Thread 96444065

How dystopian is your setting?

>>96444065 (OP)
idk ask the worldbuilding general.

>>96444065 (OP)
Far too dystopian for you

>>96444065 (OP)
Fairly? The executive branch is both too powerful and too idle. The administration is fickle and inefficient, and the military is underfunded. Corruption is rampant at the local level, and most people will not save enough to comfortably retire on

>>96444944
That's literally real life except for the military part.

>>96444960
Yeah its medevial stasis

The gods are dead and their shattered corpses are being exploited for spells and minor miracles by anyone who pretends to be something resembling their former priesthoods.

The Great Dragons are dead, and their corpses are spawning monsters who spread draconic traits like a blight.

The Arch-Fey are all dead, along with the Great Courts of Seelie and Unseelie. Now wild fey roam unchecked or band together in bandit-courts to do as they please.

Without the gods to prop them up, the Great Planes of the afterlife have shattered. There is no singular heaven or hell anymore, and dead souls are drawn into whichever conflux of magical energy is closest when they die, creating chaotic ghost-storms. Worse, the few surviving Angels and Devils are all now free agents, trying to force their version of morality on mortals.

Most mortals have no moral guidance, no sense of safety, and only themselves to turn to in times of need while a handful powerful elites hoard real power and pretend to be righteous with no checks on their power.

Less than real life.

>>96444084
You will never be a janny.

>>96444065 (OP)
Not very, but kinda. It's a fantasy NATO/HRE surrounded by aliens, humans 2.0, basically innistrad, and a ton of autistic space wizard mansons the alliance is trying to kill off so they can harvest the magic to power things that can withstand the aforementioned aliens and pseudo lovecraft stuff.

Theres also a predatory timeline that is vomiting out a bunch of people it ate to digest the setting. It's played semi straight but a lot of it is more for fun and adventure.

>>96446154
your shitty worldbuilding threads will never amount to anything

Not Dystopian, but kind of saterical. For example, one of the most radical factions is contemplating slavery abolition, but the proposal is a 99-year-plan where they're still slaves, but with the promise that they can buy shares of their grandkids' freedom.

You first, please be detailed and specific.

>>96444065 (OP)
Why does that matter?

The technology is powered and maintained by using the brains and bodies of burnt out psychics. The part that is kept under wraps is not all of them are completely gone but its hard to scream when your body gets cut down to only the necessary components needed.

If they can't be used right away, they are kept in stasis which ensures their minds degrade further because being conscious isn't necessary to tap their powers.

An ernest attempt to come up with non-human alternatives is being taken but nothing beats the genuine article.

It's also being covered up that this is causing the rise of certain phenomenon that could be interpreted as ghosts.

>>96445063

Liking the cut of your jib so far.

Is it all just a continual decay into cosmological heat death, or is there a possibility for the redemption and saving of the setting?

>>96444065 (OP)
>How dystopian is your setting?
Not dystopian enough because my players always joke that I am borrowing from real life or giving too many embers of hope whenever we play a cyberpunk setting.

>>96444065 (OP)
Comically so

>>96444960
The military is very much underfunded too IRL

As dystopian as it gets. It's literally set in hell.

>96444065
I don't owe you anything.

>>96446453
Neither will your life if you keep crying about it

>>96455946
You are the one crying about his life, it seems to me you are projecting.

>>96455060
Brampton?

>>96444065 (OP)
Instead of answering, I'm going to fill up the character limit complaining about how OP is possibly a youtube content farmer. If anyone posts sincere blurbs about their setting, I will latch onto them and demand they stop posting ITT.

>>96444084
based

>>96444065 (OP)
Generally? (Since I have created many)

Not very. In fact, more than a few were ones I’d call “false dystopias”; sure they got the grungy, gritty, dark veneer of a typical dystopian setting. Until you scratch the surface and find…

It’s not really all that bad, not perfect, wouldn’t make for interesting content if everything were all sunshine and lollipops. But the settings’ ultimately far too optimistic to really qualify as “dystopian”.

What do you want from me? I like a lot of the aesthetic and superficial tropes of many dystopian settings, just not the fundamental bleak misanthropy of those kinds of settings

>>96444065 (OP)
On the surface? It's seemingly a world based around 90s/early 2000s movies. Feel good pictures like Holes or Jumanji are the norm for adventures. PCs will never see the bush wars tearing apart the third world, or the mad desert cultists venerating ancient technology they barely understand, or the serial killer taking advantage of society's apathy to master their craft. Then dig deeper... You'll find a world composed of shadowy governmental organizations, secret societies, and megalomaniacal masterminds ruling over all aspects of life. Scary Stories to tell in the Dark, Animorphs, and Smallville give way to Ace Combat, Deus Ex, and Command and Conquer.

Hero... The age of magic is over, the age of space lies just over the horizon, Pick up your sword and FIGHT!

>>96461196
I can see a pretty dark endgame.
>Our humanity is being stripped away.
>Protect it.
>They're stealing our future.
>Fight it.
>No one ever said being a hero was easy.
>Embrace it.

>>96444065 (OP)
Not too bad.
There's lots of monsters and demons in the wilderness, but they're repelled by the human psyche so they stay away from populated areas. It's an industrial setting, so technology is good. Society is secretly controlled by magocratic fascists who conduct a lot of political assassinations and mind control, but they take their Illuminati business somewhat seriously and actually try and make sure it's generally for the greater good. Generally.
Violent oppression only happens against magic users who aren't sanctioned by the magocratic fascists, and there hasn't been a major war in like 20 years because most of the conflict is between mages and other mages, and monster hunters and monsters. Normal people are actually vibing out without giving a shit about all the retarded shadow wars happening in the woods outside town.

>>96444065 (OP)
My setting is pretty wholesome overall, there are some Byzantine intrigues and the usual deals with the Devil for power, and the usual wars for resources...but ultimately it takes place in a Dark Ages with greater availability of hot baths, competent herbalists, the occasional bit of difficult to explain archeotech perceived as magic items.

Even my orc analogues aren't good or evil, just cattle rustling steppe types with rude heads who kidnap their wives.

>>96445063
All my elves exist here and "there" at the same time so have innate magical properties but are ill perceived as their head is literally in the clouds. Existing in another dimension in part, making them seem fickle, lost, spiteful. Increased human admixture is bringing them more into this world.

I don't have any dwarves. Just arsehole techgnomes

>>96461532
>Late Roman "outpost system" of protected trade routes built on earlier empires, most nations intermingled
>Elven demi humans that exist in an extra dimension
>Evil technological Gnomes who are mostly unseen
>Cattle rustling Steppe Goblins and secretly intelligent Troll Rangers
>world has second and third moons which are habitable but harsh, a Barsoom-moon of deserty bronze ageness with radium muskets and a moon of granite plinths where Dragons live

Taking OP pic an example, the difference between cozy and dystopian is if the world magically smells fresh and clean or if it smells like shit as would be the case IRL.

>>96444065 (OP)
The one for my Modern Fantasy system isn't. It's more utopian than anything else. The main antagonistic force is the environment in the modern day, and it's not so much evil as it is just nature doing its thing. Of course, there are evil people who choose to be evil - but heroism and good are baked into society from thousands of years of Adventuring being pushed as an ideal, a profession for those who seek to help others and seek adventure.

>>96444065 (OP)
The world is all over the place because it's not fleshed out and I'm focusing only on a single city-state and the region around it. And that place is a fucking shithole.

Think Ravenloft-styled Night City. Perpetually locked in the night, a glamorous but corrupt-to-the-bone megalopolis constructed in the depths of a divine graveyard and kept functional by worshipping ghosts of dead Gods. Class and wealth disparity turned up to 11, power concentrated in a council of greedy merchants and callous archmages, the beginning of rapid technomagical industrialization putting common folk through the grinder, a spawning point to plenty a criminal empire, and cut off from other planes such as no soul can flee to the afterlife without being escorted by dedicated psychopomps.

>>96444065 (OP)
It depends on which of my settings we're talking about, but as a general rule of thumb, I try to avoid dystopia as much as possible.
Considering we're living in a dystopia, after all.

>>96444065 (OP)
My current setting is sort of... a post-apocalyptic dystopia that's been sufficiently far-removed from the apocalypse itself that it's not a post-apocalyptic dystopia *anymore.* Y'know, sixth generation after the Great Fall of the Ancients, they've got farming and communities set up again, it's gonna be a while before things are totally stabilized and states emerge but there's definitely a degree of neo-arcadian coziness going on in the established villages and whatnot.

OUTSIDE those safe zones you still have weird magical exclusion zone stuff where long-abandoned machines, misfiring spells, lunatic automata, and cargo cults can cause any number of horrible threats just by mistake or the bleed-off of their immense power, but if you stay away from the (rightly forbidden) ancient Cities Of The Gods you're generally going to be fine.

So the game has a distinct Wilderness/Civilization dynamic, where there are places where you're probably okay, well-fed, and unlikely to be horribly murdered, and there are places where resources are scarce, things might try to kill you for no apparent reason and through means you're horribly unprepared for. And of course adventurers thus get a generally more dystopic sense of things than the average country mouse.

>>96444065 (OP)
Moderately dystopian, but the plot is about a chance for it to become better... or massively worse.
Essentially reality is subject to the whims of eldritch gods, but its possible for specific humans to make use of fallen stars to ascend themselves to godhood. Thousands of years ago, a prophetess-queen became a god and ascended to become an acausal being, her awareness extending across time.
And what she saw horrified her.
Everything going on in the game now is a result of her playing 5D chess against herself to arm mankind with the knowledge and tools necessary to fight the gods, gifting us shit that we shouldn't know yet pulled from future timelines. She doesn't know if we will win or not, because her final move has to be to blind the gods, even herself. Only then will mankind have a chance to tearing down the tyranny of the gods. Even though she knows that for this to work, she has to die too.

She has no indication that a post-gods era would be some kind of golden age, but she knows that mankind can never be more than the playthings of higher powers so long as the gods are allowed to fuck over mankind whenever they want. So she is willing to engineer her own destruction if it means the rest of us have a chance.

>>96444084
Fpbp

>>96464087
kek

>>96444065 (OP)
Not at all. I went through a dystopia phase for a while, but honestly these days I am all about cozy tabletop sessions. Got a game running with my friends that is set in this kind of pastoral Stardew Valley style setting, where they are gaining the trust of the locals as they deal with small ball local concerns, while unraveling some of the town's mysterious past and forgotten lore. It has been a lot of fun.

>>96444084
Imagine being lower than a janitor

>>96444065 (OP)
It's not great.

>>96447950
Tell me more.

>>96485098
I want to hear more about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmClIgb9FYw

>>96486785
Sure. What do you want to know?

>>96485187
The introduction of psychic powers permanently altered everything for Humanity allowing for things like the creation of meta materials, Fusion, and permanent habitation in space.

The technology requires a biological component to allow machines to interact with these energies but certain things like near light speed travel and "gravity" requires certain kinds of individuals who are no longer able to affected by brain damage from constant use and maintenance of these things.

One of the (many) consequences of this is that souls are not only a thing but they can, and do, affect the world. So angry spirits and psychic gastalts of thought and emotions and becoming a thing not withstanding the numerous man made monsters and other things born from war and experimentation.

>>96444065 (OP)
If you're a peasant, very dystopian.
But I guess maybe everyone who isn't a peasant is "imprisoned by the system" to maintain it lest the peasantry rise up and kill everyone, and then anarchy rules the streets making things somehow worse.

>>96491247
Really any setting can be dystopian to varying degrees if you think negatively enough about the problems that are to be faced in the societies. Even real life, this basically sums up every medieval fantasy and brands them all as dystopian.

>>96444065 (OP)
Depends on you much of a squeamish bitch you are about cyborgs and biotech

>>96494468
Go on....

>>96444065 (OP)
Generally Noblebright:
>Space Arthurian
>humanity 3000 years in the future, with FTL space jump gates, magic-tier medicine, automated manufacturing + food production and antimatter fusion
>at least four known fully-sentient and religious Artificial Intelligences that view themselves as the protectors and guardian angels for humanity
>very small fraction of humanity (<1/10,000,000) developed mysterious variant psychic powers, which can also be given from one person to another or stored in a weapon/object. our PCs are among them
>strong cultural taboo on genetic engineering (due to Earth's history)
>meritocractic techno-medievalism, where anyone genuinely excellent can succeed, but few actually rise to nobility; only those with psychic abilities who served in the military are permitted to rule or have noble rank
>most colonies started by either for-profit corporations or religious groups
but...
>a hostile race of hyperdimensional draconic metal aliens (may or may not be a hivemind) invades + attempts to destroy humanity every ~21 years
>they've almost succeeded, twice, and will be back any day now
>the only thing that can actually injure them are the psychic abilities or (mostly melee) weapons imbued with them
>the kingdom that ruled known space collapsed into civil war during the Second Incursion, and now only 40% of it is ruled by a Lord Protector who knows that humanity may be hopelessly outmatched
>several of the AIs who were expunged from the history survived and are actively seeking revenge
>after her husband was killed by the king, the most brilliant biologist in known space decided that the prohibition on genetic engineering does not apply to her; she has achieved biological immortality, started terraforming dozens of planets, engineered thousands of new species, and started a religion in her own name
>At least one AI has aligned with her, because it thinks that this hilarious... and possibly the only way for biological life to survive

>>96497750
Lots more to this, but I won't infodump unless people are interested. I'm writing this as a tabletop rpg (with the text complete, but layout completely not started) and using the setting for a tactical rpgs that I hope to release on steam + itch.io in 2026.

>>96444065 (OP)
Very
>a dozen flavors
>natural resources and world devastated by decadence and war
>truman show puppet nation which is just one science witch puppeting hundreds of millions of dead clones. Most of which are fashioned into the ground
>blasted out factory powered utopia that ran out of energy
>post-reason french state full of senseless violence and consumption
>half of north america is a ruin after a human conquerer busted the machine empire
>decadent orbital nobles who bombard random settlements for fun and are about 3 miles up their own asses
>the last rainforest is an anti-human hivemind that wants to wipe out humanity with bioengineering
It’s kind of in the name.