Silvercat's Dream: a place to put notes

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Pimp my tropes II: Fantasy Setting Edition

Intelligent, talking animals: Various special animals in this are not only sentient but have their own societies.  Right now the only one I'm certain of is at least two (maybe three) societies of canines, but large pig-like beasts of burden, horses, and probably some birds of prey are also possibilities.

Animal theme: I want animals and animal images to be an important part of this setting. Ex: Aside from the example above I'm also having at least one of the two magic types be linked to animals.  Also the one god worshiped is known as Black Cat.

Only one god: Both to keep things simple and because it might be interesting I'm gonna stick to one deity for everyone (at least everyone in the region I'll care about).  Different interpretations of doctrine and some nature/spirit worship will be the deciding factor of how a religion is different.

Outside technological influence: One really important part is that one location in this setting is linked to a sci-fi city which lies on another planet (though vast majority of the inhabitants of said city are unaware of this), and has been for not a short time.  So the fantasy setting is interspersed with bits of advanced technology smuggled over and reverse engineered, though a lot of this latter actually uses magic.

Science-y device magic: One of the two kinds of magic, the kind that can be learned by anyone, is not based on doing magic yourself but rather building devices that do magical things.  With this definitely comes magic technology.  There would be different disciplines and schools based upon the type of devices.

Primal magic: the other type of magic is based around inherent power and activating it via instincts.

Impersonal, unintelligent magic: I like magic. But there's something I hate about it when it operates according to the worldview of people. I'd rather have it work its own way and people have to figure out it, they way they have to approach science.
Also I don't like there being an intelligent force behind or controlling magic. This applies both to gods and the "minds/souls" of people, and even to the idea that magic understands "words". Magic should be a natural force, and like all natural forces it doesn't have an intelligence.

Magic is a part of the natural world: None of this "magic is separate/comes from another dimension" stuff. Or the "magic is unnatural" stuff. Magic is an integral force to this universe and allows for quite fantastic things to be part of the natural order.


Intelligent animals:
Wolves:
---Duskwalkers: The name given to all wolves who are traditionally seen as independent of the cultures of the People.  However the truth is that Duskwalkers are wolves who have held on strongly to their traditional system of clan groupings, which in some cases leads them to choose living in areas remote from People settlements.
-----Three-Eye clan: One clan of Duskwalkers that can be found among People they are sometimes known as "ninja-wolves" due to their skills at the art of stealth.  Their true power lies in their perceptiveness and sensory magic.
-----Underbrush clan: A backwoods group of forest-dwellers, who generally choose to keep to themselves despite being quite friendly people.  They are unmatched trackers even among wolf-kind.
-----Twilight clan: A legendary clan said to live in the mid-world between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead.  They are rumored to be skilled illusionists.
---Sunracers: The wofl society that has integrated with People cultures.  They have no groupings of their own to speak of.
Eagles
Burrowing Owls

Artifice: A type of artifice is defined by whether it focuses on the type of device made, a school, or on the process of making it, known as a discipline.  (So yes, you could be a member of a school who practices a certain discipline.)
---Lens School: Makers of devices that deal in light and vision the Lens school focuses on ideas relating to visual perception, both to enhance and confuse (the latter by means of light projections) as well as more mundane qualities such as optics and careful study.  They are frequent patrons of visual art forms.  Members of the Lens School always have some sort of spectacles or monocle on them even if they do not need it.
---Hand School: Gloves are what most people think of when they recall the Hand School, but hand-jewelry is also an important part.  The magic of the Hand School is varied, from attacks to defense to manipulation, any sort of effect that could be reasonably linked to the hand (and for this reason named after a body part rather than a type of device).  Often the butt of popular jokes about greed and lust.
---The Wizard School: Derided as not a true school the Wizards concern themselves not with the device they make but on the practice of magic itself.......and how people perceive them.  Thus they shape their devices into "traditional" shapes such as wands, staffs, tombs, and other such parphenalia, and dress in long robes embroidered with shapes or "mystic" letters.  Most common folk consider them more humorous than respectable.
---Forge Discipline: Metal shaped by fire from a random lump is chaos molded into a pattern.  Forge magic concerns itself exclusively with working earthen elements that can be affected by heat, mostly metal.  Elements important to artifice: type of metal used, shape of the forged item, engraving/inlay, inclusion of gems/crystals.
---Woodcarving Discipline: A discipline that spends as much time expounding the virtues of nature and "natural living" as it does its techniques and choice of materials.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Themes:
Transformation: I have absolutely no idea what this means.  It just makes sense to put it here.

Places:

Sleepwalking Earth: This is the Earth you get when you hide all the cool stuff because you know regular people can't handle the truth.
Galactic Republic: The Big Alien Government of Sleepwalking-Earth.  Very Prime-Directive-ly driven in their dealings.  It is nearly a unitary state, only the parliament having real control.

Weird Earth: Just a hop over, dimensionally, from Sleepwalking-Earth is an Earth where the weirdness stopped being secret and now everything from aliens to other dimensions is considered perfectly normal and no one gets freaked out by it.
Galactic Federation: The Republics Weird-Earth counterpart, these guys are a lot more open to the idea that just because a civilization is less advanced than them does not mean they can't handle some open visitation.

Galactic Alliance: A third version of the Galactic X, this one in a universe where Earth does not seem to exist.

Otherworld: A fantasy realm that lies dimensionally next to a futuristic setting.

San Christoph: A city lying on the California coast just south of Monterrey.  It doesn't seem like an unusual place, given that it exists in a world of super-powers.  But what makes San Cristoph unique is that all the portals to fantastic lost worlds and broken mirrors of Earth exist not only in their usual locations but also are hidden around the San Christoph metro area.

Adventure Ideas
Title: Primal Force
--Tagline: "Unleash the beast within!"
--Premise: Underneith the surface of the bay rests an ancient and powerful secret, and one the iron-fisted Atlantians will stop at nothing to get.  Only the heroes of the Primal Force can stand in their way!
--Protagonists: The Primal Force, supeheroes with an animal theme.
--Antagonists: The Atlantians, a civilization of human control-freaks who have mastered biotechnology to subjugate nature.
--Setting: Weird Earth, somewhere on California's coast.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Once when I was younger I created world to write stories in.  I even wrote up some fact sheets on it.  I never got far on the stories.  But for some reason I'm able to remember a lot about even now, years later.  And it's still one of my favorite.  So now, not really having any other ideas to go off of I'm going to revive it and see if I can't have some more fun.

Note: This world is probably going to be filled with the sort of logical inconsistencies you get in things like D&D where people build Medieval-style castles despite the fact that there's probably an archmage out there who can go "boo" and make the whole thing fall down.  I'm just going to warn you that I've decided I like these inconsistencies, not necessarily for genre-emulation but because I just find realizing :wtf: to be the best kind of feeling.

How the original draft went:
The world was a high-tech scif-fi with lots of fantasy elements, especially magic, mixed in.  It was supposed to be a distant future of our Earth (I hear there is a fantasy series already out there with the same idea, but I didn't get mine from there), after the human species had pretty much turned the place upside down with nuclear and biological weapons.  So that added the possibility that a given fantasy trope (i.e. creature) could either have come from science or magic or both.  And the current day was intended to be so far in the future that only the cliched Secret Person Who Is Really, Really Old would remember.
The focal point of the stories was the capital city of the world's largest country, neither of which I ever was able to name to my satisfaction.  In what I thought was a brilliant move of government at the time I had to country reverse the model of the USA and throw out a useless democracy to replace it with a semi-competant monarchy.  It turned out to be the best move, as the city went on to conquer everyone else on the continent over the next hundred years and as the stories were opening was about to celebrate 3200 years of existence.
The city itself was supposed to be one of those impossible cyperpunk-ish megacities where you can't see the ground because the overgrown skyscrapers are in the way.  At least, that's what the downtown looked like, there was at least a ground-level part of the city to the south.  The whole place was in the same location as Chicago, so it had the lake to the east.  Oddly I decided the city rested smack-dab in the middle of a creature/danger-infested (or they thought it was, at any rate) region called a wasteland (despite not being that uninhabitable).
I never managed to get much into the rest of the world, there isn't anything to say about it.

For the people that inhabited this nation I came up with five races that were most common/important:
Normal humans.
Humans who had magic powers only because they were bonded with sentient talking animals (whose reproduction and life-span matched humans more than their actual species).  The type of animal seemed correspond to the kinds of magic the mage could use.  ((I basically stole this idea from a book I was reading at the time.))  In one case I had the bonded animals of an important mage bloodline related to each other nearly an exact match as their human counterparts.
Shapeshifting humans.
Werewolves.  They had colorful patterns on their face that denoted their family line.
Griffins.
So needless to say the place was crazy, although I found out you could get some pretty interesting uses out of these guys.  As for the minor races I can only think of one noteworthy:
Dwarves were apparently exactly like the fantasy stereotype.  Except they hated politeness and preferred to shout at each other.  And this actually led to them being the most pacifistic and diplomatic people on the planet.

As for magic I never developed it.  It was just there, ready to do a task I guess because I didn't feel like science was supposed to do that task.  In a sense magic was supposed to be just another part of the world, and people in the world didn't think about what they were doing wrong because that's how things were done.

There were a few other minor things, like the world's (comic-book) superheroes and my making up quotes for famous people.  Thew world did have some details.

Tune in later and maybe I'll rework this into something.

Setting Style: Semi-contemporary look (probably more 1990s) with structural elements of high-tech future and pieces of fantasy.
----What is Science and what is Magic?: Left unexplained.  To the inhabitants the actual distinction is meaningless, it being more important that the desired result be achieved than how it is achieved.  The only real distinction anyone remembers is that magic is intelligent.
Also magic is not seen as unnatural or in any way not part of natural reality.
----Tech Level: Flying cars, holograms, artificial intelligence, one step beyond fusion as power generation.  Space flight still limited to rockets, mostly crewed by AIs these days and more about caring for satellites.
----Limits of Magic: Common magic parallels the limits of the setting's science (can't revive someone who's been dead more than maybe 30 minutes, for example), but faster and rarer and possibly including its own AI.  There are believed to be very rare magics that can do anything, though the same is said about very rare sciences.

Human "Races":
----
----Werebeasts:
----Sorcerers: Humans are generally incapable of calling magic.  It is generally assumed that they lack a key biological or spiritual factor.  However a few bloodlines

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Title: Earth Rangers
--Tagline: "Go, Terra Team!"
--Premise: "It is the 42nd century of the Galatic Alliance, and a new inhabited planet has been discovered: Earth.  A new target for every criminal and evil space empire Earth needs guardians who can stand up to the might of alien technology.  The call goes out, to the most talented of the Alliances Elite Rangers: defend the planet Earth.  Go, Terra Team!"
--Protagonists: The Terra Team, Elite Rangers who have abilities and skills that go beyond the norm brought together to defend Earth.
--Antagonists: The scum of the universe, especially the Atlantian Empire.
--Setting: Earth, just arriving at the dawn of the 22nd century.

Title Primal Force
--Tagline: "Unleash the beast within!"
--Premise: "By the 23rd century humans had destroyed Earth with their rampant pollution and tampering with nature.  The benevolent citizens of the Ygdra Empire gave them a new planet on which to settle their people.  Named by the humans Gaia there is a mysterious energy created by its lifeforms.  And one faction of humans, the Engineers, will stop at nothing to get it.  Only the Primal Force can stand in their way!
--Protagonists: The Primal Force, people who have unlocked the secret energy of Gaia and use it to transform themselves.
--Antagonists: The Engineers, humans who have used genetic engineering to subjugate their own natural bodies to science.
--Setting: Gaia, a planet pervaded by a mysterious energy born from nature.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

The Silverse is a 4-color superhero setting where the superheroing is less extreme than most but no less heroic.  The uni/omniverse in this case, and Earth most specifically, does not experience the sort of major events that characterizes other settings (such as Freedom City's Terminus Invasion).  If a supervillain or event becomes threatening it's generally more localized such as on one city or directed at a group such as a corporation (all supervillains follow this plan outline: 1. Take first step in evil scheme; 2. ???; 3. WORLD DOMINATION!).  If a mastermind actually does manage to threaten a large area (say the entire Earth) the scheme never gets to the public before it's foiled.  Superheroes do not always fly in with their cape flapping, sometimes they sneak around and act like super-spies.
But the setting still has aliens, lost worlds, ancient magical artifacts, ancient magical artifacts that were left in lost worlds by aliens, evil bad-guys Hell-bent on doing something evil, and lots of fistfights.  It's Superheroes meet Pulp action-adventure!

West Gate City:
----Sunset Bridge: Lying across the straights that lead into Vista Bay the Sunset bridge frequently becomes the gateway to other dimensions.

Hidden Races and Alien Species:
----Extra-Terrestrial Humans (ETH): Humans resettled on other planets by unknown aliens sometime between the end of the last ice age and the beginning of recorded history.  In appearance they are usually indistinguishable from Earth humamns except they possess genes that cause impossible hair and eye colorations.  They are sometimes referred to as Eths.
----Tatu:  Aquatic panians with skin scales so fine that when wet they blend together and give the tatu the appearance of having smooth cetecean skin instead, and combined with their whale-beaked heads and fluked tails causes most to believe they are related to dolphins.  However unlike ceteceans tatu are cable of breathing in water.
Most Tatu live in colonies on the Pacific seafloor.  A few are native off-world, most likely the result of the same resettlement that produced ETH.
----Tek: Minor shapeshifter ancestry causes the individuals of this species to vary radically in appearance.  To Earth humans they seem to be anthropomorphic animals, though sometimes featuring colors, patterns, and extra body parts not seen in their terrestrial reflections.
----(----): Blue-skinned, pointy-eared hominid panians with orange hair and eyes.
----short people with cat ears and tail
----liontaurs
----cervitaurs
----kitsune

Outer Space:
The Galactic Alliance: A standard benevolent-yet-heavily-armed space republic.
The Atlantian Empire: A racist state focused on the superiority of the human species over all others.  Not actually Atlantians, the Empire is made up of extraterrestrial humans influenced by displaced Atlantis believers from Earth's early 20th century.

The "Supernatural" World:
Díyú, aka Bureaucratic Hell: The place that enforces the laws of the supernatural world, sending out agents to undertake such missions as collecting souls that have escaped their afterlife or correcting some obscure error in proper mythological operation.  The rest of the supernatural world lives in audit-like terror at the thought of Diyu coming down on them.  Despite it's title including the term "Hell" Diyu is really a place of pure bureaucracy, not caring about the morality of the mortal world so long as procedure is followed.
----King Yama: Overseer of Diyu.  He's got red skin, a profusion of black hair, two small horns, and wears a business suit.  Also he's a giant.
----Dispatcher: The guy who gives out the missions to Diyu agents.  That's not a title, that's his name.
----È Mó: Diyu's best agent.  A white-skinned anthropomorphic demonic-mare with red hair and a red dress.  The cross-dressing gay son of the mythological Ma Mian ("horse-face").

The Rangers: A Golden Age team who where always relegated to second-page news due to their "unusual" make-up.
----Kitsune: A Japanese-American illusionist who wore a Japanese-style fox mask.  During the war she was used as the governments "scapegoat reason" for refusing to work with the Rangers.

The Iron Warrior: A Mongolian-American engineer who, after suffering head trauma at the hands of a mugger, believed himself to be Genghis Khan reborn.  Building technologically advanced, yet ancient looking, weapons and armor he took to the streets of San Francisco to defend "his people".  Though seen as crazy and dangerous by some (at less lucid times he would insist the city was his "empire") he was held up as a cultural hero by the Asian-American community for defending them against bigots.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

"The Constellation Alliance, the greatest force for peace in the known galaxy. Composed of various semi-independant member nations both tiny and huge the Alliance is a union dedicated to the betterment of the entire universe via the inclusive process of democracy. But Evil has the advantage of dictatorship, meaning the Alliance can't afford to wait for everyone to agree when the Psion Collective mind-slaves a planet or the Atlantian Empire threatens to use a new superweapon. That's when the Alliance needs beings of extraordinary talent to stand up, put aside their differences, and fight for Truth, Justice, and Freedom!  YOU can be one of those beings.  Join up and become a Star Ranger today!

The Star Rangers: Shine with Truth, Justice, Freedom!" -- Star Rangers official recruitment pitch

Themes
Defending the universe against the forces of EVIL
Pushing the boundaries of SCIENCE
Boldly discovering NEW PLACES, NEW PEOPLE, NEW WAYS OF GETTING IN TROUBLE
ROMANCE
Groaning at OVERLY COMPLEX POLITICS AND POLICIES
Living in a universe containing POP CULTURE
Emphasizing the most important part of a dramatic sentence by using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS
Realizing that the universe is absurd


Star Rangers is a setting of Saturday morning cartoon heroics.  The heroes are hapless yet valiant, the villains malevolent yet bumbling.
 
Alien Species:
Humans: The usual hairless apes.  Humans are neither the most common species in the Constellation Alliance, nor are they the most adaptable, cosmopolitan, or friendly species in space.

Prominent Cultures:
Scrap-ship Nomads: Wandering traders of technology and information, dwelling primarily on giant ships that have been cobbled together from much smaller vessels.  Unlike many other merchant cultures the Nomads have a reputation for honesty and hospitality.

Evil Enemies:
Psion Collective: A not-secret secret society that espouses belief in the "power of the sentient mind over reality" and the idea that by joining all the minds of the universe together they can bring about an age of pure harmony.  Naturally considering themselves superior they have decided to "enlighten" everyone else for their own good by whatever means necessary.
Atlantian Empire: A human-dominated sector that has gotten the idea into its head that humans were once the reigning force in the cosmos, only to loose it when their home of Atlantis was destroyed in a war with the "degenerates".  Declaring their "right to rule" they now routinely search for ways to conquer everyone around them.

Benevolent Government: Constellation Alliance (capital:
----The Trinity Alliance: the Taurian League (capital: K-Taurus), The Gaian Republic, the United Planets system
----The Sonata Commonwealth (formerly the Tek Imperium)
----The Star Court

Random Planet Names:
----Weavend
----Crokkus (swampy planet)
----Titanus 2

Interstellar Police Force: Star Rangers (motto: "Shine with Truth, Justice, Freedom!")

Evil Enemy Dictator:

Other Enemies:
----Raknus (pirate captain)

Business Names:
----StrongByte Security
----Teelo's Diner

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

"The planet of Nexus.  A seemingly ordinary planet, inhabited by seemingly ordinary aliens going about their seemingly ordinary lives.  Yes, Nexus is a prosperous planet, blessed with tourist-attracting balmy weather and a location at the intersection of many trade routes.  But behind that facade lurks a secret..........a very, very weird secret.  You don't know what it is, but the planet is a magnet.  A magnet for crazy.  A magnet for trouble.  People fall in holes to other worlds.  Important aliens come to visit for no good reason.  You get super-powers.

"And you have to live here."

The game would essentially be a weird hodge-podge of aliens, superheroes, alternate dimensions, whatever weird stuff seems like fun.  The point would not be really be combat or intrigue (though it'd have some of those) but rather to try and create some wacky hyjinx in a world gone crazy.

There amount of whackiness vs. seriousness would depend on what everyone decides they want to play.  The game could be something just plain silly like Futurama or Hitchhiker's Guide where the entire universe is made up of freaky things, or the universe can act a bit more serious and take itself kinda logically like what you might get in a comedy anime or Saturday-morning action-oriented cartoon series (though the events driving the game would still be pretty weird).

Setting Outline:
Place Name: Nexus City , Nexus

Government Name: Constellation Alliance (capital: Ursus Minor)
----Government Type: Standard benevolent super-republic plagued by annoying bureaucracy.
----General Society/Culture: Supposedly demo- and meritocratic, but the real culture being a media-blitzed "lowest-common denominator" consumer base.

Alliance Interstellar Police: The Star Rangers (motto: "Shine with Truth, Justice, Freedom!"; HQ: "The Observatory")

Alien Species: To be described on a case-by-case basis.  No aliens differ from humans in terms of psychology.

 Cultures: Other than the galactic monoculture not many of note.

Other Random Planets:
Crokkus (swamp planet)
Kali Flower (planet of deadly plants and major agricultural producer)
Reh 3 (savage frontier planet filled with deadly creatures and cults)

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Scientific Magic:

----Methods:
Channeling (summoning and directing energy)
Access (spacetime manipulation)
Pattern (Channeling + Access = altering normal arrangements of matter and energy)

----Elements:
Earth (solids, great resistance to moving and pattern change but stays put once done)
Blood (the common elements of living things (mostly carbon), doesn't resist too much but has a tendency to backslide)
Air (gaseous elements, little resistance but will continue to change afterwards)
Lightening (energy, trivially easy to move but epically difficult to keep in pattern)


sentient races:
human
formshifter
nekojin
jird
frog-lizard (humanoid)
eel snake (humanoid)
griffin (humanoid)
griffin (animal shape)
magical horse (humanoid)
magical horse (animal shape)
large wolf (animal shape)

hybrids:
half-cat (human/nekojin)
lamia (human/eel snake)
pegasus (animal horse/animal griffin)

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=SCMP]Superheroes do not always fly in with their cape flapping, sometimes they sneak around and act like super-spies.
But the setting still has aliens, lost worlds, ancient magical artifacts, ancient magical artifacts that were left in lost worlds by aliens, evil bad-guys Hell-bent on doing something evil, and lots of fistfights. It's Superheroes meet Pulp action-adventure![/blockquote]
Well you certainly have quite a detailed idea of this.  Slightly more realistic fantasy, I guess.  SOrt of Doc Savage-esque?

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

[blockquote=SCMP]Superheroes do not always fly in with their cape flapping, sometimes they sneak around and act like super-spies.
But the setting still has aliens, lost worlds, ancient magical artifacts, ancient magical artifacts that were left in lost worlds by aliens, evil bad-guys Hell-bent on doing something evil, and lots of fistfights. It's Superheroes meet Pulp action-adventure![/blockquote]
Well you certainly have quite a detailed idea of this.  Slightly more realistic fantasy, I guess.  SOrt of Doc Savage-esque?

:huh:

I've gotta say "wow".  I wrote that moths back, I'd completely forgotten about it.  What convinced you to read enough to you singled out that one post?

In answer to your question: I thought of it more as modern super-spies and then adding stuff the superheroes basically inherited from pulps.  I don't necessarily know Doc Savage all that well, but that's probably pretty accurate.