Help Brainstorming a Fae Races w/ Flight & Magic Fantasy RPG Setting: Alfheim

[DAT]

Hi Folks,
Having recently watched the first season of the “Sword Art Online” (SAO) anime series, I became interested in the idea of using the “ALfheim Online ” (ALO) setting (from the end of the first season of SAO) as inspiration for a GURPS RPG setting.

For those who haven’t seen/read about SAO/ALO, the idea is that in the future they develop full immersion Virtual Reality MMORPGs, and AFO is one of the game settings. The ALO setting is a realm of fae, where player avatars are different races of winged fairies (each with their own racial magical powers/skills and other special powers & attributes) who compete against each other plus monsters for different quests/goals (there is an online Wiki and other resources if you want more details). I’m not interested in the whole game-in-a-game FIVR MMORPG angle for this exercise, just the ALO setting as an inspiration for a Fae Races w/ Flight & Magic Fantasy Setting.

A Fantasy setting with Fae Races w/ Flight & Magic seems like it would be a fun draw if I use the setting for one-shot games at Cons and FLGSs (a large part of my gaming these days). But it would also be an interesting setting for use in a campaign with my own gaming group.

For this thread/exercise, I thought it might be interesting to bring up different elements of the setting, state my ideas and get other folk’s thought and/or alternative ideas. This will help me finalize the setting in my head. I know GURPS Fantasy has great advice for refining a Fantasy setting, and I will be pulling out my copy and using its advice too. I would appreciate some other opinions, so that I don’t end up with a setting that is fascinating to me, but a bore to everyone else. So thanks in advance for any help!
-Dan

P.S.
What I will do, after this introduction post, is set aside a couple posts (2 and 3) for a TOC of later discussions. I will then bring up each discussion topic/element is a separate post. As time permits, I’ll populate the TOC noting the related post number. This will be useful for me tracking down thoughts, but others will hopefully find it useful too.