Ideas Are Easy

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

"It's worse than that, sir! They're economists, and they say this is for our own good."

The Crimson Permanent Assurance sails again, boys!

[ajardoor]

The Dreamlands as Cyber-Space

Alright, check out this idea for a magical setting concept. This can be part of a secret magic setting or an open magic setting, but it works better when magic is a public fact of life.

In Chapter 5 of GURPS Thaumatology, we are introduced to the Paths and Books Rituals magic system. One of those Paths is the Path of Dreams, a series of Rituals that manipulate the abstract realm of sleeping minds. The Dreamlands have a degree of objective reality as a spiritual realm in this setting concept.

The Cyberpunk genre almost always features a "cyber-space", a super-Internet based around total immersion VR and the playground of a guerrilla hacker subculture. The cyber-space is a network of networks where the governments, criminals and mega-corps have all staked a claim with their competing agendas and rival net-structures of programs, private databases, AIs and secret cyber-espionage operations.

What if the Dreamlands were the setting version of cyber-space?

Casting the Dreamwalk Ritual to enter a deep sleep and project into the Dreamlands essentially acts like jacking into the net via a neutral plug or total VR suit.

The Dreaming skill works partly as the Computer Hacking skill in this parallel in addition to its regular use. The concept may allow "hackers" to use waking world skills on Dreamlands obstacles (for example, Lockpicking to get past a dreamed-up locked door or Explosives (Arson) to burn down a Dreamlands library) with Dreaming as a complementary skill. Getting past magical Rituals requires casting the right counter Ritual, but Dreaming and waking world skills can help out the casting roll as complementary skills.

If Paths do not exist in this setting, the Book that teaches Dream Rituals is the setting's version of those big ugly programming manuals that don't fit on your shelf...

One's personal dream realm is equivalent to a custom home computer's electronic security and databases. A "digital dungeon" of cyber-space where a network of secured nodes for a single building overseen by a sysadmin that adventurers hack into could be the magical Rituals cast upon a physical place or person, all protected by an outer layer of the Dream Sanctum Ritual. Much like the real Internet, the Dreamlands is used as a global communication and content sharing network.

Spirits, bound or free, may be equivalent to A.I. Constructs - spirit guardians set to stop dream intruders are just like the intelligent machine sysadmins or Black ICE of a network.

Rituals meant to keep out unwanted dreamers are basically password requirements or anti-virus firewalls.

"Net combat" or a "hacker duel" may be the same as casting Rituals or a contest of Dreaming skills against another. Losing such a "fight" means you get forcibly "Jacked out" of the Dreamlands, waking up tired and sore - or imprisoned with Dream Shackles if the enemy was particularly nasty.

"Databases" of juicy secret files could be locked away in a dream vault of memories - a creative magician may even "write" a Book of Rituals that only exists in his Dreams, but can be stolen by another magician. Of course, actually converting Dreamlands loot into physical waking world stuff may require either casting a difficult Ritual or getting to a "hard point" interdimensional portal.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by ajardoor

The Dreamlands as Cyber-Space

So Inception, but it works at a distance and uses magic?

[ajardoor]

Originally Posted by ericthered

So Inception, but it works at a distance and uses magic?

Not just Inception. A bit of H.P. Lovecraft's early stories, too. A bit of Serial Experiments Lain, a bit of Cyberpunk 2020/RED/2077, a bit of Voodoo: The Shadow Wars, and so on.

[Anaraxes]

Vernor Vinge, "True Names" (1981). Cyberspace was built around a fantasy world metaphor. I've thought it might make an interesting idea for a game, where a character's cyberspace metaphor was a character built on (say) Computer Programming skill * 10 CP. Lots of work for the GM to keep the real world relevant, not to mention having to think of and maintain suitable metaphors to relate the two worlds.

[RyanW]

The Narnia Front

A portal fantasy, set during World War II, except the portal is discovered by the military. They begin to reconnoiter the new world, both to determine the attitudes of the locals and to see if any other portals into the real world could be used as logistics or invasion routes.

Also, a hunting party bags a really big lion.

(I spelled reconnoiter right on the first try. Yay me!)

[Anders]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I was reading about the old spainish treasure fleets. In order to protect it from pirates, all of the silver collected for half a year would be loaded onto a few ships and a sizeable portion of the spainish navy would guard it across the Atlantic.

The Silver Train and the Treasure Fleet. Known by all people who played Sid Meier's Pirates! game.

http://theageofpirates.com/miscellan...-silver-train/
http://theageofpirates.com/miscellan...reasure-fleet/

[ericthered]

These are ideas to be put in a setting rather than a full game seed:


Fantasy Aliens: There are several planes one can travel to via magic. Each plane has its own completely unique and comparatively cohesive alien biosphere and intelligent alien population



Transportable Magic Power: Magical power is grown slowly inside powerful monsters like dragons. When the creature dies or is killed, the power remains, and can be absorbed to give something else magical power. Thus all mages are carrying around the old souls of magical beasts in them, and the nature of the original beast determines the magic. This works well with dungeon crawling, where the dungeons are intentional farms for growing more magic.

[Johan Larson]

Another Brick in the Wall: The setting is a large American high school. The characters are teachers, administrators and staff at the school. One of them may also be student who is trusted by staff, or an undercover cop. The inciting incident is that one of vice principals receives a tip from a student snitch and orders a locker opened and searched. He finds not porn, not drugs, not a knife, not a gun, but a no-fooling M67 hand grenade. That's a disturbance in the Force. Something is going on.

[ajardoor]

Squares in the Spring: It is just entering the season of Spring in the big city, and the player characters have been tapped to investigate a new serial killer. The murderer's trademark is using some kind of square or rectangular projectile, fired like a bullet, into his victims. The prep has dug out the usual custom projectile after firing it, no doubt to avoid leaving behind traces or tool marks - only the square shape of the shot remains. The killer's victims have thus far been eclectic (no pattern in age, race, gender or appearance) and unrelated to one another. However, one young forensics tech has noticed that the DNA results from each of the victims comes back reporting the same abnormal findings - some weird mutation in the "junk" DNA that no-one in the lab has ever seen before...

Hagiography for Beginners: The player characters find church documents from many hundreds of years ago that supposedly record the miracles of until-now-unknown Saint. The player characters may turn them into the church and get roped into the official investigation of the records. Are they faked? Were the miracles genuine? Just what happened to that Saint all those years ago? And why are mysterious stalkers aggressively coming out of the wood-work to destroy the records and suppress the investigation?

Murder is Meat: A bizarre series of weird murders are plaguing the town - people are suddenly going insane, butchering other people and eating the corpses. At first, the sudden cannibalism was attributed to psychotic breaks, but the incidents kept mounting up. Theories as to what is causing this include the newly unearthed mummy's tomb archaeological dig just outside town unleashing a curse, a new disease caused by that fancy new (and untested) pesticide the local farmers adopted, and psychic commands implanted by alien invaders. The player characters will start by fighting off mad man-eaters and finish the adventure by confronting the source of the insanity.

Ghosting Us: The PCs are all ghosts haunting a big fancy old place rich in necromantic energies. The PC ghosts engage in slice-of-life sitcom antics, ala a ghost version of What We Do in the Shadows. They navigate a web of bumbling necromancers, hammy caretakers as played by Jack Nicholson, rival dead people, darn kids breaking in on a dare, mediums who won't getting possessed by you, true crime and horror podcasters/youtubers looking for content, historians looking over the place for preservation reasons, and the people who actually live here. The ghosts need someone to move parts of their bodies or some other anchor, if they want to leave the haunted place and handle matters outside.