story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lytefoot:

prokopetz:

panerato:

7outerelements:

prokopetz:

Concept: dungeon filled with deadly traps and terrible curses, except the dungeon is so old that the creatures that built and inhabited it didn’t even slightly resemble humans, so all of the traps are based on incorrect assumptions about the scale and gross anatomy of hypothetical invaders, and all of the curses have very strange ideas concerning what ought to be harmful – and, in some cases, even what constitutes harm – for their victims.

It would be really, really great to watch a party try and piece together information about the ancient builders from their traps. It would be, perhaps, even better to include a puzzle that required some degree of anatomical deduction to solve.

“This piece is moving. It must be some kind of floorplate. Hey, someone stand over here.”
“Didn’t we agree these things floated? Why would they have floorplates?”
“No, that was before we figured out they had some kind of oobleck sac for their organs.”
“Well either way, they can’t have weighed more than 25 pounds, so if you keep stepping on that you’re going to break it.”

Ohhh, I read this very wrong initially, and thought it was creatures who had never seen humans trying to build a dungeon to stop humans/humanoids from entering. So all the traps are super weird based on the varying opinions of the builders. Like, one trap would be too high, or another would drop this gross slime that they thought would be acidic but is really only stinky and hard to move in. 😅

Both are excellent approaches, for completely different reasons.

Magic trap that lifts you up in the air, tumbles you upside down a few times, then sets you gently on the floor. The dungeon builders’ anatomy was such that they would be seriously damaged if their entire body was inverted, so the idea was that it would kill or incapacitate any intruder without making a big mess or rendering them hard to identify.

The PCs are severely delayed while those members of the party that like fun compete to have another go on the trap, which is about on par with a roller coaster ride.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #death mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maryellencarter:

thoughts on Justice League Animated, part two of god knows what:

* The Brave and the Bold: Story by Paul Dini, script by Dwayne McDuffie, who are both fucking great, but this one doesn’t really stand up for me. It’s the one where Gorilla Grodd, a telepathic talking gorilla mad scientist supervillain, attempts to nuke Gorilla City, the hidden African city of hyperintelligent talking gorillas. I think part of my distaste for this episode – it’s not strong enough to be dislike, it’s just not one of the ones I bother with – is just the fact that, you know, over in Marvel the hidden hyper-advanced society in Africa is Wakanda, home of never-conquered black people, and here it’s fucking *gorillas* and that has a very racist smell to me.

* Fury: In which an adopted Amazon tries to kill all the men on Earth with a biowarfare deal. Somehow this works on Superman and J’onn also, despite alien physiology stuff. Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure. Script is again by Dwayne McDuffie, who was one of the greats, and it tries to point out that excluding men completely is not so very far from getting rid of the men, but it also tries to pull the #notallmen thing where one man’s good action in the past is supposed to redeem the whole category, and it’s just… many kinds of not great. One redeeming feature is that at least it does make Hawkgirl the one to set foot on Themiscyra, while in the previous Themiscyra episode Hawkgirl was *completely absent* so the heroes Wonder Woman brought to help were *all* male (for which she got banished).

Now I apparently have a therapy appointment, so more later.

>>Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure.

I watch CinemaSins videos while I’m jogging, because they’re reasonably entertaining and they have subtitles (I can’t hear the video very clearly over the sound of the treadmill). A few weeks ago I saw the one they did on The Happening.

I don’t think he even sinned it (the video was done in the 2010s), but it struck *me*, watching these clips, that I didn’t see *anybody* attempting any kind of air filtration in the face of this incredibly-deadly probably-airborne poison.

Nobody had a surgical mask. The Crazy Prepper People™ getting out their guns didn’t have respirators. Nobody so much as tied a fucking bandana around their face on the grounds that they had nothing to lose by trying.

It’s all-too-realistic, it seems, that *most* people wouldn’t. But there would be exceptions! And the thing is, you could write some really good, really horrifying horror about the exceptions!

Consider this alternate backbone plot for The Happening:

There’s a family. They live far enough from the epicentre to hear about the Happening before it reaches them, but near enough to be in acute danger.

They have one child. Let’s say she’s twelve. Old enough to comprehend the situation about as well as the adults do, old enough to wear PPE sized for adults, young enough to ping people’s Bad Things That Happen to Children Are Extra Bad wiring.

The dad’s a construction worker. He owns a respirator for work. As they’re preparing to evacuate, he gives it to his daughter. He figures, they say whatever this thing is seems to be airborne, maybe the respirator will protect her.

It *does* protect her. But the family only had one.

She watches her parents die by their own hands. She has to find a way to evacuate on her own, without being overwhelmed by the incredibly traumatic experience she just went through, while knowing that if she takes her respirator (Dad’s respirator) off for any reason–eating, drinking, blowing her nose after crying–she’ll die just like they did.

She takes a breath, acutely aware that two inches ago the air she’s breathing in was deadly. The filtered air is like a desert. The clock on dying of thirst is ticking.

Tags:

#I don’t like horror but I also don’t like missed opportunities #The Happening #reply via reblog #reactionblogging #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #illness tw #poison cw #death tw #suicide cw #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #sexism cw #racism cw? #Justice League

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moral-autism:

dizzyhmuffin:

So Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, and Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos walk into a restuarant.

They’ve reserved a table for four, with a sign above it saying “Congratulations, Jay Gatsby!”

We’ve finally found out whom Holmes and Dracula were both trying to buy Nintendo cards for!

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write

mirthur asked: Surely a tax evasion game would just be “filing taxes but lying, the game” considering the list of things you’ve already disqualified from being direct tax evasion

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

prokopetz:

(With reference to this post here.)

Nah, there are plenty of things you can do gamewise that constitute direct tax evasion (i.e., as opposed to shenanigans that are merely tax evasion adjacent).

For example, suppose that the player characters are inhabitants of a medieval village whose yearly tax assessment has come due, and the royal tax assessor is touring the village in order to estimate its total wealth and thereby calculate how much is owed in tax.

The player characters’ mission is basically to run around behind the tax assessor’s back playing reverse Weekend at Bernie’s and ensure that the village appears to be much less prosperous than it really is. Keep those cattle out of sight (easier said than done), disguise that lavishly appointed tavern as a church (churches are tax exempt!), maybe cover up any discrepancy between the village’s actual and reported population by faking a plague or two (where are they going to get that many skulls on short notice?), and so forth.

Basically, the easiest way to make tax evasion gameable is by contriving a scenario where taxable assets are assessed rather than reported, then identifying entertaining ways for the player characters to fuck around with the assessment process.

Tags:

#some of the context #story ideas I will never write #games #(although it seems worth noting that I *did* once see a game that was ”filing your taxes but you’re a dragon”) #(maybe you can have the dragon do some tax evasion?) #death mention #illness mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

king-of-fuffies:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: the old robot-with-Pinocchio-syndrome bit, except they don’t give a shit about art or love or anything like that; the thing they’re yearning for is something completely off the wall which would never occur to any reasonable human to think of as essential to the human condition, but which the robot is prepared to argue – rigorously, methodically, and at enormous length – is in fact the very heart of what it means to be human.

Some favourites from the notes:

  • Itching
  • Back pain
  • Being bad at video games
  • Freudian slips
  • Cracking open a cold one with the boys
  • Paying taxes
  • Evading taxes
  • The capacity to have cold toes so you have a legitimate reason to wear cool socks
  • Shaving
  • Schadenfreude
  • Seasonal allergies
  • Existential dread

it comes back to tax evasion in the end. it really do be like that

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #robots #story ideas I will never write #high context jokes #illness mention

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

bicatperson:

zarohk:

ratcoded:

ratcoded:

i wish there were more modern aus for his dark materials because i really want to know if the general consensus is that you’d share a twitter with your daemon or that you’d have separate accounts

a daemon is the little voice in the back of my head that goes “don’t post that idiot, haven’t you heard that paw patrol jokes are problematic now?” but instead of a mental voice its a tiger pointedly pressing the backspace button on my laptop

@featherquillpen @bicatperson

I take my cues for this from IRL people who have dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities doing a timeshare in one body).

A lot of the time they’ll have one account – it’s easier than having to keep track of who’s signed in all the time – and individual voices will sign their comments when they feel the need to. Say, one comment might have a paragraph signed by person X, and another signed by person Y. Or there’ll be one person who uses the account most of the time, so if anyone else wants to jump in with a comment, they’ll do the signing.

In HDM canon, most interactions are carried out human-to-human. So the default assumption on Twitter, etc, would be that posts are made by humans. If a daemon feels the need to have direct input, I’d have them sign the tweet.

On Twitter specifically, they absolutely sign with animal emojis. The daemon-world Unicode Consortium is VERY diligent about having an appropriate emoji for every animal anyone has ever settled as. They probably had a working plan for it before they got around to “different skintones for smiley faces.”

Facebook would have a built-in “check this box to signify that your daemon is posting” option, and then the comment displays differently. Probably has the option to upload a separate daemon avatar to go with it.

If a daemon is the primary user of an account, they wouldn’t admit it. (On the internet, no one knows you’re a…fill in the blank.) Any time someone gets Internet-famous without ever being seen in public, people will start rumors that it’s the daemon fronting the account, not their human.

Instagram is the big exception, where daemons will openly be the stars of cute-critter aesthetic blogs, and any regular animal that comes off as suspiciously savvy will get accused of being a daemon in disguise. They’re also a huge part of the “staged photos of animals doing meme-able weird things” industry.

…there are vicious arguments about whether Chuck Tingle’s IRL “preferred trot” involves literal trotting, or whether he’s the human doing an obvious misdirect as part of his weird persona. Neither side is right. Chuck Tingle is (the pseudonym of) a velociraptor daemon.

Tags:

#daemons #story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: one of those tabletop RPG settings where the Big Shiny Artifact is the source of all magic, except the Big Shiny Artifact got blown up hundreds of years ago, and in the intervening span individual communities figured out how to make their own Little Shiny Artifacts, so in the setting’s present day, each community has its own idiosyncratic magic system that only works in that community and its immediate environs.

This is all a framing device for a roguelike-style campaign where the player characters and their basic traits are persistent from scenario to scenario, but they start each scenario at “level one” (or its system-specific equivalent) because the game’s character advancement mechanics entirely revolve around mastering the local magic system, and magic items acquired in one community don’t work anywhere else, so the party has to start over from scratch advancement-wise each time they move on to a new town.

(The player characters are, of course, presumed to be exceptionally rapid at picking up on new magic systems, allowing them to speedrun the customary zero-to-hero trajectory over the course of each adventure, but there will always be a few locals who’ve had much longer than they have to get the hang of it and have made good use of that time, handily explaining why every random-ass village has some sort of godlike boss monster living in that cave over there.)

The unique nature of each community’s magic system and the player characters’ scattershot approach to mastering it would be mechanically reflected by the traits/moves/feats/spells/etc. that are available to each character on level-up being randomly determined. These traits would be drawn from a “deck” of options (which may be implemented as a literal card deck if you have a printer, some cardstock, and a lot of time to kill), with each scenario specifying a unique “deck list” for the community in which it takes place. This is, of course, entirely a pretext for implementing roguelike-style drops in a conventional gain-XP-to-level-up advancement system.

(Possibly there could be some sort of metaprogression mechanic that allows player characters to purchase persistent traits which allow the player to manipulate their trait draws in some way?)

@shinobicyrus replied:

oooh this is quite the plotbunny. Do the local Artifacts *have* to stay in a particular place or can they be moved? Stolen and put somewhere else. Have a Mobile village wandering about with its own weird magic system?

For sanity’s sake, let us presume that the Artifacts can be moved, but that they don’t generate a local magic system until they’ve been properly placed in a suitable shrine (where the definitions of both “suitable” and “shrine” can vary wildly based on the nature of the particular artifact), and that once they have, their sphere of influence takes a considerable length of time to fully manifest.

(Conversely, an enshrined Artifact very strenuously objects to any attempt to move it unless the proper deactivation rituals have been performed!)

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #games #roguelikes

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twocubes:

one of those extremely-slow-aging-but-humanoid fantasy species where everyone is actually centuries or millennia old

but the twist is that because they’re so old they develop levels of maturity that are simply unattainable and unknowable to humans

hundreds of emotion-words that all seem to mean the same thing to humans because they require decades of context to distinguish

fiction and artworks that take decades of study to understand considered standard parts of adult pop culture. one of them that you’ve known for 50 years suddenly changes their habits completely, you ask one of their friends and they go like, “oh, yes, they finished reading [name of story]”. they smile at you, like you’re a child playing peekaboo for the first time

“things were better in my day” considered a sign of immaturity, diagnostic of something analogous to a second teenager phase that you go through starting around your first half-century and get out of by the time you turn 100

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

Concept: YA fantasy/sci-fi setting with the obligatory child-sorting algorithm where one of the categories is clearly just House Awesome, except the big book three twist is that the people in charge are aware the setting runs on story logic, and the true purpose of House Awesome is to serve as a narrative quarantine for kids who’ve been identified as potential protagonists.

 

prokopetz:

(At first you think it’s going to follow the standard trajectory where a single rugged individualist rises above the rest and Smashes The System, but in reality that’s precisely the problem: the system works because the various heroic destinies in play end up burning up all their energy trying to assert narrative dominance, leaving the outside world mostly unaffected. The actual moral message is some heavy-handed Aesop about the perils of unchecked individualism.)

 

prokopetz:

@specsboy1999 replied:

I like the idea of putting all the potential protagonists together and watching them spend all their time trying to one-up each other to become the “ONE, TRUE PROTAGONIST!” Killing them off is just asking for someone to get away and over through you, keeping them at war among themselves may cost more but is better in the long term, just make sure to stop co-operation through unfair advantages.

Precisely. If the baddies tried to murder all the potential protagonists, they’d be providing them with a Common Enemy For Former Rivals To Set Aside Their Differences And Unite Against – they’re genre-savvy enough to know how that ends. Better to indulge them and channel their heroics into harmless one-upmanship until their endlessly serialised adventures wander off into narrative irrelevance.

Ironically, the only way to overcome the baddies’ evil scheme is to stop acting like you’re the hero of the story!

 

prokopetz:

(Would it be too on-the-nose for the fellow-student-antagonist the genre requires to be a thinly disguised Harry Potter expy that takes a good, hard look at exactly what sort of person would become a magic cop straight out of high school? Yes, very likely it would. We’re gonna do it anyway.)

 

prokopetz:

@spinningthehamsterwheel replied:

So do we have a viewpoint character in this theoretical story?

Given the premise, I think the most appropriate framing would be to present it as an anthology-style short story collection, with each story focusing on a different potential protagonist. Imagine if Wayside School was somehow even more meta than it already is and you’ll have roughly the right idea.

(Heck, maybe even get multiple authors in on it to really drive the point home. It’s almost a shame it’s too late to make a NaNoWriMo prompt out of it. Oh, well – there’s always next year!)

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

Concept: villain receives one of those “neither man nor woman etc.” prophecies and thinks they’re terribly clever for going “aha, that doesn’t rule out nonbinary people”, so they spend the next few years being terribly suspicious of anyone with non-traditional gender presentation, and then they’re murdered by a teenager.

Tags:

#fun with loopholes #story ideas I will never write #gender #death tw? #murder cw?