Concept: metroidvania where upgrades are gained by dying. Every time something kills you, you reincarnate at your most recent save point with an adaptation that grants a. a new movement or interaction ability, and b. immunity to whatever got you this time. The trick is that all of the obvious ways to die will quickly be exhausted (granting you your bread-and-butter toolkit in the process), so in order to stay on the upgrade treadmill you have to search out increasingly esoteric ways to get yourself killed off.
I assume that dying to novel enemies won’t cut it?
The premise would make it tricky for the game to be combat-focused in the first place. If present, enemies would probably function more as obstacles than threats; any that do have the ability to kill you only get to do so once each, and then you’re immune to that attack form – like, maybe there’s a robot that kills you with a giant laser, and when you come back you can turn invisible (and will in fact do so reflexively when shot by giant lasers in the future, regardless of source, allowing them to pass harmlessly through you).
Death to impact definitely makes you bounce. You could potentially make that two different version for fall damage vs. someone hitting you very hard with a baseball bat, but that’s logic vs. what feels right, so I’ll leave it undecided. Maybe some kind of subdual procedure, and you need to find the one bot that’s overclocked by a few hundred newtons.
If they were different, it’d make sense on the grounds of them being subtly different forms of mobility (i.e. how you use them)
You could potentially do it as, like… a containment breach game? Sort of an Aperture Science dubious science institution? Or maybe a bit more SCP.
Either way, you’d definitely be up against people with a vested interest in keeping you contained and alive. (probably because they know what you’re capable of.)
So… Knockout gas, and if you want to pass it, you have to be able to just, not breathe, which you probably get by finding a way to drown yourself.
The invisibility you get from diving into their Science Laser also lets you sneak past their security grid, letting you avoid more guards.
The problem I’m noticing here is that there’s a lot of passive stuff, and it feels like it’s hard to justify a lot of active abilities because you the player or you the character could choose to just… not use them.
The trick to avoiding having the player character simply accumulate a laundry list of passive invulnerabilities is to have whatever mechanism is responsible for their repeated resurrection come up with extremely weird adaptations to whatever killed them. The “killed by a laser, become invisible” example should not be an outlier!
Other examples could include:
Death by fire seems to grant the expected basic heat immunity, except you’ll quickly discover that if you heat up too much, you’ll explosively vent the accumulated thermal energy shortly after leaving the hot environment. This could be used to destroy obstacles, but it could also be an obstacle in itself, if whatever’s on the other side of the hot environment would react poorly to being blown up.
Death by falling might make you bounce; alternatively, it might make you shrink, thereby reducing your terminal velocity and rendering the impact with the ground harmless (i.e., by the same principle that insects and small rodents can fall long distances without harm). If you want to be a real bastard about it, this one can’t be triggered voluntarily, so if you need to fit into a small space you need to figure out how to fall near its entrance.
Death by acid? Secrete a neutralising base! The effect of the two substances cancelling each other out is purely cosmetic if you’re just, say, walking through acid rain, but if you manage to fully immerse yourself in the stuff, the resulting vigorous chemical reaction can be used as a makeshift form of propulsion.
Being killed by the claws of an animal-like monster grants the ability to emit a very loud, annoying noise, scaring them off. This would figure into sound-based puzzles later on, of course, but it also triggers automatically on proximity to threats similar to the one that granted it, which might be exploited to create stealth challenges.
Assuming that the game has bosses (which is by no means a given), there are lots of games where the final boss fight’s primary failure state isn’t “the boss kills you” – designing a final boss around an unkillable player character probably requires less outside-the-box thinking than designing regular enemies around the same.
RPG with one of those “humans can’t use magic” settings where the party consists entirely of human magic-users, each with an increasingly strained explanation for why they technically don’t count as human.
A spell backfired on me and I started growing feathers on my arm. I am not a featherless biped.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes
One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence
Example: silk moths as a base species
Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.
Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.
Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.
Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.
Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.
everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see
And then I suppose the obvious episode plot hook is, “they’ve just figured out how to deliver fluids and nutrients intravenously, or equivalent, and they’re about to start finding out how long their bodies can last into adulthood without that limitation.”
Or, some advanced alien species dropped by, analyzed their biology, and said, “thanks for ‘letting’ us examine a few abducted specimens, in exchange, here’s how you can get nutrients without eating“, and then just fucks off.
Sherlock Holmes modern adaptation but the main characters (Sherlock, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, and maybe even Lestrade) are all vampires and they’ve just been doing their thing since the time period of the original books
Irene gets to be from New Jersey like she is in canon and she’ll occasionally show up and help Sherlock with a case but they don’t ever date or hook up or anything
the latest one isn’t even a cop she works nights at the 7-11 and Sherlock keeps coming in at 2am to slam two gallons of Monster Energy and ask her what what the fuck an “amogus” is (it’s case related) and tell her how much better she is at lateral thinking than her tragically straightforward ancestor and also is her girlfriend still going to school to be a defense attorney, how’s she handling the workload
1) Irene adopts and yes she is The Cool Grandma for generations of children forevermore
2) Mary is also a vampire, she got turned at the same time as John, she and Sherlock have Wine Wednesdays every third Saturday of the month
3) Mrs. Hudson is immortal but she’s not a vampire and nobody can figure out what her deal is
4) absolutely 100% correct
whenever anybody asks how they got turned the response is something along the lines of “that was like. Over five years ago. How do you expect me to even remember that.” or “idk man I just woke up like this” or “got bitten by a mosquito on a case” and it’s never the same twice
Yes the Sherlock Holmes books exist and whenever they’re brought up Watson gets very upset that this dude stole his writing and considers him his archnemesis despite the fact that Doyle is a totally normal human and dead as hell
imagine Watson’s frothing rage at the Doyle estate insisting Holmes can never be shown having emotions. like he didn’t personally watch Sherlock weep during the moon landing.
A sleight-of-hand magician routine that’s also a stand-up comedy set about ADHD. Like I’m just there complaining about how I always lose or forget stuff, I change subject as I lose your track of thought, then suddenly remember that I was holding a fan in my hand and –
Where the FUCK did it go??
I ask the audience if they saw where it went. Not in my sleeve, there’s just a handkerchief there. Nothing in my pockets. FUck, I don’t even have any pockets. No, wait, was it in the – [a dove emerges from an improbable place] aw fuck I forgot to return that to the vet.
Now distracted by tugging a comical length of handkerchiefs out of my sleeve, I’ll start telling the story of why, exactly, I was borrowing a pigeon from a vet in the first place. The story, which is lengthy, still doesn’t go on as long as the string of handkerchiefs.
Tags:
#ADHD #story ideas I will never write #amnesia cw #embarrassment squick? #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #(I particularly like that last line)
I still want to write the fic where an outsider has all these preconceptions about what the Force is and then goes into a room with a bunch of Jedi who are tearing into each other like bitchy old academics.
“Ooh, look at Master Structuralist over here with his ever-so-deep ‘everything is attachment actually’ reading”
“I don’t want to hear that from someone who calls every new opinion ‘new depths of their relationship with the Force’”
“The Jedi Order is a social construct–”
“Could you stuff the po-mo and pick up a book once in a while? These aren’t new ideas! You are not a pioneer because you asked one question!”
“I think you could all benefit on more reflection on how our rooting in the Force is actually deeply sexual–”
“If I have to hear one more word about lightsabers being penis envy you are going to be one with the Force immediately.”
yes please I need more jedi symposiums with knights who had different views than consulars who have different views than shadows. Temple-centered jedi versus those who lead frequent diplomatic or medical missions versus exploratory and research jedi who spend most of their time in uninhabited wild space and the outer rim.
There is absolutely no way an organization that large doesn’t have factions that understand the force differently–my 15-person philosophy class couldn’t agree on a single thing we read all term.
It happened six hundred years ago so no one knows but theories range from “he ate all the snacks” to “he personally instigated a duel meant to settle whether channeling the force through combat meditation is more effective than through regular meditation but the duel got out of hand and everyone but him lost at least one limb”
the truth is that he was never actually banned, he’s just been saying it so he doesn’t have to go. he started all the rumors himself
After Mortis anakin’s presentation is just standing ahsoka on stage solid 5 minutes and then as she’s rolling her eyes and about to hop off Morai flies past a window and anakin clicks to the next slide and it just says “the bird is the light side and it’s stalking my padawan”
Dystopian Agricultural Breadbasket World [Worldbuilding]
In most science fiction, the Breadbasket worlds are sprawling farmlands with sparse population, the better to not eat the food. However, with fusion and automated building technology, you can build incredibly dense urban farms and arcologies, support a population of tens of billions, and still produce tons of food.
Thus I introduce to you Agricola, a polluted factory world, where the high tech factory is plant production:
The world has 15 billion people, many of whom are poorly fed. The primary and driving focus of the entire planet is toward agricultural, and specifically flora, production.
Industry involves growing plants, yes. But also maintaining the farming arcologies, and the machines that do the work, and some of the basic production of chemicals needed for the hydroponics. And the scientific R&D people. And then there are the people who exist to support those workers, all the way down the chain.
This world is an unpleasant hellhole to live on due to all of the pollution in the environment, and due to the nearly complete wipeout of non-foodstuff native ecology.
But this world, with 15 billion people, produces enough food to sustain 200 billion people across the Confederation, of 14 different sapient species, as well as nearly a trillion pets and livestock.
The vast majority of food production occurs inside the arcologies. However, there is a form of “luxury natural” foodstuffs that are grown outside in natural light. There is essentially no difference here (the hydroponics stuff is often of better quality), but is more “natural” to these consumers. Thus a great deal of area that could be used for more ecologies has instead been devoted to the more lucrative luxury markets, to the detriment of people who might like to spread out.
This pollution is not entirely what you’d expect. First and foremost, the atmosphere has far too much oxygen, meaning there are frequent fires on the vast planes of fields. Scrubbers take as much of this out of the atmosphere near the fields as possible, but they don’t really care about ash in the city. But the high O2 content also means that people (a) have more energy and focus to do their work, but (b) age faster due to oxidation of their tissues. They effectively are “burning” at the molecular level. The high oxygen also supercharges the pests, allowing the rapid evolution of mega-bugs, as existed on prehistoric Earth (recently, plagues of decimeter-long locusts have become a problem).
There is low CO2, meaning that there is too little greenhouse effect, naturally. So the engineers decided to start producing CFCs, which are highly efficient greenhouse gases. As a bonus, they’ve wiped out the entirety of the polar ozone layer, to the benefit of plants that photosynthesize on UV light. So this world is cold, with energy devoted to melting away encroaching glaciers, and people have just adapted to near constant sunburn
Merchants and artisans are the middle-class framework of a medieval society’s economy, but they’ve never gotten much attention in D&D. The guild most likely to get fleshed out in a DM’s campaign is a local thieves’ guild, either as something for a party’s rogue to belong to or antagonists for the PCs to fight. So when I saw the Guild Artisan background in 5E, I was definitely intrigued.
We often say that the choices a player makes while creating a character tells you something about what kinds of stories they want to see. Guild Artisan is an intriguing one, because, on some levels, it’s so mundane. And that could be part of the story that the player wants to tell. Does their character want to stay rooted in their mundane profession, even as they become an adventurer? Maybe your rogue is also a first-class baker. Maybe your fighter smithed all her own weapons. Or maybe your wizard still maintains a trade as a glassblower, fashioning bottles with the same methodical patience they use to fashion spells.
The flip side to this is that, by most accounts, medieval guilds were anything but mundane. Any organization is likely to become a hotbed of intrigue, politics, and the like. It could be that branches of the player’s chosen guild are working against one another, each trying to gain some kind of political upper hand. Or perhaps the player hopes to take control of the guild someday, thereby fully diving into the pool of connections, favors, backstabbing, and character assassination.
One thing that’s nice about a guild artisan PC is that it lends a small amount of predictability to the actions of a PC when the group enters a new town. It seems likely that, regardless of whether they treat their guild as a political situation to be exploited or just a place to get some cheap accommodations, a GA PC will head for their guild early in their explorations of the new place. This predictability means that a DM can prepare a bit of story ahead of time, in the form of a cast of characters, a location, and even some plot.
The guild as a whole can be something of a character. A guild in one town might be friendly, open, and helpful. Another town’s guild could be a bit more suspicious and taciturn, less given to being open-armed with newcomers. Yet another could be friendly to a creepy degree, possibly because they’ve been infiltrated by a cult of some darker power and hope to lure newcomers into their web.
All kinds of plots can be tied to a guild, giving you the chance to introduce storylines via the GA PC. Imagine if a seemingly lowly but expansive guild becomes infiltrated by cultists, or compromised by doppelgangers. You could have a whole storyline about exposing the guild’s corruption, or stopping them before they use their unobtrusive nature to stab at the seat of power.
A guild can also be a source of information. A stonemason or architect’s guild might be aware of secret passages in a noble’s manse. A carpenter’s guild might have noted certain irregularities in chests they’ve been asked to construct on behalf of a new temple in town. An alchemist’s guild might be worrying, as they’ve recognized that the ingredients a wizard is buying could be combined to make a large quantity of poison. Any of these things might be dropped as gossip in a PC’s ear, giving a reason to investigate and perhaps leading to adventure and danger.
Even more overtly, a guild artisan PC may get offers of adventure for a group to follow-up on. An NPC member of a jeweler’s guild may need a rare component, like the shell of a basilisk egg, for a commission and be willing to pay handsomely for the adventurers that bring it to him. A blacksmith’s guild needs to know why the copper mine they paid hasn’t brought them ore or ingots lately, ultimately leading the PCs to discover a mine taken over by duergar slavers. Any kind of guild might hire a group of adventurers to guard a caravan of goods, or to try and rescue guild members captured by goblins.
I hope this has made you think about the fantastic potential for adventure that this seemingly mundane background possesses. Next month, we’ll be delving into the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion for that most high-flying of heroes, the Aarakocra. Until then, may all your 20s be natural.
Oh, I love medieval guilds as a concept so much! Okay. Some things that fascinate me:
I love glass, and the history of glass, and if you’re looking at the history of glass in Europe you wind up inevitably looking at Murano, Venice, because it is THE European glass centre from the 7th to the 18th centuries.
A fascinating couple of paragraphs from the Glass of Venice website:
“By the late 1200s, the production of glass objects of the finest quality was the city’s major industry as confirmed by the establishment of the Glassmakers Guild that laid out rules and regulations for the craftsmen. The purpose of the guild was to safeguard the secrets of the trade and ensure the profitability of the industry. In line with these objectives, a 1271 law prohibited the importation of foreign glass or the employment of foreign glassworkers.
An even more radical law was passed in 1291 that laid the ground for the establishment of Murano as a premier glass-manufacturing center. This law required that all furnaces used for glassmaking be moved from Venice to Murano to avoid the risk of fire from the furnaces spreading onto the largely wooden structures of overpopulated Venice. Many historians agree that the true motive for this law was to isolate the glass craftsmen to a location where they wouldn’t be able to disclose trade secrets. A subsequent law passed in 1295 forbidding the glassmakers from leaving the city confirms this theory.
Artisans working in the glass trade were well rewarded for their efforts. They had a privileged social status, and their daughters were allowed to marry into the wealthiest and noblest of Venetian families. By applying this clever approach, Venetian government ensured that the glassmakers encouraged their offspring to carry on the trade, and that trade secrets stayed in the families and fueled creative processes leading to innovation and further success. This, along with Venice’s convenient location at the crossroads of trade between East and West, gave Venice monopoly power in manufacturing and selling quality glass throughout Europe that lasted for centuries.”
Venice as a city state set laws in place to establish, isolate and control their glassmakers guild on an island to protect trade secrets and maintain a continental monopoly on their trade. Trade secrets, historically speaking, were a HUMUNGOUS deal.
You could have so many stories here. Are you a foreign guild member, rocking up to the city with your letter of introduction, ready to be greeted by your brethren, and absolutely shocked by getting turned out on your ear? Maybe a shady sort wants you to smuggle trade secrets out to them. Maybe your guild branch wants you to smuggle secrets out to them. Maybe you found notes in a dungeon or wizard lair that would revolutionise certain processes, and suddenly you’re the target of every guild branch in existence hoping you’ll give or be persuaded to give the process to them and them alone. Maybe your party encounters a local guildmember who wants to leave the city and wants you to smuggle them out, breaking local guild laws and potentially fatally damaging your relationship with your overall guild in the process. Maybe the guild as a whole wants your help to break free from their city-state’s restrictions, or maybe only certain sections of the guild, and the rest are perfectly fine with their privileged lives or else deeply and genuinely believe that their secrets should be protected for the good of the city and the pride of the guild.
You’ve got options here. Murano is a very fascinating example of medieval guild-and-city politics.
On a broader scale. Moving to London here, and the Livery Companies (essentially guilds). There’s a lovely page on Wikipedia on the mottos of the Livery Companies, and it is fascinating. The mottos of a guild suggest so many interesting things about them, even when you have no idea of the history involved in how that motto came about.
Some examples:
The Worshipful Company of Bowyers (bow-makers) don’t have a latin phrase for a motto. Instead, they have three names. “Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt”. AKA the three battles where the English Longbow is considered to have decisively won the battle for the English. Like. That is just excellent and incredibly pointed marketing. “Here’s what our wares do, next fucking question!” Amazing.
The clockmakers have ‘Time is the Commander of All Things’. The Worshipful Company of Cooks has, for some reason, ‘Wounded Not Conquered’, and I’m desperately curious as to why. Musicians have ‘Preserve Harmony’ and the Glass Sellers have ‘Discord Weakens’, which is funny and makes me deeply hope their guildhalls are across the road from each other (I don’t think they are, but it’d be amazing). The Painter-Stainers have the extremely ominous ‘Love Can Compel Obedience’, which, if you need an incredibly random guild to have been infested with a cult, can I suggest?
On a similar note, the Poulters have ‘Remember Your Oath’, which, again, curious and ominous?
The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards has ‘With Upright Heart All Are Exalted’, which is hilarious and feels very much like they were trying to get in ahead of the inevitable gambling association.
A lot of the mottos are clearly biblical quotes loosely related to the industry at hand, like the Paviors (pavers) ‘God Can Raise to Abraham Children of Stone’. The Shipwrights have ‘Within The Ark Safe Forever’. The Needlemakers have ‘They Sewed Fig Leaves Together And Made Themselves Aprons’, which feels very much ‘the first day out of Eden, we were there and doing the work!’. There’s a lot of flag-planting and general ‘you’d be lost without us’ in these mottos, which is excellent.
The thing these mottos do is suggest history, ideology, story. Some of them feel defensive, some of them feel defiant, some of them feel ominous, some of them seem incredibly incongruous and make you wonder what the history is (again, why do cooks have ‘wounded not conquered’?).
From a worldbuilding POV … you can put things like this in your world. Like. Was your Cooks Guild hugely involved in a particular war? Was it born out of camp followers way back when? Does your glass sellers guild have a huge and longstanding hatred and rivalry with the local bardic college? Are your wood-metal-and-cloth stainers randomly an ancient fertility cult for no apparent reason? Do several of your guilds have close and sometimes hidden relationships to various deities and practices (are pavers the primary makers of golems)? Are the local weaponsmiths or bowyers extremely arrogant and proud of their craftmanship for extremely specific historical reasons? Are the needlemakers fed up of being looked down on when you’d all be fucking naked if we weren’t here?
Guilds are so much fun. You can do a lot with them, with their histories and hang-ups and beliefs, their relationships with their cities and each other, their reputations and reactions to how people view them, their prominence and decline as various industries crest and fall in different cities and different times. They’re an awesome set of organisations to play with in a world.
Tags:
#long post #history #D&D #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
I do wish there were more major video games that embedded original art that was worthwhile in its own right within the game.
Everyone knows that GTA V has TV shows in it but they’re not really interesting on their own, they’re like a less inventive version of South Park that lacks much artistic value because they’re not really meant to be consumed that way, they’re just more set dressing to the video game intended to convey how WaCkY aNd OvEr ThE ToP the whole world of san whatever is I forgot the name already.
I have occasionally thought about what it would be like if GTA V had, playing every in-game friday from 1800 or whatever, an episode of a short original TV show. Commission a proper movie from some art students, compress it down to 720p and stuff it in there, no one will notice the extra gigabyte. Write a couple dozen early-99pi style 10 minute radio shows and have them play sometimes. Just something fully original and largely unrelated to the world. You can have it set within the world, but make it interesting art in its own right.
This is of course a pretty big ask, to put in a thing that can be totally ignored and which perhaps is best ignored, but still, they put that much effort into the utterly inane cartoons that show on GTAV’s TV channels already. There’s a tennis minigame in that thing which I have never actually tried.
I also think it would be funny if like, as you walk around Horizon Zero Dawn, you could collect a complete music review podcast from the year 2047. It already has audio logs. Let Aloy hear about 250 Gecs.
Tags:
#games #story ideas I will never write #(…I have been extremely slowly making my way through 99pi in chronological order) #(I wonder what the implicit contrast is here between the 99pi I’m familiar with and late-99pi)
Brinens and Things 