More Half-Formed Ideas from The Onenote

Over a year ago I made a post Half-formed ideas from the onenote. Crazy to think how much my life specifically and the world in general has changed in that time. Anyway, some of those ideas I eventually incorporated into other things, many of them I never did, but now I have more!

Setting Ideas

• Post-humanity travels back in time as invaders, forcing their past selves to grow more savvy and powerful, until they are defeated, to then repeat the process until post-humanity is powerful enough to defeat some greater threat in the far future.


• A fully interconnected multiverse. It's about as easy as taking a plane, and it's been around long enough that culture and politics have adapted around it. Certain nations across the multiverse have merged or allied, new interuniversal communities have formed.


• Heavy Metal Haiku of the Machine God.


• Nurglopia: Nurgle wins (came up with this idea pre-covid; could either be really good, or in really poor taste)


• Ithaqua = frost giants, wendigo, Loki (?)


• What is the original species of Yuggoth before the Mi-Go invasion?


• Carbuncles as infant outer gods. Most are stillborn, or get eaten by other outer gods or beings of equal power, or take so long to develop that they are irrelevant. Some become true eldritch beings. Others land on celestial bodies and instigate life, or become absorbed into a pre-existing biosphere. In such a case, they may first develop a symbiotic relationship with a lifeform on that world, morphing into something more like that species. On Earth, this would be the basis of anthropomorphic gods, magic, or superheroes. Maybe tied into Lovecraftian Dreamlands?


• Golemjammer: Like lichjammer... but golems.


• Something with the Black Dragon Society (kokuryukai) and the Black Panthers.


• A superhero setting where superpowers are heavily regulated, so rich guys like Batman and Iron Man types use their lack of superpowers as a loophole around the rules. They lobby to keep advanced-tech and non-super vigilantism relatively unregulated.


• Cyberpunk where there is technically a government but nobody even knows who it is anymore. There are two police forces, both claim to be the government (as opposed to corporate). It's not even that corporations run things, it's just chaos. Clearly there are people profiting, it seems like there are people on the Foucault Flow, but the moon is completely obliterated and the tides are coming whether someone rides them or not.


• Sarugami Japanese monkey cult.


• Polterzeitgeist.


• A fantasy setting of super-OP species. 
• A species of humanoid / cold iron cyborgs mad rage geniuses like Carnage Kabuto with beetle, horseshoe crab, mantis shrimp, etc. cold iron carapaces.


• A holographic aerial species of nephilim pixies/nixies with Divine magics (closer to the gods) and aerial dominance.


• Demons from a dimension of sulfur and mercury, beings of pure explosion animating corpses of extinct species pickled in mercury and gasoline.


• Landfill animals / plastic beach.


• Heaven and Hell vs Martians; Heaven and Hell vs Humans; Vampires vs. Zombies.


• Kingdom of Oudh.


• Mother Earth expresses her will through technology. Rare Earth Metals are her medium. Teleological technological goddess.


• Gasoline Swamp: The Primordial Soup from whence hyperlife evolved. A fungus-like species covers the Earth, a constant hazy explosion of spores and heavy diesel energy. Most animal-like life in their adult form are tiny "pixies" with manic energy. They have no mouths and other than absorption of some transient energy, they have only the energy they absorbed in their adolescent / larval / tadpole state. The dominant lifeforms are hyperplants, tesselating undulating monsters which branch, root, fruit, and leaf in real-time. They are not photosynthetic and instead are mainly carnivores (fungi and animal eaters) or predators (herbivores), or some are omnivorous. Their biology is inextricably linked with plastics and microplastics, like if humans wore their microbiome on the outside. Their blood is diesel and most consumption is vampiric; diesel being the most nutritious substance for all hyperlife.


• Fantasy "salt lick" / oasis setting.


• A pocket universe that exists as a liminal space between life and death.


• How would a nocturnal intelligent species mythologize light and dark?
• Blinding to their dilated pupils.


• Vividly, grotesquely colorful (cone cells less effective in the dark).


• Those who go out during the day must wear sunglasses, a hat, or other eye protection.


• Monsters and demons more so like diurnal species, angelic / majestic creatures more so like nocturnal species.

Random Scifi / Fantasy Ideas

• Flower / pollen / spring apoptomancer.


• A reverse werewolf / Hyde / Hulk. Temporarily shift into energetic, manic, ambitious, strong, intelligent, etc, but somewhat unempathetic and detached- like detox Morty.


• "Butterfy" / pixie chaos(-theory) magic.


• Parasite of the Gods.


• A perpetual chain reaction of causality from another universe.


• Twister Troops: Create whirlwinds and ride them. High mortality rate.


• Gorgon / Medusa / Basilisk petrification as metaphor for anxiety, depression, or stagnation.


• A species that births different offspring depending on whether or not the eggs were fertilized.


• Kawauso as Kappa / Deep One transformation of otters.


• Mani Jul as Kappa butt ball as Dragon Quest-style Slime.


• Rocket / impulse deceleration boots.


• Soft Mother / Wire Mother.


• Biological implications of a creature with a pocket dimension inside of it.


• Fossil Golem.


• Starbarian.


• Bodhisattva vampire. By rejecting immortality and burning in light, they become "something else".


• Dog Mutants: Dogs are adaptable and have been relatively rapidly mutated in ways physically and behaviorally unique.


• Temporal "memory sense"; some alternate memory system as a sensory mechanism.


• Spellbeasts: Based on the GLOG idea of living spells. These have taken physical form and take various shapes and sizes.


• A Borg-like cyborg / transhuman hybrid species that loses its technological abilities and has adapted / evolved into a solely organic species.


• Protobeings: A fantasy pre-history setting. The world is new, low entropy, there is an inherent order to things. The protobeings lack knowledge and history and advancements, but are magical and fey- or god-like, more in tune with nature, but a kind of nature that is uncanny to our perceptions because of its orderedness. Whereas we think of Order=Civilization vs. Chaos=Nature, the relationship between the protobeings and nature is the inverse.


• Carnopolis Cyborgs: Organic internals have evolved into a robot shell. Mostly nerves and cardiovascular system and brain, and fat as padding. Higher thought mostly digital, brain used more for autonomic processes and memory. Those damaged are sometimes reshaped and given more primitive, animal intelligences.


• Massive, slimy, dirigible-like floating predator-plant propelled by noxious gases.


• Coffin monster and/or pocket dimension.


• Saint as "Holy Vampire".


• Colorful, iridescent shadows.


• A city of "exploded" architecture like a multidimensional diorama space.


• Dragon Mole.


• Mustard Men: Humanoid plants with balloon-like heads full of toxic mustard gas.


• Weapon made of a compressed universe or spatial dimension.


• Rainbow ape fae.


• Geistlos: Superhumans with no souls.


• Pugmen: Not actually pugs, just heavily inbred species.


• Whistle of the Giant Rat.


• Metallic / Chromatic Bats.


• Hippo-Ogre.


• Laughing Gecko.


• Aye Aye knocking on the wall (weird finger).


• Neon Dolphin.


• Living Missile.


• A creature with spiders / octopi for hands.


• A lich except with other things instead of a soul like brain, heart, brawn, etc.


• Souldier ("soul soldier").


• Bomb bees. Their stingers inject explosive chemicals.


• Missile shark / robo-bulette.


• Gun Worm.


• Caveman weapon of mass destruction. Weapon of Darkness. Debilitator and danger as a relative concept, independent of technology or other forms of progress. Liminal state between human / conscious and "the wild" / beasts.


• Emoji-Men.

Game Mechanics Ideas

• Track every killed monster on a character sheet. Can temporarily revive defeated monsters to fight for you, but lose that experience.


• Garudas and Gaussians: Binary-outcome system.


• RPG Madlibs.


• Eightball resolution.


• Final Form: A game hack or set of tables to generate a DBZ-style "Final Form".


• Ending Quest: A play on my dissatisfaction with never-ending RPGs.


• Dice mechanic where you have to roll between two values (probably percentile). This allows you to instantiate both the properties of the PC and their opposition (e.g. roll under attribute, but roll over AC, creating the range to roll within).


• Vector / Decision Tree mechanic for multi-step action resolution such as heists.


• Rules-light OSR-style game built around random dungeons with an Enter the Gungeon / Rogue Legacy-style time or generational-based ludo-narrative, and some mechanics to tie each player's characters together in that sense.


• Some sort of storygame meets tactical combat / strategy wargame wherein events in the past are retconned through time-travel as a function of narration / game mechanics.


• A framework for creating X-crawl systems.


• Stagger Stress System (i.e. FFXIII). Morale-derived? Another kind of HP abstraction?


• Tactical positioning game (i.e. Into the Breach).


• Jax-based resolution mechanic. Can it be diegetic?


• Birdwatching / Pokemon Snap-style game.


• Spaceship bridge crew game inspired by the LAN game Artemis. Rather than sitting at a single table, ideally, the players should be spread out. Each player operates some stations (engines, weapons, piloting, etc.). The captain receives specific information from the GM, and because the players are spread out, generally the captain is the one who will coordinate between the different stations. There is perhaps an "event deck" that the GM draws from periodically and/or at a fixed rate so that there is a semi real-time element to it, creating tension.


• A combat resolution die (e.g. d4 for short, d8 for medium, d12 for long) rolled at the beginning of combat. Combat always resolves at the end of the die, with the outcome determined by the amount of progress made e.g. if enemies were mostly defeated, they are entirely destroyed or run away; a critical mission is failed (failed to deactivate the bomb, an enemy sniped the prince, the boss arrives, you were spotted, etc.).


• Spells tied to an attribute and/or HP e.g. a level 1 spell costs 1d4 HP/int/wis/cha, level 2 costs 1d6, level 3 costs 1d8, etc.


• A super-fast creature that behaves physically fluid-like and exists in a gameplay sense "between actions". It moves so fast that it resolves its actions between the resolution of other actions.


• Animal setting generator: Roll ten animals from a random animal table. Two are humanoid and intelligent, two are intelligent but not humanoid, three are mundane, three have fantastical properties (roll twice on a magical quality / mutation / etc. table).


• Rainbow beasts puzzle: Monsters are color-coded ROYGBIV, and can only be injured if a wand / lasergun is set to the corresponding frequency. The enemies may be a mix of colors, so the party would have to decide which colors to target on each turn.