[Genesis]

I started work on a setting that would capture some of these elements, although I've a dearth of regularly available players right now, and too many ideas. My setting grew out of a desire to do a low-ish tech space game: TL 9, no lightspeed, quite grungy. I wanted to run a game on a giant colony ship - essentially self-sufficient, cut off from regular resupply, and big enough for a couple dozen millions of people.

I, like others above, fastened on a "heavily controlled" feel - I wanted guns to be rare and/or dangerous. I also liked the idea that this vast ship had vast interiors - unlike the normal "grungy sci-fi" feel with cramped corridors, I wanted the ship to have a grand legacy that had gone to seed. Coupling the two together got me thinking about movement in what would essentially be a hyper-urban environment: there's no ground, just more ship in every direction.

So I came to a parkour feel in a roundabout way, by stripping down a space opera until all that was left were the bones of a single massive ship. Once I saw that image in my head, however, I couldn't shake it. I took some inspiration from Feersum Endjin (Iain M Banks - one of my new favorite authors) for the ideas about scale and that "rusting legacy" feel. The other half was something like Pandorum - ruined ship, wildly variable interior spaces, there's even some stuff that could well be called Parkour from one of the survivor characters.

I ended up abandoning the project when I had the (awesome) idea that gravity wouldn't necessarily work properly everywhere in the ship. This would allow some of the more "cool" parkour styling, but trying to construct some simple maps became really tough. I actually bet this'll be a problem in lots of settings (depending on your level of detail) - you need a lot of space to make a parkour-style game work, and it needs to fit together in interesting and complex ways to properly reward the out-of-the-box movement.

I think the thing we're dancing around is the notion that parkour works best in a modern, urban-ish setting (where there's lots of Stuff to jump on), but you need some excuse for why people aren't doing easier things for their transportation (cars are convenient, after all...). So we go straight to Future Dystopia as a venue of choice. I think it's likely that many (most?) such settings will have space for parkour and other urban movement disciplines.