Micromyths and setting seeds

[Xeviat]

Hi everyone!

I've reached that cyclical time for myself where I need to take a break from working on crunch. I'm also suffering a bit of insomnia giving me time to think mixed with depression killing my motivation. Tonight, I'm watching Youtube science videos, and I've settled on Astronomy as my subject of the night.

This brings me back to seed ideas for sci-fi-esque settings. But, I do prefer fantasy for gaming settings above sci-fi; even my favorite sci-fi settings have more in common with fantasy than traditional sci-fi. I do love thinking of where things come from, even when they're mystical or supernatural.

Rather than just talking about ideas I'm playing with for a setting, I wanted to make this thread for simply throwing out little setting myth ideas that you've had, especially those that you don't know where to use.

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One setting idea is a tidally locked planet around a red dwarf. The sun stays in the same spot in the sky at all times. The habitable zone is around the twilight terminator. There's a big hurricane that rages around the 'noon' point directly under the star.

One race lives on the day side, living at the edge of the hurricane. For them, the hurricane and the sun are the two most important things in their lives. The sun doesn't seem to move in the sky, and it sits almost straight up. The hurricane looms on the horizon, and occasionally sends out arcing arms that bring torrents of rain. There's also a constant wind coming from the hurricane (downplayed from what it would apparently actually be, because handwavium). This race is aggressive (because having the "bad guys" come from the day side is fun and ironic to me), highly spiritual (the sun and the storm are personified as their gods), and not very scientifically advanced.

Another race lives on the night side. Until world travel started up, they had never seen the star. But they saw the other planets in the system moving around the sky. They could watch the stars move, and were thus able to track the year. They live near geothermal hot spots where liquid water remains. For them, the planets are their gods, but they were also able to work on astronomy and mathematics, and became scientifically advanced. They are xenophobic, because they are physiologically different from the other races and both don't empathize with them easily and don't do well in bright light.

The seed for the entire setting is reversing the alien astronaut idea. Modern humans came to this planet back during their stone age. Humans crashed and didn't survive more than a few generations, but they were able to share some information that became part of the world's myths. They brought fire, ship building, and metallurgy, as well as myths of powerful thunder weapons and fireballs (guns and explosives).

The trouble is that these humans arrived on sub-light sleeper ships. On the setting's world, humans arrived something like 10 thousand years ago, but they left Earth a far longer time ago. Due to cryostasis and time dilation, the humans on the ship survived the journey. Back on earth, obscene amounts of time passed till humans evolved into a new species, guided by genetic engineering and the assimilation of cybernetics. When they created warp technology, they sent out ships to investigate those original sleeper ships.

Back on the setting world, aliens have arrived. Unknown to the people of this world, these aliens Earthlings, just like the ancient astronauts that became angels in their mythology. These new aliens are here to explore, but they are so advanced that they don't see the natives as much more than animals. These alien Earthlings are the demons and true villains of the setting.

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A new idea I'm playing with is for a setting that's on a moon of a gas giant. Mostly, the image of Jupiter sitting in one spot in the sky at all times just seems cool. It's be around 20 degrees in the sky (38 times the diameter of the moon), and could be 4% the sun's brightness when "full" (the moon is 0.00025% the sun's brightness), meaning nights on this side of the world could be fairly bright. The other side of the moon would never see the planet, but both sides could see the other moons. Of course, I'm thinking of a planet in the habitable zone, so the sun wouldn't be super tiny in the sky, but the planet would be far bigger in the moon's sky than the sun and would eclipse it often.

I have no idea what to do with this, other than gaining the desire to learn how to paint so I could visualize that sky. I imagine that the planet in the sky would be culturally more important than the moon is in our sky, and possibly more important than the sun because it's so much larger. But again, only half the world can even see the planet. I imagine pilgrimages to see the planet, or to get to the point directly below the planet.

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What are some of your unused ideas?

[LoA]

Okay, I watched the same Astronomy Documentaries that you have. Good on you for being as much a nerd as I am! So I also had the same idea for a setting with life supporting moons orbiting a gas giant. However nothing ever came from it, so I just scrapped the idea.

Still regarding your "reverse alien astronaut" idea, how come humans are so similar to earth animals, if they came from another planet? Did mammals come from another planet in some sort of "Noahs Ark" program (Like Sky Captain and the world of Tommorow) and that's why mammals are so different from reptiles (they didn't evolve on this planet)?

Some writers are very careful about that. In science fantasy or kid's scifi humans are mixing around with aliens all the time. However really that should be impossible because humans and aliens would've evolved radically different DNA and therefore are incompatible. If a horse and a donkey can only produce sterile hybrids, a human and a squid alien shouldn't even have similar reproductive systems....

[Xeviat]

OH, there's no humans on the alien astronaut world. Humans arrived and lived for a few generations, but they died out (the environment simply didn't support them, and they couldn't repair the technology they brought with them enough once the power started to fail). That's actually one point of the setting, the twist, that none of the PC races are humans, and that the big bad evil guys are actually future humans.

The alien astronaut ideas on Earth itself make for some fun settings. I really like Star Gate and it's like (and I watch too much Ancient Aliens for my own good). Those give tons of idea seeds that can create a lot of fun things.

In another setting, inspired by someone here who was working on a Star Trek esque D&D world where each humanoid race was an alien race from it's own world, I'm having angels and devils as aliens (members of the same race that diverged at one point; angels did cybernetics, devils did genetic engineering), and demons as even worse aliens.

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Another setting seed idea, for a universe spanning Sci-Fi setting, would be a religious version of the Big Bang theory. Every star is a god. Blackholes are the evil gods. Astrology is very important; a star's influence only extends as far as it's gravity, but they can control their movements and use that to send messages and guidance across the galaxy. The "magic" of the universe would be conscious manipulation of quantum principals. I'd play with string theory and interconnectedness and alternate planes/multiverses.