Collecting pitches, ideas, bits of inspiration

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Suna

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Collecting pitches, ideas, bits of inspiration
« on: January 11, 2011, 08:53:32 AM »
I'd like to create of collection of imagery that could inspire games of AW, to which everyone can contribute, rather than having sparse threads (unless it's about AP).
Do you have some interesting culture that the character might face as a front? Or front ideas? Pitch suggestions?
If it's about color of the setting, would you like to share it here?
(Vincent, I hope this is not too much of an autocratic move. If it is, you tell me and I'll roll +Cool. On a 10+... alright, I'll stop here)

Let me start the thread with the idea I'll be suggesting to my players during next game, if I see it fitting with their imagery and characters.

The bees have reached extinction. As Einstein also suggested, this takes to the death of the planet. All flowers and plants depending on pollination disappear, fruit becomes more and more rare. It's the heritage of the past, and canned fruit becomes a rarity and more valuable than gold.
Farming economies collapse altogether. Famine and disease spread. Malnutrition and scurvy. Humans evolve to survive, they manage to somehow overcome the new change in their diet. They become something else. Forests whither, grow twisted and wilderness engulfs cities. The weather also changes, and radiations from the sun penetrate an altered atmosphere that no longer is sustained by the photosynthesis cycle as it used to be. Species become extinct one after the other.
Radiated gases give birth to a widespread fog that seems to move on its own will. The Fog twists things and causes disease, cancer, and other disquieting things in its passage, amongst which the Maelstrom. Nobody knows the exact connection between the Maelstrom and the Fog, but they appeared simultaneously and people have grown to believe in a link between the two.
The Others are those people who have been exposed to the Fog, but somehow managed to survive, albeit twisted in their soul and, sometimes, in their body.
"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ, /Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit /Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, /Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

--Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat

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elkin

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Re: Collecting pitches, ideas, bits of inspiration
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2011, 04:39:54 PM »
Here are two pitches I put before my group. Apparently, they think that "dudes, it's like the apocalypse and you can play all these badass bikers and brain-tearing psychics fighting for survival and beauty" isn't enough.

1. A caravan of refugees makes its way across the endless desert. It is made of several hundred men, women and Others who somehow managed to escape the slave-lords of the Bad River. At the centre of the trail are a few rusted trucks with precious supply stolen from their masters. They are led by a column of dust from the biker vanguard, even though most of the refugees are moving on foot, at a painfully slow pace. The prophet leading them keeps retelling again and again the old legends about a land of milk and honey, with huge cities full of unraided gas stations and convenience stores. He knows they'll get there; the maelstrom told him so. Too scared to leave, too hungry to stop and too desperate to turn back, the caravan presses onward. Before them await the cruel and barren landscape, the (literally) Red Sea, the smoking craters and the fierce desert tribes.
Eerie fluorescent clouds cover the sun. Something is going to rain down on their heads, and it sure as hell ain't gonna be mana.


2. A worn-out Jeep, made out of at least five different cars, reaches the gates of Nov on the last drops of biodiesel. The people travelling inside that Jeep have stolen something valuable, killed someone important or hurt someone influential. At any rate, they have a damn good reason to try and build new lives for themselves in Nov, a city of refuge, a place where a well-respected tradition dictates that no old scores may be settled between its sheet metal walls. The problem is that Nov is full of what passes in this lawless age for outlaws, thieves and killers hiding from well-deserved retribution, a population much more cruel and perverse than the common crooks and thugs that inhabit most hardholds. Living costs are high, accommodations are downright nasty, even by today's lousy standards. In Nov, no one will hesitate to take the little you have left. Making it through the month and enjoying a diet composed of something besides green mud and megaroaches is the most lofty goal most people here aspire to. Do you?