How do you do floating islands without being trite, overused, clichéd, and boring "fantasy for the sake of fantasy"?

Everything is floating islands
The rest is just super dense gas which can be treated in a way like both the sea and the sky.
You know, something like that design the culture and everything in the setting around it, just like it would be centric to any peoples life if it was a real thing.

Unless you meant
>"how do I make one off floating islands in my otherwise regular setting, not generic and boring fantasy for the sake of fantasy"
In that case you really can't, because just shoving them in there because they are fantasy is the problem in the first place.

This. Figure out to exploit that shit brutally and have it deconstruct the setting. Then, after you're done breaking everything, slowly reconstruct it and appreciate the new uses you've found for them.

Do this and kill anyone that bitches about because of Flying islands are fucking dank, and just do something fun with the setting, and no-one will give a flappy fuck whether or not it's cliche.

t. A flying island campaign setting creator

I haven't lost my sense of wonder.

>How do you do floating islands without being ... "fantasy for the sake of fantasy"?

By making it Sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi

Gas giant planet
Floating islands are floating because of beuyancy
Everyone is AYY LMAOs
Flying animals/fish and shit that have gas bladders
Giant sea of high pressure liquid gas with shit living inside it
Flying submarines and shit

forgot mah pic

>Are flying islands cool?
>Yes
>Include flying island in setting
>Players ask how they float
>Say you have to ask the local elves that live on them
>They ask local elves who ride eagles
>They don't know just live there
>players go along with it

Cool.

Been running this shit weekly since March, my man, and let me tell you:

You just fucking do it. Internal consistency and having a justification for floating islands at the ready helps, but so long as your group likes the concept at the outset, just run it, enjoy the freedom it affords, and have fun. Don't sweat avoiding "clichédness" just run a great campaign.

Good lord you're right. What have I become? Is this why I've been paralyzed when I want to work on anything Veeky Forums related?

desu unless your players are super on details, do what suggests.

Keep details vague. Like, take for example zombie shit. Zombie's are overdone, cliche and boring as fuck imo, unless you really go to length at the survival aspect of that kind of apocalyptic survival setting and focus on the drama backdrop of a zombie apocalypse.

Or even just setting it somewhere else. Like, Onimusha is a fucking fantastic game with zombies and shit in it. There's lots you can do with fantasy islands as long as you throw off any notion you need to explain, in detail, everything about them down to their construction and how physics works.

Because honestly? Sometimes you just shouldn't explain why something is in a fantasy world. Yeah, detail's great, don't get me wrong, but don't like splurge out on it, y'know? Keep things vague and uncertain; maybe everyone living there has stopped knowing how the island started to float and just kinda accept it, or maybe they really don't wanna tell foreigners why the fuck their island works like it does.

Just embrace the fantasy and come up with ways you want to incorporate it, unless your players are the kind of burgers who sperge out if you don't explain the hard science behind why floating islands exist...

Emeroods

Give them massive fucking harpoons, like building sized ones and launchers with which they harpoon and spear other floating islands to harvest/invade/colonize.

The islands arnt floating, the rest of the world is just sinking.

...

"Two guards posted along the rim of a floating island. A religious cult has built a temple and surrounding dwellings on this island, and they float across the continent indoctrinating and spiriting away new followers. Of course, the more established religions on land encourage all to resist the new cult and attacks on the island are common. These guards especially have to look out for fires being set in the path of the island. It floats and steers very slowly with the use of huge lode stones. Peasants on the ground are taught by the churches to set huge forest fires in the islands path to suffocate its inhabitants. These guards use very rare and expensive cartridge rifles (plundered, the industry of cartridge ammunition is long forgotten) to pick off scouts or shepherds who appear to be hurrying to warn towns of the island's advance. The cultists undergo a series of skin bleachings so that they begin to resemble dolls or puppets. The female is the example of successful treatments, and the figure on the tree is covered up due to severely disfiguring mistakes made in the process."

"The Ministry of Truth floats above the Temple Canton. Actually a small moonlet from Oblivion called Baar Dau, this celestial object is said to have been stopped in its fall toward the city of Vivec by Lord Vivec himself, who brought it to rest above the Temple Canton, where it has hovered ever since.

Although the moonlet looks quite majestic hovering sedately above the city, local legend maintains that, should the populace cease to worship Vivec, the moonlet will complete its fall and raze the city.

The Temple has dug many tunnels and chambers into the moonlet and converted it into a maximum security prison for dissidents and religious criminals, the term being vague and hence being open to interpretation, allowing various people to be imprisoned. The security of the Ministry is obvious to any who see it; the only way to and from the moonlet is by flight."

youtube.com/watch?v=9lyKxKn_WsE

The Heart of the Mountain. The gem that keeps a mountain over mined by dwarfs from collapsing from its own weight, that they must never mine lest disaster strike them.

turns out the flying islands had them as well, these ones preferring to rest higher in the aetherosphere. The flying Islands are almost all crashed to earth now since the discovery of how to harvest and use these crystals for airships, but the supply is non renewable, and every time a crystal is fractured in a naval battle or accident, there is so much less mass capable of being held aloft in the world.

The Aeronauts Windlass by Jim Butcher was pretty good for airship steam punky imagery.

I do aztec sky pirates with them. It's just one island really, and they board castles.

After throwing lots of rocks and red-hot sand, they get down with parachutes and wyverns to plunder. Captives are sacrificed to keep the island floating.

They arent floating per say, just falling incredibly slowly. In a few millenia they probably hit the surface.

The world was created through the cooperation of the gods, each land mass a carefully sculpted work of art, each mountain range, every river, all carved and molded into place.
Then one day the god of the sky threw a hissy fit and punched a perfectly good continent, fracturing it and throwing its contents into the sky.

What do you think of the Baten Kaitos setting?

Isn't it obvious? Force projection. They're flying castles. It's like having a goddamn medieval aircraft carrier.

Are there any dragons on the floating islands?

They're actually spaceships, remnants from a long gone advanced civilization. The ship reactors are literally eternal, and over the millennia they've become islands.

There was an old game called "Netstorm".

A weird hybrid RTS where you couldn't entirely control you units.

The gimmick of the game was that you could place your static and automatically targetting units on the various floating islands, or the end of bridges that were connected to the island your main castle thingie was and you had to build bridges so as to get your units attacking your enemies' main castle thingie and you could block your enemies by building your bridges so there was this Go-esque element of denying your opponent's areas and knowing when to leave a strand of bridges and where to start building a new one while your opponent is fucking with the old one.

Which sounds weird and bland, but the manual and tutorial and single player game and units browser thing had these little MTG style quotes that added weird little bits of lore to the whole thing - so the explanation for how bridges works in the manual had a little quote which was simply:

"No one ever built a bridge to make peace" attributed to some in-universe general

That quote has stuck with me because it totally sets up the whole universe as this thing where obviously, the only way to connect floating islands is by building elaborate bridges between islands, and building these elaborate fortifications and seige weapons for defending and attacking these bridges to mess with other people's ability to get to islands and everything else is just about moving resources either over the bridges or from island to island rather than putting weapons on them because the fixed emplacements are gonna be able to shoot them down more easily than the various balloons and airships are ever gonna be able to field big enough weapons to take down the bridges or the fortifications.

Literally just go find a copy of the manual for that and build proper fluff out of all the little fluffy quotes and shit and you'll have the best floating island setting.

>Baten Kaitos
my nigga

we must shout this from every rooftop

Veeky Forumsdom must ring with this truth

im gonna play this again right now holy shit

Someone say floating islands?

Use them for something more than just the cool factor? Don't have live there be just like everywhere else.

Don't just them into nice looking background art. I mean, what's the point of your pic being in the sky? It's just a normal Japanese-esque village. Think about the implications of the environment on everyday life, how it's for people who don't think a flying island is cool, because that's just normal to them.

My setting has caravans bringing supplies and researchers to the few access points to ancient drifting air ships, carthographers mapping their paths and planning excursions, and death-defying workers scaling frail towers to secure access to these ships with ropes. All life stories that could not exist without my specific environment.

Just put some thought into the execution.

...

If you want flying islands because you want flying islands, it's already fantasy for the sake of fantasy, and you will never be able to escape that.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This guy knows where it's at.

And this.

Explain why they are floating.

That's seriously it.

Of course if you just want floating islands for the sake of them, that's fine too. But don't half-ass it. Don't just have a floating island be there and not do anything. Floating islands are cool as fuck and should be treated as such.

Huh...

How poignant.

>50312603
It was a floating prison set up by a very old and senile God to hold Mother Abyss, a quasi-real reality devourer. she was caught in transition and is only fractionally left in the materium. Enough that this God took her essence and crafted caretakers of it to ensure the rites were employed to maintain her prison. Did I mention he was a lazy senile God?

Eventually she wriggles just a fraction of a fraction of her self out and infects the high magistrate, the only critter on the island not made of her essence stuff.

Oddly her essence constructs still held true, therefore the magistrate (an elf of unimaginable age and remarkable power) held a tourney in one of the most populous cities in the materium. Tien Chi. He distributed missives to all sufficiently powerful avatars of fate (adventurers) and offered them to chance to visit the legendary island of Baj-To'Ral. He ended up giving away incredibly powerful door prizes to lower their usual paranoia and sate their list for treasure. All items he crafted

>.

Eventually he took the adventurers and drained them into soul gems to facilitate the final ritual that would remove the bonds on Mother Abyss, he needed the essence of the god, technically, but the essence of the thousand most powerful mortals in the realm would suffice as a brute force method.

The island would gradually fall apart, the PC's were tasked with gathering his research journals scattered around different hidden bases on the island (which was a single city with differing sections) to learn the ritual and save the day. They were led by the magistrates apprentice. At the very end of it, the magistrate was to siphon the essence constructs back into mother abyss, to power her just as he was on the verge of losing. This would cause a big kerfuffle, the PC's would finish the ritual and then the portal would close shuttling mother abyss into her home plane and shutting her out for 100 years. A new deity would rise from her scattered essence created of the amalgamation of her essence constructs who had developed a sense of self and solidarity in their task, even if they did not know their own eldricht origins.

The island would fall, sinking into the sea, the party would be whisked to their home by this deity, and possibly recruited as its first converts. Its portfolio would include forbidden knowledge, the lost, and duty

Tenants would be preventing more of its kind from permeating into our reality.

It would not realize that it spread them like an infection as its cult grew. Most abominations cannot move to the materium without an anchor, any anchor. Mother abyss was old and hungry and desperate

Telling people, even only a few would spread the awareness of these entities and call them, hungering, into our world.

It would be the very cause of the plague it sought to stop.

Except my fucking players are assholes and immediately started killing other adventuring parties for their loot and it fell apart there. I made a single ducking request for this game. Every splat was open otherwise. Make a GOOD aligned character.

I just wanted to pretend I wasnt running for a bunch of autistic murder hobo's just once...

I'm actually working on a setting where everything IS is floating islands. But want the sea to exist in tandem along with the sky. Any suggestions?

All of the resources are under the sea. It's more efficient for the large cargo-transports to travel via sea than airship.

That's actually a funny idea, and something I definitely plan to use.

It sokay
Once you realize you're in hell, you can start climbing up

Idea I had about that very thing

>Cosmology is like pic related, with the Firmament separating the stable Earth from the chaotic Waters outside

>The Waters outside came in, boiling in the oceans and spawning all matter of terrible monsters

>the gods, seeking to preserve their people, raised up sections of land into the sky

>now the world is a bunch of floating islands, with airships flying in between. On the surface, some people still fight against the Creatures of the Waters to hold onto their land, which still has the majority of the resources. It's necessary for the Sky Realms to trade with those on the Earth, but it's a dangerous trip to take, and things from the Earth (like metals and stone, or food that can't grow in the thin soil of the Sky Realms) are worth a fortune

Mechanize them. Some old civilization that lives there saw a catastrophe was going to happen, so the king arranged for the nation to be flown to the sky with *insert flying device here* attached to mechanical towers intended to give power to the devices, and appointed a series of engineers to oversee the tower functions. By now, either little towns have sprung around the towers, and the nation is broken into islands, what with every tower malfunction disaligning its immediate surroundings from the rest of the island.

Bonus points if the catastrophe turns out to have been fake, too weak to actually damage the nation, or thwarted by some boondocks province to curry favor with the king...just as the flying towers went online.

They're not floating, they're hanging by giant chains that reach far up into the atmosphere.
None of the people know what the islands are hanging from.
One day, one of the islands slowly starts getting pulled up.

For explanations, try:

>Magic antigravity mineral
>Magical flying engine
>Divine blessing
>Ancient evil* sealed inside
>Laws of physics work differently
>Laws of physics on strike because magic shit
>Nobody knows

>you should have a system like this, goyim. It makes sense and plenty of (((people))) used to believe the world was like this anyways

but user, we're here forever.

A series of islands held aloft by a temple on each, extolling the virtues of the great saviors. Durring a great crisis they are to be awoken to save the world... But when you wake the first, it's power stops floating the isle and it drops like the rock it is... Now, go murder the rest of the islands and their inhabitants if you want to save the world.

give the a reason to exist, it's easier to defend, it's a social stratification thing.

It doesn't matter why they're floating. What matters is that they affect gameplay in some meaningful way.

>It doesn't matter why they're floating. What matters is

... Their plan?

Please see below, you're doing it again.