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[thatoneguy]

I've had some ideas for Storycrafter games floating around for awhile and am going to make a post dump to troll for interest for any of them. Here's three right now.

Promised Land

Humanity has journeyed to the stars, making it unto another sea. Ships plummet through the void, seeking worlds upon which to settle or thrive, mining resources from the heavens. Much like the old days of sea exploration, journeys are dangerous, fraught with peril, and while pirates are a rare circumstance, they do happen. And, sometimes, just like in the old days, things go wrong. Ships diverge from their normal paths due to strange phenomena, poor navigation, or faulty equipment. A misplaced degree can doom an entire vessel's worth of people, and a misjudged star can throw everyone wildly off course.

Sometimes, though, such a ship gets lucky and they spot a blue and green planet in a nearby solar system that registers on their ship's computers as a colony world and fling themselves at it as best they can. Sometimes they even make it there. Sometimes it's not a colony world at all.

Your ship is like this; you were on board a transport ship, ferrying people from one colony to another, and a shipboard accident forced you out of Mallett-surf and into normal space. Finding the signal from a colony transponder, the captain limped the ship even as it broke apart to an innocuous planet and everybody loaded into the escape pods as the boat was sundered in the atmosphere. When you emerged, you came out into a tepui-like tableland with sparse green algae on the rocks. The first order of business would be getting down. After that, it's staying alive long enough to find someone or be found.

(I had initially wanted to bus-crash people in a strange environment with surreal qualities; I split the idea into two separate ones, one of which became "Isolation." I have a pretty decent grounding in speculative biology and have a planet worked up just for this, as well as a short history of why it's giving off colony transponder vibes.)

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Isolation

There is The City, and there is The Zone. Those who live in the city find their comforts taken care of if they work. They can work anywhere, from a farm on outer terraces or inside vast warehouses to newspaper mills, burgertapping foundries where men stand in one place and touch one finger on a burger disgorged from massive black walls, to hissing sewers that drain out into the soil of the earth, to any other jobs a city might offer. Cities are linked by airship or plane, and none dare walk across the boundless expanse known as The Zone, a vast landscape filled with extreme danger, hazards, hallucinations, and the decayed ruins of civilization outside The City.

No one, that is, except for the people called Isolators.

Despite their name, they live and travel in groups in varying degrees of madness. The most broken of them all travel alone, waiting to die for one reason or another. They walk in the places where the effects of The Zone are the strongest, where the most powerful and dangerous monsters and storms brew. They feed off the land and drink the brackish waters tainted with possible parasites and shun the safety of The City. Why would someone do this? The answer is simple. The matter is that there are places in The Zone deep inside the pockets of madness where realities converge and time mingles.

In those places, dreams come true and wishes are granted.

(Characters here would be either Isolators or people hiring one to get to one of these wish nodes. Game would deal with psychological issues, surrealism, and what happens to people when they're in an environment with little to no stability.)

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Coldfall

The summer of 1969. The Apollo moon landing held the grip of the world in its cold, vacuum-tipped fingers. The Cold War is in full swing. Give Peace a Chance is on the radio and the conflict in Vietnam rages; Nixon is in the White House, and the Mariner program is doing fly-bys of Mars in preparation for the Viking program to be launched in six years.

On July 29, 1969, contact was lost with Mariner 7. Re-establishing communication indicated the craft was heavily damaged and far away from its intended trajectory. JPL attempted to determine the cause, and analysis of the empty sky revealed a massive suite of space-borne objects headed for Earth on a collision course with the northern hemisphere in just two days' time. With little time to prepare, the nation watched the skies and the television with the same bated breath they had just weeks ago, up until the sky fell.

Meteoroids, thousands of them, rained out of the night sky and into deserts, forests, homes, cities, and empty stretches of road, scattering themselves over a ten hour period across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The largest of these, some 100 meters or more across, fell from the heavens and into the Gulf of Mexico, striking the entire Gulf Coast with tsunamis and detonating over the seas with a force of over 120 megatons. For two more days the world was silent before anyone moved to attempt to pick up the pieces.

Russia has gone even more silent, Europe watches with bated breath, and the United States has declared the southeastern United States a disaster zone, with spotted disaster sites across the country. Luckily, most strikes avoided populated areas, aside from "the big one" in the Gulf. The Object Collision Event, as it is now being called, has forced the government to recall some of its Vietnam troops back to American soil, and is busy marshaling a small force of scientists and relief experts to Port Arthur, Texas, the closest city to the Sabine Wildlife Refuge and the impact event that remains mostly intact, The Object Impact Event Task Force. This newly formed task force will have the dubious task of managing disaster efforts, retrieving tsunami survivors, dealing with a flooded coastline and nearly destroyed New Orleans, and attempt to mitigate psychological damage to a battered country and direct media attention toward more convenient avenues.

What happens next, however, will change the face of the world forever.

(This will turn from a disaster relief effort into a sci-fi scenario dealing with Cold War paranoia. That's all I'm going to say about that.)

[thatoneguy]

Power

During the Berlin games, Der Ubermenschen made international headlines by carrying der fuhrer and his entourage to his seat over his shoulders while Hitler was still in his car, leaping up the stands and into the boxes. He dominated the games, and the world reeled. That was before the British unveiled the Flying Man and the United States of America discovered "The Meek" in California, a woman who could survive anything thrown at her and spread a terrible disease. Soon, super men and women started popping up all over the globe, and as the world descended into war, these men and women found themselves on the front lines. Historians looking back found evidence of these people in slim supply; the Massachusetts Mauler, Spring-Heeled Jack, and other strange and unearthly people scattered in the winds of time.

The Black Knights flew their power-created planes out of a secret island in the Pacific in the defense of the Allies, and the Axis powers performed terrible experiments on those they could find among their enemy number. The powers nearly rivaled tanks in their strength and might, and the world thought them invincible.

When the dust from the way had cleared, however, over eighty percent of those with power had been slain; D-Day was an absolute massacre, the beaches and land strewn with the dead and the land awash with the glow of powers. Nothing the powered could do, however, could compare to what happened i Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eyes turned away from those with powers, who had become nothing more than easily slain men with delusions of grandeur in their eyes, even if it was their own grandeur they had instilled their heroes with, and toward the dawning atomic age.

As the world crawled by, powers began to emerge with less frequency, even if they never decreased with strength. By the modern day, powers were as normal as television sets and air conditioning at home. A few things have changed from our world; powers didn't care if you were a man or woman, and so a few female powers saw the front lines, which meant an earlier women's liberation movement, civil rights riots that were far more violent but quicker in their results, and a more moderate America overall.

Now it is the modern age, and those who wish to do so can sign up to become individual crime fighters, form groups of powered and non-powered who want to do good, and heavy regulation of powers through international councils and nationwide registration and regulation. You can have powers and be registered, but if you want to use your powers in public, you must be certified to do so.

(Here is all I've got so far; what I want is to construct a superhero world that is not oppressive, not overly dark, but just kind of... there. To do this, we have Golden-Age level powers that never got anymore powerful. That is, in the Golden Age of comics, heroes often weren't more impressive than "the power to fly at 50 miles an hour!," which served to their detriment after the nuclear age; Silver Age heroes were given more power to compensate for the lackluster sales of comics after the war. Basically, I want to mirror that progression, but not up the power to compensate. After the war, powers became like radio had in the past. Something everyone knew about, had heard of, or seen, and was just as much a part of life as everything else, to be ignored or had interest taken in it like any other hobby or aspect of reality. I'll update with notes about powers if interest is spawned.)

[Get Carter!]

These forums aren't frequented as often as they should be, so don't be discouraged if you don't get many responses here.

Both Isolation and Power sound appealing to me. The first appeals to my love of King's "The Dark Tower" novels and the second appeals to the side of me that just loves comic books in general.

[thatoneguy]

Yeah, I noticed that about the forums in general, and didn't expect a whole lot of a response. I've been poking friends with some of these ideas, and oddly enough, the two you mentioned are getting the most interest there, too. If I decided to work on Isolation I'd have to throw a lot more details out there, like about Dream, Death's white city, and just a lot of rather odd tidbits. I might do that one, too. Missing posters can just be swallowed by the jungle there.

[Pappa Doc]

Both Isolation and Power