Oh boy. I started to approach the mere idea of doing something CYOA like with settings in mind that I already had created for RPGs. Those still do hold some good stories in my mind, but the bigger problem is keeping the original setting intact as I’d transfer it to Choicescript. Therefore there’s nothing happening there and these are more settings than whole story concepts.
Warlock In Szradovit, the Land Beyond the Mountains, dynasties of Warlocks rule the land, but it’s more than that. Their very magic is of the land, and so its rulers are inextricably linked to the very soil they govern. For three thousand years they have done so while the world beyond the mountains has at times languished, at times flourished on its own. But in recent times, children have been born with magic abilities not of Warlock blood. And yet, by blood and custom, all Warlocks are nobles in the land of Szradovit. The High King seeks to seize these new magic-users for his own purposes, having created Royal Orders to contain and shape them while the nobles lack a unified response. But the Warlocks are old and powerful and these wouldn’t be the first pretenders for them to suffer. For now, this remains a cold social war.
- The original plan for a ‘story’ was really just to follow a young Scion through a year or two of their Apprenticeship with a senior Warlock and slowly being led into the political games behind the veneer of civility. It would equally set up the world for further use as seen from a Warlock’s eyes.
- In parallel, there was a plan to have the story of an engineer from the Royal Order of Demiurges (magical mechanics and electricians, essentially) as they go about taking on ever greater projects. That one would have given a view of the world at ground level though probably would have given in more to my love of architecture.
These are mostly stalled simply because I have a very detailed idea of how the magic works in that setting and I know I lack the understanding of the coding to make it work the way I want to. Also, going with the Warlock option rather than the Demiurge one, I think a lot of people around here might get skittish when you get to the human sacrifice parts (though every Warlock will assure you that they’re necessary to appease the spirits and ensure this year’s harvest). I’d rather people focus on the social change aspect than the grisly necessities of working Warlock magic.
Legacies is my low-powered (actually mostly unpowered) Vigilante setting. The city of New Rochelle has seen a cold war between crazy villains and sometimes gaudy, sometimes violent vigilantes for as long as anyone can remember. Now its Batman analogue who was mostly responsible for the balance of power is gone and that cold war threatens to explode into a hot one. The city’s remaining vigilantes try to prevent just that from happening but can’t decide on a course of action.
The stories for this setting are part superhero romp and part uncovering the city’s hidden history and dirty secrets with the first story delving into the power struggle in an underground society of freaks and misfits mirrored by the aboveground struggle of the Batman analogue’s former sidekicks and their groups of supporters. This could be spun almost infinitely though, either with an evolving MC who rises from obscurity (or even a criminal past) to the top of the food chain.
This has probably mainly stalled cause I’m viciously torn on how to handle the various factions in the backdrop. I’d love to give the player the choice to hook up with one but then I’d have to completely branch the story or, worse, rehash the same scenes with dynamic names where one guy from faction A is the equivalent of a guy from faction B in outlook and that would need a very fine level of adjustment to make sense and feel ultimately hollow to me.
Daedalus Falls is set in the same universe as Legacies but deals with the emergence of Mutants with a capital X. Over a hundred years ago, Daedalus Falls was the city of the future; a future that never came. Now many of its factories stand empty and the once swanky manors up on the hill are overshadowed by the tenements across the reservoir from them. And yet, in its history, every time people thought the city was dying, it managed to gather enough strength to limp onward; get a new influx of people, attract a short-lived industry, something.
Mutants, Evolved as they like to refer to themselves, might be that new thing. From across the United States, they’ve been trickling in for years now. Not as heroes or villains (though when they do get rowdy, things can spiral out of control pretty quickly), but just as a scattered tribe of people migrating to new land to settle. In that vein, the stories don’t so much deal with superpowered fights but with growing up and finding your identity. Drawing lines and deciding which side you want to stand on.
What hampers this one is mostly my indecision on where to start. I do have a lovely treatment I’m very attached to but it’s kinda more talking to you and showing you things in a vast framing narration than letting you play the thin story. I considered doing a Prelude which reuses some of the framing narration and is essentially the MC’s road trip to Daedalus Falls. Which has added advantages and disadvantages. Who wants to play a Prelude that does little but intro the setting and allow you to fine-tune your character before getting to the meat of things?
And those are just the ones I already had to work with. I’ve tried to come up with stuff more directly for a simple, elegant Choicescript story… but my mind doesn’t work that way. I’m a worldbuilder first and foremost, a storyteller third. I tend to get hung up on the intricacies of the background and its internal logic and consistency or, worse, a snazzy system to play it all out.
But them’s the breaks.
