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Dragonstar was very much like that, though not 100%. One of my favorites from the original D20 days.

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But what if they were playing LARP Of The Dead? LARPers playing LARPers who were playing LOTD when the zombies came?

(Obligatory World of World of Warcraft link)

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Oddly enough, I find myself attracted to the first half your setting rather than the second. The mages just felt wrong for some incredibly weird reason.

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They could just be called mages with all the cultural spookiness that comes with that. Kind of like the technomages from B5.

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Yeah, I can see that. I thought about a sci-fi setting where everything is just metaphors for the fantasy version (races = aliens and dragons = Big Bad ships) but I also like the science! vs magic side. If I were to actually run a game in that setting I would replace ^ with magic. The only way to control gravity or travel FTL is if you have mages on hand but you can shoot crazy railguns and have antimatter bombs without them. I don't know how I would incorporate other stuff though. Throwing a fireball doesn't seem all that useful when you can throw a grenade.

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Yeah, you can use engineers with the trapping of wizards. That's different from the classic wizard brought to mind though. The trappings may be the same, but what the wizard can do is different. I can certainly see that fitting better.

I've seen a few places where FTL=Magic -> FTL requires wizards. If I used the magic FTL idea I'd probably be using different wizards than your classic fantasy setup though.

---------------------------------------------

I was watching stargate:sg1 and wondering about how one would make that universe make economic sense and came up with the following:

Orbs of Power:
An alien artifact has been discovered on an archeological dig -- an orb that seems to be a source of incredible raw energy and strange phenomenon. Using it, Humanity has built a spaceship capable of defying gravity and traveling faster than light. They've even figured out how to make classical energy sheilds. But they can't duplicate the orb. Just do amazing things with it.

This is actually the state of affairs across the galaxy. Less than 100 of these orbs exist. Each of them is at the core of a fantastic ship and for the most part in the hands of haughty tyrants with various technical ability. At least of few of them have detected a new orb active, and are bent on stealing it from its unexperienced owners -- the PC's.

The PC's run the ship. At least one should be a gadgeteer who can come up with new ways to use the orb's power -- stronger shields, different weapons, teleportation, and so on. The enemy orb ships will engage not only in violence but also subterfuge and diplomacy to try and get the PC's on their side. Most Space Opera conventions should be in effect.

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One idea I didn't include was one where civilization has collapsed due to almost everyone uploading themselves into the Big Computer that controls the world. "Priests" are the people who are authorized for access to the Big Computer because one of the uploaded personalities who still takes an interest in the world likes them. "Witches" are people who can communicate and give instruction to the still-ubiquitous nanotechnology, locally over-riding the Big Computer's orders.

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Wizards vs Aliens: simply put a high fantasy world being invaded by aliens, a story of sci fi vs fantasy while both start stealing from the other side to win the war.

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Home on the strange: a planet used as a disposal for a future earth that has grown evil, cold and social darwinistic. It's where they send those who they deem weak, failed experiments and criminals. The planet however has developed over time to something that looks like a wild west type setting with a wide variety sci fi elements such as robots, aliens and various aliens. Essentially a new twist on the space western genre

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Legend of the spire: 1000 years ago a cyberpunk earth was hit by a large alien wave of energy called "The Highstorm" that caused earthquakes, wild mutations and given various people the gift of psionics. Today this earth is now a medieval culture, with psions treated like wizards, where various mutations have become almost identical to typical fantasy races and monsters, and where old technology is worshiped like gods

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A setting where oceans and many areas below sea level are covered with a permanent dense fog. Any living thing that dips below the edge will get torn to pieces by something. There are no land areas larger than a largish sized American state.
TL is just hitting 5 where experimental dirigibles have just been invented by the peoples of the largest island. Now is the time for exploration.

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New west: An alternate history version of the wild west where an alien spacecraft containing a colony of alien refuges crash lands on earh. In return for a new place to live the aliens help improve technology. Essentially a western with laser pistols and robots

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Blood moon: An apocalyptic future where the moon had turned blood red and various people have turned into permanent were wolves. The players play wolf hunters devoted to hunting down these beasts.

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The Anty Government Conspiracy

Worldwide sugar consumption has tripled in the past 50 years, and obesity rates are hitting 30% in some countries. What is it that's driving this change?

Ant People, of course. The executives and owners of the agro-industrial complex are a majority either of Ant People or their pawns. The whole food industry- fast food, snack food and beverage producers, advertisers, media outlets- are all working for the Ant People conspiracy, some wittingly, but most unwittingly.

And what is their goal? They're only a few years away from economic markets being dominated by the flow of sugar- white gold- and then they'll be able to hold the sweet-addicted human population to ransom. They're also building up a stockpile of sugar so that they can feed their brethren when it's time for them to conquer the world.

And who can stop this global epidemic? It's up to a ragtag bunch of pest exterminators, food scientists, dietitians and weight-loss reality show hosts to sock it to them where it hurts- right in the mandibles. But who's going to believe them? And how can they fight against a country living on a permanent sugar-high?

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This is a variation on a theme explored to good effect in Season 7 of the television show, Supernatural.

Of course, the bad guys, there, had a rather more direct use for fattened humans. :)

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Did they have to make an uneasy alliance with the Ant People's natural enemies, the Talking Cockroaches?

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Kingdom Come: in the year 2050 scientists have found a way to put a man on mars, what that man found however changed human history forever. He found an ancient Martian city, one that was medieval I nature but a city none the less, and inside where tomes upon tomes of martian lore. Over years of study scientists have learned the martians secret, they had magic, and over time man had learned to use this magic. The year is now 3012 and society has met with a variety of aliens all in the shape of one fantasy race or the other. Basicly a new take on science fantasy and space opera.

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Here there be dragons: In the year 2020 dragons have come back from their long rest to take over and rule the orld once more, and with them magic and creatures from eastern lore. That was 980 years ago. Basicly a wushu style fantasy in a post apocalyptic future with some near future tech thrown in the mix.

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May show my love of the bizarre, but I think it would be more interesting for the first astronauts to land on Mars to discover human remains. Perhaps with shoddy, garage-kit space suits. Or, for extreme weirdness, period accurate Roman legion gear.

Not sure what I'd do with that, though.

I'd do that one differently, too. I wouldn't make it post-apocalyptic. I'd take a page from Salvation War and have the humans put up a (very effective) fight. Last time the dragons were here, they were fighting (and sometimes losing) to late iron age cavalry. I might have the humans find that when fighting dragons sword<gun<holy sword<holy gun, and give military chaplains some teeth (Praise the lord, and pass the ammunition).

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Well while you are free to post your own settings with those guidelines, neither of those suggestions are what I'm trying to do with these settings. For the first it's supposed to be star trek meets lord of the rings not a couple of confused astronauts who just stumble upon some corpses, and for the second one first it's not supposed to be based on European fantasy but rather Japanese fantasy and second I wanted to do something different than the whole dragons come and humans fight them off sort of deal, and I wanted to do a wushu style fantasy in the ruins of modern day society.

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Bloodsport: In a future cyberpunk world, humanity has grown evil and social darwinistic a gameshow exists called bloodsport. It's a show where those society deems "unworthy" are put in a dark and twisted mockery of a modern day reality show where people are shoved through a lethal minigame every week until one person survives. The winner gets to rejoin society. The players play contestants.

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Descend: a plague forces humanity underground, but what they find underneath are twisted beasts intent on killing anything they see. The players play operatives trained to kill these beasts so that humanity can expand and survive. Pretty much alien meets metro 2033.

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Nope. No Ant-people, and no talking cockroaches. The Leviathans essentially planned to farm humans as a low-volition food source, by feeding them fast-food that was tasty and nutritious, but high in calories and dosed with a low-end sedative that built up through time and made people more calm and suggestible.

The bad guys were great, the main boss villain was very well played, and the season had some fun social commentary. It was one of the more watchable seasons, even leaving out the introduction of Felicia Day's recurring character, Charlie Bradbury/Celeste Middleton.

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Here's a post-apocalyptic idea I've kicked around for awhile. The party members are humans who've grown up as the third or fourth generation in a Vault. Now, 100 years after the apocalypse, the Vault is running out of resources and nutritional deficiencies may soon start to appear, so the party is sent out to explore.

Pretty standard stuff, so far.

However, the apocalypse wasn't caused by nuclear holocaust, or anything, like that. Instead, dimensional breeches appeared and triggered EM pulses that caused serious damage to electronics of all sorts. Right after that, predatory beasts that resemble "the Dark," from Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy slipped through.

I'd make the "Dark" beasts a nocturnal (to the extent of taking damage from UV) hive-mind that uses chemical communications boosted by mild psionics. Each member is capable of taking on any one of several different shapes -- a flyer, a climber, a runner, and a pouncer -- any of whom can have barbed or clawed appendages.

It takes time and energy to shift forms, so most hive members segregate themselves out according to needed specialties, and they just remain in the initial shape chosen.

The species reproduces by fission, and any member will "bud" off a youngster, given access to sufficient nutrition. The ability to alter their forms, and plenty of redundant blood storage organs, combined with a robustly-competitive evolutionary history, means the Dark take limited damage from blunt trauma and puncture wounds (but cutting damage acts as normal, and UV results in serious burns), although sufficient force will kill them as efficiently as it does anything else (artillery always works).

The Dark eat animal proteins, and when few in number a hive is semi-nomadic, traveling at night, until it reaches a rich hunting ground. Then, it finds an underground lair and sets up shop, permanently.

Upon reaching a sufficient number, the collective IQ of the hive begins to increase, until the Dark achieve an order of sapience. At that point, they begin to herd and harvest human beings and other animals, as consistent and reliable food sources. They also become capable of recognizing and attacking communications, electrical and transportation infrastructure, so as to create isolated areas.

On the surface, the Vault explorers find small towns and villages inhabited by what appear to be regular people, living on the edges of old, ruined cities or amongst foothills. They suffer the usual sorts of raids and other problems common to post-apocalyptic settings, and are glad for any help. The people are always welcoming, and encourage the visitors to stay awhile -- even to the extent of offering the "hospitality" of young, eligible members of the community.

In essence, the villagers hope to increase genetic diversity and offer the visitors up to the next "cull," and in so doing spare the lives of their own elders. For their part, the Dark don't care who they get -- they need sufficient calories, and don't care where they come from.

The only people who are "free" in this setting are the raiders -- some of whom can be just as psychotic as anybody in a Mad Max movie. However, they know that to settle down and to try to build anything will attract the Dark, sooner or later, so they just keep moving.

What this has in common with a zombie apocalypse is that the greatest threat comes from the other survivors, and not necessarily the Dark. However, the Dark make for much more challenging adversaries than do zombies, when they do appear.

Alternatively, for a "doomed shoot-'em-up" campaign, back up the timeline and have the party be members of a military squad, or police unit, or set of first-responders, trying to deal with a natural disaster that has messed up electronic power and communications, while slowly becoming aware that inhuman things now rule the night.

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They came from the sea: 50 years ago giant monsters rose from the sea to lay waste to civilization, now humanity has finally been able to make a weapon to defeat these monsters, mecha. Basically a post apocalyptic pacific rim.

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Why is humanity better able to manufacture mecha after civilization has been laid waste than when they still had their knowledge and industrial base? Mecha seem to require tech-a.

Sounds more like a setup for why they turned to magic after their technology failed them and they had no other choice. Or maybe supers; there's still a lab that can induce mutations / produce super-soldier serum / whatever, and despite the usually horrible results on the subjects, there's still some small number of people noble or desperate enough to volunteer, some few of whom even survive to battle the beasts.

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Meh rule of cool mostly,really though Mecha's are completely unrealistic since for the cost of developing one them you can usually buy a hundred tanks. I imagine if we do get to the point we can devolve mechas, they'll more or less be the toys of eccentric billionaires rather then military tech.

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I actually had a friend experience this, once. He loved a mecha miniatures game, and couldn't understand why I had zero interest (I think mechs are stoopid, for the reason listed).

Anyway, I talked to him about the economics of the situation, to explain why I thought the game was silly. Something must have stuck, because the next time he played, he decided to experiment with regular heavy and light tanks and infantry, and not buy any mechs with his point-budget, at all.

He wiped the map. After that, he got it.

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Alright, that's actually a good point. Maybe instead it can be something where we invented mecha while civilization was still alive and breathing, but it wasn't enough as there where no end to the monsters and now there are either lone warriors fending for themselves in mecha suits or entire societies forced to live in these mechs in order to survive.

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Actually that could be an interesting idea for a setting, your fighting in a mech for some sort of game show sponsored by eccentric billionaire who actually made mechs with their money.

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I wasn't criticizing mechas on their own (de)merits. Just asking how that was supposed to fit into a post-apoc setting that didn't have technology.

That could work. Sort of a BSG vibe. Missions to scavenge parts from ruined bases and such. Defeat the enemy before you use up the remaining hardware, so the campaign has built-in time pressure. Also could be a good excuse for the "why melee weapons instead of ranged" question, so you have to go toe-to-toe with the daikaiju. Missiles are scarce, but you can keep swinging that Voltron sword (nearly) as much as you like.

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yeah, and in the case of a whole society living in a mech could also add elements of game of thrones political backstabbery for who gets control of the mech

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The thing that strikes me as weird about this is the multiple forms that the enemy can take. How does this add to the story?

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It illustrates the alien nature of the opponents. It also means they can and do adopt more complex tactics, the more numerous (and intelligent) they get. Also, simple protective measures aren't enough.

I mean, the Dark aren't about to get into dogfights with any F-22s that managed to survive the EMP, but they can certainly glide over the chain link fence and concertina wire that protects the airfield. Some of them can fly over log stockades or stone walls (or just silently climb them), or lurk in a thick forest canopy and either drop on prey, or wrap a target in a barbed tail and then drop.

Any of this can take place while the group is keeping a sharp eye on the undergrowth, around them, because as sure as they don't, some toothy, clawed Dark horror will pounce.

Making the opponents more tactically unpredictable adds to the suspense, I think, and prevents the "bug-hunts" from becoming repetitive. The enemy has a different mix of capabilities, every time.

Basically, I don't think zombies make very convincing reasons for the collapse of civilization and, honestly, they're really boring. Give me a predatory species that is very definitely not human, and I could do a lot more with it.

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world war greece: A greek fantasy world that broke it's medieval stasus and now lives in a 1930's era. A greek epic where wars are fought with guns instead of swords and where a Cyclops can face off against a tank blessed by Dionysus.

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Well, it's better than World War Grease, where battles are decided by drag races and marathon dance contests to 1950s tunes.

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Hey, now. Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion.

Grease is the word.

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The Hell We Made For Ourselves: The premise is that a great empire has done the terribly clever things that people keep suggesting as applications for GURPS magic spells, most notably including massive use of undead as fantasy robots. So now we have a huge population of skeletons and mummies doing pick and shovel labour, picking cotton, acting as military cannon-fodder, carrying taxi-litters whatever. It's a golden age of wealth and prosperity although there is a certain tendency to look for excuses to sentence commoners to undeath and the empire is not at all popular with it's neighbours because of its policy concerning disposal of the bodies of both sides and what it does to just about anyone it captures.

Of course the Thanasian Empire has noticed an increasing difficulty in casting healing spells. Also there seem to be increasing numbers of spontaneous animation of dead animals. And the weather control bureau seems to making an increasing number of mistakes. Also the crops this year aren't doing especially well even apart from the lightning storms. And there have been a few mysterious murders and missing servants of the victims. Also some earth tremors and sink holes. But everything's fine, I assure you.

The challenge is of course for the PCs to survive the approaching apocalypse.

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Scavengers: A plague had struck the land in the year 3000 killing off 90% off the human race, the year is now 5000 and humanity, though they have regained their numbers have only recovered 50% of their technology. The heroes play a special ops group trained to infiltrate the ruins of the past world and learn more about the past while dodging security systems, genetic monstrosities and lost tribes of humans who now worship this technology as gods. Basically Indiana jones in futuristic post apocalyptic world but with ancient technology instead of ancient treasures.

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Working off the last idea, A sci-fi setting set after humans met high ubertech aliens, joined Ubertech aliens, fought in wars across universe for ubertech aliens, lost/won/doesn't matter the war, regressed to pastoral tech on many planets, populated many planets, got back almost to modern tech, discovered many ubertech items, ships and factories. Now the human race on one world is Pseudo-WW1 England another is Pseudo-WW1 Germany. WW1 with planetary invasions. Trench warfare with Nanotech instead of mustard gas. Bolt action Ultratech Guns.

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I tried this one and it never really got off the ground. I blame PbP format.

An advanced race of aliens recruits a number of warriors from earth to fight in boarding actions. The 'patrons' have good technology but are themselves totally unsuited for hand to hand combat (too big, too small, too slow, mental blocks, can't stand the required temperatures or so forth). The humans find themselves view pieces of a quest to recover ancient artifacts. They also find themselves on something of a quest to learn more about their employers, and if they should really be working with them.

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Did you ever play a computer game called MAXX by any chance?

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No, Should I have?

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The plot was very similar to the one you proposed - you might like it (can be found on GOG.com).

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An entity called the Harbriger of Nightmares decides to invade the world by calling upon Humanity's collective nightmares. Giant spiders, chtuluesque creatures, the Waffen SS...

He is opposed by the Vanguard of Dreams, guardian of humanity, who takes on the hopes of those who suffered greatly yet prevailed thanks to their dreams, to create an army to oppose the Harbringer of Nightmares. A bunch of Couriers, Commander Shepards, Samus Arans, Harry Potters, and miscellaneous tabletop RPG characters start popping up around the world. They are powerful but depends on the power of the dreams of the ones generating them to exist. (I am convinced dreams are one of the most powerful things to exists. I was bullied at schol and survvived thanks to the support I could get in my dreams.)

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Aquis: The world of Aquis is a very different take on both medieval fantasy and swashbuckling. A TL 3 world where sailing was invented when the world was TL 1 and one that only consisted of small islands, the world of Aquis now lives in world where the world population can't possibly fit on the worlds land and now live on giant boats large enough for entire civilizations.

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Age of storms: The modern day has been destroyed by countless mana storms from an unknown source, these storms have mutated the local wildlife into terrible monstrosities, enchanted items with powerful magic and have changed the properties of the very earth itself. The players play survivors who have emerged from bunkers to explore this new and dangerous world that their home has turned into.

Lord of the dead: A TL 3 fantasy world but one that is different in two ways, first this world is going through a version of the black death that destroys the soul and the victims are left as wandering husks intent on devouring the souls of any they find, and second magic in this world powerful but slow requiring very specific materials and long casting times to perform.

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Space:1930: a space opera dieselpunk setting where world war 2 is being fought amongst the stars and with bizarre technology.

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Savages: A plague has killed 90% of the worlds population, and now for an unknown reason dinosaurs have come back from the dead. Basicly Mad Maxx meets Jurassic Park

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Or, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenozoic_Tales

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....huh.... cool....

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I bought GDW's Cadillacs and Dinosaurs RPG years ago and every once in a while get an itch to run something with it. Like many licensed game adaptations, it suffers from a tendency to be geared towards making characters exactly like the ones in the source material rather than making characters who would be interesting to play in the setting. Or maybe I've just never approached it from the right angle yet.

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Oh, I'd imagine the game designers wanted to appeal to the readers of the comic (and those who viewed the cartoon) as the core market demographic. The way to do that is to allow them to play people such as the protagonists.

It's not a bad approach, really, and from the standpoint of the hobby, it helps draw in people.

That said, I'd probably devote some time to the creation of a more coherent background, but that's just me and I'm an habitual world-builder.

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Into the woods: An alternate reality where since the 1900's it has become common place to abandon unwanted children in the woods to the point where in modern day there are whole communities made up of these unwanted children. The players play children who have been just dumped off in the woods.

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The king of a small border kingdom (think authurian england) commissions a sword capable of founding a kingdom and dynasty to be made by a famous and powerful mage in a far off land closer to the center of the world (Think Byzantium, though thematically he may live closer to Jerusalem than constantinople). The players must escort both the payment and suprise.

Real world locations are optional. We can do this fantasy style.

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"Hansel? Hansel? What kind of name is Hansel?" - asks the giant talking rabbit.

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A blog post for Free RPG Day:

Millennium steals the basic idea of Mage: PCs are among the few "proper" mages, and most of society either doesn't believe in them at all or is opposed to them. But rather than the wide-ranging Mage approach to spell-casting, PCs are using Cabalistic techniques, perhaps with Path/Book magic. This will severely restrict what they can do, and this is a campaign where PCs try to stay too small to be noticed rather than charge up against the big bad guys (though in the long term this could change). Following my preference for transformational moments, PCs will be the first mages of their type, or at least something close to first; but the stars are right, and magical stuff is popping up everywhere. (The ancient conspiracy of mages, which these things always seem to need, should see its own power increasing as magical stuff in general becomes easier. Or maybe it isn't, which would also be interesting.)

Ars Scientiæ is a post-collapse game: scholars attempt to rebuild lost knowledge. This blatantly rips off Ars Magica and would run in the same format, with each player generating one scientist and one or more bodyguard types (who are probably several tech levels lower, at least at first). The biologist wants a sample of a giant mutant venus fly-trap? The physicist needs a proper high-power laser from the radiation-blasted ruins of Cambridge? Guess you're escorting him into the rubble, then.

The Turbulent Century was mentioned at greater length in the podcast for April: a fantasy version of 14th-century Europe, with pointless wars and a divided Church and mad nuns. This also has some elements of Ars Magica, in that a serious mage is not a PC but an NPC patron. It starts with dungeon bashing, then moves into the much more dangerous realm of civil society.

Wives and Sweethearts: a small ship of the Royal Navy (in space) visits old and new worlds and tries to keep the peace. Tech assumptions need to be set up to enable a ship's captain to be the ultimate local authority: no FTL communications, and long operations without the need to refuel. (Age of Sail in space, though the attitude to people and tech is closer to John Winton.) Sometimes the problem is alien artefacts, sometimes it's a colonial governor calling for help, sometimes it's personal problems on board. The ship is capable of handily beating off pirates or civilian attacks (it has moderate capabilities in several areas as well as one specific military job at which it's especially good, something like a Type 23 frigate), but will have to run from bigger military vessels. I suspect, as people have said about Star Trek games, that it would make sense for players to have several characters: one department head, one slightly more expendable crewman who goes on landing parties, and perhaps one other miscellaneous character.

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Real doll sex toy company seeks to create AI. Now imagine Reign of Steel where the AIs were originally sex toys.

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They have a direct way of making money from AI, and the customers aren't likely to complain publically if dissatisfied.

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Wormverse: In one world, a large ship containing the last remains of human society crashes into an interdimensional portal 1/10th, in many other worlds portals start appearing that drag all kinds of creatures to this one ship. Fast forward about 10 years and you get the world of today, all matter of civilizations who rub up against one another in a small enclosed space. Hilarity ensues.

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Battalion: The players play members of the allies secret psionic army in WW2

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September 13, 1999 an alien space craft that will later be called SDF-1 crashes into the Moon and sends it hurtling out of the Solar System. The crew of Moon Base Alpha struggle to unlock the secrets of Robotechnology and get back to Earth.

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Couldn't you just have a random wormhole open up and swallow the moon, and then randomly spit it out again in various places in the universe?

That strains credulity a lot less.

I mean, I was 12 years old when Space 1999 first aired in the United States, and even I knew the cause of the disaster was silly, as was the notion that the moon could reach another solar system (much less more than one) in the lifetime of any of the crew.

Getting hit by an alien spacecraft is even less plausible than an explosion in a nuclear waste depot. Any disaster energetic enough to blast the moon out of its orbit would just turn it into gravel, instead.

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My entire family made fun of me for watching Barbara Bain attempting to act. But we all have our guilty pleasures that seem aggressively counter to our natures.
I will say one thing in my defense of Space: 1999: there were very few science fiction shows during my childhood.

A later episode of Space 1999 did show how much havoc the loss of the moon caused on earth.

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Magical gates aren't any more credible.

But for gaming, a Philadelphia Experiment style disaster causing an entire space station to shift realities sounds awesome.

Reminds me of The Time Tunnel, Quantum Leap, and Sliders.

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The SDF-1 was a space ship that was 1.2 kilometers long. When its hyperdrive started up accidentally it transported a sphere which contained the entire island it had crashed on. Now I wouldn't personally use that idea to move the entire moon, but maybe a hundred miles or so would be enough to transport plenty of resources with you. Although one idea I've considered is doing Apocalypse Troll. The whole moon is a gigantic Death Star underneath a thick layer of camouflaging stone. You could explore the interior decks for a lifetime.

Or alternatively you could go with the more reasonably sized Deimos, which is also a lovely name for a warship.

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For some reason that reminds me of that godawful Doctor Who episode where the moon is really an egg getting ready to hatch. The plot was an incoherent mess with it gaining mass to equate earth gravity for no rational reason, and leaving an exact moon duplicate to vaguely match previous episodes of future earth.

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That idea would also work better than something hitting the moon, or blasting it out of orbit with a nuclear explosion.

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How about this: mecha reproduce.

They are unequivocally mechanical, though of an extremely high tech level. They self repair, slowly, when damaged. If, say, an arm gets blown off, and they are unable to reattach it, the stump sort of heals over. Maybe it can somehow be coaxed to regrow, if the post-apocalyptic denizens can figure out how.

And then, somehow, they reproduce. If you get two (or more?) together at the right time, they emit some kind of a seed, and when put together with another seed you have an egg. In the right conditions (maybe some kind of energy input and some way to carry off waste heat) it will mature and eventually hatch into a new mecha.

The mecha themselves might develop into various taxons, and might only be able to reproduce within (or without!) those taxons.

(What happens when someone has enough tech to put parts back together, but doesn't have their own mecha? They scavenge parts, basically every bit blown off of a mecha they can find, and try to put them together so they'll work. They keep trying and trying, not succeeding, until one day one of them comes across a forgotten seed, or a broken egg, and tries to implant it into their Frankenmech...)

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Whether technobabble with real words, or technobabble with complete silliness like multiple universes and phasing into and out of reality is better is purely aesthetics.

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Don't really have a name for the setting but I do have an idea for a monster hunting game but set in a cyberpunk city

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Demon City: The characters are police officers in a near future city plagued with mysterious malfunctions of advanced technology. When it isn't just breaking down it seems to acquire a mind of its own. The result is a very schizo-tech setting as citizens choose between modern, inexpensive and unreliable, over engineered, really expensive and slightly iffy, or just plain retro. As cops you find yourself being being issued revolvers just because your pistols kept jamming and the city is trying to find the money to build "police boxes".

But you have more immediate problems with the unidentifiable predator attacks, mysterious disappearances, museum thefts, and apocalyptic cult leaders... Stuff happens when the magic starts to come back.

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Credible as in believing it could actually happen, no. Credible as in more internally consistent, oh yes it is.

Agree about the transdimensional space station.


Hans

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Not so. Technobabble with real words is inherently inconsistent (if it was consistent, it wouldn't be babble -- real life comes with built-in consistency). Technobabble with imaginary rules MAY be self-cosnsistent (plenty of examples where it isn't, but it's possible), which is much much better for suspension of disbelief.



Hans

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Devils to the west: A monster hunting game in the style of Hellboy but set in the wild west, where the players play monsters hired to fight evil monsters with steampunk weaponry

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Labyrinth: In the near future modern day society finds a set of ruins with monsters from European lore, deadly traps and magical artifacts, and then they start finding more. In the year 2070 human society has used the magic from these ruins to create marvels of technology, the players play specialists trained exclusively to raid these ruins. Basicly it's your typical dungeon fantasy but with proagnists you'd only find in a cyberpunk game.

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Some threads from RPGnet relevant to this and fun reads besides:
[setting riff] Voices From Below and the Long Stairs
[setting riff] The Long Stairs --- Second Landing
system agnostic] Operation Long Stairs as a justification for a strange conspiracy game
and a wiki Subterrestrial Operational Theater

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The deepest mine on earth goes down 2.4 miles. What if they hit the lairs of Mole Men? Only for us to discover that they live everywhere but only 1/2 a mile down and now they know about us.
Of course many would invade to steal their magi-tech. It's not like they're really people.

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Battlefield: Metropolis: In the near future a comet strikes the earth that gives one half of the earth's population super powers and kills the other half, now a devastated world is being fought over by humans with strange abilities. Basically capepunk meets mad max.

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Age of dragons: A world war 2 setting where the world has always had a variety of species of dragons as wide and as varied as the how to train your dragon movies, except humanity has never made a vehicle stronger than that of a dragon. Basicly it's WW2 era warplane movie but with dragon riders instead of pilots.