Four Settings

 Some stuff I've thrown together. Just some summaries.

Human Species, By Ettore Mazza

1. Kith and Kin

Most common one I've posted about thus far. A stone age/copper age/very eary bronze age survival ttrpg. The focus is most often survival, but Kith and Kin is a personal setting with a lot of my own ideas thrown in, so its got some strangeness in it.

"Races" are various species of human and sometimes other things. The setting is animistic and generally speaking the timeframe of "technology" is pushed up. Things are a bit anachronistic but instead of leaning into it for comedy I'm leaning into it to show how alien the world is. Its not Earth, but it should feel somewhat familiar.

Tone varies based on location. The main broad region is two continents that form a huge sea between them (just called the Northern and Southern continents right now) which sort of act as rough analogs to Eurasia and Africa (geographically at least, I've done very little in terms of making real world cultures part of Kith and Kin for a number of reasons I might go into later). There are also rumors of more distant lands. The Land of the Turtle is a rumored land, supposedly with just as much people and variation as the two continents thus far, and there's at least two more beyond that.

I've written quite a bit about it already.

Rest Stop, 4:36 am. Source.

2. Hidden Worlds

Modern "new weird" and occult horror setting. Been a little bit underdeveloped for a while, but its essentially the real world with a lot of paranormal shit going on. People are at least vaguely aware of it but its about as distant to the average person as specific criminal organizations on another hemisphere are. This setting is less concerned with broad scale differences and more with the weird shit on a more personal level, though there is some broad scale differences regardless. Regardless this setting is best conveyed through lists of oddities, rather than descriptions of whatever broad scale stuff there is, so I'm going to save that for its own post.

3. Upon The Deathless Corpse

A planet-sized alien "deity" has "died" but the remnants of its worshippers across many worlds, internal and external fauna, divine servants and so forth have lead to an ecology forming. Where decay holds the planet might seem almost like the real world, albeit with larger mushrooms, alien skies, and an abundance of alien fauna. Elsewhere its flesh yet lives and grows. In some places its growth has gone wild and given birth to monsters and demigods, like tumors born from its flesh.

Its divine animus is indestructible, so it must take new shapes, it incarnates in the things born from its corpse. This death is more a transmutation. Its divine psyche is also indestructible, but can be splintered and fragmented. This has given rise to an astral realm, a proto-afterlife, and strange spirits. Its divine will is also indestructible, and has led to the slowly forming new gods in its psyche and corpse.

In some sense its tragic, this god is dead, but in other senses its not dead at all. The gods of this world are born from its fragmenting will and psyche, and so remember being one with it. Maybe they are still one with it?

An alternative version has this as a whole multiverse that was a corpse, the corpse of some impossible meta-being. The cosmology forged from its deathless corpse. I like that version too so I'm mentioning it, but its not the main version. 

James Webb Deep Field.

4. The Flourishing Void

Semi-Utopian Sci Fi. Skerples beat me to it but I'm still gonna post about it because its been in the works for months by now. It began when I was watching star trek and thought "wow life is so common in this, but what if they were genuinely alien?"

The feeling its meant to convey is a sort of awe. Life on earth is complex. Animals are just one branch of the eukaryotes, and don't even show up in their own category on the cladogram that shows up on Wikipedia. And Eukaryotes are just one Domain of three (Eukaryota, Bacteria, Archaea). Life is fractally complex on earth. We only see so much at once but there are 2.16 million described animal species alone, and an estimated 7.77 million total. And this changes as new ones slowly split off and evolve.

Now imagine a cosmos where life is abundant from world to world. Not "more common" than lifeless worlds but common enough. Imagine the sheer diversity of each individual world, even primordial ones that have not yet had their "Cambrian Explosion" analog. Imagine each one just as intricate and complex as our own. Now remember that alternative biochemistries exist in this cosmos and try to imagine just how much more diversity that injects into it.

The closest and longest-standing allies to humans are Crustaceomorphs, a quadrupedal species with four manipulator limbs, two for dexterity and two for crushing strength. Through sheer cosmic coincidence their biosphere is roughly compatible with our own, biochemically, and they occupied a similar niche to humans in their history, leading to a bizarre familiarity between the two. Other aliens, even ones with minds radically distinct from our own, are also allies, or at least cordial and friendly. Many have learned that cooperative tactics, symbiosis and mutualism are pathways forwards, and so tend to adhere to these principles.

There are a few "big lies" in the setting that allow for some other weird stuff. Warp Drives work, forming a distortion of spacetime in front of and behind the star ship that uses them (these might work irl but they have some problems that need to be accounted for). Certain hyper-tensile materials exist, allowing for the construction of megastructures. Most populations live in Dyson swarms around lifeless suns. Psionics exists, but has specific scientific principles that I can lay out in another post ("Mind" has a field of its own, like electromagnetism, the Higgs field, Etc.)

Part of the inspiration also came from when I saw that the federation in star trek had 350 member worlds at its peak. Sorry, what? The milky way galaxy has 100-400 billion stars. So there's a sense of scale here that I want to convey as well.