Elephantom
Chicken Broth Paragon
Alright, if that's okay with everyone else, we have one (important) order of business:
@Yiyel @Buckteeth I want to start doing History/Hx on Thursday, and hopefully Thursday or Friday we can start the game. Is that enough time for you two to make your characters?
Also, y'all + @Verdana @Tori_98 @Elephantom, here are the worldbuilding details I've worked out. Should give us a good idea of what our surroundings look like, and a better feel for the world and the world's psychic maelstrom:
Is there anything outside this city? The wasteland is made of concrete and steel, lying in tangles under and over your feet, prohibiting movement. Roads have heaved and split, buildings have crumbled, a skyscraper is in the shape of a C. Poisonous plants overgrow the debris with a purple-grey cast and if you look hard you can see monstrous scale-things loping and slithering around. Holds stand brazen, reinforced rubble reshaped into something habitable. They control what they keep close, but are you going to take your chances in the ruins? Maybe in the brush-waste? Everything you can get to with any ease has been picked clean.
The oldest remember how the golden age ended. The sky was red, and every structure moved like it had a mind of its own. Complex machines stopped working, computers exploded. The city collapsed. And the oldest know it was the same story everywhere.
Now what we need is scarce. Clean water. You can't drink that salt. Food. The scale-things eat the livestock, and nobody likes to share their plants. (Can you catch a scale-thing? Many can say and fewer know.) And something else. You can't put your finger on it, but you hear it in people's voices, the slang of this city made insular. See it when they walk like they're hunting.
What do you see when you look to the horizon at sunset? A city in spiral pieces, or the vast expanse of salt-poison sea? The endless brush-filled flatness full of eyes and teeth and scale-things and who the fuck knows? What smells waft to you on the wind? The cedar-ash scent of the plants overgrowing the outside tearing at each other? The occasional fire, and is that hope or fear? What wakes you from your daily slumber? The shriek of a scale-thing after it's torn apart its prey? Or gunshots, or some ungodly man-made tool drilling the wastes?
The best meal you've had this month is meat patty with wilted greens and bread. Fresh water is also more valuable than booze around here.
Catch yourself staring off and refocus your eyes, and you see a scale-thing wrapping around a matching angled tree to lure in prey. Another threat is outside your senses, outside perception. Water dancing in spires. Holding a candle in the eye of your palm and it doesn't hurt at all. Someone has a hand on your shoulder, shoving you forward with all that power. You don't know what they'll do if you don't walk.
Mind if I suggest some ideas?
Firstly, I think there's a bit too much emphasis on scale-things or the creature they're supposed to imply. We might not want to divert the player from the fact that there are also cannibals, mobile hunting packs, and gung-ho raiders out in the wastelands.
Secondly, it'd be a great shame if everything were contained within singular places. I[SIZE= 12px]nstead of implying that most of the wasteland is just old steel, why not make the environs more of desert/barren-like? Skip the former sea, and replace it with salt flats? Emphasize more on the past ruins, the secrets they contain, and the people that have taken sanctuary in them? Fortified prisons, caverns, fallout bunkers, anything. Resource mines desired by the savvyheads, wells, distilleries and pipes wanted and controlled by the waterbearers, flat-out entertainment tools for the Show and the Skinners, and all of them wanted by the hardholders. Many skyscrapers destroyed, slanted, half-buried within the sand and picked to mere scraps by the scroungers and shit, time-worn bridges still standing and towering over the mud-eaters, the looming threat of bandits, mutants and only-god-knows-what-else always keeping the city-folks on their edges. [/SIZE]
[SIZE= 12px]In essence, I think we should try to capture a more dynamic world like Mad-Max/RAGE rather than an extremely hostile one like the Metro series.[/SIZE]
[SIZE= 12px]There's a lot of threat in a post-apocalyptic world, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one should forego the greed and adventure for it. [/SIZE]