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seven tropes we apparently need to stop using in our world building
Snooty, Tree-hugging, Tolkien Elves...a big no no.
Elves should be like this?
"cat got your tongue?" Werner turned to look for his travelling companion. The thing, crouched in harold's splayed-open belly, tearing at an organ with a knife fashioned from a chewed femur, man-like despite the yellow cat eyes and pointed ears, remained focused on its fresh kill. Werner, paralyzed with fear, gagged as a bone pushed through from his back to his front, and something bit down on his throat.
Oh right...that is more like goblins or orcs. So much for RAPTOR elves...
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So your 'elves' should be a human subculture who disfigure their ears to make themselves look 'elvish'
Gotta love io9 for their info (I read it regularly), but they can be massively skewed to one side of the opinion scale on a bunch of different issues, and completely confident that their opinion is the last word on all that is real and good and interesting.
I recommend taking what they print with a grain of salt. I also recommend it as an excellent news source for sci-fi and fantasy books, movies, artwork, indie projects, etc, etc.
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No precursor race. Humans are the drivers of our world.
Not necesary to know the names of everything. So 'the anvil' might be what you call that region where rocks fall from the sky on a semi-regular basis (skyfall) but you shouldnt have the characters call it that.
Mono environment worlds are out: that kills ice planet hoth, degobah the swamp planet, tattoine, and but not coruscant. So the locals may call it the world-jungle but thats because they have never been beyond its periphery where modern civilization is bulldozing the trees.
There's a lot of obvious tropes on that top 7 list. Using them doesn't make a campaign any less fun. In fact it might make the campaign more fun so long as it isn't obvious.
I think the one big thing to remember when creating a fantasy world is to take inspiration from real people, things, and folklore. Brushing up on world history helps a ton too.
This is just clickbait. Is there a pop culture journalism site around today that doesn't do "N Things About X" articles to generate traffic? They're attractive because we like to know we can just read the bullet points and see if we're interested in reading the rest. And some of them are amusing. But I think they're lazy. Pointing out that something's been done a lot isn't the same thing as doing something new. There, I just pointed out that pop culture lists are done a lot. So, that's lazy of me.
That said, single-culture planets and races are a necessary shorthand in SF and fantasy. The only time I saw it called out was when Babylon 5 (perhaps accidentally) lampshaded it on the "The Parliament Of Dreams" episode. All the alien races sent a representative of their planet's religion, and the earth had a long line of people from all the different earth religions. I'm not sure JMS was doing it deliberately, but it felt to me like he was saying, "Yeah I know single culture planets are wrong, can we just move on?" The problem it solves is that you only have so many pages or minutes to tell the story. Getting into the weeds with variations of culture is going to use those resources up. So the writer has to handwave some of it to keep the story on track. I just smile and nod and move on.