifest their ways into alternate realities to get whatever they want or need. It's not terrible, and being copyrighted in '72 I'm sure it was very imaginative for its time and certainly one of many works that would be greatly influential upon certain subgenres of fiction we take for granted today, namely the isekai.
But also? It just kinda sucks. There's no real sense of stakes given the main character literally manifested an entire alien army to march on the capital in a two paragraph blurb in between story beats. Also that guns just magically don't work in Amber, like they just cease to function in the city proper somehow, a thing the protagonist promises to upend in the sequel I'm probably never going to read, it just feels so arbitrary and undercooked, like much of the story overall which does little to make great use of its—for the time at least—abstract premise.
A magical utopia kingdom of light out from which all creation, all existence, across every possible reality flows, that's a premise you could do so much with, say so much with. So it feels almost like a punchline that out of all multiversal reality, our protagonist prefers Winston cigarettes. Wow.
Another big setting I've found myself thinking about a lot is that penned by Mercedes Lackey, namely I've been reading the Mage Winds trilogy (which I'm almost done with and would like to also read the Mage Wars trilogy but for the life of me am struggling to find a copy of Black Gryphon), and there's so many interesting things to latch onto. It feels a bit like Lackey threw everything at the wall to see what would stick, then stapled her favorite things that didn't anyway.
Magic is like radiation and "mutates" users/magic creatures to turn their hair or what have you white, and can infect the land itself, the pivotal Mage Wars which shaped the setting apparently saw magic glassing over entire cities. There's semi sentient psychic animals like the deer-like dyheli, friendly psychic wolves called krys who like to play babysitter, and of course the human sapience level gryphons whom the Mage Wars title books are sorta named for. There's the Tayledras who are all but wood elves in every way except they're not elves using magic funneled through giant crystals to create tropical vales even in the dead of winter building their homes upon the branches of gigantic trees they cultivate.
This is just scratching the surface, and not really an answer to the question but something I often think about regardless. If nothing else, I don't feel it "needs another crack at it," but have found it very inspiring. It often feels like Lackey tapped her pencil to her chin and would ask herself why does something have to be the way that it is, and answer herself because it would be more fun or at least interesting. She also wrote in '93 a sexy cat girl named "Nyara," so you know she was ahead of her time.
I guess for a real answer I'll go back to the well of Warhammer yet again. Though it feels almost too obvious an answer. But having read a good deal of Age of Sigmar fiction, I find it often feels like the setting doesn't matter, that it's incidental.
I don't mean that the author failed to mention any fire themed set dressing when the story has to visit Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, or what have you. But rather that often the setting often feels like it's merely the arena for the fighting or battles to happen in, rather than, as I'm supposed to believe, a place where people actually live. There's no sense of people living their day-to-day lives, just warriors and wizards, clashing with great artifacts of devastating power or wicked sorcery of unspeakable might, etc. and so on and so forth.
It's only in titles like Soul Wars that I've felt the setting is actually lived in, through effort to show or at least think about how people live and pass the time. It's especially funny, because the Stormcasts—our inherent protagonist fodder for the setting—provide an easy immediate lens for this by virtue of their ongoing recurring lives, where they have to realize and come to grips with no longer being able to relate to the mundanity of mortality they once knew even as they observe it in those that still enjoy such a short spark of existence. It's something I feel Reynolds—and to a lesser extent other authors like Annindale, Guymer, and even Lucas, loathe as I am to admit it—really understand and does an at least interesting job of exploring (though I still fucking loathe Godsbane by Lucas; it's a wretched piece fantasy fiction even by the low bar that is what you'd expect from Warhammer writing).
That's not exactly a concise answer but it's a difficult topic I've had to think about for a while.
