Lost Children

All of them are catboy breeding studs.

Humans that does not possess a Fairy will be transformed after becoming lost in the forest: Adults will become Werewolves, while children transform into Skull Kids.

They say that when non-fairy folk enter the Lost Woods they become monsters!

The group I'm in plays in a setting where there's one people, nightlanders, who have basically been fighting a religious war in their native land for so long that the average age has gone down and younger and younger people are forced to fight, and fewer and fewer people remember how it started. They're almost extinct. They scavenge, kidnap, ambush and are generally fucking terrifying to fight, but they're also kind of socially retarded because they haven't known anything else.

A player played one and it was so awful that we ended up killing that character by feeding it poison.

>Guys, those other travelers might have robbed or killed you, so I cut their throats when you slept.
>Well of course I shot him before he could say hello, he looked like a wizard.
>I think your friend is hiding something, I'm going to cut pieces off him until he talks.
>She was trying to give me food, that's how they get you, so I pushed her off the ledge.
>I don't feel so good, someone must have poisoned it, I don't get it, why was only my food poisoned?

No sense of restraint, too scared of opening themselves up for potential betrayal, obsessed with striking first and watching their back to the point of violent paranoia.

Even more terrifying since the setting is generally a pretty down to earth and cozy medieval fantasy setting.

Fertility isn't a thing that only appears when you're 18.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

I remember reading about some African tribe that would send the kids out alone or in small groups to fend for themselves when they reached around 12 or so. The idea was that they would leave early, endure hardships to prove their ability and then eventually form their own tribes to keep the tradition going.
It's been a long time but I think that's how it goes.
In the end you have tribes all over with some babbies and a lot of old folks but it's still relevant because there's almost always 100% child villages out there because of this tactic. You could probably pull from this somehow, unless you were looking more for "a wizard did it".

Place is cursed. Something stops them from growing while it kills or mutates the adults. The mutated adults serve as foot soldiers for the kids.

Look into otaku culture. It's full of 30+ year old children.

The tribe of kids are actually aliens in disguise during their summer vacation.

They share a genetic disease that causes puberty to go horribly wrong. Life expectancy is 20.

In Ar Tonelico, everyone has a chance of being born with a condition that gives them magic powers, but makes them stop aging in their late teens and shortens their life expectancy to 40-ish. This is caused by recessive genes that everyone carries from genetically engineered magical girls that all the men preferred to fuck instead of human women.

The movie pushed it up to age 30 so they could get the actors they wanted, but in the book you RENEW'd at 21.

To expand on this, OP should read it if he hasn't already (assuming OP isn't just the lolispammer). It's been a long time since I've read the book, but the basic idea is that children are born in tubes and raised by robots in a group nursery setting from birth to age 7. Once they hit age 7, they're kicked out of the nursery into the larger (enclosed) society. There's a particularly jarring flashback to when the main character was kicked out of the nursery and the first "adults" he encountered were a gang of teenagers who roughed him up.

Nobody is raised with any morality, because they all get "Renewed" (killed) at age 21, and there's no government aside from the Sandmen who chase down people that try to avoid renewing, but even they are just agents ordered around by an AI.

That is important, but I think a temporary community is more interesting in a certain way. A sort of material and social realization of the fire of youth/ephemerality of childhood.

There was a decent episode of Star Trek: TOS in which a team of scientists developed some mcguffin that slowed down aging by a factor of twenty or something, but as soon as puberty was completed aging went into overdrive and killed people within minutes.

I think it was an airborne virus or something. Hope that helps!

An interesting twist?
Make it not a savage place.
No matter how the society of children came about (whether magic turned everyone permanently into kids with the associated mentality, or whether it's a group cast out from civilization, or whether all adults died), the classical notion that a group of children without oversight would immediately devolve into fucking animals is absolutely retarded purported by adults who forgot what it was like being children, or had a seriously fucked up childhood.

>"Renewed" (killed)
This also doesn't need to be a thing.

You don't actually *have* to have things grim and fucked up.
Yeah a lot of authors like doing this, because it's only high grade literature if it's edgy as fuck, but honestly that notion is retarded and what's more edgy than contrasting the "innocence" of youth with absolute horror.

This doesn't need to be a thing though.

A) If children are raised right they are not fucking savages.
B) The number of actual bullies is minimal and the "normal" majority would not side with the bullies, because they collectively are stronger than them and they are not retarded.
C) Generally children are not as retarded as a lot of people seem to think.
D) Children are a lot more idealistic than adults, so this would rather lead to being less prejudiced and corrupt than adult societies.

I'm not saying it would definitely work, but to assume that any children left to their own devices ... at ANY age above kindergarten would turn into savages, that's just moronic.

And i loathe the books/works of fiction that purport this to be true with a passion.

he really is quite smug

The Cathedral of the Mind, a powerful aggregate intelligence, manages society. It grows stronger by incorporating the minds of humans, and runs a breeding program to constantly create more. Juvenile minds are significantly less functional than the minds of young adults, so all residents of the complex are naturally permitted to age until their 16th birthday before being guided into the incorporation chamber and joining the aggregate that manages all systems of the complex, including the robotic drones that patrol outside to defend the structure.

Because the drones sometimes venture outside of radio contact with the aggregate whole, they are often controlled by a single mind. These robotic drones controlled by human minds are sometimes found adventuring in distant lands.

You're suggesting putting kids that not only fuck but get pregnant and reproduce in our settings? Pedo spotted.

Wrong. All the Reyvateils you are describing age normally until the time they die. The only ones that age up to 18 are the artificial Origin and Beta models, which can live indefinitely in the case of the former and up to 150 years in the case of the latter.

I like this

Made me go and reread Neverland.

Any setting set in a pseudo-medieval ages that has people only getting preggers and fuck after they turn 16 is unrealistic.

Their children would only be 10 by the time their average life expectancy runs out! And it's probably even lower than that if it's a fantasy setting with roving bands of Goblins and magical monsters and all kinds of other shit.

Children are chaotic evil by default, they'd just start killing each other with little to no restraint like Sicilians.

Kids next door has some good ideas

Been trying to piece together an idea for Knd 40k with my friends to play

I had one idea where it was in vogue for magic users to make themselves look like children or young teens

I was just about to suggest this. In three hundred years they had only aged a few months. It's also good for providing a conflict with stakes that aren't based in fighting.

The Lost Generation from Eclipse Phase was an interesting take on the idea. Take a group of freshly born babies. Put them into genetically engineered bodies, and put them through a time-accelerated simulation of real life.
While it did devolve into Lord of The Flies style, there's plenty of indicators that it happened solely due to external influence... (like everybody getting hit with Watts-Macleod, a disease that gives you psychic powers but also makes you insane)

They'd all just be edgy marxists living in a failing communist ""Society.""
If we're talking about 0-18 that is.

Oh.

I like this.

Literally Communism: marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm, look for the word "children" in a subtitle. Add some science fiction to Kollontai's ideas and you have a robotic orphanage raising children autonomously for the good of the workers' paradise. Of course, like much Soviet technology, it may not work quite as intended or have adequate supervision.

the human species has fragmented; it is dominated by a race of immortal, permanently pre-adolescent males (the Boys), who are created by advanced medical techniques. Some time in the past, they had defeated the equally immortal (though now extinct) Girls, in the ultimate war of the sexes. The Boys have enslaved the unmodified humans (though they have evolved somewhat), from whom they take boys to replenish their ranks.

The Boys hunt food with spears but are educated.

World Out of Time, Larry Niven