Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[PTTG??]

It started with this:

See, now that you've said that, we're going to end up with The Elder Scrolls VI: Moonrim next, set on one both of Nirn's Moons, where you'll be able to see both Nirn and the other moon in the sky. It'll be set another 200 years in the future, and you'll be at an Akaviri lunar base with magic air shields holding the air in and magic sailing ships which sail between the moons and Nirn.

Also, half the characters will refer to Nirn as "Tamriel."

Eventually I got a little crazy and got told this:

Maybe it could be made into a game. In ASCII perhaps.
Please take it to another thread, though, this is for Skyrim.

So I did, and here it is:

...Imagine, you could have a cosmos built around a series of moons surrounding a gas giant. They could each represent a nation of sorts, giving our setting an assortment of magic and technology that leans to the space opera or even planetary romance side of the scale.

How about this: A humanlike species evolves on the earthlike moon of a gas giant. This moon is smaller than earth but denser, like all the moons of this giant, and thus has similar gravity but less surface area. This race eventually uses technology we might distantly recognize to travel between these moons and terraform them to a variety of climates; there are dozens, and they fit a variety of niches (deserts, oceans, forests, ice, swamp, fungus, crystal, etc...). All sorts of techno-gadgets exist, from guns to teleporters to spaceships to AI.

A cataclysm not only stops all contact between these planets, but also blasts every world back to the stone age; this could be the sudden appearance of magical forces or the failure of the main sources of power used by the interlunar society. Perhaps some kind of doomsday device used in war, although this would presumably lead to a certain amount of fallout, which might confuse the setting.

Over the course of, oh, ten or twenty thousand years, the various now-isolated remnants rebuild. By the time they contact one another again, they have forgotten all of the history they once had and have even divergently evolved into nearly separate species. At first, contact is solely by semaphore- flashing sunlight off large mirrors- but after many, many years, the secrets of the ancients are being recovered. Many of them are lost forever, and because many of these secrets are being rediscovered, technological progress is not linear. Archers and swordsmen board ships capable of traversing the void, and mages question demons as to the best orbital trajectory for a flight around the central giant.

Our story could be set decades after the first voidships are built, or it could begin a century after first contact, now that the various groups are intermingling, and we might find anything from a majestic port city where people from all cultures come to trade to a hidden void pirate moonlet to the central temple of a icy world's xenophobic religion, containing the manifestation of their god, the holographic avatar of a malfunctioning defense computer.

Naturally, one of these planets could have plentiful natural caverns and low ceilings, and mushrooms just bursting with brewable carbohydrates. That's only to be expected.

So tell me, is that totally crazy or completely insane?

[Cthulhu]

Pretty cool.  A bit 40k-esque but that's not a bad thing.

[Levi]

Sounds fun to me despite my natural allergy to ASCII.

[Omegastick]

Sounds fun to me despite my natural allergy to ASCII.

I'm sorry, how did you come to find these forums?

[Sowelu]

I love fantasy games set on moons.  Probably because I grew up with Final Fantasy IV.

[Levi]

Sounds fun to me despite my natural allergy to ASCII.

I'm sorry, how did you come to find these forums?

I've always used a tileset for DF.   

[PTTG??]

I wanted to make a point of saying that this would definitely not be very similar to WH40k. Among other things, the original idea sprung from something The Elder Scrolls. The setting would be more similar to a relatively normal fantasy world with just a few sci-fi elements imported. WH40k is... WH40k.

One potential implementation of this would be to make it as a total conversion mod for Oblivion. Engines are not easy to make, and Oblivion isn't bad for modding.

[LostEnder]

Honestly your post made me think of the anime One Piece, but in a post-cataclysm space opera setting. Thinking of the moons like islands with their own culture, climate and such.  I think it's a pretty neat idea, as it leaves a ton of space for developing narrative.  If you wanted to keep a sort of TES gameplay style, it'd probably be easiest to shorten the post-apoc time to hundreds of years, and focus more on the environmental/social changes and the societies that would be spawned by them, rather than taking a longer, evolutionary approach. 

I'd say it wouldn't hurt to read Dune, of course, as well as the Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison, and Armour by John Steakley, since they both feature a many-worlds model of human society.  Also in the original Ender's Game saga, though it's less of a focus there. There's a bunch more, but I think these would be a good start for inspiration.

Playing with the sci-fi/fantasy slider and the interactions thereof could make for an interesting setting or series of settings, but you could also go all sorts of places with it. Democracy/authoritarian, order/chaos, hostile/paradise etc etc etc...

[Rose]

looks awesome. following.

[Nivim]

Playing with the sci-fi/fantasy slider and the interactions thereof could make for an interesting setting or series of settings, but you could also go all sorts of places with it. Democracy/authoritarian, order/chaos, hostile/paradise etc etc etc...

Do you mean sci-fi/fantasy scale as philosophy or style? ([Logic/explanation vs. plot-device/story-telling] VS. [spaceships/supertechnology vs. colorful-mind/soul-powers].)

[ductape]

Sounds like a fun and engaging storyline for a tabletop RPG. That would be fairly easy to implement as such and you would spend most of the time writing and doing fun creative things to create this world.

I personally recommend forgetting the idea of ever making a computer game out of this.

[PTTG??]

Well, there are a number of different qualities that that science fiction and fantasy share and do not share. One key similarity is, of course, the fact that things that are not possible in the real world are possible in the fictional one. The key difference between the two in this regard is that in fantasy, the past held arcane secrets and the powers of gods held sway; the world is in decline from this power and may someday be no more magical than our own. Science Fiction, on the other hand, promises that as time goes on, new secrets will be unlocked, and new miracles become possible. In science fiction, we look forward to ever more amazing powers.

Of course, there are reversals of both of these- Star Wars miiiight be called Sci-Fi, despite being heavily based on fantasy archetypes, and I'm sure that somewhere there is a dungeons and dragonesqe setting where magic is being reinvented- but the rules I've outlined above are generally true.

In the setting we're discussing here, we can reverse and combine both of these laws; On the one hand, the ancient technology hearkens back to a time when logic and reason shaped the world. On the other, Magic (or at least technology so advanced it is in all respects magical) is driving a Renaissance.


Talking to Tahin, we've been thinking that purely supernatural magic could be removed from the setting entirely; we could have all the magic in the game be advanced technology so long forgotten that it is inexplicable. I myself like the idea of making it entirely unclear. It MAY be that everything is explained by mystical forces, or it may be that everything is technology, or it may be both, with the interpretation entirely up to the player, be they sitting at a screen or a table.

[Acanthus117]

Oh gods, I so am watching this.

[PTTG??]

Oh gods, I so am watching this.

Well, I have many projects. I may work on this at one point, but at the moment I'm working on other things. I don't want to discourage others from taking this idea and running with it, though.

[AntiAntiMatter]

The idea sounds brilliant.