Like takeout boxes full of brains!
Went to the office, tried to eat a braised pork bowl but it was too fatty, did some work.
Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 4 (Syu Yasaka): Despite each still not realizing the other is gay, they spend Christmas and New Year’s and into the school ski trip getting closer and closer to either making out or dying of heart attacks.
Written (game design): 338:
We’re not making a time-travel game (I hope), so the present of whatever
our vague setting is does depend on its past. What are our options for
the general trajectory?
Post-apocalyptic and ancient world were already mentioned. They are
similar in that most good (valuable or interesting) stuff comes from the
past, but the aesthetics are different: in one, everything is “normal”
just busted up (nuked, dehydrated, zombie-infested), while in the other
the beaches sparkle dazzlingly because they’re a billion years of wear
from structural diamond girders, the landscape is covered with huge
circular lakes from the Age of Relativistic Bombardment, that mountain
range is a buried arcology, etc. Post-apoc is usually SF because the
previous world is supposed to be relatable, meaning usually our world,
but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary. A sufficiently
well-understood fictional setting (generic D&D) would probably work just
as well, and a novel setting that’s fallen apart is just part of the
current setting, which people are fine with being novel. Probably.
Ancient world/deep time settings tend more to be science-fantasy,
with the fantasy usually being psionics and other dubious
science/technology with Clarke’s Law (Numenera), but sometimes real
magic (Ultraviolet Grasslands). The science part is almost always there,
because pure fantasy deep time can be anything, and isn’t more engaging
that pure fantasy that was poofed into existence. Black powder masers
notwithstanding, I don’t think I want to go the science-fantasy route,
but maybe that’s wrong of me. Apparently it’s how D&D started.
If it’s post-apocalyptic but the good stuff is new, and the old bad
stuff has been rejected, I think that’s solarpunk. I feel like that
needs more a link to our world than regular post-apoc, so that we
understand how bad it was. We can tay the ancients’ magic was innately
cursed and that’s why they fell, but do the players care? I guess maybe
if there’s a point in the campaign where they discover what’s in the
basement of the ruins of *m*l*s.
Even though I’m an extremely basic sucker for the OSR Aesthetic, not all
settings have to have apocalypses. That doesn’t mean peace; I’m thinking
of like early China where it was a heap of little kingdoms constantly
conquering each other. It wasn’t much fun for people in the way, but not
everything everywhere was destroyed all at once, so civilization as a
whole carried on. Lower-intensity would be Celts/Sartarites and constant
cattle-raiding skirmishes. Or, everything could be a peaceful utopia,
which is why PCs have to go Anywhere Else. (But that may lead to
colonialism.)
The world could even be improving (see Frieren, where they actually
develop new spells), which again just means less atrocity, not none,
although the improved state does have to be enough better for the
players to appreciate it. Also, if things are already getting better,
what do PCs do? Obviously they help improve things, but this implies
(does not require?) them to be more a part of society than murderhobos
usually are. That might not be a bad thing, but it’s probably more
limiting than D&D.
And of course, on the other side, maybe there’s not an apocalypse yet, but
everything is deteriorating. Probably not what people want to play in
this year 2025, but on the other hand, if the PCs play their cards
right, they could be the apocalypse! Requires a height to fall from,
probably.
Going up one level and then going to the other side, what if something
good happened (euapocalypse? I think that means something different, and
has calamitous koalas)? That can be just as disruptive and exciting as
an apocalypse, although not always as murdery. The biggest one would of
course be the creation of people, by the gods or space bats or whatever.
Maybe the world was created at the same time, or maybe it existed
earlier and didn’t matter because no one was around to see it. This
lends itself to an exploration campaign, which could be light or dark
depending on what they find out there in the world or what people at
home do with it.
Less drastic, but still a pretty big deal would be a sketchy titan
offering mortals a light around the back of the temple, the goddess
Etain bringing the secrets of writing, the wheel, and the double-blind
experiment, or the Okay Sage discovering Zero so you don’t have to herd
pigs any more. People having existed before this and probably gotten used
to how things were, there seems likely to be some social strife, even if
it’s good overall. Also exploration-oriented, but maybe more
competitive, and again, dependent on what possibilities in the world
have opened up.
Speaking of opening up, maybe the new thing is a region or world to
explore. If it’s not inhabited, though, it might not be very
interesting, and if it is, that can lead to colonialism. Maybe that’s
interesting to navigate?
A popular arguably-good change is magic appearing or returning.
That’s almost always in a modern or future setting, but what if a
psuedo-historic setting suddenly becomes a fantasy setting? Nobody
knows what kinds of magic there are, or what the limits could be. I
think this would need a stronger magic system than a settign that had
always had magic, even if only the GM knows it to begin with. Either
that, or some meta-system for discovering the magic system in play, like
the emergent mystery systems from Brindlewood, Ex Tenebris, etc. This
wouldn’t be a general fantasy-adventure system, but it could be
interesting.
A twist on that would be, surprise, there’s gods now! Could be very
similar, could be more social upheaval depending on what people think of
these gods and whether they had preconceptions.