Unappreciated Aesthetics Thread

>>50800838
Western.

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>>50800838
Post-Apocalyptic settings where, instead of everything being blown to a hellish desolate wasteland, nature is reclaiming everything. This is my biggest setting-fetish.

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Is my take on "modern fantasy" an underused one?

I run moé-fied, monstergirl/boy-ified Planescape campaigns (see image) wherein technology is effectively modern-day by way of enchanted items.

The Society of Sensation's recorder/sensory stones can record data, so they are used as the basis for computers, digital media, audio/video/smell captures, and the like.

The Harmonium desires to connect everyone together in harmony, so they have tapped into their musical affinity to transmit data via magical sound waves that pass through the Astral Plane. This is called the "Harmonet."

In the streets of Sigil and other planar cities, one can frequently see celestials, fiends, cordians, elementals, faeries, and mortals walking around with little crystals, bones, or shards of metal. These trinkets project "tactile illusion screens" that respond to touch and serve as the interface for what amounts to smartphones. Each of these phones has a helpful sapient A.I. within them called a "mimir," which is really just the awakened object-spirit of the phone itself.

Belief is power in the planes, and thus Harmonet memes are extremely serious business.

In the average planar creature's household, there might be a scry-levision that receives feeds from the Harmonet in the Astral Plane, a refrigerator and a cooling system powered by eternal ice from the Paraelemental Plane of Ice, and a computer with a quad-soul processor.

Businesses and buildings are likewise rather modern. There are department stores, beauty salons, nightclubs, and more. You might be attended to by a lesser guardinal store clerk (those compassionate Elysians simply love to help people!) as you go about shopping for a lightbulbs powered by Continual Flame spells.

There are no cars though. Intra-city and inter-city portals are a more convenient method of transportation, and for when people do need vehicles, they can always take spelljammers (which work more like 4e's spelljammers in that they can traverse the planes).

>>50801412
Literally stopped reading at "monstergirls". Why do people waste walls of texts on this sort of magical-realm garbage that never actually happened?

>>50801358
Good taste

>>50801358

so, pic related, stalker, an enormous chunk of russian fantasy art, and some video games nobody can care about, like Krater?


also, i played in exactly 2 space-western-themed games and both times the games felt unfulfilled in premise.

there's too many fucks out there who immediately point to Firefly when they hear "space western." i dig it, sure, it was alright, but hear me out: Jonah Hex in his time-travel episodes where he goes to wild-west equivalents in space. That's that good shit. lawless frontier themes are the biggest crossovers between space operas and old westerns and we never see decent mesh with them.

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>>50801479
If you can deal with how awful firearms combat is in every system ever, setting like that are pretty fun in tabletop games.

Try running Shadowrun with such a setting sometime, it's a nice change-up from the typical corporate mega-cities and stuff, but still leaves room for tech-savvy characters to be assets to the story whenever pre-apocalypse tech comes up.

>>50800989
This. Just usual western, no weird stuff, no horror creatures, devils, robots, ghosts. Just piss poor, armed men.
>>50801433
You didn't stop at moé?
>>50801479
Krater has such a great setting and I often use the music for roleplay. Too bad the game itself lacks anything to hook me.
We played a space western campaign in star wars Edge of the Empire. If your GM knows what a Western is about (impact of a single man, frontier wars, revenge and poverty) it's really fun to do that on a mining planet and with lasers.

I like playing modern thieves and rogues, there's a lot of fiction about them (just watched art of steal yesterday, not bad movie) but there's an awful lack of rpgs about criminals, that aren't futuristic or have a fantasy influence. actually I don't care a lot, universal systems and such, but I think something else than One last job would be neat

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>>50801358
>post-apocalyptic nature

Goddamn do I love a green wasteland. Also a big fan of abandoned cities 2-6 feet deep in water like a concrete bayou. Random, odd animals that escaped from zoos, the environment as a hazard.

I ran a short game about setting up a safe zone inside a rainforesty city, fighting overgrown killbots ranging from man-sized to Martian Tripod, and all ghillied up raider types who'd moved into the skyscrapers to stay out of the swampy ground level.

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Japanese Wild North.
Angolan Civil War.
Street gangs.
Byzantium.
Mercury-period NASA.
Fantastic Voyage.
Really most of the underappreciated aesthetics are modern or early modern. I would love to see an airship drama except with early Cold War technology.

>>50801684
Certain degrees of moe are tolerable. I can't say it's my cup of tea, but I can see it holding the same kind of atmospheric appeal as pulpy comic-style fiction. If people are into that, fine.

Monstergirls was where the whole thing became a stupid fetish-fueled magical realm sperg-fest. I mean, if people are into THAT, fine for them, but it's one of those things they should keep to themselves instead of obnoxiously shoving in everyone's face and parading around their complete lack of social awareness.

The classical world, settings with Greek, Egyptian, or Persian aesthetics are rare but have the potential to be really cool

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>>50801715
>Golden Kamuy
Muh nigga

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>>50800838
English Civil War - era shit.
You get renaissance-pseudo-era settings, you get Napoleonic-pseudo-era settings, but you don't really get anything in between.

>>50801684
>This. Just usual western, no weird stuff, no horror creatures, devils, robots, ghosts. Just piss poor, armed men.
eh while in theory that could be fun, in practice that will probably end up awful for most groups

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>>50801768
>overarching quest for LEGENDARY AINU GOLD
>frequent meal breaks and fetch quests
>memorable side characters
>every time Hijikata's onscreen it's straight Hokkaido Western
>the most ridiculous random encounter table everywhere
I wish Noda were my DM. And that The Revenant were this good.

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>>50801715
>Byzantium
My Negro

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I've always been partial to "used future" aesthetics ala Alien movie franchise or the Millennium Falcon.

Tech, hardware, and attire that is 95% practical in design with minimal concern for aesthetic appeal. Often with a patch-job appearance from irregular upkeep outside a proper maintenance facilities.

Also that 80's/90's boxy computer feel with monochrome green screens.

>>50801784
Your theory against my anecdotal evidence

>>50801846
That tickles my dick too

>>50801846
>tfw Ender's Game movie would have been 100x better with a used future aesthetic even if they'd kept in the stupid warp drive

>>50800838
90s CGI demo reels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbG34c1qorQ

>>50801849
>>50801784
Maybe enjoying the shit out of western is just something german. With the german 'dub' (better calling it version) of the bud spencer westerns and the winnetou books...

>>50801862
I feel like i'm watching PBS again

>>50801358
I run a post-post-apoc fantasy setting like this.

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I love that Steven Spielberg sci-fi with comfy home life and weird robots

Pic related gets my dick rock hard

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>>50801894

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>>50801907

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>>50801915

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Retro sci-fi gets no love.

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>>50801949
Retro sci-fi is damn fine

>>50801857
I think we can all agree that there are a lot of changes that would have made that movie better.

>>50802019
Harrison Ford was a solid choice. I thought the movie was like a 5/10. Some bits were cool, some bits sucked, but it was a story I've read over a dozen times since I was 9 on the big screen.

Now is a pretty decent time to be a geek or nerd or whatever SciFi fans call themselves in this post-nerd era we live in.

>>50801412
Please... don't do that to Planescape. It's like purposefuly driving over a litter of puppies. I usually like modern fantasy, but no, please, don't do that. Rename it or something. It's not Planescape anymore if you anime it that much.

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>>50800838

Future settings that are fucking beautiful. Like togas and crystal spires. And to flow into that, Where technology is filled with a sort of mysticism.

Throw in some mild feudal government structure, and some really spiffy philosophical religious bullcrap and you've got something i REALLY wanna play.

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>>50802143

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I have a few.
First of all: whatever you want to call the Aesthetics of early Miyazaki works, like Shuna and Nausicaa. Central-Asia inspired post-eco-apocalypse?

>>50801695
>Goddamn do I love a green wasteland.

Fallout 3 and 4 really wasted an opportunity when they went with the same aesthetics as Fallout 1+2 that were explicitly set in a desert.

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>>50802171
Another example. There is something quite fascinatingly exotic and nostalgic at the same time about this.

>>50802172
I don't think they really missed an opportunity there. Fallout settings are associated with deserts for a good reason. It was stupid of them to set the games in Washington and Boston, but I don't think trying to reinvent the aesthetics of the series the way say, Wasteland attempted, would be a good idea.

>>50802150

I've been trying to cobble together a setting which basically boils down to "warframe but not shit" for a while now mostly because of the reasons you outlined

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>>50802171
>Central-Asia inspired
yes please

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>>50802159

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>>50802207
The mongolian honour guard are pretty based in terms if uniforms. Wonder how someone could go about making an imperial guard regiment of them.

>>50802172
Fallout 4 really wasted an opportunity when they made the half the game a wild goose-chase for a bratty baby and the other half some retarded SJW-tier message about Synths.

But yeah, Point Lookout DLC in Fallout 3 is the closest we'll ever get to a "green wasteland" in a Fallout game.

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>>50802207
Well, first Miyazaki's big manga project was actually set directly in Mongolia, and revolved around local Mongolian clan wars and disputes. Rather... interesting choice for a kids comics.
Later on, Shuna is based on old Tibetian myth and a lot of the settings were inspired by high altitude plateaus, steppes and that kind of shit. I think Miyazaki was rather fascinated by the subject and it bled through all the way into Naushicaa.

Personally, I found the whole setting so fascinating that I based my own world-building exercise on it.

Another type of aesthetics I have a huge boner for though: "Scandinavian/Slavic Fairytale", Bauer and Biblin style. Should include works of Trnka and the recent movies by Tomm Moore.

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>>50802259
Another example. Honestly, this "scandinavian/slavic fairytale" is mostly just specific form of art-nouveau applied on fairytale topics. But it's absolutely beautiful.

>>50802247
Now you are just being a mad angry /pol/ sissy faggot.

Go swallow a bucket of smegma and then carve out your whiney faggot guts with a butcher knive. Go fucking kill yourself.

>>50802200
Warframe's setting is pretty flawless.

The setting is just too good for an F2P micro-transaction multiplayer game.

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>>50802315
>He actually liked playing through a story that the player character had zero reason to actually care about.

Lets be real here, when it comes to setting, the best Fallout game was New Vegas, the one that was deliberately set in a desolate desert. Funny how that works, huh?

>>50802281
Yes, it is. Good tastes.

>>50802346
>implying i played fo4

Won't buy it until TC mods hit the Nexus.

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>>50802315
Calling the syth part "SJW-tier" might have been a little extreme, but gotta agree when the guy says it made for a pretty shit story.I wasn't against Syths being a thing, but I didn't fucking CARE enough to be invested in that part of the story either... and when that part of the story was literally like 70% of the game... yeah, bad choice there.

Pic unrelated, just trying to stay slightly on topic with setting stuff.

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>>50802281
>>50802377
Thanks. And speaking of art nouveau: I like virtually all iterations. One of my favorite ones, and little known, is the setting of the movie Revolutionary Girl Utena.
I mean the movie is pretty fucking shit, but MY GOD the environments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHwMrOkqldY
Fun little fact: the second biggest artistic influence (right after Disney) that west had on anime and manga was actually the work of Alfonz Mucha, who is largely to blame for the anime hair and female character proportions.

>>50802403
You can't salvage that game, it's core systems are all trash except for gunplay.

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>>50802200
>>50802324

Warframe scratches sooo many itches, and the new stuff has been very A plus lore wise.

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>>50802411
Next on: East-European Melancholy.

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>>50802425

>>50802191
>I don't think they really missed an opportunity there. Fallout settings are associated with deserts for a good reason. It was stupid of them to set the games in Washington and Boston, but I don't think trying to reinvent the aesthetics of the series the way say, Wasteland attempted, would be a good idea.

/disagree

The aesthetic of the first and second games already differs to show the growth after people stop doing Mad Max and start in on the serious work of rebuilding civilization. Not by a lot, but I'd argue that this is more of an engine constraint (and the fact that we're still in the same geographic area) than because the art direction wanted to stay the same.

I especially feel like Fallout: New Vegas shows that you can stay true to the general Fallout Aesthetic (50's weird sci fi post-apoc) while innovating in the details to show changes in time and location (sarsaparilla, cesars legion, New California Republic military developments etc.)

>>50802247
>Fallout 4 really wasted an opportunity when they made the half the game a wild goose-chase for a bratty baby and the other half some retarded SJW-tier message about Synths.

It was especially infuriating to have to blow up the institute if you didn't side with them.

>But it's the only way to kill them!

Listen fucker I am whirling death incarnate, I've killed more people than you've ever known. If you task me to kill the institute, I'll kill them the best way I know, with fire and steel, not your fucking stupid "let's nuke the only useful powerplant" strategy.

>>50802315
>Now you are just being a mad angry /pol/ sissy faggot.

get fucked yourself faggot, this was a nice discussion before you showed up.

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>>50802425
Magical realism is the best genre.

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>>50800838
>I am aware "asthetic" is a meme term
>aesthetic is another word sacrificed on the altar of idiocy
Please be lying, or something to ruse me. Please.

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>>50802467
>I can't use a word if people I don't like also use that word, but wrong
Grow up.

>>50802281
>Another example. Honestly, this "scandinavian/slavic fairytale" is mostly just specific form of art-nouveau applied on fairytale topics. But it's absolutely beautiful.

Have you seen Pic Related before? It sometimes travels with the words Art Deco/Art Noeavu replaced with Art Dwarf/Art Elf.

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>>50802488

Fucking forgot to attach the pic like the faggot I am

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>>50802447
The first time I did a Brotherhood of Steel run, I was legitimately surprised (in a bad way) that they were honest about wanting to nuke the Institute, since in their every other appearance in the lore ever, they've always had an uber-boner for technology. I literally went through the whole game thinking Maxson was just lying to your face and his true motives were to take the Institute for the BOS.

And then he didn't...

What the hell Bethesda!?

Also needs more pic-related, Scifi stuff that actually has to do with exploring/surviving on hostile alien planets instead of this whole "intergalatic community of hyper advanced races" every scifi tabletop does nowadays.

>>50802417
That'd be unfortunate... I guess I should have expected it.

>>50802447
Tell that to the angry /pol/ reddit tumblr virgin autist who immediately started schreeching about mystical magical goblin gremlin boogeyman sjws.

The rest of you post is on point though. Why the BoS would blow up the powerplant, after they fought soooo hard for a simple solar collector in NV...

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>>50802447
>/disagree
I think we have misunderstood ourselves. I'm not against the human civilization growing and evolving between the games, and I'm not against introducing smaller new elements. What I do find pretty bad idea is changing the entire core aesthetic premise: that is going through the dry, desert settings to say, "green apocalypse", to nature reclaiming the land, that kind of shit. Just as it would be completely stupid to move the series outside of America.

I think New Vegas pretty much handled it perfectly, but Fo3 and Fo4 completely blew it. They did not waste the opportunity to re-invent the settings, they just did not understand what made the original settings appealing in the first place. Those are two pretty different things.

>>50802497
I haven't seen that pic. It's pretty amusing.

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>>50802510
>Getting this triggered over what was obvious sarcasm/exaggeration that literally everyone else in the thread figured out.

>>50802502
Do they use an actual nuke?

Because even in NV, the BoS are really really really against nukes.

If you dismantle the nukes in LR, the BoS becomes really happy with you.

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>>50802411
I really, really like symbolism. And Fin-de-siècle stuff in general.

>>50802502
>universe full of dead worlds to explore
I never knew I wanted this.

Though I did design a setting once where ancient aliens had hollowed out a brown dwarf for catacombs and installed ecosystems to watch the honored dead, at appropriate depth for gravity.

>>50802529
No, same as every other faction they destabilize the Institute's reactor which causes it to go critical and blow up the Institute.

It's pretty much the same as using a nuke, aside from the fact that they're using one that's already there rather than launching one.

>>50802510
I legitimately thought you were referring to the anon who called for gruesome suicide until I untangled your sentence.

>>50802425
maaaaan, that was a good game

>>50802518
At least 3 (haven't played 4 so can't comment on it) felt like a theme park version of Fallout that someone with no real understanding of what made the setting to work put together in one afternoon.

>>50802510
You seem like the only angry person here, you triggered autist.

>>50802502
>Bethesda

I actually think the problem with FO3+4 was Bethesda. If Obsidian had been in charge, DC and Boston would have been fine environments.

>>50802584
Have you played Pathologic? And the new prototype, Marble Nest?

>>50802595
That is very much precisely what it was. Actually Fallout 4 shows a little more understanding for the settings, but the fucking storyline is about god-damn replicants, so yeah. They officially run out of an ideas where to take the bloody series.

>>50802645
I don't think Obsidian would ever place their games in Washington or Boston in the first place. Those are actually pretty poor choices for Fallout settings. I mean if forced, Obsidian would probably make it work SOMEHOW, since they are (were, not sure about the direction the company is taking now) pretty good at making fun classic RPG systems and writing. But I think the very decision to set the game in those cities alone shows utter lack of understanding of the actual tone that made Fallout 1/2 so damn good.

To be completely frank, Fallout should have died after New Vegas. There is basically nowhere to take the series without destroying what it was about.
They should have developed new IP: that would relieve the creative constraints and allow new space and new tone to be explored without being dishonest to the originals.

>>50802518

I think that if we got a better class of dev than Besthesda Game Studios, FO3+4 could have been better games. Yeah, NV was better than both, but I'm not convinced it's because they moved back into the desert, I'm pretty sure it's just because Obsidian is a better dev.

When I say I want a green apocalypse/nature reclaiming, I am definitely not talking about the south-west deserts - those should stay barren because that's the terrain. I just want FO5 to be set somewhere green.

/agree on America though. It could be fun to have a spin-off DLC in Europe or China, but the main game should stay American.

>>50802530
>Fin-de-siècle

my boner is ready

>>50802648
I think Bethesda just shot itself in the foot popularity wise.

They are a nerd company, their entire upper command is made up out of Morrowind veterans.

But they are popular with the Coowadoody crowd. They have to create simple dumb narratives that dig deeper when you hit sidequests and shit -because if they make games like Morrowind, 99% of players will be "wut?"

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>>50802687

>>50802696
From world building&story viewpoint Bethesda's big mistake probably was to start releasing their RPGs on consoles.

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>>50802717

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>>50802733

>>50802726
I hope they bring aboard some writers skilled at layering lore.

I know it is a meme by now, DAWRKU SOAULZ, but if Bethesda learns to layer lore like how From Software does, we hypernerds will have lots of BESThesda to look forward to.

>>50802679
>Yeah, NV was better than both, but I'm not convinced it's because they moved back into the desert, I'm pretty sure it's just because Obsidian is a better dev.
Actually, the two are inseparable. Obsidian is a better dev, which is why they understood what made Fallout special, which is why they moved it back to the desert. Again, if you want dramatically different type of settings, then why the hell do you insist on it being Fallout? That would be FAR better solved by just creating a new post-apo IP.
The fallout games are set in a desert because it's a series about how humans FUCKED THE WORLD. Remove that and you are literally removing one of the narrative and aesthetic cornerstones of the IP. It's like setting the next Mad Max in a lush forest, or setting Blade Runner in a green fucking countryside. If you want to explore how cyberpunk countryside might look, you might not do it in a series whose aesthetic cornerstone is perpetual fucking night.

>>50802696
>They are a nerd company, their entire upper command is made up out of Morrowind veterans.
I don't think that is true anymore. I think anyone who actually cared about good world-building, the people who made Morrowind, are long gone. Nowdays, Beth is one of the most souless, cynical and uninspired developers out there. They have absolutely zero creative ambitions: their games are basically purely market-research driven.

>>50802726
The real mistake was to stop viewing game production as an actual valid artistic persuit, and start viewing it as pure business proposition. I think the fact that this shift in design philosophy aligned with their decision to persue the console crowd was actually coincidental, not causal process.

>>50802717
>>50802733
>>50802745
Fantastic shit. The swan-song of modern western art, really. Also, you can see where Moebius got his ideas.

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>>50802745
Arts and crafts movement stuff is excellent too.

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>>50802759

>>50801589
Firearm combat is pretty spiffy in Traveller.

However it does suffer from being Rocket Tag, though that's fairly accurate to shooting IRL.

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>>50802786

>>50802786
I'm pretty sure that was drawn as an illustration to one of Poe's short stories...

>>50802755
As far as I know the only notable Morrowind veteran that left is Kirkebride.

>>50802487
Truth is made by majority rule. The more you let the words slip and twist away eventually it will be you who is wrong. Moobs and yolo are in the oxford dictionary now. This is the future you're choosing. Still happy with your choices?

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>>50802808
>>50802759

Yes, maybe not this one but the previous one, definitely. They both are Harry Clarke engravings. All of his work is stunning.

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>>50802803
>>50802786
Dude, are you familiar with the works of Tomm Moore, contemporary Irish animater, the guy who made Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea?
Because if you aren't, I REALLY recommend you getting those two movies and watching them.

Also, slightly unrelated, but still something I always think off when I see this kind of stuff:
Martin De Thurah, Danish (I think) music video and short movie director with some amazingly atmospheric and magical works.
Examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4rZE_J1beA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Kw6s8CTrk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr2JQNBGxC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F-CpE73o2M
He inspired an entire wave of aesthetics in mostly Scandinavian and English music videos.
Symbolism and Fin-de-siècle stuff may not have much of a continuation in classic visual arts (outside of few rare exceptions, like the aformentined Moebius), but in cinematography, it still has quite a legacy.

>>50802844
Semper, ego non felix.

>>50802844
>Truth is made by majority rule.
Not really, no. There is always a balance between public consensus, and authority consensus. Language has a pragmatic, functional dimension. If the public let's certain valuable and useful concepts slip into meaninglesness, it's necessary that an authority body steps in and gets them back on the right track.

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>>50802259
The Swedish Norse fantasy RPG Trudvang has a huge hardon for Bauer trolls.

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>>50802907
Oh, yes, I am. I haven't seen Song of the Sea. I should, thanks for the reminder. I'm going to watch your videos when I get back.

>>50802810
>As far as I know the only notable Morrowind veteran that left is Kirkebride.
No. Kirkebride is actually the only guy who was really famous and that we know by name. Bethesda was made out of a lot of people whose names we never even learned, but who still constituted the creative core of the team. A lot of them left.

>>50802923
Don't forget that some languages have a strong authority governing it.

There is a reason why almost every language borrows the word computer from english yet the French use ordinateur. TheFrench have an official language institute.

>>50802957
If you want to see TRUE insanity in terms of language authorial regulation, look at fucking Iceland. It's pretty much the only country in the world (possibly outside of Best Korea) that actually practices nearly-perfect linguistic purism.

Most countries actually have some for of governmental authority on their language. That said, the strength and practical power of it differs.

>>50802315
different opinions are hard

>>50802989
It is not about opinion. It is about keeping retarded memes and memers out.

This is a special-interest board. This is not /b/.

>>50802755
>The real mistake was to stop viewing game production as an actual valid artistic persuit, and start viewing it as pure business proposition

God yes.

Of course view it as a money making endeavor, I'm aware Zenimax is a publicly traded company, but you'll stop making money if you stop being a unique voice because other people have been doing generic longer and better than you.

Do art - proper art - and release that. The market will reward your vision.

>>50800838
>"aesthetic" is a meme term

Are you genuinely fucking stupid?

So fallout 3 was, to me, a fun game. The wacky shit was fun and the exploration was good deathclaw sanctuary was somewhere i avoided for about a month real time before exploring, but the story was trash. What it was not, was a fallout game. It lacked the depth of the originals, the Brotherhood was completely swapped ideologically from what they ought to be so there could be generic knights in armour, the entire environment was awful. The expansions, and particularly New Vegas, were a lot closer, but the damage was done. Then fallout 4 happened, and it was the same mediocre filler that made fallout 3 so different from the originals without even the fun weirdness of 3. The exploration is the only bit thats been consistently good for the last three games

>>50803020
>The market will reward your vision.
Hopefully it will. The thing that pisses me off about Beth is that they don't HAVE to worry about money. They are one of the richest development studios out there. They have monopoly on the first person open-world sandbox RPG's. They own two of the four biggest RPG brands of the decade.

They could be the Elon Musk of the industry. The guys pushing the fucking progress, the guys raising the bars.
Instead, they are THE laziest development house out there. I've never seen a company cutting so many corners on titles that have so fucking secure customer base. And again, this is the company that once created one of the most compelling fantasy worlds ever: like not only in games, but across all media.
They have just nothing to actually say these days. And that is why I think the creative people have really left the company. Nobody with the kind of creative ambitions that shine through Morrowind would be able to stay with the company, yet produce shit like Oblivion or Fallout 3/4.

>>50802932
>The Swedish Norse fantasy RPG Trudvang has a huge hardon for Bauer trolls.

Bauer's vision is the de-facto vision of folklore in all of Scandinavia. Everybody has been inspired by him.

E.g. contemporary artist Peter Madsen who does comics and has therefore adopted a more cartoony style still has obvious stylistic homages to Bauer, like:

http://www.petermadsen.info/pages/galleri/growl.html

>>50803059
On a positive note, they have succesfully brought back the arena shooter, and appear to bring back the thinking man shooter with Prey.


Don't tell me Bioshock kept the thinkings man shooter alive as a continuation of System Shock.
Because Bioshock was fucking dumbed down shit.
Deus Ex was good, but the whole switch perspective in dialog thing always kept me from calling it a shooter. It is more a shooter/adventure.

>>50803059
>Hopefully it will

Well yes, of course there are no guarantees.

But it is the search for guarantees that gives us commodified products like CoD and BF - it's like a car company, no real economic surprises: You know how much marketing and how much polish will give you how much return on investment. Much like cars, there is also no surprise to the consumer. It's got wheels and a gearbox and the only thing that really changes is the paint job.

What Bethesda is missing is that this is not a game they can play. The entire point of playing a Bethesda game is the surprise and wonder - exactly the things you don't expect from a commodity product.

>>50803099
>arena shooter

If you mean Doom, I feel like we need to draw some serious borders between Bethesda Softworks the publisher and Bethesda Game Studios the developer.

>>50800838
My playgroup whined for a fucking steampunk setting for years until I gave in, but to shelter myself from their cogfop faggotry I made a city that was pretty much Southern Gothic and Wild Norwest mixed together with zero steamshit excused by this being the most frontier town in the setting's civilization, the edge between gaslight and darkness.

After getting there on a quest my players wanted to stay there and become cryptid hunters rather than keep playing useless aristocrats pretending to be STEMpunks.

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>>50803099
I actually kinda like what Zenimax is doing on the publishing front. Dishonored was actually quite an amazing and bold step: not only they saved Arcane (company notorious for good ideas, terrible execution and pretty poor sales) from a fucking bankrupcy, they gave them four years of AAA budget to develop a completely new IP in a genre that was basically dead for a decade. That was... actually really cool.
Wolfenstein TNO and Doom 4 were pretty good too. And Prey does look pretty promising. They actually are doing good job when it comes to everything that is NOT Bethesda Development. So I wonder if the problem is not actually directly in Todd himself. Because it's not Zenimax: they are proving themselves as quite the risk takers.

>Don't tell me Bioshock kept the thinkings man shooter alive
Ahahahaha - yeah, no. I'm actually one of the few people who thought Bioshock was actually pretty shit game whose only redeeming quality was the meta-narrative twist. Even the art direction while looking good on paper, was actually incredibly poorly utilized.

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>>50802935
Randomly throwing in some other works I like before I get back to work. Dreaming of a turn of the century mystery rpg or something like that.

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>>50803072
Actually, Trudvang kinda made a point of trying to capture the folklore feel of Bauers troll paintings.

>>50803158
Keep at it, it's appreciated.

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>>50803158

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>>50803172
Still my husbando.

>>50802467
Honestly, I feel like actual aesthetic and meme a e s t h e t i c are distinct enough for it not to matter, mostly because the latter has to be placed in a fairly particular context to be considered a meme. To me, it remains an actual word until you bring up vaporwave or widespacing.

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>>50803184

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>>50803197

>>50802923
>If the public let's certain valuable and useful concepts slip into meaninglesness
then it'll pick them right back up like all the other times this has happened, holy heck it's like you think casual register is taking over the entire language

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>>50803207

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>>50803216
I love Schiele, though I think he might not everyone's taste.

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>>50803222
... especially with a picture that size. Sorry, I hadn't noticed.

>>50803212
>then it'll pick them right back up
And how the FUCK do you think that happens?
Also, no. Like, the word art has slipped into the realm of meaninglessness almost sixty years ago and nobody was able to salvage it yet. Instead, the whole institution has started falling apart and losing relevance to general public in western societies.

The words "arbitrary", "relative", even actually "subjective" and "objective" had followed very much the same or very similar fate. It's actually pretty easy for language unsupervised to start fucking pretty important subjects up pretty badly.

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>>50803226
Finishing with Sergius Hruby because he is my other husbando.

>>50803150
>Ahahahaha - yeah, no. I'm actually one of the few people who thought Bioshock was actually pretty shit game whose only redeeming quality was the meta-narrative twist. Even the art direction while looking good on paper, was actually incredibly poorly utilized.

Yeah the plot twist was kind of interesting but I never saw it in the game, I put that shit down after maybe half an hour because

>Shooter with bad shooting mechanics
I can't breathe
send help

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>>50803246

>>50803159
>Actually, Trudvang kinda made a point of trying to capture the folklore feel of Bauers troll paintings.

Oh yes absolutely, I'm not trying to detract from either Trudvang or Bauer.

I'm just saying, all the Trudvang art felt immediately familiar to me because that is *the* style to draw folklore in when you go to Scandinavia - especially in pre-2000 works when artists didn't get their influences from the internet.

>>50803216
Is this for the Emperor's Nightingale fairytale?
I don't think any other fairytale ever inspired quite as many quite as beautiful and terrifying images. I don't know what it is about this fairytale, but it's just crazy: I can think of at least fifteen different breath-taking illustrations for that particular scene alone.

>>50803272
I believe it is, yes.

>>50803231
The same way it's happened every single other time? Anon, I responded to you in Latin at first because I thought you'd take the hint. The word "art" has slipped into meaninglessness but we have other words doing the jobs it used to do, and it's not the language's fault, it's, get this, the institutions'. We've got institutions telling us what is and isn't art (Star Wars isn't, Piss Christ is), and they've almost completely lost their relevance because of their disconnect with the Reasonable Man.

>>50801358
This was a great documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyEUyqfrScU

>>50802447
>The aesthetic of the first and second games already differs to show the growth after people stop doing Mad Max and start in on the serious work of rebuilding civilization.


Can we just appreciate (depreciate?) for a moment that oooga-booga wasteland people somehow built an Aztec temple complete with deathtraps between Fallout 1 and 2? For a fucking shirt no less?

>>50803359
>The same way it's happened every single other time?
Funny how this is the second time you actually did NOT answer the question. Even after I gave you examples of words that are losing their meaning - have been doing that for at least two generations and nothing is getting fixed.

>Anon, I responded to you in Latin at first
What? You actually just did not. Literally, you did not use Latin through out this entire discussion.

>The word "art" has slipped into meaninglessness but we have other words doing the jobs it used to do
Like? I want to hear those words.

>and it's not the language's fault, it's, get this, the institutions'.
Uhhh... what the FUCK? It's the institution's fault that they are not overseeing the language properly. And clearly, in this case, the lack of proper institutional control is not being fixed by the normative consensual public regulation.

The whole problem with art is that the institutions that are supposed to tell us what is and isn't art either don't do it at all, or they do it in a way that is inconsistent and illogical, in both cases resulting in a situation where no satisfactory meaning of the word "art" can be established.
Half will claim that everything is art, the other will claim that Star Wars are not and Piss Jesus is, but they will fail to provide satisfactory reasoning: the reasoning that actually forms the definition, the meaning of the word.
And that is why it disconnects from "reasonable man", because there is no use, no function for words that have no meanings in rational discourse.

The institutions are fucking up by not controlling the meaning of the word, and the word is failing to recover it's relevance among the public. That exactly proves my point about the importance of the institutions actually doing their part as language watchdogs.

>>50803473
Look, anon, I'd love to have this discussion with you but you're soiling the discourse with your "uhhh..."
That sort of language would be much more appropriate on, say, Reddit or one of those Invision boards.

You're also not getting that one of your first replies was in Latin, and that me claiming to have used Latin was a claim to the authorship of that post. I really wish I could boil this down with you but you're not very smart.

>>50803508
>Look, anon, I'd love to have this discussion with you but you're soiling the discourse with your "uhhh..."
That might be one of the most pathetic attempts to weasel out of a discussion I've seen on this board. Like seriously: do you have absolutely NO dignity there? If you don't want to continue the discussion, fine. Just don't post. But trying to pretend that "I totally have the arguments, but I'm not going to give them to you because you used the colloquial "uhhh"" is beyond fucking sad. You are literally just drawing attention to the fact that you refuse to actually counter-argue despite not having any reason to do so.

>I really wish I could boil this down with you but you're not very smart.
See above. A normal human would actually have dignity preventing him from actually further drawing attention to his own cowardice and lack of capacity to argue further like this. Welp, fuck off then: clearly this discussion would not lead anywhere anyway: you really do not have anything to actually contribute. I'm obviously not missing out on anything here.

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>>50800838
This is probably my favourite. It's sold on its scale alone, and it's fantastic.

>>50803556
>>50803508
You're talking to someone else. You responded to me in latin. I was off doing other stuff like eating and reading a book. Sorry, my bad.

>>50802502
Hive and Vex architecture in general is super interesting and distinct, and I'd love to run sci-fi campaigns exploring those kinds of spaces. Dead, labyrinthine organic husks like the Hellmouth and the Dreadnought, or sprawling, incomprehensible machine landscape of unknown origin or purpose like the Vault or Citadel.

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>>50803671
No, it's mine, should have been able to tell between the wordy posts and yours. How about those a e s t h e t i c s though.

>>50803609
My Melanin-enriched compadre!

I'd be super down for either a Blame! environment of abandoned, mind-bogglingly huge supercity, or a more compact but still huge Seed Ship Sidonia setting.

Sidonia's story might have gone to shit, but the idea of one of Nihei's superstructure cityscapes actually being lived in by a considerable population, adding their own personal charms to their habitat over generations, while simultaneously forgetting about and eventually rediscovering long-abandoned facilities packed into the walls, just tickles my creative nut-bladder in so many ways.

>>50803469
>Can we just appreciate (depreciate?) for a moment that oooga-booga wasteland people somehow built an Aztec temple complete with deathtraps between Fallout 1 and 2? For a fucking shirt no less?

Hah yes.

>>50803609
Man I wish Nihei had ever told us something about the android woman and her dog.

>>50803807
Well, that was still technically the floor with BioElectric Corporation, so she might have had some distant relation to them, though her purpose seems to have been the same as Killy, rather than just trying to break into the netsphere.

Maybe she was pre-Safeuard too? As for the dog, I like to think that there are parts of the city with depleted safeguard/silicon presence where botanical/zoological facilities have just completely overtaking the whole Floor and it's just a jungle. Kind of like that one piece of art where Killy and Cibo are wandering along a beach in full fucking bodysuit gear, walking past people in bathing suits just having fun in the sun.

>>50803840
I appreciate that it's another hint at the vastness of the setting, but I liked those characters in particular. Maybe Nihei will do another Blame short when he's done with Doll Country.

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Whatever the fuck The Metabarons is.

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>>50802502
>>50802534
>>50803693
>>50803609
>>50803745
This. Blame! is fucking amazing for mega-structure inspiration. Though I do feel like it sounds awesome as >>50803693
said, it would be really difficult to make it interesting. Part of the fascination of these mega-scapes is the sheer scale of visually existing within them. Describing endless giant halls over and over gets tedious and boring for players, plus theres SO much travel involved. But I'm sure there's a way to make it more interesting.

My setting is fairly unique... though I definitely draw from some familiar tropes and media.

Post-post apocalyptic !notdieselpunk (purely because they don't use diesel :D) on a corrupted planet. But since the apocalyps has been over for at least a few millennium and humans have re-emerged from the megastructure substrates that rift the planet where they originally hid from the toxic death spread by corperations, war and spacetrade (back when spacetrade was still a thing, people of the stars are now merely legends).

Throw in airships ala Last Exile, toxic jungles from Nausicaa, oceans fowled by hull eating algae that may or may have not been biogenetically engineered in the last great war as a final fuck-you to everyone on the planet. The dependencies of humans upon man upon the few still functioning fabricant machines in the substrate led to a VERY arduous re-education on how to live on the surface, paired with the inability to cross the oceans that make up 90% of the planet, made for a very interesting explosion of culture clashes and trade when the first airships were built.

I have more if anyone's interested.

>>50803864
That's "just" somewhat generic (visually) SciFi drawn by a very talented artist.

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>>50803864
my fucking dude

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>>50802315
>everything I don't like is /pol/
God, just the thought of a single board is causing more asshurt in 2016 than I've ever seen on this website. I don't even think people pissed and moaned about pre-/mlp/ horsefuckers as much as they do /pol/.

>>50803671
>You're talking to someone else.
Fair enough, I got myself trolled like a moron. Silly me. Still, my points stand.
And I'm still confused: I did not respond in Latin: I don't even know Latin to begin with. If you are refering to the fact that I used words with Latin origin, that actually does not prove your point: in fact the presence of latin-originating words in English further proves my point about authoritarian control of language, considering that Latin has been language conserved and controlled exclusively by authoritative, academic bodies with no actual common-folk userbase what so ever, and it has been introduced into English top-down: through authoritative bodies. So I don't see how that would help your argument.
If you are referring to the fact that I'm using Latin alphabet, then that actually relates to the subject matter even less.

>>50803944
>I don't even think people pissed and moaned about pre-/mlp/ horsefuckers as much as they do /pol/.

There was much bitching and it was entirely justified.

>>50803876
Interesting, I have been working a very similar concept. Minus the megastructures and the Nihei elements: The idea of a Shuna or Nausicaa-esque post-industrial post apocalyptic (but the apocalypse happened a very long time ago) world with anachronistic elements and oddly enough, nearly-uncrossable oceans.

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>>50804013
I honestly think we've talked about this before, and I remember thinking "shit I hope that guy doesn't publish a graphic novel like I plan on doing some day!" Were you the guy that alerted me to the fact that Waffle has hidden vore-porn on his DA?

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>>50804063
>Were you the guy that alerted me to the fact that Waffle has hidden vore-porn on his DA?
Nope, that definitely wasn't me. I've talked about my concepts in world-building threads before so we may have met there, but that was mostly a year-or-more ago, I kinda gave up Worldbuilding threads since. Used to be kinda known as the Bull guy, because my world had working title "The Land of The Bull" used parts of Bulls body as part of it's toponymy. Pic kinda related.

>>50804111
Oh nice, that looks way more original than the last guy's ramblings.

You are familiar with waffle I assume? He has some really great Miyazaki/Shuna-like airship concepts. They don't all share the exact components for my world, but the forms are inspiring. Since we seem to be planning similar settings, mind discussing some things?

What sort of pitfalls / tropes are you trying to avoid? What has been difficult to justify?

My three biggest worldbuilding issues right now:

-Lift generations for the airships. I don't want them to be armored balloons, I'm thinking ancient grav tech right now for the lift and turbines and conventional methods for propulsion, but I really can't decide.

-Smaller craft. I don't want it to turn into dogfights around larger ships, I'd like to keep personal craft to a minimum, like vanships or similarly less effective smallcraft. Yet the way technology seems to advance, there's really no reason they wouldn't have a fuckload of planes.

-Skin tones. If the people all over my planet really lived in the substrates for millenia, they would lose their melanin and all be pasty white. Even after they've been on the surface for a 1000 years, that's not enough time to evolve skin tones... and I don't want everyone to be pasty as fuck. (Yes I know my grasp of melanin evolution isn't the best, but even scientist are arguing over it right now) Also this one applies less to you since thats a bit more related to my design choices.

Feel free to ignore me if you don't want to discuss.

>>50804170
>If the people all over my planet really lived in the substrates for millenia, they would lose their melanin and all be pasty white.
If they were constantly in a state where melanin was a selective disadvantage. Cave ecologies are extreme, and those energy levels would have problems supporting a civilization of any kind.

>that's not enough time to evolve skin tones
It could be, human evolution happens a lot faster than we give it credit for. It's certainly long enough for cultures to develop elaborate skin dyes, which may end up being more interesting than locked-in colors.

Besides, what's wrong with being pasty? I'm white and I'm proud, bigot.

>>50804170
>Oh nice, that looks way more original than the last guy's ramblings.
Thanks, but it's rough to say the least...

>You are familiar with waffle I assume?
Heard of him, but never really looked him up. I've avoided air-ships in most of my fiction so far...

>What sort of pitfalls / tropes are you trying to avoid?
That is actually a pretty big question. I was trying to avoid... well, most of them. Tropes, I mean. The idea was originally really just to expand on the aesthetics and atmosphere of Shuna's Journey, and the thing kinda came to life on it's own. There was a lot of ambition to create something that does not really confirm to classical fantasy or sci-fi genre conventions. Outside of Miyazaki, to whom I own most (actually, too much, that is the biggest problem I have with the settings), I mostly derived my inspiration from central Asia, from Thousand and One Nights, from Chazarian Dictionary and stories by Borges... I was trying to forget everything I know about fantasy and sci-fi outside of aformentioned works by Miyazaki.

>What has been difficult to justify?
Economy of a world that lacks nearly any kind of agriculture, and that heavily revolves around trade with a strange, alien civilization, which is willing to trade in their wheat for human slaves. Which is taken verbatum (but not intentionally, that is the saddest part) from Shuna.
That shit would actually probably just not work logistically.

>-Lift generations for the airships.
Do you really need to justify it? Remember the airships from later parts of Nausicaa manga? I don't think they explained how they run. And I don't think anyone minded either.

>there's really no reason they wouldn't have a fuckload of planes.
Do they actually have the technology to make the engines, or do they salvage them? I did ultimately decided to make my world near air-ship-free, but for a while I had an itching for inclusion of air-ships, and I solved all problems with distribution of them simply - (cont soon).

>>50804255
>That shit would actually probably just not work logistically.
There's definitely a break-even point. And it not working is a good plot point.

>>50801783
Mine honourable gentleman of Moorish stock

>>50804170
- simply by taking away the ability of humans to construct the engines themselves. All of them would have been actually dug out from under-ground, ancient pieces of technology that nobody really knows how to replicate.
That could help you to avoid problems like having too many airships, or having too many small air-ships. If you don't come across many small-scale engines, you won't have small planes.

>Even after they've been on the surface for a 1000 years, that's not enough time to evolve skin tones
No UV lights in the underground complexes? That would make them dead by vitamin D deficiency pretty soon.
Also, what this guy said: >>50804252 - skin color would probably not change unless the change itself would be provably advantageous.
And thousand years is quite enough to develop some degree of skin-tone. I mean: a single year of living and working under the sun will make your skin pretty visibly darker for a good while. Skin-tint is by no means a matter of genetics only. So I would not worry about that too much.

>Feel free to ignore me if you don't want to discuss.
Nah, I'm pretty happy with this discussion.

>>50804268
>And it not working is a good plot point.
Obviously, I kinda disagree with that, since, well, I am still keeping it a central theme of the world.
The logistics obviously are a bigger problem. I'm kinda trying to balance it out by gradually increasing the efficiency of the existing agrarian systems, but I don't want to go overboard with that too, because agrarian landscapes are something I have been quite consciously avoiding to have in my world in large quantities.

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I don't know. I'm running a M&M campaing set in Jak II Haven City. I couldn't resist using that map and the cartoony but morally grey characters

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>>50804252
>Cave ecologies are extreme, and those energy levels would have problems supporting a civilization of any kind.
Oh yes, that's why they were so disadvantaged when finally emerging on the surface. They had been sustained almost entirely artificially by convening around the remaining active fabricator machines from the last age. Total reliance bred an age of complete regression, therefor explaining why no-one can replicate ancient technology, and can barely use it when found. Some nations still exist in the substrate, preferring the weather cover and more season-less climate.

>Besides, what's wrong with being pasty? I'm white and I'm proud, bigot.
It has nothing to do with "wrongness" its just boring. I want different nations to have skin tones. I like the a e s t h e t i c .

>>50804255
>I've avoided air-ships in most of my fiction so far...
Oh sorry! when we compared similarities i just assumed that was in there, re-reading i see no mention of airships!

>I mostly derived my inspiration from central Asia, from Thousand and One Nights, from Chazarian Dictionary and stories by Borges
I was gonna say! I thought I recognized a few of the names in there.

>heavily revolves around trade with a strange, alien civilization
I'm intrigued, care to elaborate?

>Do you really need to justify it? Remember the airships from later parts of Nausicaa manga? I don't think they explained how they run. And I don't think anyone minded either.
Since I also want this to be a setting, and one of the classes being engineer (you'd need at least one on every ship to basically keep the engine running optimally) I'd like to go into the process and even have rules for maintaining and improving engine performance.

>Do they actually have the technology to make the engines, or do they salvage them?
Good point. I'm leaning towards salvaged. Likely from the elevator mechanisms from parts of the substrates (ancients had fancy lev-elevators OOOOOO! or some other similar shit).

Japanese Watercolor

>>50803231
Actually the word "art" has slipped into the realm of meaninglessness almost 110-130 years ago, depending on how deep you want to plunge.

If you want to talk shit about art, make sure you know what the fuck you're talking about.

You really don't know shit about art.

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>>50804433
Annnnnd forgot pic

>>50804315
>I am still keeping it a central theme of the world.
Could be they got a windfall in times past but now they're reduced to trading slaves for food? Unsustainability would produce drama. Sustainability is possible but would require a profit on, at the very least, the amount of food required to raise a slave. This requires outsized incentives on the part of the buyers, and raises the question of why they aren't breeding their own slaves, which opens the door to even more drama of the nightmare kind.

>That would make them dead by vitamin D deficiency pretty soon.
There are ways to get around that.

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> 171 Replies
> 47 Posters
Oy Vey

>>50804498
Arguments were had, and pictures were dumped.

>>50804498
Yeah... that means people are discussing things...

Also nice minecraft porn. I guess I know what I'll be building next.

>>50804546
Also means there was a stupid toxic arugment but that's over now thank god.

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>>50804397
>Oh sorry!
Really, no need to apologize.

>I thought I recognized a few of the names in there.
I flail those names around pretty often, so the odds are, if you ever came across me in nearly any thread, the odds are that I've mentioned them at some point.

>I'm intrigued, care to elaborate?
The backstory is pretty long and probably rather forced. Short story is: there is a "race" of strange beings commonly referred to as "Celestials", sort of nature-bonded flesh-golem looking creatures that inhabit a buoyant organic island deep in the ocean. They are a remnants of an old ecological experiment, an artificial ecosystem that was meant to provide enough food for a long-defunct advanced civilization: the Celestials themselves were humans transformed beyond recognition to be perfect safekeepers and "gardeners" of the island. When their makes fell, the Celestials survived and kinda "grew feral": living on their own, still tending to their fields and gardens. But having no natural way to breed, they had to find new human hosts to subject to the same transformation to boost their own ranks. For a few thousand years they sustained "skeleton crew" by kidnapping what ever people they came across. Eventually they found a tribe that attempted to communicate with them, and the two sides worked out a deal: the tribe supplied human slaves, while the Celestials rewarded them with the surplus food they had produced. The tribe, much like most people living on that continent, was basically early stone-age level of technology with little to no agriculture: hunters and gatherers...
This sparked a new growth of civilization in that particular landmass. The tribe began preying on other tribes, grew into an empire, empire imploded eventually, leaving in it's wake many small city states and cultures all still dependent on the central trade with the Celestials. And that is basically where the world is at... (cont soon.)

Pic related is the original inspiration for Celestials.

>>50804676
So the celestials take the slaves, turn them into more celestials, and then fuck them?

>>50804397
>I'd like to go into the process and even have rules for maintaining and improving engine performance.
Well, you can have engineers understanding that for the engine to run, they might say a nozzle to produce sufficient airflow that keeps the thing in the air. They might know how to fix the engine when the nozzle is cracked, or that they can improve it's performance by optimizing the radius of the nozzle, but still be unsure what actually generates the airflow in the first place. I think that is how Miyazaki explains his engineers in Nausicaa at least...

>I'm leaning towards salvaged.
That might help the explanations a lot. It automatically limits the quantities of any given salvaged element to how much you need without need for further explanation.

>>50804459
>Unsustainability would produce drama.
Yeah, the system is FAR from being stable and sustained. It goes through consistent cycles of saturation and crisis. The more population you have, the more slaves you need to "burn through": and slaves require time and food to replentish. So basically every few generations, your population will INEVITABLY grow past certain threshold and hunger will ALWAY strike. Then you lose part of your population, the amount of needed food will decrease, things will saturate for a while, population of slaves slowly grow up, and the cycle begins anew.
it's worth saying that there are tens of thousands of people who live as nomads and hunters and gatherers, and or primitive agrarians. Not everyone is dependent on the slave-trade. It's just that the local agriculture and animal husbandry is not enough to sustain urbanized populations: it's really just the cities that are dependent on the Celestials.

The question of why the Celestials don't breed their own slaves is one I can explain pretty easily. The bigger portion is really just the volumes and logistics of resources being shifted, volatility of the enconomy, question of why do the Celestials need so many of the slaves.

>>50804741
They take slaves, turn them into more Celestials, and use those new ones either replentish those who had died over the course of their "natural work" (they have very high mortality rates if they work "full time" because of some... uh, design oversights their makes created), or they use them in order to expand their own ecosystem.
Their "island" which I call Arborea for now (it really one giant growing boyant bed of algae and free-floating mangroove-like trees losely holding it together) has a bit of cancer-like properties: if the Celestials tend to it properly, it can grow almost infinitely - parts of it often fracture and drift away: some of them "nesting" in new locations and becoming new Arboreas. Most of the times though, these "offshoots" die and so do the Celestials on them. So they basically always can do with more members and more options to spread out and grow.
The Celestials don't have functional reproduction organs, by the way, and are rather alien to concepts of parenthood. Hell, even concept of survival itself is rather... new to them.

>>50804779
>>50804843
This is cool and you should feel good.

This thread in general is one of the most constructive things i've seen on /tg/ in a while.

>>50803987
I believe this >>50802915 is the crux

>>50805198
Oh. I entirely missed that post, it was posted neither by me nor by the guy I was arguing with. And what does "I'm never happy" actually have to do with anything?

>>50805524
>you're choosing a future where plebeian words are becoming commonplace, risking the replacement of language with lower-class grunts
>are you happy with that future?
>grumpy Roman response, implying that all of English is lower-class grunts
was it that hard to piece together for you?

>>50805568
>was it that hard to piece together for you?
Yes, because it still does not actually make sense. Because nobody actually implied that the problem with language devalvation is specific to English, but rather to all common discourses. Again, the existence of Latin actually just further illustrates the necessity of external authority to oversee the language discourse.

Hey guys, please stop, this thread was finally getting nice again.

>>50805608
a
u
t
i
s
m

>>50805664
Nice is subjective, or cheese.

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So many parts of the modern world never get explored or only get explored in a few prescribed ways. It's a gold mine if you look.

>>50805769
Oops, Nice is a place not a cheese. Still about as relevant though. I think it's bed time.

Good job, you killed the thread.

>>50806423
>waah why did my content creators leave, no I won't create content
Bring up an aesthetic or get out.

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>>50802245
Yamnin volunteers come quite close, at least helmetwise

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>>50800838
>Samurai cowboys is better than generic future setting #2846
Debatable.

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been wanting to run a Monsters & Other Childish Things game in a setting inspired by the works of John Kenn Mortensen;

http://johnkenn.blogspot.co.nz/

>>50806623

Anybody know anything about those Samurai looking dudes there? Any fluff about them?

>>50802497
Art Dwarfco / Art Elveau?

>>50801846
Agreed the aesthetic for alien/s was always top notch for me but apparently for everyone else too because it's a style that is seen repeatedly especially among 90's and 2000's sets games and sci-fi.

>Post-Modern Mundane Slipstream
Think Earthbound or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy levels of wacky dumped into a serious World War 2 allegory, utilizing elaborate pulp technology, to enable the retelling of the historical content in a modern context. Things like Winston Churchhill working at McDonalds while Hitler is working at Burger King, and both are fighting for fast food supremacy through increasingly elaborate gambits. The only limit is your imagination. Brain harvesting robots that have a fatal weakness for polka as the SS? Sure. Tim, a mech-dinosaur could be responsible for maintaining wartime propaganda, through social media, despite intentionally trying to lose his job? Why not. Horrific genetic experiments resulting in self-cooking "foodimals" that you can eat while they're living? Go for it.

The way to keep the whole shtick going is to make sure you write fantastic characters in mundane settings with human emotions. High concept narratives are also super helpful, because pretentious people will feel smarter for reading entertaining nonsense. You juxtapose the mundane with the extraordinary and use it as a vehicle to critique the arbitrary and nonsensical construction of today's society. Just make sure you have an ironic cant-tell-if-he's-smart-or-a-child tone and boom, you're a genius. Just make sure you don't go "lulrandumb" by getting too far up your own ass. The idea is to use the pretentious bullshit to make something entertaining and not the other way around.

>>50801358
But that's been popular in a bunch of post-apoc games the past decade

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>>50803864
I love everything about Metabarons

>>50809388
>The only limit is your imagination.
Imagination wilts without limits.

>>50810057
>Imagination wilts without inspiration.
Fixed that for you anon.

I meant that figuratively. Quite literally I'm saying that there are very strict limits on how to pull this off well and not look like a dick, but you can use basically any concept successfully if you tentatively justify it.

>>50810170
Inspiration is directional.

There are incredibly strict limits on how to pull this off, and at best it won't escape the stigma of fable. There is a vast world of concepts unusable beyond their shock value.

>>50801358

Mutant Epoch has what you seek.

>>50810241
>There is a vast world of concepts unusable beyond their shock value.
Exactly. You use the shock value as the vehicle for a meaningful critique and an entertaining narrative, in a compressed pulp package for easy reading.The problem is, those with chops to pull it off are pretentious fucks and that's generally unfun, while those with the inspiration don't have the self-awareness to filter the garbage.

>and at best it won't escape the stigma of fable
See, that's where you're wrong. The whole trick is that the story about the story IS the story, which makes it intrinsically separate from a story about another story to educate someone. You're compartmentalizing the allegory and the narrative, where I see both of them melded together as the end product. While you're reading about how corporate capitalism is the same as nationalistic attitudes during wartime, you're also reading about the arbitrary conventions about our life, and how that can radically effect the nature of our reality. This is why hitchhiker's was successful. By combining the extraordinary with the ordinary and having a human perspective, as an author, you have an opportunity to provide meaningful critique through quality characterization.

That being said, I can see how "fast food world war 2" could quickly become masturbatory bullshit in either direction, which is why you need to be smart, or have interesting ideas through naivety.

>>50810494
Feel free to correct me, but
>TLDR: Quirky, left-field stuff with human characters = Fun if done right.

>>50810536
Almost, more like:

>If you plagiarize from another source, and use a wacky setting as inspiration, smart people will give you more credit than you deserve, and stupid people will enjoy reading about robot explosions.

>>50801949
>>50801978
The problem with retro sci-fi is it is kind of hard for modern people to really do. It's like saying "remove all knowledge you have about modern science and replace it with random things about 'the power of the atom' and 'Amazing man made textiles' "

The look is fun but it's hard to convey that and make it feel coherent and not weird or broken.

>>50808517
Ah shit I love those

>>50810494
Not him, but I really can't agree with you there. For three reasons:
First of all - concepts based in shock value tend to be semioticaly shallow. That is why they are edged out to the "shock" territory. Serious gymnastics have to be made to be driven to meangful content and those gymnastics alone, together with the whole "shock with premise, slowly steer into meaningful" structure can easily become in itself predictable. There is a reason why most people suddenly realize they stopped watching South Park, and it's precisely because the whole bloody thing is entirely predicated on this model - driven to extreme.
Second of all, I think it's rather patronizing way to view your audience to assume you need to propose a shocking premise to catch their attention. And there is basically nothing worse you can do as an author to start viewing your audience from a patronizing perspective. That is a guaranteed road to hell.
Third, I disagree with the very notion that an entertaining narrative has to contain "meaningful critique" to begin with. In fact I think that is something that should be reserved to special, mostly niche genres - satire, distopia, political fiction. Most works - and most authors, let's not kid ourselves - are not even in a position to actually critique anything, much less have the potential to make that critique meaningful.

What you are describing seems like frankly a pretty cheap way to approach narrative.
Good narrative always stems from the same fundamental notion: having an observation about the real world that will be meaningful (relevant) to the audience. Which does not mean it has to be critical in any way.
Tolkien did not write his worlds because he wanted to shock, or to preach anything to anyone. He wrote what he wrote because he saw the beauty of classic mythological narrative, a beauty inaccessible to most people as our ability to read and understand traditional mythological language has diminished, and he wanted to fix that.

>>50808517
MOCT is a neat game but I dislike the relationship stuff. Any game that turns relationships into gameplay elements creates an environment of metagaming and munchkining the story itself. Don't form friendships and relationships because you want to in character, form them because you wanna roll two more dice

>>50810682
Seems like your feathers are a bit ruffled. I was attempting to explain the intellectual merit behind the nonsensical construction by showing how easy it is to synthesize high-concept ideas into the general concept of the setting.

>What you are describing seems like frankly a pretty cheap way to approach narrative.
That's exactly what I'm describing. The problem is that most people try to reinvent the wheel, and while it may happen once in a blue moon, more likely than not you're going to write something completely unremarkable and up it's own ass. This concept has two main premises:

1) People like to read entertaining things, but what's entertaining is often shallow, or not very plausible.

2) People like to read things they've read, but what has already been written is probably way better than what you can produce, so you don't compete on the same terms.

Let's use southpark as an example. Without question, their most successful episodes were either parodies of already established concepts, or critiques of contemporary culture. The problem is, after their early success, they had to compete with the nostalgia for their own show, without the chops to back it up. Hence Imaginationland, where they unironically tried to ironically create an arbitrary setting with an allegory.

What I'm specifically describing is a way for boring people to spice up their terribly dull writing, and for "fun" people to make sure they aren't just spewing out garbage. You aren't patronizing the audience because you're writing for your audience, which is why these kinds of stories have very strict rules. You just happen to be writing to two competing audiences so that together they both enjoy the setting, rather than always excluding one or the other.

It's the reason Robo-cop is a successful movie. It's satirizing the exact tropes it's presenting through a frame narrative, and the way to do that is by lowering expectations, but still delivering the goods.

>>50804063
Oh holy shit, hi. No that was me.

>>50811134
>I was attempting to explain the intellectual merit behind the nonsensical construction
Not really. First of all, you yourself admitted that it isn't actually easy and that it can, in fact, incredibly easily go awry.
Second of all, you actually advocated proposing a nonsensical construction, THEN forcing a virtually unrelated intellectually valid statement behind it. You don't really NEED the nonsensical construction in the first place to make that intellectually valid statement, making the nonsensical proposition redundant.
Third: having spent better portion of my life among pretentious intellectuals, I can assure you this is not how you get their attention and approval. Barring aside the question of why do you want the approval of pretentious intellectuals, I can tell you that if you propose a premise of Hitler and Churchill leading fastfood chain wars, any self-not-respecting pretentious intellectual will IMMEDIATELY roll his eyes and grab a Joyce instead, because you yourself admit that is pretty cheap and the one thing a pretentious intellectual does not want to happen is to risk being accused of spending time on cheap fiction.
Fourth: I'm questioning the whole purpose of encouraging people to take the cheap (not not easy!) route. You yourself stated that you will STILL need to be able to write good, relatable characters, valid message etc... Well, if you can do all of that, you don't really NEED that cheap and pointless nonsense or shock value to begin with. And if you are indulging it because you think your audience is too dumb to recognize and pay attention to good fiction without the shocker... well we are back at the patronizing perspective of your audience.

>What I'm specifically describing is a way for boring people to spice up their terribly dull writing
It's STILL going to be dull. If you can't write decently, no amount of "fantastic nonsense" is going to make your work any less dull. The shocker or nonsense is not what makes things fun.

>>50811426
>This entire post

Seems like you're upset that he's marketing to vapid douches rather than your smart friends. To be fair, assuming he didn't tell you why he was doing it, a good chunk of people love exactly what he's talking about.

>>50811636
Actually, I'm more annoyed that he is deluding people into thinking their shit works can be redeemed by cheap circus tricks. As somebody who has to deal with people who fell under the same delusion on daily basis, I'm just more aware of the contraproductivity he proposes than most.

>a good chunk of people love exactly what he's talking about.
Not really. I mean the douches actually mostly don't read and the vapid girls will ultimately rather go for stuff like fucking Divergent, a book that is based on premise stolen from Zayatin's "Us" (one of the most important and influential dystopian novels of all time) and really rather far from the playful nonsense he is proposing.

I mean: yeah, you can target to teenage or clueless pseudo-geek demography by exploiting the weaknesses of that market. But that is really a job for a marketing team, and the writer plays the least important role in that process, so I don't actually think that is what even what he actually seem to be advocating either.

>>50811742
>under represented aesthetics
>anon snipes an extremely profitable and underrepresented demographic that is basically /tg/
>"Well, I have to edit deluded shitty writing so all writing of the sort is the same."
No anon, you are the demons. I'm going to write a gonzo nonsense setting, post here and lap up the goodness in a week.

post apocalyptic settings where the previous civilization was obviously far more advanced than the current one.

The dark tower nailed this perfectly in some areas with it mostly having a 19th century western aesthetic but with run down oil rigs, cars, billboards, machine guns, teleporters, robots, ancient architecture, etc.

It really captured the dying world feel with a ever present sense of hopelessness that makes me dreading the movie coming out because there is literally zero chance that the story would work without turning it into some flavor of art house bullshit

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>>50811879
apart from king writing himself into the story TDK was god tier

>>50811803
Under-represent aesthetics are something completely different from nonsensicality of the premise.
If you think random nonsense bullshit strung together is under-represented and profitable, you don't know anything about current literature and general fiction market state.
And I have edited writing that would not be shitty, it was just consistently bogged down by the unnecessary delusion that mashing together random elements for shock and surprise value actually adds value to it.
I have not seen a story that would really benefit from such approach yet.

>I'm going to write a gonzo nonsense setting, post here and lap up the goodness in a week.
I'm gonna say completely and genuinely: Good luck with that. To you, and the roughly thousand other authors that had the same idea just within the span of last few weeks.
Well, I'm drugged up now, so I need to stop posting. We can continue this discussion tomorrow if the thread is still up and anyone of you still hangs around. Seeya.

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Underwater. I fell in love with the sea after watching The Little Mermaid. It's a wonderfully alien world down there, and there is plenty of legends and myths about what lies beneath from sunken cities like Atlantis, to enchanted kingdoms of merpeople, to cyclopian ruins of Ryleh. I want to run an underwater campaign so fucking bad.

spiked armor and a lot of edgelord armor like sauron, lich king

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>>50800838
Soviet Utopia

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Biomechanical. You saw it a great deal in older 80's anime and manga, like Zeiram and Battle Angel Alita. It's weirdly organic in shape despite being constructed in rigid materials.

>>50801433
>uses one term you don't like
>the rest of the setting is thus invalid
Truly epic

>>50812502
This.
Bionicle a best.
Even better if everything is actually mechanical in nature, so instead of cutting down trees, people unscrew them from their roots or the like.

>>50813244
Bionicles were gorgeous.I remember getting the first iteration of Lewa, Toa of Air for Christmas one year. That thing was so cool.

>>50813469
One year, I got Takanuva for my birthday when I was a kid. That was like getting a Gamecube.
My favorite toys as a kid were all Legos, and Bionicle was my favorite of all.
God, that brings back the old childlike wonder. I'd run a not!Bionicle campaign to death.

>>50813244
>>50813469
>>50813633
My Onu-Matoran friends.

>>50813665
They apparently brought back the brand in 2015? The new stuff looks far too busy in design, it's lost it's elegance.

>>50803944
Well when they just have to screech about the big bad sjw boogieman ruining everything no matter what the topic it's pretty obvious where the shitposting is coming from even when they play innocent and pretend they're totally not from /pol/

>>50817418
sjw

>>50801715
>Mercury period NASA
You just made my dick so hard. My nigga.

>>50801358
I write post-post-post-apoc, famalam

>>50801862
ランダムムーンルーン a e s t h e t i c

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I have a soft spot for Spiral Knights, including the music.
Rest in peace.

>>50814745
It got canceled since it didn't sell well.

>>50800838

I'd like to play in a setting where everything is a maze of pipes, data hubs, vents halls with all kinds of ruined tech with crazed cyborgs and shit. I know it's probably not rare, but something like 40k's AdMech tech bullshit set in a chaos infested hive or something.

>>50803609

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It seems like heaven to me.

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>>50801412
>moé-fied, monstergirl/boy-ified

>>50813244
Biomechanical in all it's forms is great, from the fully robotic where everything is cobbled together out of a junk heap, to the living metal style ala bionicle, to smooth augments where you can barely tell where meat ends and metal begins, or the phyrexian style where bone and iron and both tools to be taken apart and crafted together into a horrific abomination.

>>50804170
There's a book I really love called "A Deepness in the Sky", by Vernor Vinge, that you might be able to draw some inspiration from as far as a mechanism for lift goes. He had it so that there was a special material that was left over from an incredibly ancient civilization that basically had to be mined out of the ground like rare earth metals. But then you grind it down and make it into plates, and you have antigravity sheeting.

Possibly you could have it from even earlier than the human civilization pre-apocalypse? Some former inhabitants of this world that went undiscovered until the humans sheltered in the catacombs? If they lost the knowledge of how lift works, they wouldn't be able to design airplanes, and they'd be entirely reliant on these antigravity deposits to build airships.

>>50819019
So the ending of Canticle for Leibowitz?

>>50820057
That's what it sounds like.

>>50810858
>Don't form friendships and relationships because you want to in character, form them because you wanna roll two more dice
the idea behind those mechanics tends to be that by giving a mechanical reward to forming relationships players will do it more often and that makes the story more interesting. it's not always appropriate for a game but it can work well

>>50810858
But that's how irl networking works

>>50811410
Lol small world! Hiya haha

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>>50801783
My setting is based on a similar time period. I go for a dark fantasy with low magic set in an aesthetically 1600s world. People wear large, feathered hats, doublets and carry muskets. It's pretty fun and I can recommend.

>>50821999
I don't think it would work well depending on the players. I know mine would look at it from a purely mechanical standpoint and just spend a long time "Buffing Relationships" so they could have more dice. And my carefully crafted NPCS would be nothing but bonuses to them.

>>50822085
It's also why I hate most people.

>>50822528
>I know mine would look at it from a purely mechanical standpoint and just spend a long time "Buffing Relationships" so they could have more dice. And my carefully crafted NPCS would be nothing but bonuses to them.
but at least then they'd be interacting with them instead of ignoring them completely, it's not ideal but it does help narrow the gap between people who focus on mechanics vs people who focus on narrative

>>50802419
well, it's pretty, but the space teenagers ruined it for me, not to mention all of the unresolved and underutilized plotlines

>>50822598
I think the bigger problem is that it would go like this"
"I wanna spend some quality time with my dad to buff that relationship"

"Ok, what do you wanna actually do?"

"What?"

"You wanna spend quality time, what do you wanna do with him?"

"I dunno, who cares? I just want to have a better bonus from him."

And then 20 minutes of trying really hard to get them to RP instead of just Rollplay.

>>50809034
>GW focusing on regiments other than Cadians, Kriegers or not!stormtroopers

No. They haven't traversed that road after Vostroyans
A damn shame

>>50822735
I'm pretty sure this is why the golden rule in rpgs is "say what your character does, then apply mechanics where appropriate" so people can't just say the names of the rules they want to trigger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdVb4UnqO7A
I fucking love this aesthetic. I love 'Americana' as a setting, especially when it comes to stuff like investigating suburbs for weird, otherworldly, things. Goblin Punch's Eldritch Americana sort of scratches that itch, as does Delta Green. Weird Fiction combined with Leave it to Beaver, basically.

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This but at a different techlevel.

>>50814745
>>50819582
Slav here, they're still selling great here.

>>50802502
I would personally do multiple species like a gang of hobos fighting or trading for scraps. No one is 'hyper-advanced,' just trying to grab up as much lebensraum as they can, and shivving any fucker that tries to oust them.

>>50822777
Yeah, but rollplayers aren't in the game for the Roleplay, they're in it because they're numbernerds who just want to minmax characters and trigger conditions that let them win. It's spreadsheet fighter for them.

>>50823010
and they don't want to play a wargame because?

>>50811742
>Actually, I'm more annoyed that he is deluding people into thinking their shit works can be redeemed by cheap circus tricks.
What is Blizzard...
What is Pauldrons: The Fortune 500

I'm deeply saddened that he's right but' he's right...

>>50823029
Expense, probably.

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Everything Zdzisław Beksiński does

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Barlowe is quite good.

What this thread is still around?! Great!

>>50819999
Thanks!!! I'll check it out mang!

>>50823138
My fantasy setting has a rift dimension thats mix of Barlowe's hell and Lovecraft mythos' Dreamlands. I soon plan on plunging my players I to it for an entire campaign cycle.

The "entrance" is a circular cyclopean labyrinth thousands of miles in diameter, hundreds of meters tall and dozens of meters thick. But since you don't end up there by physically entering a portal, but rather a mental hurdle, its pretty much impossible to enter the plane and not end up at the start of the labyrinth. The closest portions of the labyrinth to its start point (the center) are developed into makeshift cities built from the crumbling titanic bricks and populated by the various hapless individuals that found their way into the labyrinth but not out, subsisting and usually emaciated on the pale fungus and vermin that inhabit the routes. The labyrinth also shifts occasionally ala... well the labyrinth movie. The secret of escape lies almost exclusively with parleying, tricking and cautiously sneaking around the strange blind guardian creatures that roam the structure.

And all this is only the entrance to the plane.

I fucking love barlowe.

>>50823404
Oh and before someone calls me out on it, I also drew some bolstering inspiration from the maze runner movie, though Ive had the concept for almost a decade prior to that movie's release. Namely changing the "entry point" to the center and making the thing circular.

I have a boner for cities built on/in megastructures ala that French bridge city, cities built into the side of dams, cliffs, chasms, etc.

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>>50800838
Comfy apocalypse.

>>50824450
This is a fantastic manga. Not great for tabletop adventures, but still fantastic settings that I find surprising isn't explored more in fiction.

>>50824627
What manga is that?

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>>50824684
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, or Yokohama Shopping Log or something like that. It's a beautiful, melancholic post-apocalyptic slices-of-life thing. Pretty weird, really slow paced (seriously, there is basically no actual "plot" to the thing). It's about slowly and calmly dying world and an android who is running a coffee house in a middle of nowhere, watching the time slowly pass. It's actually considered as a successor to very old and very classic Japanese artistic ideal called "Mono no aware", "the sorrow of things" that seeks catharsis in realization of passage of time it's impact on the world around us.
Not suitable for people who enjoy a lot of navel gazing, not so much for anyone else, but I rank it second to Mushi-Shi in atmosphere and charm. A lot of good, if slow world-building and building subtle mysteries in the background.

>>50824771
Damn, that sounds good. Thanks!

>>50824627
>Not great for tabletop adventures
It's pretty Ryuutama, isn't it?

>>50824627
>>50824450
Probably the manga thet left me the saddest. I cried with the plane chapter.

Fuck last time I felt sad an cried for japan shitwas like 10 years ago during the first full metal alchemist anime.

>>50824450
Finding out why those lights are still burning is a sublime moment.

Second favorites are the ever-circling plane and when the guy's exploring the highway tunnel.