In a thread on reddit, someone said that they didn’t see what kind of problems the setting would present, and I thought that u/lawrencelot’s response was excellent enough to save and share here:
Someone stubbed their toe but has a fear of doctors. An organization develops a robot that can replace a deceased loved one. A family of badgers have built their home under railway tracks (note: this recently happened in my country). Alien contact. Someone is mean to a racist. Trees are growing their roots through nuclear waste from the past. A package was delivered to someone’s neighbour and that neighbour ordered the same thing. Clouds start forming mysterious shapes. A kid’s balloon flew away. All inhabitants of a city start having nightmares of an apocalypse. Someone throws soup at a famous painting to ask attention for robot rights.
It makes me really happy to see that other people get the concept, especially because I don’t pretend to have enough imagination to come up with as many ideas as this, so I’m really hoping that this game inspires others to come up with ideas like this that I can play some day.
For those who want a more straightforward dungeon crawler, or a spy thriller: A bunker full of old world billionaires and their acolytes wake up from cryo sleep to discover that not only did the world survive the global climate wars without them, but society no longer has a place for them at all. Seeking to regain control and to carve out a place for themselves at the top, they fire up automated divide-and-conquer tools designed to assess the weaknesses and divisions in a society and to exploit them to sway public opinion. Over time, they escalate to cyber attacks, and real world murder.
A survivalist cache is discovered by a deconstruction crew. It’s recent and casts several dissapearances from the last few years in a new and worrying light. The players (possibly members of the Civil Defense?) are called in to find the survivalists and mediate things before the local villagers pick up violence again and take it into their own hands. (I’d pictured this being set earlier in the timeline, but it could be a part of the world where things are still a bit tougher)
There are investigations which can involve environmental crimes like identifying polluters - who left these barrels of chemical waste in the woods or in an abandoned warehouse? Who poisoned this river?
The players could be tasked with escorting something weird like radioactive waste on its way to a modern reactor that can use it as fuel and make it less dangerous
Something mysterious found in the municipal reuse system
I’ve also read about a game where the young players decided to skip the main quest and focus on the farm the DM gave them at the beginning of the story, causing a bunch of improvised rules and storytelling around growing crops, expanding their land holdings, trading with people in town etc. Not every game needs a threat to be fun with the right group of players. Sometimes the challenge of occupying a very different world is challenge enough.
Really like the first one in particular
I’ll admit I’d been thinking of your playstyle
I love this.
The first one reminds me – and this is somewhat silly – of an episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers this network TV series from the '90s.
Anyway, there’s an episode where a team of a elite Nazis awaken from suspended animation in a bunker somehow far underneath Metropolis, and upon determining that the Third Reich fell, they set about infiltrating society and reassembling the Nazi movement. It’s a very cheesy episode, but as a premise I found it delightfully direct in giving the protagonists a wonderfully hammy anachronistic arch villain to oppose. I think that’s an evergreen story premise.
Adding some more from a recent discord chat:
A cool investigation campaign with an emphasis on cyber skills could be delving into old world corporate research files, buried/abandoned for not being profitable enough. Perhaps looking for medical trial data or drug formulas for a rare disease.
There’s also the world of legal archives, things like land ownership and water rights. The book The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi was all about a near-furure scramble to claim legal ownership over a river in a perpetual-drought-plagued, fractured Untied States, using hundred year old treaty paperwork. And with the kinda scrappy, crime-based Los Vegas water knives facing off against the more cleancut CIA-style California Intelligence service in a bloody espionage campaign. It’s not a solarpunk story by any means, but it’s good. A cool piece of the FA background is around the very effective Land Back campaigns in the setting’s history and the legal framework they used. Something like that could be a cool structure for a story campaign. Finding treaties, contracts, or other leverage in returning tribal land.
Also, and mostly unrelated to these ideas, I keep thinking about the stories I’ve read about goodwill employees finding fifty year old grenades, service weapons, war trophies, and other crazy stuff in boxes donated to them. I can’t help but think that in a setting with a huge library economy, where a lot of stuff used is probably donated, some wild and mysterious items find their way into a drop off box.
https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Braindance if braindance tech isn’t already a thing, it could be an awesome adventure plot point
That’s really cool!
I think recording someone’s internal experience would be theoretically possible. It’s an interesting idea.
I think The Naked Pirates need to be explored more. To me, the idea of a world that doesn’t need secrets is a very attractive one, and a villain that attempts to achieve that goal through privacy violations is fascinating. Adventure could explore the reasons people keep secrets and how isolating having such secrets can be. I also think that NostroCramo should be a group of Faithless Reality Syndrome sufferers who want to escape the simulation–an unintended side effect of the drastic increase of the use of VR in society.
That’s cool!
