How do I make things not sound like they're just something from Skyrim? By having horizons consisting of much more than 'Lord of the Rings', 'A Song of Ice and Fire' and 'Skyrim'. That sounds pretentious and condescending, but it isn't meant to be that way. What I mean is that I have a huge range of sources of inspiration and because of that I have a much wider field of reference. I'm familiar with non European cultures and history, and have made deliberate attempts to find interesting things about other languages and cultures. Then everything that's in my head goes into a blender and stuff I like, stuff that's unique to my world and context, comes out the other end.

And nothing is really 'original' in the sense that we'd like it to be anyway. It's far more important to do something well than to do something new, at least a lot of the time. So what if nobody has ever done time-travelling vampire elf knight dragon riders if you do it and do it badly?

Instead of trying to blaze new trails and make new paths I just try to make everything I'm doing to best it can possibly be using all the information that I have. If what I end up doing redefines a genre that's cool, but that isn't my primary purpose and I don't think it should be yours either - what should be most important is achieving the aims you set for yourself, and achieving them to the best of your abilities. For me, that means I have a specific and distinct goal in mind, and my worldbuilding and novel writing is all subsumed to that one goal. I'm telling the story I want to tell in the manner which I want to tell it, with details I've picked carefully. Sometimes those are language rules I designed for the creation of internally consistent names and so on, and sometimes those are obscure details of law or whatever. But you have to have rules even if you never tell anybody else what they are, because otherwise you end up building something that's internally a mess and inconsistent as well (which is great if that's what you're going for, but I imagine you're not going for that or you wouldn't have asked this question).