Veeky Forums OC thread

I'm writing an original system, and I've been sitting on it for months because I'm at the point where I need playtesters. I have all the systems I think I need at this point in place, I have them tuned as best I can without seeing them in action, I know how everything in there works and what my intentions are.

All I need right now is to expand the fluff, and get players to test it so I can tweak the values and see if I've forgotten anything, repeat until done.

Then I need to pump up the formatting, have it edited, maybe pay for art and I'm good.

But I can't get a group together for testing. I've had so much dead time on this project I've even started planning expansions.

>what am I working on

Factions for a space opera setting. Currently have:

Humans: do human things, realise they're weak, and try trade and negotiation to survive. After getting stomped by an alien admiral going rogue and capturing three systems before his own side could execute him for breaking the truce they upgraded their ships to be less shit.

Astorans: The worst excesses of Elf assholery with added love of bureaucracy and paperwork, a class system so strictly enforced a ship captain has two levels of intermediaries before they have to talk to the "scum classes" personally and wave motion guns on most of their fleet. They aren't even that hot, being tall, gaunt and mostly dull shades of grey-blue.

The Corene Intellect: An energy being whose ego was so huge it divided itself into millions of shards to work out how they could BECOME AS GODS. It built an AI controlled fleet to live on, which is happily stripmining planets from orbit without much care for the locals.

The Coral Bodies: Psychic Space Coral. It drifts around, crashes into a world and over millennia destroys it in the process of reproducing. Also causes psychic powers, birth defects and climate fuckery. Really dangerous and all but impossible to get rid of once it takes root.

Telesk: A seemingly friendly race who, unfortunately, have short tempers and long memories. Rather like dorfs, if they like you they'll save your ass, if you annoy them they'll probably still be spreading rumours about your grandchildren. They don't really enjoy war, but are surprisingly good at it because any Telesk who willingly volunteers to fight outside of national service must, therefore, already be most dangerous.

It's formulaic (spooky ayys, space kaiju faction, blue ayys and squats) but fun.

I like that

Any other reasons?

Food, mostly.

Monstergirls don't have the taboo, and human is damned tasty when you get down to it.

I have a few things I'm working on, I'm trying to convince a few of my friends to try TTRPGs, trying to finish my homebrew setting and am trying to come up with the DnDest DnD campaign that ever DnDed

Why do I get a feeling the Humans are crapped on by everyone. Might be because the last time I played a sci-fi game, humans were weak and pathetic while the GM and friends wanked about their OC donut alien races which were for all intents and purposes humans with stuff added on them

Currently brainstorming ways a hunter could distinguish different species of polythrope from the traits preset on their humanoid form.

Also considering what could/would happen in the disease infects a different species than usual.

So far I have arrays of small oozing black spots on the back, forearms, and calves, with the size and arrangement these spots telling of both the age of the monster and the general size of its feathers and quills. Blindness is common in all older polythrope, but changes to pupil dilation, color, and shape occur at different rates among species. Fingernails tend become thick and black with age, and may naturally take a pointed, curved, shape as they grow. The average length and width, along with the color, is another hint to the specific species of terror. In some of the most ravenous monsters, the human form will have bony growths of cartilage along the length of the nose, possibly ending in a hook. Baldness and a red rash on the neck as scalp may also be an indicator, but some scholars argue that such ailments are of a different curse entirely.

Also, fuck phone posting and auto correct.

That's already some pretty cool stuff.

Well so far in the backstory humans met the Astorans, demanded an exchange of ambassadors and opening of negotiations, and got it.

They fell through, and before they could be reconvened a group of Astoran warmongers assassinated their diplomats in a false flag to try and start a war, but failed.

So one of them grabs a fleet of madmen and invades anyway. He is a shit commander, and all he manages to do is capture three backwater systems, run out of supplies and get shot by his subordinates for being a fucking idiot. During which time mankind captures an Astoran ship, learns a lot about their tech and gives their empire's reputation a kicking.

The Astoran government panics, purges the admiralty as reparation for this, and accepts a fairly punitive treaty to help rebuild.

Enter Admiral Caslok, or space elf Hitler. He worms his way to become supreme fleet commander, then uses his mastery of paperwork and politics to fill the admiralty with his cronies before staging a coup and declaring war on Earth.

Mankind, however, was tipped off to this by a defector and his invasion is met by a fully mobilized human fleet of significantly better ships.

It's not an easy fight, and it's much more of one than he was expecting.

Relations with the other races are:

Telsek: they have so many different factions they don't have a single foreign policy. Most of them like humans well enough.

Corene: Efforts to reason with them along the lines of "let us evacuate this planet before you break it apart for minerals" were met with autistic robot screeching and WE WILL BECOME AS GODS. They are now at "purge on sight" threat level.

Corals: they're giant laser shooting rocks, they poison humans by existing, they eat planets, they don't give a shit. Destroy on sight.

My DMV is having all of us write an alien race

What are some cool cultures I could steal from to make this better

Even better is that a lot of those signs are typically seen in the oldest people. Liver spots are sometimes mistaken as black spots, dark, thick, curled nails are common with age, and black sharper nails are even a fashion among woman. Blindness is rare as our world, but eyesight in this setting still diminishes with age. Dry and scaly skin on the hands and feet is also a sign, one that is frustratingly common.

Hooked noses is a racial stereotype and physical trait of one of the ethnic minorities too. (not based off the Jews you imagination deprived cocks, they've borrowed features inspired by the Tatars and Evenks, on a thick foundation derive from Australian Aboriginals)

One thing I am debating is whether infected woman birth/lay eggs after their ovulation period, but people tend to lose their shit at even the slightest hint of sexual organs or sexuality.

Ah, and another day of flavor: these monsters are part of a triad of intelligent monsters that use aggressive mimicry to blend in with their prey populations. The triad is based on the Three Mystic Apes pictorial maxim. Specifically, they "see no evil"

>Department of Motor Vehicles
What?

It's an American thing, they give you time-consuming activities while you wait in line to help pass the time.

Creating a setting where all sentient beings have a collective psychic force that takes their imaginations and runs with it. Reputation is key here since your magic powers are mostly steeped in what people believe about you.

Got inspired by some random thread about a villain using Twitter. It's not very well developed yet in terms of system mechanics and the fluff.

Maybe from the Miao or Basha peoples?

Autocorrect my friend

DMv would be a lot cooler than the DMV tho

I'm trying to pull together a bunch of things right now for space adventures.

The magic system needs costs and skill requirements figured out. The psionics needs genetics and an actual list of talents and skills. And I need to figure out a new pocket of space races because I don't feel like having yet another first contact from the "main" galactic community.

They got nice dicks, and some of 'em can get very creative with their hands.

Settings mostly.

>Standard cyberpunk city-world
>twist in the inhabitants where contacted by a !not-god-like entity during their middle ages
>entity provides sporadic leaps in technology via induced visions that man has to reverse engineer
>ghost in the shell levels of augmentation. Sentient machines, 2 dollar clone limbs
>massive income gap where workers are the wealthy and everyone else gets state sponsored food, shelter and clothing with zero entertainment or education

>Bleak ass frontier planet
>Alien "sci-fi" Boxy crt and green everywhere
>world is almost totally barren, featureless and impossibly large
>wealthy in rare minerals so settlements are mining and mining support
>scale is fucked "nearby" is a 100 hour drive and far away tends to mean thousands of miles
>atmospheric anomalies mean there is no visible sky. Just a dark layer of cloud that keeps the world in constant night
>unending darkness plus massive size and featureless surroundings erode human circadian rhythm and sleep cycles
>time looses all meaning when all you have is a clock that no longer agrees with the body

>fantasy post apocalypse
>magical space meteorite hits fantasy kingdom. Corrupts local wizards investigating it
>shits corrupted dirt into the atmosphere and brings about fantasy nuclear winter
>plant and animal life is mutated or wiped out
>humans survive by building on mutated super-crabs and move when magical weather fucks an area up
>original wizards are now an order of corrupted peacekeeper types. Dependent on the corruption they purify land for the humans, keep livestock within safe tolerances and handle education
>skills are family locked to try and prevent clannism. there is ONE family per town who can make clothing, farm or read and write