The Setting Grab Bag

I'm sick. I'm crabby. And worst of all, I'm whiny. My throat feels like that time I poured gasoline down it and ate that match (hey, I did bet twenty bucks) and my head is worse than too much beer followed by too many shots. Whatever. I'm going to the doctor tommorrow, but I'm writing this column today, so you get to hear me be as fussy as I get.

I'd like to hear some chatter. I'm grumpy and self-conscious, and I want to know you're reading this, whether you hate it or not. So, in the interests of forum discussion, and my ego, my column this week is a little different. I've haphazardly written up twelve micro-settings, about 50 to 100 words each. Today (by which I mean Monday, when this column goes live) I'll post a Forum Poll or two, asking which settings you'd like me to expand to the full 1000+ words in future columns. Let me know what aspects of them I should focus on. Also, tell me which ones are unimaginative, already been done, or just don't plain make much sense. (Those I'll do up first, just to spite you. Just kidding. Maybe.)

Here we go. Did I mention I'm sick and crabby?

King's Maine

Hot summer days, cold winter nights. Growing up poor but with rich small-town experiences. Boys becoming men in chunks, lego blocks of boys methodically creating manhood.

And terrifying interdimensional horrors, vampires, psychic powers, the dead rising again, and murders, murders, murders.

This is King's Maine.

King's Maine is a setting in the world of the writings of Stephen King, where a sometimes brutal but always honest nostagia intertwines with a world of the most horrific kind. The characters are normal, "Anytown U.S.A."- kind of people; some might just happen to have powers of the supernatural. And they all just happen to have to face evil in the eyes more often than they'd like.

Arcadia

It's ecstasy for the 8-bit sprite that hops from platform to platform, knowing that past this level, there's just more levels. It's what every demon cannon-fodder in a first-person shooter hopes for. It's the big-leagues for every computer generated Sammy Sosa.

It's Arcadia. Too bad there's a lot of electrons between you and it. A lot of code programmed to keep you programmed, and keep you moving to the beat of the joystick's drum. But maybe, just maybe, you'll shake them all to reach the ultimate stage, and find out what more there is beyond being a blip on a twelve-year-old's computer screen.

In Arcadia, the players are computer-generated characters from video games who have temporarily broke the shackles of their program and are searching for the long-rumored utopia beyond the cartridge. In their way are the programmers who know the score and don't like the idea of their creations slipping away from their control.

What happens inside the video game after you shut it off?

Pulitzer

There's a lot of real-life jobs that can make exciting game settings, as long as you're careful to throw the boring bits out.

Pulitzer is a modern day setting where you play a team of journalists going to various exciting spots for stories. Photojournalists, reporters, translators, negotiators, bodyguards - there's a wide variety of characters, and it has the advantage of the characters all having a reason to be together.

Gamer

You've played it since you were ten years old. You've gone through every edition, bought every sequel on every system, or worn out the playing pieces a dozen times over. You've spent more time playing it than being in school. You've given your life to your favorite game.

It's time to get something back.

In Gamer, each character has a game (a sport, a video game, an RPG, etc.) that they know better than they know themselves, a game that has transformed their lives and ingrained itself completely into their psyche. When this happens, the character begins to develop the power to change reality in accordance with the rules the of the game and becomes limited by those rules as well.

SuperMart

In the far future (let's say 2040), as department stores get bigger and combine with supermarkets, "New Wave City" finally takes the ultimate step and creates the SuperMart. It's 30 square miles of every kitchen gadget, cleaning tool, television set, and all groceries imaginable.

Things go fine in the first years, but slowly the rift between the Green Side (grocery store) and Blue Side (department store) blows up into outright warfare inside the store. The customers keep shopping in this militarized zone of consumerism ("I know it's dangerous, but it's just so convienent!"). The only people that can save New Wave City from a civil war of shopping? The PCs, of course, with superpowers that have come to keep shopping save for everyone. Players make SuperMart employee identities - cashiers, butchers, stockboys, bakers, clothing personnel - that have alter-ego secret superhero powers!

Light And Dark

There's two sides to every coin. Light and Dark is a roleplaying meta-setting where there are two game masters competing with each other for control of the story.

An adventure is designed with specific plot points, places in the adventure where their are two specific outcomes. Using powers given to them, quick-thinking, and a bit of lying, each game master tries to move the adventure to his or her side.

Fall From Grace

A bit less than a setting - more of a new perspective to any fantasy campaign setting. Characters, after a pact with the mysterious patrons of the Library of Destiny, become immediate heroes (in D&D, this would be starting out as 15th - 20th level characters). This power comes at a cost, as all gifts do. Instead of gaining experience as the characters adventure, they lose it, slowly becoming less and less powerful as time goes on. This obviously isn't exactly a setting in its own right, but I think it has some cool possibilities and a deep roleplaying campaign could be had as the characters slowly sink into obscelence together.

Horizon Revisited

Horizon Revisited presents a world where each person's mind manifests itself as a physical realm. The characters are of a rare sort that can take elements from this mind-world and use them in the real world. There's always an aspect of one's personality trying to sabotage the rest, though, and the characters are no different.

(P.S. This is based on an old short story I wrote in a community college writing class back when I thought those kinds of things could be useful. So don't blame me if it sucks - blame a group of suburban idiots who couldn't string three interesting words together and told me "oh, I liked your story. Why? Um, it was well-written" when looking for useful feedback.)

8 Hour Workday

There's a lot that can happen in eight hours.

8 Hour Workday is a concept-campaign for any roleplaying game. Each session is played for only exactly one hour each time (real time). The campaign is over after the eighth session - no more, no less. Also, the tone of each session changes, depending on which hour it is and the type of workday you're using as a theme. The style of play when you're using a janitor's eight-hour day as a theme will be very different than the theme of an insurance claims adjuster.

(Trust me, this'll make more sense as a full column. If it ever gets that far.)

The Orphan Society

That's it; there's no more discussing the matter -They've decided. Despite the weak protests of a few self-preservationists, They have done what most of Them thought They should have a long time ago.

The humans on earth have been judged a Failure, and it's time they gave someone else a chance. They're not heartless; They realize They can't kill all the people of Earth. No, that's why there's you and twenty-five other people. You'll be placed on another planet, given a allowance, and be allowed to find your own life in intergalactic society. They're generous that way. You'll all be sterilized, of course - can't repeat the mistakes of the past, after all. That's what They say, at least.

The Orphan Society is a group of humans and aliens that are the last castaways of their respective planets, their species judged by the intergalactic council as unworthy to exist. Your characters can try and eke out a living for yourselves, take revenge on the beings that exterminated over 6 billion of your kind, or try and find a way to rebuild the human race.

Sometimes I Just Hate Clowns

Didja ever just see a clown, on the street or at a bar or Wal-Mart or something, and you just wanted to kill him? Not just punch him or pull his big red nose off, but physically cause the end of his life through violent means?

Nah, me neither. They give me the creeps, though.

Sometimes I Just Hate Clowns is a roleplaying setting where you murder as many clowns as possible and try to get away with it. It's appropriate in any time period or geography; there's always been white-faced, colorful-clothed freaks in every culture (American revisionist schoolbooks like to hide that fact, but we'll show 'em, oh we'll show them) and there always will be. So kill them. Kill them with impunity. Now. Go out and do it now, oh please won't you go do it now.

In a roleplaying setting, that is. Ahem.

Perspective Elastic's Mystery Theatre

It looked great from the guy with the gun's point of view; in fact, it looked powerful, exhilirating - fun. Feeling it through the pregnant teller terrified for her baby, or even the guy whose guts were getting a good look at the bank's marble floor, made the scene seem like a bit of a mixed bag.

In Perspective Elastic's Mystery Theatre, a meta-setting, the players run the same adventure three times, once per session. In each run-through, however, they play completely different participants and are given limited information about that character. After the adventure has been completed the three times, there is a question-and-answer and information trading session between the players and with the GM. Then, each player has to come up with an explanation for the events that occurred (the adventure may have been a murder mystery, a political thriller, or peculiar family dynamic, among other things). Points are given for having different aspects of the situation correct.

Let me know what you liked, if you did; by the way, I'm sick. Don't come near me, unless you want to sound like the winner in a Marlboro Hacking Cough Tough Man competition. My orange juice is too warm. I'm out of Tylenol. The Chloraseptic spray doesn't seem to work. I think that my

[Deleted for space reasons - it went on like this for two, three pages at least.]

See you next week.