Remembered Places - The Worst Setting

Tell me more about the worst setting.

>adventurers are commonplace, heavily taxed, and treated like naive dreamers wherever they go. "Get a real job" is the most common response after announcing yourself as an adventurer

>there are 8,000 named major Gods, with a combined 33,000 holy days each year. The Gods regularly visit the world, and are prone to punish people who forget things like the anniversary of the first time they milked a yak.

>every square foot is sought after and contested by at least four factions. If the PCs defeat one cult/orc army/necromancer/dragon/thieves guild/hag coven/drow house, another faction immediately moves in to maintain the status quo

>battlefields include stands and seating so PCs and villagers can watch the High-level NPCs solve everything

>ancient artifacts are considered the property of the state, and must be donated to museums upon discovery

>the food is okay. Not great, just okay.

>High-level NPCs like to send lower-level adventurers on quests to find impossible items, only to toss the hen's teeth and horse feathers in a bin when found

>There are plenty of capable and observant city guards. There are also a lot of very annoying laws that are enforced.

If that's from a parody setting then it's brilliant. If it's serious, it should be a parody and the players are just normal people who travel around to watch things unfold and get front row seats to all sorts of generic rpg-setting buggery.

>dragons are always whispered about as ever-present threats, and anyone who would slay one would become a reknowned hero
>they are never actually encountered

>adventurers are commonplace, heavily taxed
I actually came up with a setting based around that a ways back. I called it 'dungeons and bailiffs', and it was basically 'go adventure for meagre returns or your gear gets repoed', and 'go hunt adventurers that stole their own gear from the bank that owned it'.

An old VtR ST of mine's attempt at worldbuilding

>Neonates aren't allowed to leave their neighbourhood without permission of the local Baron because it is dangerous in the city

>New York City has absolutely no hobos and no strays at all

But his backstory on how Vampires arrived in America was just...
>Jesus Christ was the first vampire
>The Jews shipped vampires to America when they were migrating there
>That means that vampires have a pact that doesn't allow them to drink jewblood
Did I mention that he was a kraut?

>light spells and cantrips are illegal, due to successful lobbying by the torch and lantern industries

>light police regularly patrol dungeons and punish lawbreakers with Counterspells, fines, and prison sentences.

I'd actually consider this for a real game, since 5e trivialises light-as-resource so badly.

>>Jesus Christ was the first vampire

That actually makes a scary amount of sense.

>tells his disciples to drink his blood
>resurrects himself and others from the dead
>dragged thousands of souls out of hell
>hates crosses

>Superhero setting
>Except the government has changed public view so everyone hates people with superpowers
>And the government captures and lonotomises any superhumans they can
>Then they stick then in power armor to hunt down other superhumans as soon as they pop up.
>The first three sessions are all of the player characters clinging to one another while running away from the nearly omniscient mind-controlled power-armor wearing army that pops up at the slightest mistake of hiding your powers.
>First session we literally got chased out of the city because someone mentioned to a cashier at a gas station that we've ran away from someone with fire powers, never mentioning in any way that we had powers.

Ah, grimdark. They're always the worst settings.

A stake trough the heart didn't seem to have put him down though.

Is that an actual game that happened? Because that sounds terrible.

I hate people who think they're so clever by making a grimdark X-men universe where superhumans are universally hated to a ludicrous degree.

Are there any good
>realistic
superhero settings?

I fucking love this.

Worm?

Besides "Everyone is a Dick" Worm.

Yeah. Played it over roll20 text only. The party ended up falling out because theplot never seemed to go anywhere besides "Run, hide, repeat". No rebel group, no resistance fighters, and no reason for the blatant hate boner everyone had for superhumans.

In my experience, 5e and D&D in general trivializes torches because every single non-human race has some form of darkvision. Not because of light spells.

It's hard to define what's realistic in a superhero setting, because it's hard to gauge how exactly people would react. Depending on how common or how strong they are as well, that changes things further.

I personally don't try to concern myself with it. Trying to deconstruct the superhero setting and just having them all bagged by federal agents and used as bioweapons might be realistic to some degree, but that's going to be a lame setting to try and be a superhero in. At that point, it'd be more fun to play the mundane agents dealing with rogue metahumans.

My preferred 'realistic' outcome is for the government to essentially offer every superpowered individual they can a job as a civil servant with a sizable paycheck. In return, the superpowered individual can either just sort of laze around and not break anything, or use their powers to fight crime in a somewhat official capacity.

What a boring setting.

>Adventurer Insurance

>Pays off if your shit gets wrecked by PCs.
>Kingdom Companies, Ye Farme of State, Digressive.
>Squads of "Adjusters" are send out to seek recompense from adventurers who cause too much in the way of payout. Eventually they just send hit squads.

Flo is a 20th level wizard, will happily fuck your shit up while naming a boat after herself.

>Red Flo

Worm is good, but the world is a steadily declining pool of quicksand with sewage at the bottom that's been painted gold. To the public it looks good, but the more involved and aware the characters are the worse things appear. Also some shit is incredibly retarded, like Eidolon's death, muh shards create conflict, the ridiculous explanation for endbringers and the lack of concrete answers how powerful they actually are. Also, Cauldron's plan was bizarre

So do I get the minigun or the coat full of derringers?

That could honestly work. The players get superpowers but have to run from the proverbial bigger fish, except that they're about as relatively powerful as a goldfish vs a megalodon.

Out of all the most ridiculous things in Trigun, including giants that throw their own children as ammunition and a gun that carved a hole in the moon, I can't shake the idea that a little girl carrying fifty single-shot pistols is the most ridiculous of them all.

This sounds like a good setting as long as you don't try to sell it as a "superhero" setting. It's clearly not about superheroism out of the comics (even 90s comics), it's urban fantasy on the lines of X-Files or the Matrix.

>urban fantasy
I was drawing a blank on genres when I wrote this post, I should have said cyberpunk instead of UF.