Thread to talk about Dark Sun, dying earth, Jack Vance/Gene Wolfe influenced, far-future, post-apocalyptic settings and games, etc.Thread question:>Do you prefer a more sci-fi/high-technology or fantasy/high-magic flavor to your Dying Earth setting?
The main problem with most Dying Earth is that the scale of death is still well beyond the scope of human imagination. There's always an indefinite amount of time, likely thousands or even millions of year of future remaining, so the idea of an aged earth or fading sun is really not that important. The bleaker tone and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic ideas largely just end up being reskinned forms of fantasy, and some authors who dabble in both traditional fantasy and Dying Earth (like Vance) really don't help matters by blurring the lines considerably.A Dying Earth should have less than fifty years left at the max, with every ten years being sufficiently cataclysmic to reduce the world's population by another half. People in the setting should be confronted with imminent death and the futility of life/hope directly, and not as some distant concept that will only matter a hundred or thousand generations from now.
I like it when it's fantasy with a generally low tech level, but there are still some functioning pieces of ultratech left from prior ages.
>>93902680>A Dying Earth should have less than fifty years left at the max, with every ten years being sufficiently cataclysmic to reduce the world's population by another half. People in the setting should be confronted with imminent death and the futility of life/hope directly, and not as some distant concept that will only matter a hundred or thousand generations from now.That's an insane argument. I'd argue that the Ice Age is a good standard for the 'dying earth' genre.Doggersland sinking under the waves was such a significant event that it echoes through mythology, but it didn't happen between one Tuesday and the next.
>>93902169Good game, might have been the alternate world path to the Gold Box games if Quake/Doom hadn't made people think in 3D terms and vidya remained top-down usometric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHen4IStzYoTo answer the question, I prefer sci-tech clad in mystic robes, ala Galtar, Ulysses 31 and Thundarr the Barbarian.
I like Dying Earth with time travel, so you can see it falling apart at each notable stage (Chrono Trigger). I also like mostly fantasy with buried vestiges of modern or near future tech, like Trigun, Xenogears, or Nier. I'm currently working a campaign that's exactly this, initially inspired by Dark Sun and wanting the players to take a tour of the different ages, witnessing exactly what caused each age to happen. And so I have a human coming ship crash landing on a planet because some super-human plant thinks of himself as a god, and his attempts to exercise dominion over the planet slowly kill it throughout the next millennium.
>>93902680>This particular thing I don't like is why the entire genre is bad!You could just hide the thread, you know?
>>93906246No one said it was bad, only that it could be improved.
>>93902680The absolute end of everything, everywhere, everywhen, forever, is 5 to 15 billion years away. Huge waves of debarionization particles pour in from dozens of tears holes and pinpricks in the universe fabric, these waves which look like auroras render the areas they pass through utterly devoid of energy, cold, dark, utterly dead, and completely physics broken, physics effectively disbanded for those areas. Nearly every star in the universe is either a white dwarf, a red giant, or a purple dwarf. The only new stars or planets anywhere are artificially made by what very few species remain. Nearly every rocky planet in the universe is a frozen night world nearly devoid of light and most usually completely devoid of any form of life whether it's animal or plant. The last 10 billion 500 thousand "humans" remain, but they are not anything like a human in appearance or behavior. These beings enclose themselves from before-birth even in a space suit capable of traveling at FTL, using nearly every form of sensor that exists, have on board weapons, have on board manipulator limbs, have shields, have a fuel source that lasts 9 billion 30 thousand years, have on board communications, and have 8 organic parts, a single hand, 1 head, 1 brain, 1 heart, 1 super efficient lung, 1 super efficient liver, and 1 super efficient kidney, these organic parts gaining all needed sustenance from a nutrient bath of fluids. There have been no wars or rumors of wars in millions of years or longer, there is absolutely no possibility of extending the universes lifespan in any way and the universe will absolutely definitely end in the very near future (for them), and there is no escape from it, as time travel is simply putting it off to another day. Hedonism is completely pointless, military prowess is completely pointless, creating art is seen as transitory and mostly pointless, and near total ennui set in ages ago.
>>93906032>wanting the players to take a tour of the different ages, witnessing exactly what caused each age to happenhttps://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded
>>93906356But your """improvement" would make it worse.
>>93902680You are the dumbest faggot cuckold on the planet. Read The Night Land. Jesus Christ.
>>93914889But be sure to read the modern version because the original's prose is so purple it's about to start diddling kids.
>>93915028The original has its merits, but even Lovecraft criticized it for its semantic terrorism. Hodgson got hit in the chest with an artillery shell in WWI so he never got to make a sequel.
>>93913701>5 to 15 billion years awayWhy such a huge window?
>>93913883
>>93903159>that it echoes through mythologyAs in atlantis/the great flood or something else?
>>93906022Ty for the link
>>93913701Someone fund this man now
Black Omen hovering over the surface so long people don't even notice it until the world ends and it's the only thing left...
>>93915672fucking annoying godddamn boss, thanks for the flashbacks
>>93913883>D&D game where everyone just happens to be dinosaurs>guys there's a calamity in the sky that will kill everyone!>see how long it takes the players to figure it outLiterally within seconds of the calamity being mentioned. God, I STILL hate tumblrfags.
>>93913883>grassy plains>muh dinosaur prehistoryUneducated D&D brainrot mudwit. Grass did not exist when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.
>>93902169>TQI run a dying sun setting in GURPS that goes from TL4 to 8.Most commoners live in a medieval society but the elite has electricity and access to modern weaponry and technology apart from anything that uses fuel. No magic but the elite managed to make psionics thru eugenics.
>>93915294I'm not sure semantic terrorism is a strong enough term, to be frank. It's a bit like having Jesus kick down your door and tell you the gnostics were right all the time, except it's not Jesus, it's Klaus Schwab in a fake beard and wig, and he's naked and whipping himself with a stocking full of chicken fat. Some of the word choices just don't make sense even in the context of the time and you feel like you're having a psychotic break. It inspires a level of disconnect while you try to wrap your head around it, all the while the rest of the prose is just hammering against your noggin.In fairness, I listened to an audio book of the original. That might make it worse.
>>93915028>the original's prose is so purple it's about to start diddling kidsKek, I'm stealing this.
>>93919033That bad? I just read "The Boats of the Glen Carrig" and liked it a lot though that was really wordy at times.
>>93902169for me it's millions of years, earth is half-dead already>last remnants of sacred crystal-technology guarded by religious priesthood>ancient nobility with mountain strongholds, caught up in pointless feuds over honor and territory>nausicaa or caelid-like forest of rot spreading over the barren earth, bringing strange new forms of life>a poison ocean, which only the crab-men can survive on their ships made from giant shells
>>93902169I prefer 80s and 90s sci-fi movies. I've seen Hell Comes to Frog Town more than any other film I can think of. Amazon Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Mad Maxes of course. The Running Man. Los Angeles in Predator 2. Nausica.So near-future violent, fall-out tech level. Gamma world stuff. The problem is that it often looks just like fallout at this moment. Mostly just 'cuz Fallout did it well sometimes.
For me it is, was and always shall be Barsoom.>World is fucked, the canals are slowly failing, our people are too decadent to stop it, the barbarian is at the gate, but this has been the case for several thousand years and there's bitches with big ol' tiddies and adventures to be had.
>>93902169I couldn't get into the Vance stuff because everyone is an unrepentant asshole.
>>93919708What's a caelid?>>93920020And the secret hidden races running what's left of the world are somehow even more decadent, naturally.
There is only one work of Dying Earth fiction that is appropriate for 4chan.
>>93921081Caelid is something to do with Elden Ring
>>93914889The Night Land is the worst shit, holy fuck. You should never speak again. You deserve to be violently castrated, and hung naked on a pole so you could be jeered at as you bled to death.It's actually hard to find a worse book.
>>93922594It's almost like the writer was trying to go down a checklist of bad writing.-clumsy language that is pompous and plodding-navel-gazing pseudo-philosophy-endless amounts of tell but no show-stupid names-nameless protagonist-the worst and driest 'romance' ever written-plot-armored narrator survives despite never doing anything clever or interesting-it was all a dreamAnd, ironically, even despite Lovecraft's endorsement, he sucks at horror. 90% of it is "Dare I say it, it cannot be, my eyes cannot bear to witness what is beyond my sight, it is far twice spooky fourth me."
>>93902680BSDC and it the other modules that came out of it for you, then
>>93921081>What's a caelid?Region in Elden Ring, place where some magical apocalypse happened or something and now it's covered in grody shit and mutants.
