Settings Built around Unusual Premises

A giant ball of water orbiting in space. The night side is perpetually frozen, while the day side is steamy.

I love shit likes this, but it does raise the issue of evolution. Unless the planet's life is implanted or artificially created, there'd probably only be small pockets of stable life where the temperature swings aren't as drastic and lethal. Fluctuations of something 'minor' like 10-20 Celsius are already potentially deadly changes for Earth life, and Earth is fairly regular and stable temperature wise. Swinging completely behind a gas giant would cause shifts multiple magnitudes higher than that, unless the majority of the planet's heat was through tidal pressure and an active core being captured in a rather dense atmosphere.

>For example imagine a world that is an endless maze of rooms that would typically be found in a wealthy house
So basically Jean Paul Sartre's 'No Exit'?

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Well, evolution isn't a thing in most fantasy worlds anyway: if gods didn't directly create everything, then you had a bunch of Elder Things or other really weird shit messing around the place. In my case, the lords of Law keep things sort of in check, allowing me to have it impact the world only just enough to make for interesting adventures and situations, not to mention sweet-ass nightscape full of moons and one gigantic gasworld, rather than turning the entire world inimical to all life.

I tired this once but my players were just /v/ tards who think ringworlds started with Halo.

And I had put some thought into it too. Imagine intercontinental trade on a ringworld. If you want to get to a place you have two options: East or West. Impassible desert in between you and someone else? Too bad, literally go all the way around the world to get there.

Yes except with a lot of people and functioning societies

Imagine a ringworld in a scifi setting that uses orbital elevators to get across the ring.

Any examples of a race living in a space fleet and having no home planet?
I know of the Quarians from Mass Effect and the Ousters from Hyperion.

Inverse World

I stole the main idea from my setting from golden compass alternate realities.

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Didn't Spelljammer have an Illithid Alderson disc cast into perpetual twilight? I vaguely remember something like that.

> For example imagine a world that is an endless maze of rooms that would typically be found in a wealthy house
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/53006207/
>A conclave of evil wizards gives birth to a self-replicating dungeon deep within the earth
>The dungeon grows day by day as rooms beget rooms
>In time, the whole planet may become one giant dungeon

larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Ringworld
You could also go north or south. Its width is about 1.600.000 miles. For comparison, Earth's circunference is about 40.000 kms. I'll be very impressed of you have such a amount of trade that this isn't enough.

Are you familiar with WH40K? You could fit the entire Imperium of Man in one ringworld and there would be leftover space. Niven calculated it with the living space of three million Earths.

You don't need orbital elevators, you can install regular ones along the Rim walls. They are 1.600 kms tall. Although I'm not sure if that's enough to escape the "gravity wheel" of a ringworld.

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>immediately thinking this was a giant space dong.
I've been on Veeky Forums to long.

Fucking space giants.
Them and their stupid mega structures.

I like the premise of Spelljammer, that each campaign world is contained in it's own universe, which is expressed in the Ptolemaic/Copernican model of the cosmos, each universe contained in it's own celestial sphere with the stars being embedded into the furthest out celestial sphere, a firmament dividing the material world with the celestial. That you can go out beyond your sphere and visit other spheres is really cool.

Bentusi from Homeworld, I'm pretty sure.

Check out WAKE.
The setting is a space faring civilization based entirely out of a massive constantly moving fleet.

Whenever they encounter a world to either be brought into the fold or exploited for resources they leave behind a portal so they can easily reach it, so the Fleet-Capital is always at the edge of civilized space.
It's implied that the fleet has lapped the galaxy before, but so long ago that it's been forgotten.

I recommend it.

>nipples
MODS
MOOOOOOOOODS

Integral Trees doesn't get enough love.

>You could also go north or south. Its width is about 1.600.000 miles
Mine was a bit more narrow. Say, somewhere in the hundreds of miles across.

Had one setting that was basically a flat earth..as far as most people knew of. The world was really round, but the flat part was a large chunk of the planet lifted up into the air.

Due to a large scale magic war that happened over a thousand years ago, the land got corrupted, so a massive cleansing spell was cast, causing healing water to flood the planet, while the population was gathered onto one of the last un-corrupted lands, which was then lifted up until the planet was safe enough to go back down to.

There's also a second floating continent that was lifted up with technology instead of magic(splinter faction that wanted to give the common man the ability to stand up to the Magocracy ruling at the time), and everyone so often that'll take a ship down to find parts of land that are considered clean enough to pull up and add to their own land.

What most people on the Technocratic land don't know is that due to them having to constantly expand to meet it's growing population, they occasionally pull up land that isn't quite "fixed" yet, which is going top cause problems down the line.

Was taken for a Golden Sun rewrite I was going to try to make that I decided wasn't happening, so I took the notes and made a TTRPG setting with them.

a fidget spinner

I hate that those are a thing, a friend works in early childhood ed and she won't stop bitching about them

>For example imagine a world that is an endless maze of rooms that would typically be found in a wealthy house

bitch you rang?

It turns out that certain electromagnetic physical laws don't apply if you allow infinitely large structures.

For example, it is entirely possible to create a sort of magnetic monopole if you have an infinitely long charge that rotates in place. Basically instead of fundamental point particles you have fundamental line particles.

I tried imagining a universe built out of line particles but it was too strange for me.

I built a spelljammer setting that had smaller crystal spheres inside of a regular one. One had a scaled down version of the solar system in it, another had a small ringworld that was perhaps 1000 miles in diameter, I forget exactly. Big enough for a campaign world.

Here's mine, I haven't thought about it a whole lot yet and things are subject to change.

See pic related, there are multiple suns which move in patterns far above the world which we'll call a flat plane for the sake of convenience. The best land is near the core of the Earth, which has a distant black sun and a central silver sun, and for these people things work much like our world. The exclusion is dim sun period events, where that silver sun and the black sun swing by at the right time to exchange patterns, running their cycles one or more times before switching back to their original sites. The black sun has a shell of ebony which saps some of the color from the lands it covers while the silver sun is away, and the black sun does not affect vampires unlike the silver sun. Dim sun periods lead to somewhat cooler temperatures, weaker crop yields due to lower sunlight, reduced energy and mood in all sun-dwelling creatures, and the stirring of hungry beasts and men alike. Usually they lead to some restlessness, economic decline, and social tension, but it is rare for anything serious to happen solely because of a dim sun event. The lands formerly warmed by the black sun liven up during a "dim sun period" and the sea creatures of the dark waters move north towards the black sun, while humans from the core continents take the opportunity to trade, raid, and explore the southern/outer lands where there are few humans and the creatures are strange, adapted for the more severe effects they experience during dim sun periods.

With this sort of thing I just abide by the rule of cool instead of climate realism. Far to the south, under the black sun, there are dark jungle biomes which have adapted to the dimmer light and can adequately harvest energy from the black sun, with mechanisms to preserve themselves during the short periods when the silver sun crosses over these lands.

to clarify, pic related is only semi-related, the world isn't Earth and it doesn't work the same way as in the pic, this is just for perspective

Are you me?

I've been working on a setting for Spelljammer that is basically a bunch of moon-sized worlds orbiting a Gas giant of monolithic proportions where its rumored the gods live as the colossal storms raging in its atmosphere look eerily like eyes to the peoples living on said worlds.

Had a setting that was a mix of this and Demon Souls and Stalker

Magical tears to the elemental plane of dungeons were causing the world to turn into dungeons

Any space that was sufficiently dark and not occupied could become a dungeon

This meant cupboards could suddenly become secret passages to small goblin nests

And wine cellar frequently became infested by giant rats

These dungeons need to be cleared out and their dungeon core looted to shut then down and return them to normal

At least one continent has been claimed completely by dungeon and the corruption as well as the monsters are slowly crossing the sea

Adventurer guilds clear out dungeons for hire and the magical loot found inside, which can be very valuable

So the world teeters on the brink of being swallowed by this alien other, but humans being humans we've made a booming industry and black market out of it

A series of entirely enclosed caverns. Each contains a magic portal to teleport to another random cavern. There is no other way to move from one to another, barring a stone that lets you return to a "hub" cave and three other chosen caves. This stone only works after finding some MacGuffin in each cave, though.

For whatever reason, partially-submerged types of land are just really common on this planet. Lots of marshes and mangrove forests. The driest thing you'll find is a floodplain. Maybe even a hill in a floodplain.

Merfolk are this setting's orcs.

The world is virtual (not virtual like a computer) where only those bearing fire enforce any kind of permanence upon it. Cities must stay constantly lit, there is no sun, etc.

>For example imagine a world that is an endless maze of rooms that would typically be found in a wealthy house
I've had a series of reoccurring dreams taking place is exactly such a setting.

They were weird.

A 2D world.

>my players were just /v/ tards who think ringworlds started with Halo.

You have no idea how sad this makes me.

oh boy, so many ideas for settings...
for 4th ed D&D,
I had an idea for a setting where the element spirits and the primal spirits created a world, so everyone had either elemental powers or primal powers, and then they also had the choice of being trained to use their body (martial) or their mind (psionic) so everyone had 2 power sources from which to pick abilities.
Dragons were a perfect melding of both primal and elemental, and so were the only ones who had powers from both of those.
the bad guys would use the shadow power source and were trying to return creation back to darkness.

for Reign,
PCs are people who have hunted and killed one of the Great Beasts of the setting, animals that have been magically mutated to be bigger and stronger then normal, by killing one, you have become tougher then a normal human, your weapon is now magical and only you can wield it, and you can shapeshift into the beast you killed. You can also do magic (each beast has a special ability and you can use that ability when in human form. the more beasts you kill the more powers you have) questions to be answered are where do the beasts come from, why are they attacking humans. the bad guy knows the answers and is using them to amass an army to take over the world.

George RR Martin?

BECMI D&D / Gamma World:
England does standard spell magic, France creates magic items, France has decided to build a magic nuke and destroy England. English saboteurs set off the nuke when trying to destroy it, now France is a massive magic storm that is leaking magic that is mutating everything to the east of it.

I've been thinking about doing a campaign based partially on this insane book, with some tweaks it'd make for a rocking Sword & Sorcery/Planet setting

Oh hey, the realm of Aysle (TORG) was pretty much like that, except the sun in the middle bobbed up and down (because the gods made it so) bringing alternating night and day to both sides of the world.

An idea for a setting I've had for a while but never used:

>enormous (light-years across), spherical hollow inside a plane of infinite earth
>gravity pushes away from the center of the hollow
>most of it is very faintly lit (think in the middle of nowhere on a moonless night, but even darker), with miniature suns orbiting giant stone monoliths embedded in the ground, though there are a few stars that move randomly and don't have monoliths
>entire hollow is always at exactly the same temperature everywhere
>lands around monoliths are full of plant life, while dark regions are covered in forests of luminescent mushrooms and fungus
>lit oceans are fairly normal, while dark oceans are full of eldritch creatures
>no elves, but most humans are more elf-like than normal
>dwarves run vast underground empires that link to each other and surface empires by spiderwebs of tunnels
>halflings are indistinguishable from human children, very susceptible to suggestions, and are often used without their knowledge as spies by the dwarves
>orcs are a failed attempted by a long-dead wizard to create a race of servants
>race of pitch-black coloured, dark adapted humanoids that live out in the dark regions

Is it shit, and if so, what needs changing?

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such exceptional taste

I'd drop the uniform temperature thing; climate variation is more interesting than no climate variation.

I guess. It's there so that thermodynamics fags don't pick apart the setting, but a slight variation wouldn't hurt

Uniform temperature is weirder thermodynamically than most other things. You have a heat sink with infinite mass, so you can get away with anything. If something is generating heat inside the hollow, it won't slowly warm up and bake everyone or anything.

The weirdest thing thermodynamically are the luminescent mushrooms. Where are they getting their food from? Normally mushrooms eat dead stuff but something had to have died there first. This works out if your world is very old and there used to be more sun-monoliths. The mushroom forests are then consuming the remains of ancient forests, where there used to be light. Which is actually pretty cool! Adding thermodynamics to your setting usually is. (Unless it's just someone being a dick.)

What is this from?

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, however it's recommended that instead of reading the original version which was written in a manner that was considered incredibly archaic and hard to read even when it was published in 1912, you should read the version John Stoddard wrote in 2011; The Night Land, A Story Retold which retells it in more modern English

>which was written in a manner that was considered incredibly archaic and hard to read even when it was published in 1912
That's very interesting. Is there a particular reason why it was written like that or just the guy writing it was weird?

I've read a few old books (granted most were Jules Verne translated into English) but they never seemed to hard to read at all.

I'm planning to do my next campaign in a world that's entirely on a vertical (slightly tilted) wall. I'm talking miles and miles of cliff-side in every direction.
Gravity still pulls you downwards, but chances are you will be caught by a plant or structure below you. Entire mapped kingdoms exist vertically. Sometimes there are folds in the wall, causing two parts of land to look out on eachother.
The PC's will be dropped in from the real world as contemporary humans, so this world will seem alien even to them.

There actually is a 'top' of the cliff. Those who travel there will find a horizontal surface with nothing but thin sand with strange magical properties. Those for travel to the bottom will find an incredibly thick 'jungle', filled with horrific crawling plants and lovecraftian scenery.

The entire thing is loosly based on some of Plato's philosophies. Players dropping in from another world obviously relates to the allegory of the cave. The cliff is an embodiment of Plato's theory of ascension, where the bottom is nothing but raw, unfiltered matter (the jungle) and the top is nothing but the immaterial idea (the dessert).
Most kingdoms will also adopt a system in three guilds: scholars, adventurers and craftsmen, which relates to Plato's idea for the ideal society in three castes: the philosophers, the military and the workers, respectively.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear them.

I also think Plato's philosophy is entirely shit relating to the real world, but it gives quite a bit of inspiration for fantasy.

And with less Satan, presumably.

No one is ever going to get it, but I guess it's fine otherwise.

No strong feelings either way.

Does it really matter if the reference is gotten though? Just because it was inspired by such a thing doesn't mean it has to be obvious.
Not him by the way, just a random user's thoughts on the matter.

>No one is ever going to get it
That's alright, I don't expect them to be looking for inspiration from classic philosophers in their game of pretend. It's just a tool for me to get inspiration and make the setting weird in a way that's not just random.

>What are some unusual or just plain weird ideas to build a world around?
Sunless Sea ?

Once played in a setting where everything was a tree.

>Mutants and undead are common place because of so much toxicity and life energy mixing
>No idea what's higher up, speculations involve gods and aliens
>The rest is just ocean, forever.

It was a simple enough concept

Had the same dreams but endless mobile homes. They were stacked as well as side by side.

That does sound pretty similar: in my version the moons and the planets and the sun -are- the gods, at least as far as people believe, but in truth the lords of Law live in the gas giant.

No eyes, though.

sounds neat, does the wall carry on indefinitely or does it loop around to form a vast mesa?

Dang I didn't know Sillage got an english translation.
Das great.

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An infinite world, like Minecraft.

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>Is there a particular reason why it was written like that
I can't speak for the guy and I haven't read it, but there are a lot of reasons I can see for that. Right now I'm in the process of planning out the plot of some books I'm starting in 6 years or so, I plan to use vague or even improper grammar coupled with thousands of rare, outdated, and invented non-lore words thrown into common dialogue and narration alongside hundreds of invented lore terms. In addition, the first book is drivel. It resolves zero plot lines and opens countless, most of which are abandoned until they become relevant 6 or 7 books later. The plot is needlessly complex and since it doesn't flow in chronological order, impossible to fluently assemble into words. Ideally, every plot element mentioned should open up multiple more, requiring that you look like a rambling sciolist to try and explain it. This should make it feel more complicated than it really is. The difficulty of explaining it has less to do with the complexity of the plot itself and more to do with the fact that it jumps back and forth years during and between chapters to intentionally screw with the perceived storyline.

I just want this to be an illegible and grueling waste of time but still bearing fruits, like Gurdijeff's work. You should check out his book Tales of Beelzebub to his Grandson if you're into illegible English translations. The book itself is concerned with the vagueness of language among many other things. Gurdijeff was a mystic so rather than pushing his ideas on other people, he wanted them to earn knowledge through the unnecessary work and commitment of transcribing his works. That seems to be a common reason for people wanting things to be difficult to read.

I had a dream similar to this once. In it the whole of civilization was built into a large vertical stone pillar, which had no "top" or "bottom", because if you went far enough up or down, you'd eventually end up back where you started, like those old video games where you'd go off one side of the screen and end up in the same place on the opposite.

If I can remember right, the inside of the pillar was hollow and there were openings in the sides where people would build long bridges to reach the opposite side of the pillar more quickly.

The setting was more modern though, weird shit like housing tracts built up in a sloping spirals, freeways and highways that connected everything, etc.

Exceptional fucking taste, user.

I couldn't get this in it's full resolution; I don't know how Pinterest works.

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A setting where magic is so powerful that any species capable of using it would most certainly blow up their own planet.
A few races discover magic after being able to leave their home and survive.
Most life that becomes technologically advanced however has strong anti-magic auras and almost never discover it and come up with ideas like "dark matter" to explain its effects.
Instead of gama-ray bursts and such there are waves of magical energies.
Planets with life on them suddenly getting hit by strong negative magic would become necrotic worlds.

"Mad Hatter" World. Every so often the King of the Gods stands up and decrees 'CHANGE PLACES'. All the gods shuffle portfolios and continents and islands shuffle position too.

>CTRL+F Last Exile
>No Results

I am disappoint, Veeky Forums.

It largely wasted the setting, but I guess that's an anime tradition.

I want to make a setting that's sort of nobledark The Borrowers.

Even had a thread on Veeky Forums about a while ago.

Was even going to make a shitty pet project video game, but I am lazy and cant draw for shit, and the Blender and Unity programs have been sitting on my computer for a good year or two now.

I sort of think of it like Bronze Age Mad Max centered around you palying as an Conan the Barbarian-esque character.

But hey, whatever.

Filename

Well I think the injection of an opinion was valid because the post implied (albeit utilizing hyperbole) Last exile to be such a shining beacon that it's oversight would be disgraceful. Considering this, the point of quality is kind of open to contention.

>Last exile to be such a shining beacon that it's oversight would be disgraceful.

Because it is and only a tryhard Hipster would think otherwise.

Why is it that good?

I had an idea like an alderson disk, but instead of being solid its the ring of a gas giant. Lots of rocks floating in space, with a few habitable moons orbiting it. everything is relatively fixed, so there are trade routes between the planets and forts out on the ring feild, strange creatures. Would be high magic setting so i could hand wave away shit like being able to breathe in space and gravity with magic.

Penumbra, their abandoned homeworld.

There's like, paint or really tight latex or something.

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"God is dead and we have killed him," taken literally.

Mortal conquerors have battled through heaven and killed God for his power. His corpse crashed onto the planet below, and forms most of its significant geography, now fossilized and worn away into mountains.

There is an ecosystem of the cosmos just as there is on earth. Gods' bodies decay, preyed upon the equivalent of aether microbes, after which sprout lesser deities. Some grow more powerful, even becoming a pantheon of predators, absorbing others' power.

Unlike the distant, clockmaker-style creator, these gods roam the physical world, or stride over it, striving to reach the empty heavens and establish a cosmic dominion.

Basically a modified d&d cosmology. There are a bunch of self-contained multiverses suspended in the far realms, each with inner planes that create substrates for the material, outer planes that imbue them with concepts, an astral which serves as a carrier between them all and a sort of cytoplasm, and an ethereal sheath around the material that acts as a filtering mechanism. Multiple multiverses are connected to a really huge far realms entity, and there multiple of these far realms entities. They sustain the multiverses connected to them like a giant heart that pulses these energies in and out of the planes, and they determine the arbitrary elements that compose the outer and inner planes in order to see how they manifest in the material. The outer planes also exist in a feedback loop with the material, so each one is constantly redefining the other, while the inner planes remain relatively stable. Every multiverse is an experiment because these huge heart-entities are curious about controlled existence as their far-realms existences are largely uncontrolled.

They're sort of lovecraftian but they're not evil or anything like that, although they do define what evil even is. In the one I'm focused on a race discovered the true madness of their multiverse and decided to seize control of it and separate it from the big god entity so that they could mold it entirely in their own image- predictable, stable, logical and enslaved.

>the world is a big ol' game of musical chairs
>once an era, things get a little crazy as the cosmos fights for a seat in reality
>every time there's a shuffle, there's one less slot for a landmass, one less name in the pantheon, one less pillar holding up creation.
>it's fine though, the rest are all just off enjoying the rest of the 'party'
>you could travel 'there', to those former parts of reality, but things got weird in the intervening period
>and that's where the other planes came from!

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Its original never been done before type deal, hope it doesnt fizzle out and the game gets to feel alive.

I'm looking to run a space fantasy campaign in the vein of of Spelljammer but with the cosmopolitan feel of space like Star Wars.

I've concluded that I want to keep my systems in crystal shells, but I don't know how detailed I should make them. It's common for there to be just one main point of interest in a system, and travel is done between these points.

Spelljammer however suggests developing each crystal sphere as an entire system, since Spelljammer chiefly was used as a method of incorporating space into D&D and travelling from campaign world to campaign world.

Any suggestions of what method I should use?