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Old 07-04-2022, 04:31 PM   #11
SilvercatMoonpaw
 
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

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How do you like my two entries on this thread?
The second one maybe feels like an Alternate Earth to me, but I don't actually care if someone puts an urban/historical fantasy on this thread. :)
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Old 07-04-2022, 05:07 PM   #12
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

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What we did on our Summer Vacation

Well, I reckon that it started when Bill and I took that Egyptian statue that his great Uncle Cyrus sent home from Egypt, when he passed through on his way to be a missionary in East Africa, to the old Indian mound. Bill's grampa says Cyrus wasn't eaten by cannibals, no one could ever stomach Cyrus. I brought the funny little idol that mom's cousin sent her from Asia. No one could ever say where it came from. We set them up in the old witch's shack she built on the mound. She's been dead twenty years but her stack is in good condition. Then we got the old hoodoo book from Chicago that Suzy found in her attic.

The gang was going to cast a spell, just to see if we could. It was summer we didn't have all that much to do. We agreed to try to summon a fairy. The girls thought it would be sweet, and the guys didn't think tiny little women with butterfly wings would be a problem.

We learned better.


Basically, it's 1946. The Mana level planet wide is now Normal. But other than some kids in an American small town, no one knows yet.

All the kids who tried to cast the spell now have Magery -5. If you have access to older GURPS materials and the advantage that allowed people to spontaneously know useful spells in survival situations, these kids could have that. Otherwise, they're just cobbling what they can out of grimoires printed in Chicago. (Note: Chicago was a major occult publishing center from the 1880s to the 1990s).

This is the Little Rascals meets Cthulhu. And Cthulhu runs for it.
Brilliant, I want to play in this one! The time period could easily be changed from anything from say early 1900s to even contemporary.
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Old 07-04-2022, 07:54 PM   #13
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

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Brilliant, I want to play in this one! The time period could easily be changed from anything from say early 1900s to even contemporary.
Very true. It's Ray Bradbury writing the Little Rascals. So basically any time period from the 1890s to the present. And the setting could be changed to any small town in the West. And I mean Western Civilization.
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Old 07-04-2022, 08:01 PM   #14
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

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Very true. It's Ray Bradbury writing the Little Rascals. So basically any time period from the 1890s to the present. And the setting could be changed to any small town in the West. And I mean Western Civilization.
Stranger Things, only with Fair Folk?
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Old 07-04-2022, 08:19 PM   #15
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Paladins of the Crystal City

I always wanted to leave our farm. I only stayed because I was loyal to my mother. My father's new wife sees me only as competition with her children to inherit the farm.

When the priests of the Crystal City came to the local fair to buy cattle, hogs, and sheep. They offered to tell fortunes. We knew they didn't bother to read omens. If you cooperated, they gave you a blessing of luck. The blessings were powerful. Why they did this few knew. But I know now.

The Crystal City travels through the air. It follows a long path covering many miles a day. The people born to the citizens of the city must be artists, Mages, scholars, or priests. This leaves them lacking warriors. Moreover, they need warriors that can fly.

They see me as able to be transformed. They will give me living wings and sight of eagles and owls. The speed of falcons and the endurance of swans and ravens as well. But I must join their legions for no less than twenty years.

Where do I sign?


Basically, the classic young kids seeking their place in the world. Have the PCs create a tough farm kid or similar young person,on about 150 points. Then add Winged Flight , Dark Vision , Telescopic Vision, and about 200 points of skills, attributes, and advantages.

The PCs will be more than raw recruits by this time, but they won't be veterans or have high rank.

The Crystal City travels from Scandinavian to tropical forest environments. Passing over seas and deserts on the way. Thus the PCs will have to deal with a wide variety of fantasy settings and cultural patterns.
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Old 07-04-2022, 08:39 PM   #16
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

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Basically, the classic young kids seeking their place in the world. Have the PCs create a tough farm kid or similar young person,on about 150 points. Then add Winged Flight , Dark Vision , Telescopic Vision, and about 200 points of skills, attributes, and advantages.
Sounds like the basis for one of those early-80s 30-minute toy commercials.

I love it!
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Old 07-05-2022, 08:25 AM   #17
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

This world once wailed under the oppression of the demons, the fey, and the undead. Until the Mythos came and offered the oppressed a deal for the power to fight back.

Why choose the lesser of two evils?

Essentially Lovecraft-powered fantasy races vs pre-Lovecraft fantasy monsters. If you like your Mythos to be weird and alien, insert all sorts of questions about "who's really in control" and "is the devil you don't know better than the devil you do?".
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Old 07-05-2022, 08:47 AM   #18
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

I've often thought about creating a fantasy world to run a time-spanning campaign inspired by Chrono Trigger. It would have like seven major time periods:

1-the Dawn Age: an age that is equal parts Prehistory with Dinosaurs, plentiful Lovecraftian creatures, roaming Titans, rampaging Demons, and the Rise of the Gods. A Harsh world of monsters, gods and demigods.

2-the Ancient World: the gods have vanquished the Titans, trapped the demons, banished the Elder Things, and tamed most of the monsters. Now the mortal races have begun building their first kingdoms across the world. The Elves seek to create a global empire of magic from their flying cities.

3-the Medieval Era: your "traditional" Dungeon Fantasy world, with kings and knights and adventuring warriors. An age of warring states, as the mortal races recover from the fall of the Elven Empire.

4-the Age of Enlightenment: A clockpunk/steampunk time period, as the mortal races' grasp of science leads to immense progress and new developments. An age of exploration and discovery

5-the Modern Age: a world much like our own, save that humanity shares the world with a variety of other races, and magic co-exists with technology. This is an age of Action adventure, heroes fighting against crime groups and vague terrorist organizations. GURPS Technomancer would be a great inspiration here, although I'd make the world a bit backwards in terms of technology, around TL7 with some magic and dieselpunk options.

6-the Cyber Age: A more scientifically-advanced age, one where corporations have become the real political power of the world. An age of cyber-runner mercenaries fighting in the corporate shadow-wars.

7-the Apocalypse: a Cataclysm has shattered the old world, destroying the major civilizations of the world. Monsters of all kinds have reclaimed most of the world, the remaining gods are at war with the forces of chaos, and those mortals that are not caught in the conflict struggle to survive.

The overall campaign would be a time-hopping one, involving factions from different time periods seeking power and dominance, and using time gate magic to try and alter history for their own designs.
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Old 07-12-2022, 04:32 PM   #19
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

The Gate of the Moon

The city had a name once. But that was when there was a vast fresh water sea rich in fish where now there is rock strewn desert and a small salt lake dead and poisonous. The priests of the moon foresaw the millennia of drought. The also saw the return of the rains and the sweetwater sea.

The priests wove a mighty wyrd. The city now only exists when the Full Moon is above the horizon. When the Moon sets the people in the city see the rising sun become the Moon. Those outside the city see only the city fade like a forgotten dream.

The nature of the wyrd is somewhat strange in that while time is sequential within the city, to those outside the city it seems the ages of the city are a random jumble. Similarly, the world beyond the city seems to be a strange whirlpool of different ages. One man who stayed in the city market past sunrise found he returned forty years late. One woman told a cadi that questioned her that she was from a thousand years into the future. It was sometimes thought she spoke the truth for she stayed young and lovely for five generations.


Basically, an exotic market city with the added bonus of random time travel. Although the reference to the Cadi (Islamic jurist) points to an earthly Arabian Nights setting, possibly linking a classic Arabian Nights setting with a Sci Fi/Arabian Nights setting, any fantasy setting with significant cultural change over time works.

Although as written the setting reflects the coming and going of the Sahara desert, the sinking and rising of Atlantis, or the coming and going of an ice age would work as well.
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Last edited by Astromancer; 07-14-2022 at 05:13 PM.
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Old 07-12-2022, 06:46 PM   #20
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Default Re: New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

I once came up with an alternate future timeline for the Champions Universe that went something like this:
  1. Demon City: In the near future advanced electronics become increasingly unreliable causing a return to vacuum tube technology. Meanwhile cities become increasingly dangerous as mysterious disappearances and horrifically mangled corpses become more common. City police forces and secret societies form groups to hunt the demons coming through to prey on the city populations.
  2. Time of Exile: Most cities are now abandoned demon hives. Humanity has learned that the enemy is attracted to groups of people who stay in one place for long, and so they either in isolated homesteads or as wandering nomadic tribes. But some of the heroes from the previous era triumphed and their cities still stand, protected by wards that that prevent demonic invasion and transformation. The occasional demon appears out on the countryside, but nothing that can't be dealt with...so far.
  3. Rise to the Skies: Increasing levels of wild magic on the surface have driven humanity into the skies on floating chunks of land kept habitable by magic. Flying boats and dragons battle in the skies while adventurers descend to the surface to recover resources and relics of the past.
  4. Solar Empires: With the help of a mixture of magic and reinvented technology humanity moves out into the solar system, using magic to reshape worlds and even planetoids into habitability, producing a rather pulpish era of space adventure.
  5. The Stars Themselves: "Spaceship" have now been mostly abandoned as an ever-expanding network of magic portals link the worlds of many different stars together. Meanwhile in a nearby parallel universe they are experiencing a new era of "superheroes" and "supervillains" and contact between the two realities is becoming increasingly common in ways that cause trouble for both sides.

Last edited by David Johnston2; 07-12-2022 at 11:10 PM.
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