Fate setting ideas: the Dream
One game setting idea I've had for years now...
Reality is really a vast conceptually fluid realm of dreaming, with creatures composed of ideas. This, and other, worlds are specific bubbles of solidified ideas and rules. The dream-people can enter a world, manifesting as an 'appropriate' being based on local rules and their identity.
So a grizzled veteran might be a Vietnam vet on Earth, but an old warrior in plate mail in a fantasy world, a heavily reprocessed cyborg in a scifi world, or a scarred gray jackrabbit in Bunnies and Burrowsland.
In each world, actions that strengthen identity give the dream-people power, sustenance, and growth; when the grizzled veteran uses his knowledge to help others, when he's in a fight, even when he falters due to age, all of these things validate who he is, and gives his true self power.
This power can feed him, or he can trade away some of it for something new, or for other sustenance. In the open dreaming, folk pass ideas and concepts as solidified things. I might buy a box of secrets, trading away a sharp-edged spite.
Particularly deadly entities can, however, steal or consume identity, ripping it from other folk. Or someone can trade away parts of themselves, though this is a difficult and usually painful process.
I've been grasping at good ways to represent all of the above in a game system... until I read Fate. 'Elements of Identity' translate pretty naturally to 'Aspects.' Still requires a lot of thought in how to represent some things -- among other things, Skills shouldn't be as important in such a system.
Reality is really a vast conceptually fluid realm of dreaming, with creatures composed of ideas. This, and other, worlds are specific bubbles of solidified ideas and rules. The dream-people can enter a world, manifesting as an 'appropriate' being based on local rules and their identity.
So a grizzled veteran might be a Vietnam vet on Earth, but an old warrior in plate mail in a fantasy world, a heavily reprocessed cyborg in a scifi world, or a scarred gray jackrabbit in Bunnies and Burrowsland.
In each world, actions that strengthen identity give the dream-people power, sustenance, and growth; when the grizzled veteran uses his knowledge to help others, when he's in a fight, even when he falters due to age, all of these things validate who he is, and gives his true self power.
This power can feed him, or he can trade away some of it for something new, or for other sustenance. In the open dreaming, folk pass ideas and concepts as solidified things. I might buy a box of secrets, trading away a sharp-edged spite.
Particularly deadly entities can, however, steal or consume identity, ripping it from other folk. Or someone can trade away parts of themselves, though this is a difficult and usually painful process.
I've been grasping at good ways to represent all of the above in a game system... until I read Fate. 'Elements of Identity' translate pretty naturally to 'Aspects.' Still requires a lot of thought in how to represent some things -- among other things, Skills shouldn't be as important in such a system.