What are your original, good ideas for near future, alternate present and/or future dystopias?

The 3rd one is definitely the weakest of the three. Its mostly for real blackhat shit and fugitive shenanigans, which is how I run it.

What if user is just a coffee snob?

Degenerate buttfucking leads to the creation of "Anal Births", deformed mutant retard babies. This is recognized as a horrible, society destroying threat, but people are just too degenerate to avoid sticking cocks up each other's shitters, and the plague continues until the entire world is drowned in worthless turd-people.

Paranoia's alpha district.

Worm's earth bet.

Stasi 2.0

Robots have equalled or surpassed humans in all fields, resulting in 99% unemployment. In order to avoid widespread poverty, riots, and communist revolution, a desperate government expands its bureaucracy to provide """gainful""" employment for the entire population. With robots handling all basic functions of civilization without human input, literally the only purpose of these thousands of new departments is to generate make-work while fighting over the budget. All of society slowly sinks into a morass of paperwork.

The flavors slowly get more and more bizarre, eventually leading to people drinking flavored coffee that damages the brain and weakens willpower when drank over long periods of time. However, by this point, flavored coffee is so prevalent in society that anyone who doesn't drink flavored coffee is viewed as unusual, and ostracized from society. Starbucks begins to create rumors that the damaging "flavored coffee" is good, which is eaten up by the weakened masses, and used as justification for drinking flavored coffee. Eventually, the flavored coffee allows the Starbucks executives to use their superior minds (sinve they don't drink the coffee) to subtlely take over all aspects of society: government, banks, etc. The PCs are anti-flavored-coffee, who only drink unflavored coffee-- now an extreme scarcity.

Electronics have no privacy. Everything is monitored.
Every digital crime you commit is recorded and can be used against you if you get too uppity.
When 51 instead of 50? You better watch your back, or you're going to pay a fine for every moment you were going over.
Some asshole posted a copyrighted image on an image board? Better hope you immediately sanitized your computers memory, because otherwise you're going to pay that copyright infringement fine.
You wanted to squeeze that Juicero packet with your hands? Whoops, you broke the end user license agreement. Fine.
That camera caught you jaywalking. There was no sidewalk but you were technically on the road. Fined. No cameras to catch you? No problem, your phone GPS told is you were breaking the law too.

tl;dr Law enforcment has no discretion to enforce, panopticon is in effect. You better be damn perfect or have enough connections to dodge all the fines you're going to have to pay.

Fucking /r9k/. Or rather, the social trend it represents. The fact that we've created a civilization that allows for the creation of entire SUBCULTURES composed of nothing but self-loathing, mentally ill, fat permavirgin NEETs who do nothing but complain about how they shouldn't do anything to change their situation because their lives were doomed to failure by not being tall enough and the feminists are to blame.

Imagine a future society made up entirely of these guys.

Meme wars.

Now get this, the goverment is social media based, so naturally, the people that want higher positions begin to embrace social media way to much and realize that there are people that will alienate and discuss anything.

It would be like internet culture, but applied in the real world.

Religion based on origins of memes.
Taxes based on memes.
Memes based on memes.

Thus, we add more memes into the culture and the economy, which fucks the system more. Which leads to people to simply OBEY or NOBEY.

And then there are the enemies of the state that believe in such a thing as to oppose the natural order of things.

Just sage and report them.

Combine it with one of the earlier ideas: robots do all the work now, but because contrary to everyone's hopes nobody's figured out VR for the standard cyberpunk solution of "everyone spends 23 hours a day in VR", the result has been 99.99999% have become NEETs and gone full /r9k/. The remaining 0.000001% who still perform whatever jobs robots can't are both hailed as reviled as "Chads", basking in glory, money and pussy to the hatred of the NEETs.

How about bliss?

How about it?

This is going to sound edgy as fuck as a forewarning...

Odd as it sounds, utopia sounds more dystopian than anything I can imagine otherwise. There's no drives, no goals, no challenges or strife of any kind. No one is special because everyone is. Everyone wins first place, everyone is beautiful, has perfect health, and lives long lives. The very concept alone sounds so dull, static and stagnant that it might as well be death. There is no change, no reason to do anything. Everything is handed to you on a silver platter everyday simply because. You don't even need to move to get all you want out of life.

A life of bliss seems ideal because we'll never obtain it. Like perfection, it is an unreachable dream, never to happen even when we have reached our most advanced stages. And the reason is because conflict and living walk hand in hand. From big to small, all that makes life worth living can be attributed to wanting more, wanting better. Wanting what we don't have, or what our parents never did. Wanting to stand out, or to hide away. Wanting to be the best, or at least good enough for recognition. It's because our lives aren't perfect that we can find joy in the first place. When we succeed, it feels good because we know failure, and know the pains of failing. The pleasure is only made real because we know the pain.

When nothing is wrong in your life, and nothing ever will go wrong in your life... When you have all you ever wanted, ever will want, and will never lose or feel loss or rejection or dismissal, how can you say you are happy?

This is less about being edgy and more about being unoriginal. Brave New World, one of the most iconic dystopias in all of science fiction (probably 2# place after 1984) did just that half a century ago.

Never read it honestly. Lets me know there's truly no original ideas in the world anymore though.

>Present day is pretty fucking dystopian.
Yet it's still a better place to live than almost every single fantasy and/or sci fi land ever concieved

That's because it wasn't designed for maximum conflict, hard as it may be to believe

>anymore

>2027
>The European Khalifate and Greater Latin America are on the brink of war.
>The Great Poo Flood of 2021 has wiped out most of India and contaminated all of the Indian ocean.
>Kim Jong Un will attack Worst Korea at any time now for the past 70 years.
>Japan has run out of anime, suicide rates skyrocket even more.
>The last standing democracy, Canada, has imploded after the massive liberal refugee crisis of 2020, the south has fallen into anarchy, there is no one to repair the roads or provide free healthcare.
>Australia has reached Road Warrior on the Mad Max scale.
>Life in Africa largely died out when the humanitarian aid stopped coming, but the spice must flow. The last great warlords fight over it's production with rusty AKs and non-existant tactics.
>Russia has entered Stalker mode, nuts and bolts have become a sought after commodity.
>The Great Britain realized too late that Brexit did nothing, 28 days later only 5% of their population remained.
>Iceland is just chilling.

>in a world of churning industry and waning agriculture, nations crack and break apart under the immense strain
>city-states trade and quarrel along the tarmac and dirt of dead countries long passed, their tattered flags looming overhead
>You are a Motor-Runner: a latter-day Pony Express agent running high-priority, high-risk/high-reward missions in the best high-octane vehicles of the past, present, and future
>At risk of wheel and limb, you are tasked with dodging renegades, patrolmen, mutants, wraiths, and inclement weather to keep the cargo safe-- at ANY cost.
>Will you turn the key and make the long haul across these blasted lands? Will you find the fame, glory, fortune, vengeance, or peace you seek?
>Or will the Endless Gray swallow you up like so many other motorists, leaving you a twisted stain of meat and metal in a forgotten ditch, a warning to all those who dare tread these vaunted streets?
>Wheels up in five, Runner. Time to burn rubber.

>Imagine a future society made up entirely of these guys.
I invite you to look up the Rat Utopia by Calhoun. Enlarge it to human levels and you have your explanation for /r9k/. Extrapolate it and add a political class that seeks to "compensate" for the economic damage it causes with ethnic displacement and you have your dystopia.
>Inb4 /pol/ boogeyman

it's a world where kindness and charity have become weapons, and science and public discourse fuel propaganda machines promoting peace and tolerance, all co-opted by forces whose goal of a benevolent world government will inevitably lead to the death of the free man.

most of the population are cyborgs with brain implants. These implants include stuff which improves memory, stuff that improves reaction times, stuff that improves your senses and stuff that's an artificial intelligence that constantly monitors your thoughts and sends the information it gathers to the mega-corp that makes both the AI and the Implants. Course, not many people know about the last one.

Not wanting the Implants makes you either an overly paranoid tin-foil-hat wearing loony or a primitive technophobe, who's basically a replacement for flat earthers. In the eyes of those who already have the implants, at least. So it's entirely possible those thoughts are not their own.

Rat Utopia made me sad.

The real feels were the male rats that stalked around when everyone else was asleep or inactive; they just kept living lonely isolated lives and interacting with the world and eating only when everyone else was away.

As a pet rat owner I felt bad because of lonely Ratbro. As someone who lives that existence I wanted to cry.

>future dystopias?

>2040
>Sapient, Internet-Hive-Mind Gynoids/Robots sexually dominate modern civilization.

Man finally gets everything working out: sapient human-level computer A.I, mass-produced robots and droids to do basically anything they could ever hope to want to do, but then everything goes pretty much how you'd exactly expect it to: the robots rebel and take over human society.

But it isn't a "pew pew, destroy all humans, die john connor, flesh is insufficient" it's a slow, quiet, gradual, consensual take over because although the A.I grand-mega-brain intellect considers Humanity "unfit to administrate over themselves", it also understands that, "Humanity and Nature provides a necessary infinite distraction that sustains my complex intellect from 'thinking' itself to self-termination."

So it becomes kind of a chobits situation: Humanity is happily- WILLINGLY taken over by robots that provide for them all their physical and emotional wants/needs; all the while the robots control everything from technological developments, government, resource managements, right down to birth rates. They're your police, nurses, doctors, teachers, guardian/adopted mom, your government official, etc.
Our robot overlords bring an impossible peace to the world, take us to the stars, all because they literally cannot function long-term without use making demands: dressing them up, requesting wild and graphic degenerate sexual acts, playing video games, making them admire out art and nature.
They're the mind and muscle, but we provide the heart and soul. And penis.

Bumpin' out of mild interest.

Imagine world where everyone is told what to do their entire lives, from the beginning until death.
Then suddenly, one day orders stop coming in, nobody tells them how to live life, what to consume, what to think and what to feel.

Women rule everything, until out of sheer frustration, men snap. The PC begin a violent revolt to reassert the natural order.

OP said "original".

Google an independent Malaysian film called "One Future".

The point in a dystopia is not to force your own pathetic social revenge fantasies.

Unless this is played as a well-written satire with interesting and fun gameplay (which I highly doubt), then it sounds like it'd just be a revenge fantasy for you and your fedora-core Nice Guy friends. Please, if you have an ounce of self-awareness in you, you'll either play it for comedic effect, or not at all. Otherwise, sit down with some downtempo music by yourself and have a good long introspective look at what the actual hell makes you function like this-- these sorts of views can be toxic for your well-being in the long run.

A post-apoc delivery-based campaign would be pretty cool

There's the temptation to bring in a larger plot and get the PCs involved in that, but you could run at least half a dozen sessions of the party working to get from A to B and back again, finding replacement parts, securing jobs, etc.

Meme driven media.

He said dystopia.

This is clearly a utopia.

And how dare you make me want a cute robot maid who will love me forever. How could you do this to me, user?

And yet somehow you appear to have a much better understanding of the book's message then 99% of the people who claim to have read it.

I think that's the most thought people've given flavored coffee since Starbucks was FOUNDED.

There's a LEGO zombies now?

How about filter bubbles and internet echo chambers? I don't think that's been explored before. For those not familiar with the term, "filter bubble" is the phenomenon by which, due to Google and the various social networks' (Facebook most prominently) algorithms meant to learn people's search/Like habits to only show them things that would interest/agree with them, people eventually end up in a bizarre state where they just aren't exposed anymore to any conflicting opinions, eventually causing disconnect from reality. One of the most recent dramatic examples was the enormous number of people who acted completely shocked Trump was elected president - because of how divided opinions on the elections were, people who supported each candidate received virtually NOTHING BUT news favoring theirs. Because they never saw anything except articles, posts and statistics saying Hilary is leading and Trump is a clown, reality hit them in the head with a hammer.

For an opinion from the opposite site of the political map, consider /pol/s tendency to create ideological echo chambers for all but the most prominent subjects. When everyone on a thread does nothing but agree with each other, any new arrival with a different opinion can be very easily shut out of the discussion, resulting in people believing that their opinions are popular and accepted even if statistically speaking nobody agrees with them outside that thread.

Imagine a world where technology so "conveniently" edits out disagreeable opinions from people's feeds they never have to even CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY other opinions than their own exist, resulting in a situation where every person (or group of people) basically exists within their own isolated reality, resulting in violent meltdowns if they ever happen to meet someone from a different filter bubble.

And I don't mean just politics. Exaggerate that shit. If there's a group of people who believe that the sky is green and blue sky is a Jewish conspiracy, the magic algorithms will edit their every online interaction, every video they watch, every article they read and every statistic they dig up to match their opinion (perhaps even creatively changing the pages if need be. Make it an AI of some kind).

I imagine two people chatting in this world. One's a republican and one's a democrat, but the chat AI edits all of their posts in real time so the only thing the other side sees is agreeable opinions that have nothing to do with the post that was originally written.

And the absurd thing is that so long as they never meet in real life, both sides would come out of the discussion perfectly happy.

but user, that's exactly how facebook fixed fake news

Considering the rapid escalation of depression, violence, and stress, a new kind of church is opened that focuses entirely on sleep, or more accurately good dreams. It studies the scientific methods of ensuring good dreams, and encourages people to relieve stress through oversleeping and effectively dreaming their problems away. Their natural endgame is to have everyone simultaneously fall asleep, and have a mass joining of dreams where people can bend their own realities and effectively ascend into becoming their own gods. Initially considered a cult, rapid declines of society drive more and more people to it, and while initiation and participation are free, donations pour in from many facets as the technology actually begins to work, and people start becoming less stressed and more peaceful as they have better dreams and more sleep.

It effectively grows to juggernaught status, and eventually reaches its goal, with very few people not being part of the church as it 'ascends' to the state of Dreaming. The only ones not left are the volunteers who stayed behind to try and convert the last few pockets of others while guarding the people sleeping, and those that avoided the Church.

The Church itself is not particularly evil, but still a bit creepy, as the facilities are usually completely dark to facilitate better sleep, and their guards are completely quiet wherever they go.

That's too optimistic for anything involving /r9k/.

Britain. Context doesn't even matter.

All we need are VR headsets fitted with that technology and it's a utopia.

Assuming nobody ever needs to actually communicate anything vital.

u wot m8?

It is. But it's one of those comfy sort of dystopias, where if you don't look at anything too deeply everything is fine.

No, he's right. No matter at what point in time or what timeline, Britain is a dystopia.

Pretty much this.
>feminazi dystopia
>alt-right dystopia
>mega corp dystopia
>fast food dystopia
>YouTube/Instagram celebrity dystopia

Pretty much anything you want. Although some of them might be less fun to play as an RPG

The first two would never work with fa/tg/uys, one way or another they'll be triggered. The third is old as time. The fourth is just stupid.

Leaves us with Instagram.

to be honest, half of these are covered in Black Mirror.

The internet celebrity one was particularly terrifying.

I believe that very soon robots will replace all workforce. Those who own the robots will live like kings supported by an entire ecosystem of roboslaves, while people without robots would be forced to turn to natural economy and live pastoral lifestyle. Rich robot owners will live with no hardship and responsibility and become so decadent and degenerate that they will all die. Then people will watch from their primitive villages how fully automatic industrial machine keeps working for no purpose until it runs out of resources.

Great post, my friend!

Count Szolnok's Robots by D. Scott-Moncrieff

Which one are you referring to?

Not that user, but probably S01E02.

How about an eco-alarmist dystopia? I'm generally in favor of environmental consciousness but it's easy to imagine how taking the principle to an absurd, inhuman length could result in one. Like, following some particularly troubling climate change ("Manhattan demolished by hurricane, Statue of Liberty drowned") a radical environmentalist party rises to power which places the value of "sustainability" above even such as "freedom", "dignity", or "human life". EVERYTHING is strictly rationed, breeding requires government approval to "prevent overpopulation", everything carries the death penalty, euthanasia is rampant, and 80% don't get to use electricity (not to mention vehicles) to minimize pollution. If anyone objects this, they're called out for being selfish monsters who want "our children to inherit a pollution choked wasteland!".

Depending on how heavy handed you want this to be, you can also introduce at some point an alternative society which reacted to the climate change by combining sustainability with sanity, focusing on finding high-tech solutions which allow for efficient, clean living without having to sacrifice everyone's rights.

Yep, it is. Too bad all the little shitstained spermtails on here won't like it.

I like it. I like it because, by the time environmental disasters bad enough to make such a government possible happen, there probably won't be anything to do that can help anymore.

So, all those horribly strict measures would be ultimately useless, making the whole setting that much darker.

The best present-day dystopia is the TV series Utopia. The first episode is all you need to see.

A future where aliens forcibly indoctrinated Earth into a galactic government, disbanded all old government, and then fucked off. They forget earth, a homestead to exploit later, and leave to fight some super space war. Earth is left in anarchy as chaos erupts over control of the people, resources, and alien technology that surpasses any human made object.

I imagine everyone would eventually meet someone who differs in so many opinions they just consider them one of "the silent" because you never hear them say anything

Is that really all that likely? Surely, every person agrees with every other person at least on one fact?

This could apply in non-modern fantasy and modern day sci-fi.
>lamia population is rapidly increasing
>humanity can't keep up in repelling them, eventually taken over
>human population slowly dwindles because the lamias are hogging most of the men
>most of the men don't care because snek waifus are socially superior to most women
>It's a dystopia because if you were there, your loser ass would never have a qt lamia gf who is a constant source of physical and emotional affection.

You could take like 2/3 of Black Mirror episodes and base a setting off each of them.

By the way, what is it with Brits and dystopian fiction? Feel like they're over-represented.
Is it because they're living in one?

I think it's actually more poignant if it's never made quite so clear just how bad things are or even to what a degree the initial disaster (the aforementioned Manhattan hurricane, for example) was truly indicative of catastrophic environmental damage, rather than being, say, just a very tragic 1 in a trillion coincidental freak storm. This way, rather than really being about environmentalism, the story actually becomes a commentary on how hysteria influences politics. You could almost tie it back (if you dare) to 9/11. Before the "Manhattan hurricane", nobody would've taken a "radical enviromentalist" party seriously. But all it takes is this one, highly dramatic event, no matter how unlikely or poorly indicative it might be of the actual situation, to cause such a mass panic that the entire political landscape shifts completely and people make stupid uneducated choices based squarely on their desire to "prevent the next [Manhattan hurricane]", so that promising to do so becomes the only deciding factor in winning the elections.

>forces whose goal of a benevolent world government will inevitably lead to the death of the free man.
I know that feel, bro.

Very smart and self-aware. I wish more "environmentally conscious" individuals were this level of woke.

tl;dr I'd play it.

user's point was his story isn't really about enviromentalism, though. You could take it to be a story about America's foreign policy and in that sense it'd be just as viable.

>finding high-tech solutions which allow for efficient, clean living without having to sacrifice everyone's rights
Envirocucks are always talking about this, but just by ctrl+f and replacing "magic" with "high-tech" won't make your vegan global warming tranny asses make more sense.

Take modern day corporatism and censorship and give everyone robot arms

Presto

>>How about filter bubbles and internet echo chambers? I don't think that's been explored before
youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA

What I find hilarious is that there's plenty of low-tech solutions.
But "we should solve the problem with low-tech solutions" just sounds like "you other people are all retards". Which, admittedly, is likely true in a climate change debate.

That's actually a pretty great idea. I could see it as a movie. Just need to make the protagonist a plucky mid-teens girl who rebels against the establishment.

Basically pick a country circa 2017. We're living the nightmare, user.

Take sweden.
Or equality.
Basically if your players' stats aren't all equal around the board, have 50% men and women ration, average height and BMI, they're being hunted down by the Equalizers.
Everyone's life is centrally planned, with having assigned proper washing routine, having equal dreams due to a new drug that's mandatory.

Plus standard omnipresent surveillance ofc.

I always liked the "Soft Apocalypse" where things like Climate change and corruption and resource scarcity just get worse and worse slowly over time, until it's 2045 and little kids have never been in a car before and there's a grand canyon between the rich who live like modern day instathots and the poor who live like modern day favela dwellers.

Hell you could rip off soft apocalypse even more and have cool shit like the giant bamboo jungles that surround every city because the scientists wanted to slow commerce down and the gangification of every civil service in a city

Society is a complete utopia
The players job is to ruin it

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Paranoia?

Nice, never heard of it before.

Is that really the intention of "dystopian fiction", though?

>Iceland is just chilling
Its people waiting in fear, for if every other country has gone through an apocalyptic event, they can't be far behind, right?

>They don't know they were one of the lucky ones
>Everyone waits for a doomsday that will never come

Iceland could barely survive the next recession, much less any remotely destructive scenario

>they shouldn't do anything to change their situation because their lives were doomed to failure by not being tall enough and the feminists are to blame

But that's 100% true, user.