We Create A Horror/Surreal Setting

>The gouge is actually shrinking, but the land doesn't seem to heal up the same it used to.

>The gouge is in fact healing, but the land is dead and blighated, pulsing with anames unnatural malevolence.

Under certain circumstances negative effects get +2/3rds (0.666...). A nine planet alignment on halloween could get +6 or so on bad things like hit rolls and damage. (Blood god reference?)

House rules change every session or on special events. Like hiding is 10% easier during a time special to a thief god.

>Many of the Undead, whilst nowhere near as powerful as a True Dragon, can still lay waste to whole kingdoms if given the chance.
>Where these terrible draconic wills tread, thick miasma poisons the land.

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>everything is a variation on themes already explored thoroughly in Bloodborne and Dark Souls

>Strange constructs made of crystal hang in the night sky, humming an alien song as they float along their paths.

They devour your brainstem and live inside your head. They have access to all your brain, in so far as you aren't consciously and actively and intently opposing them, and they control your body far beyond it's physical limits. If you somehow remove them, you die, unless you somehow also have a spare and compatible brainstem.

Mix body horror with magic horror, why not?

Undead draconic horrors that eat people's brainstems and assume Direct CONTROL? I can dig it.

> dragons are related to demons and devils in the way that Satan takes the form of a dragon in Revelations

> demons/devils achieve greatest power when they take true physical form (dragon)

> undead is a cheaper, easier method at the cost of much power

>In order to combat the threat of Draconic Intelligences, an order of Hunters has been developed in order to study and defend against this threat.

>The fae have been dead for millennia, dead from fighting the draconic foes, however their influence has not left this realm, their 'glamour' twists and warps reality without there influence, deer of bark that need blood to live wander the woods, birds made of bone and dead leaves fly through the blackened trees of their former domains.

>Even the lands that once held the Courts of the fae are desolate and empty, their once inhabitants long since dead.
>But ancient power still flows through those cold ruins, all it needs is one to help rekindle it.

>there are rumors of forges that burn with the heat of the fae. These forges are said to transform any metallic object into a lightweight and virtually indestructible relic of its former self, but this process forever snuffs the magic of the mystical forge. These relics are also said to be consuming, slowly ripping the soul out of its bearer and replacing it with a wild and ferocious spirit that seeks eternal vengeance against the living and undead alike.

dude seriously stop making this thread

dude seriously people have fun on these threads.

I don't know what the hell you are talking about. Not every person you dislike, or every thread for that matter, is made by the same person.

>The few remaining kingdoms are some of the most protected places in the world, and are some of the few that are safe from the corroding miasma permeating the various wastelands.

>not every person you dislike is made by the same person
what did he mean by this?

And yet this exact thread with a different image is made bi-weekly.

Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. But we all know that you are too damn lazy to provide actually proof for your claims, and all you care about is your autistic shitflinging.

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>the order of Hunters is actually controlled by one faction of dragons, being used as a pawn in the greater dragon wars they fight among themselves

>[DRAGON CONSPIRACIES INTENSIFY]

This sounds like a better version of Numenera.

Huh, I completely forgot about Numenera actually. Whatever happened to that?

It was basically D&D and also not very good in terms of mechanics or setting.

Hmm, that's kinda sad. It looked promising. Have we heard anything about Torment?

General consensus seems to be "meh". Lots of exposition, bland and poorly written, not terrible but when you have stuff like Pillars of Eternity why would you bother.

Yeah, so much potential yet it was all wasted. Especially when they decided ohalf-ass most of four the world's lore in favor off "It was all ancient tech hurr".

>its another 12-year-old crying about scifi in his fantasy

I'm suddenly reminded of that time the Wizardry devs got FUCKING DEATH THREATS because they put laser guns, robots, space ships and computers in their fantasy world.

I remember carnis mundus was getting worked on here.
I wonder what happened to it?

>The sun's blood can be seen to be leaking from it's wounds, which after travelling an eternity through the aether falls to the earth as enormous shards of burning boody ice

Numenera *wasnt* fantasy though, it was just a poorly written attempt to create a scifi setting that failed horribly. I will admit that some of the ideas behind it were good, but they were executed terribly. Anyway, this isn't what the thread is about either way.

I spoke to the guy making it, he's a busy dude.

Numenera just seemed like weirdness for the sake of weirdness.

Much like this dragon mega-conspiracy game.

Except this is more fun.

Indeed it is.
>Worms of withering light flow throw the decayed earth, feasting upon the remains of the Dead that litter the earth.

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Every fucking time we have this thread, some ass hat comes in and says "oooh the sun is spooky and shit". Stop it.

I have noticed that the sun meeting a painful end is indeed a common thing in Worldbuilding threads.

It's been done

>The world and planet as we know it is actually the brain of a titanic creature we live on
>all the terraforming and mining we've done to its brain has caused it to go insane
>now off its rocker, the titan's psionic powers to transform the world into a hellscape of nightmares.

I might hit that.

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That doesn't sound like a good idea user.

>The Black Heart bleeds with the nightmares of mortal kind, flesh parting and dark liquid flowing free where night terrors and Infernal dreams dance.

While nothing really excuses death threats, the idea to shove their fucking sci-fi garbage in there was absolutely mind-boggling retarded. The same goes for Might and Magic series that for some god-forsaken reason copied the idea.

I have nothing against settings that rely on sci-fi logic but fantasy aesthetics or vice versa, and in theory even combination of both fantastic and sci-fi elements in single setting can work, but my god you actually have to know what the fuck are you dying and why.
Wizardly and MM were just shit at this.

Is there an SCP based on this image? There should be. Something different from the Flesh That Hates though.

>No one is happy

archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/subject/surreal setting/
Kill yourself

This is almost exactly the setting I'm working on right now, except it's psychic noise from the collective unconscious driving the planet mad

Wowie! You actually went out of your way to provide half-assed "proof" for your shitflinging. Truly impressive

This is truly the darkest of settings: the screeching of autists trying to win an online argument with strangers over something that doesn't matter. It's like witnessing the elaborate rituals of some dark god of banality.

bane?

Fuck this is great. I even have a non-horror game this would work well in.

I do not wish to get into a screeching contest over this crap. Let us get back on track hmm?
>The Order Of Hunters has split off into many branching orders and groups, all connected to but distinguishable from the main branch.

You people do realize that surrealism and world-building generally don't go that well together because worldbuilding is inherently heavily speculative, and surrealism is not a speculative endeavor, right?

>Library full of forbidden knowledge. Librarians are willing to read the information to visitors, but they are sirens and too long in their care will result in enthrallment. Despite the risk it is still safer than reading the texts directly.

Surrealism and world building aren't mutually exclusive. It just requires a different set of reasoning, like the mindset of fables, tall-tales, legends, or dreams. Lovecraft's Dreamworld stories or the Sunless Sea/Fallen London setting are super surreal with extensive worldbuilding lore.

People freaked out when Kelvin calculated that the sun would probably be dying sooner or later and it's kind of become synonymous with the end of our reality; or atleast it used to. See stuff like The Night Land for a fantastic contemporary take on that fear (contemporary with Kelvin's ideas, that is). Incidentally we had a pretty solid thread on The Night Land yesterday.

A relatively recent game that did this was The Banner Saga; the sun suddenly stops in the sky one afternoon and this is seen as a sign of the end times. The setting is quite grim in general as its gods were confirmed to have died a good while before. Good shit.

>Surrealism and world building aren't mutually exclusive.
They kinda are.

>Lovecraft's Dreamworld stories or the Sunless Sea/Fallen London setting are super surreal
They kinda aren't, Fallen London in particular.

Now don't get me wrong: this is not criticism of those works. They are pretty damn great. But it's not what surrealism means. Surrealism is about exploration of human psyché. That makes the root of it in meaningful psychological symbolism, and with overriding causal logic with symbolic language. And that is something you can't do in a world based on speculative fiction: that is one that is inherently based in form of internal rules and consistency constraints.

You can have strange settings, and you can have aesthetics trying to re-create certain specific surreal work, but it's not a surreal work in it self. You might even attempt to create a surreal story, but the whole point is that he story will not be driven by logic of the settings, but purely by meaningful symbolism UNIQUE TO THAT INDIVIDUAL STORY. The "logic" of surreal aesthetics cannot be driven by consistent rules.

Fair points, well made. If we were talking about actual, legitimate surrealism then you're correct, having any sort of structure or consistent logic undermines the whole endeavor.

However I'd argue that most of the people on this thread are more looking for surrealist trappings as opposed to legitimate artistic surrealism.

After all, you could extend your argument to 'surrealism is mutual exclusive to any structured system,' in which case what's the point of it being here?

The point of threads like this is to put the horror first, to which surrealist trappings lend themselves very nicely, which is why they're fun to speculate on. In the end it's not true surrealism, since there is a consistent logic underpinning it all, but that logic is far enough removed from our day to day logic to give the impression of surrealism.

But if you want to be really technical about it, yes, surrealism isn't the right word. Really fuck'd weird would be more accurate.

>However I'd argue that most of the people on this thread are more looking for surrealist trappings as opposed to legitimate artistic surrealism.
While that is true and I'm well aware of that, acknowledging that fact would not give me an opportunity to flaunt my pretentious knowledge of artistic movement theory and basic frameworks of speculative fiction here, now would it?
And the thread would not get bumped in the process.

Sure, yeah. I know. I'm a dick with an insomnia. I know that people use the term losely, to define aesthetics roughly approximating the impression some of surreal works provide and mostly explore possibilities of strange, absurd, highly expressive iconography. Sadly, you ruined my fun, and now I'll have to go and try to sleep again. Thanks a lot.

>The ancient texts that the Librarians gather and catalogue are host to alien powers that can shatter ones mind, or even bring them into the thrall of alien wills.

>it's not proof because I say so

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>there is no sun
Are you spooked yet user?