Okay, I'm falling into an old trap of mine. I have more than one setting worth of ideas whizzing around my head, and it's crippling me.
My biggest issue is that I'm a huge fan of Warhammer 40,000, but I have some real issues with the fantasy elements. To put it better, I love the Imperium of Man, Tech Priests, Inquisition, Space Marines, the dark feel, and the sense of lost technology and technology as magic, but all the fantasy stuff like magic, space elves, space orks, space demons, etc. get me. So inevitably, I find myself sort of reimagining WH40K in a way that doesn't tweak my "Drow in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!???? Really?" reflex.
To make matters worse, I have a lot of random ideas regarding a reimagining of WH40K, and they keep polluting ideas for the Gothic Space Setting I'm working on. Heck, really, that setting could merely be the early days of the WH-esque setting, but ugh! I'm paralyzed by the different directions to take things!
Any advice or suggestions?
Well, the essence of WH40K, besides the "Gothic Space" setting bit, is the "There is only war!" thing. So, you have three options as I see it. The first, is stick to something like Dark Heresy, where your gothic space humans are just hunting down rebels and heretics within their own borders. The second would be to have a similar set-up to standard 40k, where there is warfare across the galaxy, but stick to the the weirder, more alien and less fantasy-ish enemies like Tyranids and Tau. The third option would be to draw on some of the characteristics of the various "fantasy" races in 40k and instead apply those qualities to new human settlements at war with the Imperium. So have some more savage humans instead of orks, or humans with advanced technology who highly specialize their troops and develop strategic dissociative episodes in combat instead of Eldar.
Would you suggest developing these settings independently of each other or should I let them influence each other? I've mostly rectified my issues with WH in my mind, but it keeps polluting any other sci-fi setting I work on. Likewise, my settings generally have me running from one to the next like a moth in a light bulb factory.
Quote from: Humabout
Would you suggest developing these settings independently of each other or should I let them influence each other? I've mostly rectified my issues with WH in my mind, but it keeps polluting any other sci-fi setting I work on. Likewise, my settings generally have me running from one to the next like a moth in a light bulb factory.
I can't even begin to say whether or not they should influence each other without knowing more about them. If they make sense as different planets within a 40k mold, then that is fine.
Fair enough.
I think they could work as different time periods in the same setting, but I guess my issue has been (with other settings as well) that I get overwhelmed with ideas and find the setting drifting away from its core identity.
Quote from: Humabout
Fair enough.
I think they could work as different time periods in the same setting, but I guess my issue has been (with other settings as well) that I get overwhelmed with ideas and find the setting drifting away from its core identity.
If this is about tech levels, then different groups or planets could concurrently have different tech-levels within the same setting. For example, in the 16th century, exploring/colonial powers in the Gunpowder age of our own world found other cultures still in the stone age technologically speaking. Some "older" things might exist as a remnant in places the newest tech hasn't been disseminated yet.
It's not tech levels so much as general treatment of the game (degrees of realism), cartography (for one setting, I'm definitely using real star catalogs and a lot of math to generate more realistic worlds), and general feel (gritty and realistic vs. more pulp sci-fi). I'm not really seeing how the two would mesh, necessarily.
Quote from: Humabout
It's not tech levels so much as general treatment of the game (degrees of realism), cartography (for one setting, I'm definitely using real star catalogs and a lot of math to generate more realistic worlds), and general feel (gritty and realistic vs. more pulp sci-fi). I'm not really seeing how the two would mesh, necessarily.
Well, gritty vs. pulpy will probably want to be handled not only with different
settings, but with different
game systems too.
You know, I find I have pretty good luck doing both with GURPS, but yeah, that aspect in particular has me thinking these need to be separate. I suppose a pulpy-shadow of the gritty game could exist somewhere in the pulp scifi's past, but even that might infringe on the pulp feel. Oh well. Another setting to work on...