Create a setting -- diesel punk awesomeness!

[vicky_molokh]

I like E (Shattered Empires), and to some extent B (Great Game), and am curious about the possibility of combining them. I am strongly against C & D.

Also, I'm interested in the anarchs being a significant faction too, perhaps best fitting into Shattered Empires. "Not all governmentless badlands are bad places to live!"

[ericthered]

(b)The Great Game is my primary.

If I had to pick a second, shattered empires (e).

Opposed to maximum madness (f)

[whswhs]

Just a small point: Great Britain in a dieselpunk setting could not have "lost" the Commonwealth. It was the Empire then; it became the Commonwealth in 1949.

[Flaco76]

I vote for Option E

[Rysith]

E seems interesting and perhaps the most 'open' of the settings - it's easy to drop random groups appropriate to whatever campaign into it. I think that E with some shades of A and B would be my vote - perhaps the catastrophe was a plot by one or more of the conspiracies to break the nations of the world in preparation for taking power, but it went too far - no superpower survived to become the figurehead, and now there are several smaller world powers jockeying for position and absorbing unaffiliated areas while the conspiracies try to spread their influence and the Free Peoples to to avoid assimilation and bandits ruin everything.

[TGLS]

I prefer B, verging on A and C; all great powers treat people decently (but not necessarily fairly), while they start gearing up for World War with each other, by building interlocking alliances not unlike the start of WW1. Radicals working from the fringes and the shadows; perhaps a big powerful radical not unlike the 20s Soviet Union looking to export revolution.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Just a small point: Great Britain in a dieselpunk setting could not have "lost" the Commonwealth. It was the Empire then; it became the Commonwealth in 1949.

Okay, good point. I'll correct that.

Thank you!

[christ0pher]

A. Seeds of Corruption (SoC) would be my preference, a world of wonders on the surface where the PC's slowly discover the creeping evil and must stand against it.

[Fred Brackin]

I rate C highest followed by E with A at the bottom.

[Daigoro]

Late to the party, but here now.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

So, we'll have a setting that combines Ottensian and Piecraftian dieselpunk, and that contrast should drive much of the conflict.

I wasn't clear that these distinctions said any more than that one's an optimistic view and the other's dystopian. Did I miss some important nuance?

C. Axis & Allies (A&A)

D. A Bipolar World (BiW)

I'm going to go for one of these.

But I'm also going to suggest that we consider alternatives to making an Alternative History. We trod over that ground fairly extensively with the steampunk thread, so we'd have to be careful not to bring out the same themes. Also, while I learnt some interesting historical stuff and enjoyed trying to twist it to the setting, the amount of research it took was a bit exhausting.

Without necessarily going all cross-genre (though I'm not ruling out the possibility of supers-dieselpunk from Captain America, or zombie/robot dieselpunk from Sucker Punch), we could invent a new world, or maybe do dieselpunk on Mars or in space.

And for that matter, along with the optimism-dystopia axis, we'll need to consider the realism-fantasticalism axis too. (Avoiding the word 'cinematic' because I think it's too broadly used.)