On a scale of 1 to 10, how special snowflake is your campaign setting?

>The mesh
>Making up your own special name for the net/wired/shape/cyberspace
That alone adds like a point or two of snowflakeyness.

How special snowflake is magical Australia that is modeled after the elemental planes

N/A, since 'Special Snowflake' is a term used to refer to characters?

Maybe, that happens all the time.
People won't label similar things the same way in every setting.

>I don't just brainstorm settings for fun

Fucking please help me. I need to put pen to paper and write shit but I don't.

Yeah, but deliberately coming up with new shit every time just for the sake of not calling it the same thing is kind of SS, I mean it's like where every zombie game calls them everything but zombies. It's just silly when they aren't functionally different.

7

This sounds cool as heck.

What makes a setting special snowflake?

>tfw nobody to play with
>have a setting anyway

One day...

I'm guessing it's like
"obnoxiously unique"

depends on which setting, I've got like at least 4 I'm tinkering with at any given moment, sometimes much more

Thanks! It's been a lot of fun to run, and I've used it for multiple groups. I'm a huge fan of settings where characters are just as new to the world as the players are, and the 'old world' setting opens up the room for scholar and historian archetypes to have a decent impact in group knowledge.

The landscape and biodiversity is essentially !NotFinland with an old, fallen Great Wall of China that splits off the Sarmatic Forest region from an area that's basically the Alberta Badlands.

>Elemental Australia
Sounds fun. If the natives are all shamans that commune with nature and the players are all criminals dumped on the island, I'd say it's only 2/10.

If you wanna bullshit and talk shop while you work on it, I can start a text google hangouts.

7/10, pretty snowflake.

Note that a snowflake setting isn't essentially bad. I'd still play yours.

Yours reminds of the one I made while I was in high school where the world was heaving in the aftermath of a successful rebellion against demonic rulers. All of the cities were ruled by medusas.

But didn't Kurzweil, the man himself, call it the mesh?

That's why I changed the name. Before it was basically just internet 2.0, called the net.

I seem to have fooped, but I doubt that the Internet will be called simply internet at that point, due to it being more of a one huge cloud rather than a billions upon billions of singular nodes.

So what would you call it? The Cyberspace? The Matrix for all the irony?

I could imagine Matrix being a meme name for it.

The Mesh is already used in Eclipse Phase.

Oh sorry, I google searched the term with quotations and didn't see anything. I don't read pop-sci stuff so I wouldn't know.

It's got no magic, psychic powers or nonhumans, so either zero or a straight ten.

There are a ton of political factions trying to establish control and influence after the world began recovering from the apocalypse. Also, organized crime comes in a million flavors, from desperados and outlaw truckers to crime families and street gangs. Anyone who tries "adventuring" or travelling alone is picked up by one of the gangs in short order.

Here goes:

>Magitech fantasy world with strange magical gems called Legend Stones that let people power and control giant robots
>However the robots are magically bonded to their chosen pilot and die if he does
>It turns out Legend Stones are fragments of a magical supercomputer a precursor race built to upload themselves into a collective consciousness

>four main empires in the focal landmass

>Logis, a militaristic empire that has the best robots but small numbers of them, dividing them into themed Chapters
>Astor Vale, a mercantile kingdom with a powerful air force where people are helped by freelance troubleshooters called the Stalwart Brotherhood
>Sagran, a desert kingdom of ancient temples and pyramids whose people mostly live by a vast river. It has dinosaurs and dragons.
>Lamune, a republic where crazy rich wizards live in a flying city and rule over the peasants below. After its president discovered a form of immortality based on reverting to her youth every 80 years 200 years ago she has become an unwilling permanent ruler and is currently a world weary goth teen living in a spooky mansion.

mm probably a 5 or 6?

It's basically just four continents split up each one dealing with their own problems and history, the BBEG's objective is to bring all the continents together (Physically).

No problem matey.

I just checked "The Singularity is Near" again and the word mesh is used somewhat to explain the next-level internet. Not too explicitly as naming it, but implying it to be a possible new name for it.

Still gonna use Matrix as the meme name for it.

>Magitech
Ye.

>!NotZodiacStones
Ye.

>Supercomputers
Meh.

>Lamuria the floating city
Ye.

That's only a 5. You didn't go off the reservation trying to think of only original donut steel stuff.

Rate my snowflakeness

>main continent has nation of goblinoids set up four hundred years ago after said goblinoids were betrayed and their species' souls sold to demons forever (done so by a fey lordling so he could become powerful). Six rose to godlings and now rule over a literal city of the gods at the center of their conquest.
>Elven empire with numerous slave races attempting to recreate the fey courts to the south and be recognized by the ArchFey as a court unto themselves.
>Nation of demon cultist humans worshiping mainly CN aspects of the demon hosts. The nation itself had its teeth kicked in by goblinoids over the last century.
>Drow living under the continent, angry at the fey but unwilling to try and recreate a court.
>Main conflict of the setting is the world (which is a disk) is on the fast track to ending. Same with the outer planes. The universe is going to run out of steam in 400 years.
>Most of the older gods are going senile.
>The goblinoids are at the center of a conspiracy to steal Lost Paradise, an enormous crystalline stone that was used to create this "Planar Nexus" (the prime/inner/out planes)
>They are allying godlings to make a snatch right at the end then run with Lost Paradise to try and flee to create a new Planar Nexus
>Numerous factions are either planning on what to do in the multi-verse's final days, or planning on how to survive without a mutli-verse

I run a heavily homebrewed scion game where prometheus escaped from hell and promotes a fedora tier libertarian and atheistic ideology in order to overthrow the gods by empowering humans in a gestalt sort of way.

This sounds like Faerun.

>Every major city is controlled by difficult to kill, named npcs with small written backstories.
Waterdeep, Cimbar, Luskan, Halarahh

>There's a witch city where the entire ruling class is female magic users
Immilmar, Menzoberranzan

>Undead can be neutral or good, though they have little society and keep to themselves
Baelnorns, the church of Jergal

>Ocean is filled with twisted monsters, and coastal cities must defend against them during storms or floods. The ocean cannot reasonably be crossed.
Read the Threat from the Sea series

>Oozes in every underground place, 'cause I like em
Ghaunadar is responsible

Actually, maybe I'll explain more so people can rate.

>Mesh / Matrix is Internet 2.0, can take many forms, customizable. Public spaces are defined by to have certain aspects, but person can change their "graphics".
>A big percentage of people lives as digital entities in the cloud exclusively, players would be these (Otherwise characters would go missing for years every time they wake up from the mesh because the time difference (1/1000)
>A person's ego/soul/whatever is called the Source (After source code, obviously)
>Synths (AI) live among humans, almost indistinguishable from humans, no distinctions between them really exist anymore, players can be both
>Players would be a task force of either crackers or anti-crackers
>Usually people can exit parts of a mesh (like personal spaces), but certain software can prohibit exiting or entering
>This is naturally used to either fuck people up or quarantine them until they're catched
>Alternative campaign ideas could be like victims of some sadistic fuck who prohibits exit from nasty games like murdering each other
>Player progression would most likely be gaining new software rather than simply becoming better at something. Expertise is fast and cheap ("I know Kung-fu" -style)

That's the mesh-side of things. Physical humans are dwindling, and with slave-AI (Different from Synths, they don't have Source) maintaining the systems, they aren't needed anymore.

Space travel would be possible, but is pretty much meaningless other than to escape the doom of the planet thousands of billions of mesh years later.

I admit this is my magical realm, I want to get rid of this meatbag body, for real

Oh yeah, and people's "passwords" can be things like entire matches of chess, the first million decimals of a number, basically uncrackable shit.

Uh... about a 5/10.
Elves are pretty Mary Sue but they're few and far between. Half-breed races aren't a thing, there's no cat girls or fox people, or any of that shit, and any pc who tries to pull some special snowflake bullshit will be called on it by some npc.
I don't go full 'you can't play a woman because women weren't warriors in [time period]' (I'm not a full neck beard, I do employ 'PCs are exceptions to most cultural norms') but when they start trying to break or change the attitudes of the society in general that society pushes back.
For instance, a female PC in a Bronze Age campaign I ran tried to form an entire regiment of female hoplites to defend the town the PC's owned. Almost all of the women she spoke to about it said that fighting was the role of the men, while women managed the household. The PC ranted about the sexist nature of such a notion until her character was blue in the face, and all the women npcs essentially replied, "so?". She persisted and forcibly conscripted a hundred women and teenage girls, and during their first battle they got slaughtered because two weeks of training does not a warrior make.
Even the other female PC was telling her to get over it by the end and just work with the constraints.

Elemental Plane of Water full of ramshackle floating settlements, goblin pirates, kraken worshiping whale hunters, religious cults, immense and deadly coral reefs and evil lurking deep below the waves

Essentially fantasy Waterworld so maybe 6/10

Pretty sure mine's rather generic atm, mainly because I haven't been focusing on the overall world but rather where the players are at right now.

>Main focus is on a newly discovered continent and the colonization/expedition endeavors that occur in it. Outposts are constantly under attack by gnolls and certain areas are becoming rife with drug production and trade. Too many details to list.

>Continent A is the biggest one, holding both a victorian-esque empire and basically not-Valhalla. Both are locked in war over resources, the victorians holding resources and clever minds but the valhallans have sheer numbers and brutality.

>Continent B is the Wuxia seed; Single empire formed from roughly a hundred formerly warring states, ran by the single Aasimar who claims to be the reincarnation of the creation god. Right now they have a few research outposts on the pioneer continent seeking old knowledge.

>Continent C is my desert civ; a republic formed from the greatest minds of engineering and art, and vehemently opposing magic. Country is starved for agriculture and supplies, so they must build to survive entirely on exports. Recently they discovered a natural gunpowder and have begun revolutionizing the defense industry. They have a trade outpost on pioneering continent, and the gunpowder has become a side-plot in my current game.

>One thing I've yet to finalize; there is no known universal calendar. Every empire has their own calendar system primarily focused on how long their leading party has existed. However the wood elves have a female druid that has existed for a long-ass time, influencing the entire elf culture from under the guise of various aliases. I'm planning on having her be the lore-dump for anyone seeking history, but I'm struggling on where to locate this isolationist empire.

Anyone care to lay judgement?

Maybe a 5?
Basically a Not!Earth where long ago mortals developed enough magitech to attempt throwing off the shackles of divine control. The gods won the war, but barely, and consolidated their remaining strength and worship as the Heavens, with a Catholic church setup running things in most of the European style areas. The northwest is more pagan though, and the middle east has lots of djinn and other spirits vying for control amid merchants that worship only the almighty gold coin. The world is littered with weapons from both sides of the war, from vampiric rifles to divine swords to experimental creatures.

>amid merchants that worship only the almighty gold coin.

>Setting
>Special snowflake
Neck yourself.

Around 3, maybe?
It's just European post-apoc with magic and shenanigans.

I say 7/10, but feel free to correct me.

>setting is a bunch of islands floating above a pitch-black eldritch ocean
>various continents and cultures make up the outer layer, jungles and adventure world make up the middle layer
>airships and blimps and hot air balloons, lots of gaslamp fantasy technology
>humans are only sapient race, elves went extinct long ago and had super high fantasy magic, so their old tech is really powerful artifacts
>they shattered the world in their war with the psychic aberrations that dwell in the deep ocean (they lost, but barely)
>goblins live in the adventure jungle layers but they're at stone age technology and caveman culture
>also dinosaurs and prehistoric megafauna replace standard animals (and some fantasy ones) because I unashamedly love dinosaurs.

How can a setting be special snowflake? What? What does even mean? If a special snowflake is a character that clashes with the setting just to stand out how can a setting clash with itself to stand out from-- itself? Others settings? Is there a setting of settings by which we can judge what the "standard" setting is and then anything that deviates from that can be measured in "specialness"?

This topic is bad and you should feel bad. Here's your (you), idiot.

I think OP just used poor wording. I think what he means to say is a setting that's "different" and "unique" just for the sake of it.
Like having a setting where all the elves are actually colonies of insects that pretend to be people, or nonsense like that.

7-8 for sheer edge m'e tier

>Cyberpunk city-planet
>Ruled over by an assortment of titanic corporations operating out of fortified flying islands
>Unemployment and wage gap are the only real problems. A tiny percent of people work while the rest rot in state housing with state rations and state provided clothing. Zero entertainment and next to no jobs
>The employed are a nightmare of augments/cloning/sentient ai/robots

and the kicker. The whole thing is possible due to the influence of a vocal not-god-like entity who uplifted the planet and regularly provides them with cryptic clues for new discovery. In exchange for the abolishment of all faiths, because the metaphysical "sound" bothered it

How does three dudes just getting drunk all the fucking time so they barely do any actual adventuring rate?

Not sure if special snowflake
The setting is at the junction between aquilonia, the pict land and cimeria.
The players are maning a small outpost close to a remote village
Their everyday life consist of dealing with local disturbance, making sure the border and the taxe are paid, while repealing the pict raiders.
Only a few weeks in conan slay the king and takes his crown. Then shit will hit the fan

i ll be playing this on 2d20 since the kickstarter should be arriving soon.

I d rate it earthdawn/10.

So how is Tolkien not "snowflake" as fuck? How is Star Wars or Samurai Jack or Slayers or TTGL or 1984 or Call of Cthulhu all not "special snowflake"? Any memorable setting is memorable because of how it is different from other settings that came before it.

Settings can't be special snowflakes. They are literally definitions of what is considered "normal" in a story. Individual characters may or may not fit into that and their specialness may be a plot point, but the setting itself cannot be "abnormal."

Considering that its about how nonspecial the how everything is based on the fact that thanks to an universal reseting mechanism, there is bound to be multiple of a kind.

More edgy than mary sue.

As user said, they would be different JUST for the sake of uniqueness.
So it's not about them being memorable or not. It's about them shoving how different they are in your face. Originality becomes their goal, quality is just a second thought.

A good setting/story should have a balance of original and common elements. Common enough to be relatable, different enough to bring something new to the table.
For example, you've mentioned 1984 ; do you not see how it draws from the tradition of utopias in literature and from real life events/people, but brings new concepts like newspeak ? That's what balance is.