Your support makes Blue Moon possible (Patreon)
- 𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐈𝐍
-
Sixth night since Brightwater, and the sky is still too light for stars. Another Baumsworld midnight sunset. Somewhere above the badlands, past the wide salt river, the horizon is blue-green: colour of ocean, colour of alien daylight, above a broad stain of burning amber.
Not here.
Here, the hidden sky is smoked glass and dust-spoiled neon. Six different kinds of music put a heartattack under the night's thin skin, and Teo drags the whitenoise of a razor across his own. Grimace, rictus, pout, cringe: he pulls his face through the motions that move the skin just right, lining up the grain of his stubble and the angles of his cheeks and jaw into smooth planes for the blade.
It's a bad job. He hisses sharply. A nick blooms red from just under his jawline; runs bright and relentless down his neck. He's not used to this anymore.
(Printing a month of disposable razors – bamboo laminate hinged handles and single steel blades thin as a fingernail clipping – comes in cheaper than a laser clinic visit by far. Consider that the clinic visit would last him six months though, and the math gets shakier. His money can't stand up to that kind of arithmetic. He'd call it a sign of the times, but he'd be wrong. It's always cost more to be poor.)
Pulling the blade along with the grain, Teo grimaces when he should grin. Another bead of crimson joins the mess he's made of himself. (The mess he's made and is making. An ongoing process.)
The door jumps in its frame. Slam slam shudder.
"Keep your piss in, guy! Shit. It's been, what, like five minutes?" Teo kisses his teeth: a sucking pitiless sound. Rough and impatient, he lathers up for a second pass.
Same fist as before, same meaty sound. It slaps against the slats of the sealing, folding screen.
"For real? You're that jazzed to use this? You want a piss or a pity party, ami?"
The bathroom is a converted decontamination shower in a row of converted industrial decontamination showers: some bathrooms, some storerooms, some pay-per-view TEIR trip cubicles. The drain has been expanded into a squat-toilet. Grafted onto the wall above it, a grubby-white agglomeration of tank, pipes, and articulated hose let it pass for something that could flush. (Teo looked at it once. Tried not to look again, let alone use it.) The tiling is the kind you print onto the wall in sheets. Paintstick scrawl reads im becom ᴅʀᴜɴᴋ destroyr of ᴡᴏʀᴅs; dozens of spray-on snapcodes that could lead to cascade porn or medusa hacks. Under the years of graffiti the walls might still be teal.
The apparatus runs a hose along the wall and into a basin: one nozzle spits water, the other sucks it up. The mirror is an aperture in a fist-sized bubble of reinforced glass and a screen below it, glitching. A column of lurid pink slashes down the left side. The light in the bathroom is steady, but in the mirror it strobes: hallucinations of blacklight violence, flashbulb stutter-stop motion. Sometimes space in the image shifts; Teo's secret shaving faces go from bad, to worse, to a carnival kind of wrong. But he pauses and the glitch passes. The face it leaves him is half-lathered white, flecked in red, and tired tired tired.
No: tired isn't the word. Dark circles, drawn face. Puffy and hollow in several of the wrong places, his skin hasn't felt right in who-knows-how-long. But his eyes are staring and sharp. His jaw is tight. His backteeth ache with a concentration that won't slacken — hasn't in days.
font is young serif
He/Him or They/Them pronouns.
UK-based. (It's awful here. Send help.) GMT timezone.
I cook, read, keep houseplants, play videogames, make cocktails.
Sometimes I see foxes out my window.
Sometimes all the above happen at once.
Quality writing. Fussy fancyboy high standards.
Regular posts. 200-600 words; more when necessary.
3rd Person. Present or past tense.
Threads. PMs. Discord.
I write male (and masc-ish non-binary) mains.
I'll happily handle as many NPCs as are needed.
F-List available at charmingly-worded request.
Collaboration, please. I'm an Aries. Get on my level.
- 𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐏𝐓𝐇
-
I've played around as a writer for most of my life now. I've written short fiction, published a novel and a tiny bit of poetry,and put out some long-ass long-form fanfic in serialised chapters. Enough to know how to carry a plot, a cast, a setting by myself. But there's just something satisfying about collaborating with someone, isn't there?
Writing's a big deal for me. Whether as a reader or a writer, what I really love is detail. Punchy specificity. Lean, fast-paced, but descriptive.
I play male characters and masc-leaning non-binary folks as my mains. They vary. What they usually aren't is the square-jawed, broad-shouldered, sensible-haircut-and-bootcut-jeans lumberjack-in-a-past-life type. They've usually got some edge of the unconventional to them. Human disasters with good hair and cheekbones, if we're really typecasting me here.
I can write in any number of side characters and NPCs. They'll be a lot more varied. (I also love a partner who's just as confident with bringing in NPCs.)
I'm looking for writers who play women (including transwomen), and femme-leaning non-binary people. Your real life gender is your business, and has no impact on whether I'll write with you. Can you create and play interesting, balanced characters, every bit as psychologically complex as any real person worth a damn? Hell yeah, buddy: come on over!
Lately, I like writing in the third person, present tense. (Those strong, clipped verb forms. That sense of immediacy, time, place. The easy way it gives itself to writing about memory and the past.) That's my preference, but I'm easy, adaptable, and happy to experiment.
I want quality writing. That means more than just good grammar and a fluent grasp of English. I'm talking pacing and rhythm. A sense of style suited to the story's tone and your character's mind.
To keep things interactive, and hopefully keep posts regular, I tend to write between 200 and 600 words for my posts. Shorter posts for fast-paced action and dialogue; longer posts for intros, stretches of introspection, dream sequences, montages, characters spending time alone.
I want collaboration, co-authorship. I want creativity. Imagination. Ability to improvise with confidence, throw out your own ideas. A love of brainstorming and worldbuilding, maybe? I like to leave blanks and wiggle room even with my premade original settings, so you can fill them, make them your own: ours not mine. Communication's also important to me: clarity over what we both want, and what does and doesn't work for us.
I try to write how I'd like to be written to. (Hell, I try to be the kind of partner I'd want.) I thrive off enthusiasm, and offer plenty of my own. (Honestly, I kinda wilt without it.) Hype me up and I'll hype you up. Lets start some fires.
I love to create and share moodboards, inspo images and gifs, item and outfit refs. I love using face-claims and body refs where possible. Sometimes though, you just can't find something that matches the character you have in mind. I get that; it's okay. Description should come first over visuals every time; images are a great aid to verbal description, but never a replacement. (Note: I've got a preference here for photographs rather than illustrations, at least for faces. They're just easier to look at and think 'hey, that's a human person!')
Basically, I'm choosy. I also have to be careful with how I organise my time recently. I will gladly give anyone who contacts me a chance to get to know me, and introduce themselves and their ideas. However, it's worth saying up front, I won't click with everyone, and can't afford to take on more than one or two stories at a time.
Chatting is no guarantee that we'll end up writing together.
I don't ghost, but I will (gently) decline if things aren't working out.
Prove your potential! Get me keen! I'm a fucking delight! - 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄𝐒
-
Sci-Fi. Fantasy. Supernatural and Occult. History. Escapism.
What The Fuck Is A Plot/Porn Binary?
:: Why have either/or when you could have both/and? Like ever?
:: Sex is psychology, power, hope and fear.
:: The tension between wanting and getting.
:: Bodies telling stories of what they've seen.
:: At least for most people, it's one of the stronger human impulses.
:: It drives us to action or away from it, but it drives us.
:: What's that if not plot? You just have to make it matter.
Homebrew and Worldbuilding.
:: I have a bunch of original settings and a lot of the ideas below hint at them.
:: If we're right together, let's throw things we both love into a pot, taking turns to stir.
:: Even when I write in an established setting, I wanna make it my own. (Ours?)
A glimmer of grimdark.
:: A darker slant on things.
:: Cruel fate, capricious chance, difficult choices.
:: Is life pleasant for some? That's because it's harsh for most.
:: Are we gonna have a happy ending? We're gonna need to earn it.
:: A touch of horror maybe?
:: This doesn't mean I wanna wallow in misery.
:: It means small sweet things shining all the brighter. Humour in spite of it all.
Wonder and Awe.
:: Think 'dark' or 'gritty' stories sap the wonder, hope, and awe out of things?
:: Gently, respectfully: fuck that?
:: In worlds like that, just daring to hope is an act of heroism.
:: In the dark there can be discovery. A sense of uncovering the wonder in things.
Realism.
:: Between darkness and wonder there's realism. It stitches the two together.
:: Cause and effect. Actions have consequences.
:: Most things have a reason for being the way they are.
:: Others have none at all: random chance, random cruelty, random kindness.
:: Creating fictional peoples, settlements, societies — doing it smart.
Slowburn.
:: I talk big game about grit and grimdark, but I'm kind of a sap.
:: Stories about characters developing feelings for each other. Emphasis on 'developing'.
:: Chase, struggle, banter, arguments. Trust issues, awkwardness, secrets. Tension.
:: The long and bumpy road to better, whatever form that might take.
:: Begrudging mutual respect? Appreciation? Codependence, love? Forbidden love?
:: Strangers to friends to lovers. Strangers to rivals to friends-who-fuck. Estranged childhood friends to new strangers to lovers. Comrades or colleagues to rivals to begrudging respect to rough friendship to hot mess. Enemies to allies to...
:: You get the picture.
Inverse Slowburn.
:: Instead of building up to that first time, we start with it.
:: Something smashes the characters into each other's lives, bodies, beds.
:: Arranged marriage, one-night stand, drunken dalliance, mistake.
:: Awkward or casual. No reason for it to mean or say anything about either of them.
:: But circumstances tangle their lives together. The aftermath doesn't just go away.
:: Working, living, surviving together. Stuck.
:: Strangers who know each other intimately — and not at all.
:: Start with a bang. Dial back. Build up again?
:: Here we are: back on the bumpy road to feelings.
Consent.
:: I don't do non-con. Like, at all.
:: If all the characters involved don't want it, I won't be interested.
:: Ideally I want enthusiastic, informed, actively and repeatedly affirmed consent.
:: Dub-con is debatable. (I guess by definition.)
:: Drugs, alcohol, loosened inhibitions? Heat cycles and soulmate fuckery? We can talk.
:: Ultimately, this is fiction, and we've got access to the characters' internality.
:: If we, as the writers, know they're both getting what they want: fine.
Vagabonds, Adventurers, Mercenaries.
:: Drifters, scum, outsiders, nobodies, getting by in an uncaring world.
:: Struggle, ambition, hope, survival, adventure.
:: Low-powered protagonists.
:: What will you do for a glimpse of the good life, even if only for one night?
:: What will you do for money? What won't you do?
:: Mercenaries and workers in dirty bloody gig economies.
:: Sellswords, scavengers, guns for hire, hedgeknights, witchers.
:: Anti-heroes? Yeah, pretty much.
Homes That Aren't Houses.
:: Spaceships, seaships, skyships, mech cockpits.
:: Something moving, rootless, and personal.
:: A point of safety and freedom and independence in a troubling world.
:: A home base, but unfixed, emphasising a character's placelessness.
:: Their belonging is in belonging nowhere.
Building Something Better.
:: A company of mercenaries or a criminal gang.
:: A village harbouring a resistance cell, fighting against an oppressive regime.
:: A frontier outpost, struggling against the elements and the wild and lawless world.
:: A smuggler ship trying to make ends meet, out in the black between the stars.
:: Base building and support characters.
:: Incremental improvements from a rough and rocky start.
:: Hustle, bitch. Taste the grind.
:: Forged in the Dark and XCOM vibes...
Playing To Find Out.
:: I brainstorm and worldbuild slow. I plot fast and dirty.
:: Are we An Effective Team? Do we trust each other, vibe with each other?
:: Let's see where the seats of our collective pants take us.
:: Write to find out more about the world as our characters live in it.
:: Write to find out what happens.
Found Family and "One Good Things".
:: People connecting in hard, cruel, indifferent worlds.
:: Chosen family vibes. Sometimes home is people.
:: She's his One Good Thing.
:: "Ma'am, this is my emotional support human disaster."
:: Friends.(Who get each other off occasionally.)
Clever Bastards.
:: Educated, cunning, or both.
:: Too clever? You're only too clever if you get caught.
:: Tangled, wordy minds.
:: Curiosity and overthinking.
:: Wonder or pessimism.
Mean Bastards.
:: Cold and hard or hot and vicious.
:: Rough and hardbitten.
:: All too familiar with violence, but with a hidden heart of gold.
:: Or smooth talking and sweet faced. Kind deep eyes and a small black heart.
Plucky Kids.
:: Call me nostalgic. (I grow old, I grow old.)
:: Characters in their late teens, early twenties?
:: Old enough to think they know it all, young enough to not realise how young they are.
:: Plucky, naive, enthusiastic youngsters striking out together into difficult worlds.
:: Or characters who've known each other since they were younger. Shared history.
:: Shared memories of messier, simpler times. Becoming who they became.
:: (Any adult content will occur after characters are of age.)
Defamiliarised And De/Reconstructed.
:: This isn't our world. It just ate our world and digested it.
:: Worlds made of bits and pieces that feel familiar.
:: Surreal urban settings.
:: Pieces of the 20th or 21st century, stolen and recycled.
:: Cassette futurism. Jazz age ecstasy. Brutalism. Mild dieselpunk. Disco.
:: Not quite sci-fi or fantasy, not quite real.
:: We share words but don't mean the same things by them.
:: Familiar concepts with new roots, new histories. Grown up in unfamiliar ways.
:: Disco Elysium, China Miéville novels, Electric Bastionland, His Dark Materials, Brazil.
- 𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐒
-
In roughly descending order. Mix and match at will.
A Wɪᴄᴋᴇᴅ Cɪᴛʏ: canon and original setting.
Low Fantasy. Supernatural. Eldritch Weirdness. -Punk. CRIME.
hypehypeIn brief: Blades in the Dark, Barding style.
hypehypeLet me start by saying that the system here is optional. I've played Forged in the Dark games one-on-one and without a GM before. They work well; I'd love to do it again! But mostly I just want to tell the kind of story Blades in the Dark is designed to tell: stories about a group of daring, desperate, dangerous, downtrodden people trying to survive and thrive in an underworld of criminals, revolutionaries, dissidents, and occult secrets, in the carcass of a corrupt, unjust, industrial low-fantasy city haunted by its own history of violence.
hypehypeHere's the thing though. I either want to overhaul BitD's canon setting, making it completely our own, or I want to start from scratch in an original world. A wicked, claustrophobic, industrial city, but built from more eclectic influences, and our own shared interests. Straightforward steampunk/victoriana leaves me kinda cold; I'd like to work together to build something more nuanced and complex.
hypehypeVisualise: The Long Eighteenth Century and the gothic Nineteenth, crushed in tight and tangled up with mid-20th Century modernism. Neo-gothic, neo-classical, art deco, art nouveau, brutalist. Muzzle- and breech-loading singleshot firearms sharing a world with glaring electric lights and muttering magnetic tape computers and crackling radio, maybe. Powdered wigs, silk stockings, flapper dresses, punk jackets.
hypehypeVisualise: Youth culture and subculture and alternative culture: the 80s and the 70s and the 60s, and every 90s movie that has a scene where they go to an underground club and there's loud music and probably bondage stuff going on and it's the coolest thing you've ever seen — but filtered through the past.
hypehypeVisualise: Music. Townes Van Zandt. But also chain gang songs. Einstürzende Neubaten. Analogue electronic music. But also old timey French chansons. But also someone playing zither in a little corner of a bar while people drink herbal spirits from tiny glasses with stems far longer than their actual cups.
hypehypeConsider: High stakes, riding a razer's edge of stress and trauma, burnout and recovery. Characters chasing what they want, and being forced to ask and answer how much of themselves they're willing to put on the line to get it. Crime, gangs, cults...trade unions!
hypehypeCharacters: The rigid, repressive status quo of capitalism and conservatism forces anyone outside or against it into the same shared and shadowy demimonde. Criminals, down-and-outs, progressives and radicals, labour organisers, social outcasts and marginalised people, heretics and occultists and seekers of proscribed knowledge, all alike.
hypehypeCharacters: Thieves, street toughs, drug runners, smugglers, con artistes, assassins, clawing their way into the big leagues. A cult, crawling over the bodies of victims and failures and rivals towards transcendence.
hypehypeInspirations: Blades in the Dark, obviously. Dishonored and Peaky Blinders and The Lies of Locke Lamora, sure, but also Perdido Street Station and Disco Elysium and Brazil and the more analogue noir parts of Blade Runner and whatever the hell else we want.
Aɴ Eᴅᴜᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ Iɴ Hᴀʟғʟɪɢʜᴛ: a theme.
Dark Academia. Occult. Supernatural. Conspiracy. Slice of Life.
hypehypeSharp and hungry minds venture down the rabbithole, deeper than sense or caution says they should go. The occult, the oblated, the sublime, the forbidden.
hypehypeCharacters: Young people, too bright and too full of questions, who want it all, all at once: to stay young forever but uncover the wisdom of age, to feel it all, know it all, experience everything life has to offer, now now now, and when they have the power they seek, the prize will all be worth it...right?
hypehypeCharacters: Rivals or working together? Allies, but for how long?
hypehypeCharacters: Tutor and student, descending together. (Ascending together.)
hypehypeConsider: Pride and greed are the central sins of this trope. Burn the candle at both ends to get there; burn yourself down to outshine the night.
hypehypeVisualise: Collegiate austerity; student poverty and excess. Long nights, bad choices; coffee, sex, wine stains. A demimonde of academics, revolutionaries, occultists, and criminals.
hypehypeInspirations: The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Cultist Simulator.
Sᴇᴇᴋᴇʀs: an original setting.
Modern. Supernatural. Occult. Paranormal. Horror. Slice of Life.
hypehypeI'm not talking about the kind of setting here where all the old folklore, magic, mythology, and superstition just turns out to be right and real. I'm not talking about secret societies of vampires or werewolves running the world, or at least its nightclubs and biker bars.
hypehypeI'm talking about something more mysterious and more plural. No secret mythos, no grand unifying theory, no big supernatural truth behind the veil of humanity's own willful ignorance. Instead, the world is full of mysteries, some perhaps connected, most unrelated. The most anyone can do is understand fragments, glimpses.
hypehypeConsider: You are walking in a labyrinth filled with an infinity of rooms. Every door is locked. You can only ever look through the keyholes, see corners, shadows of their contents. You see pieces, but you'll never map the labyrinth itself, and you'll never escape. That's the hidden world.
hypehypeConsider: Lovecraft was a hack. A racist mess of a human who passed off his petty prejudices as a deep understanding of humanity's fear and awe of the Other and the Sublime. Still, I love a lot about some of the seeds he planted. Not the Cthulhu Mythos itself. Just brushes with a supernatural that is horrifyingly corporeal, horrifyingly physical; things that should not be but are.
hypehypeVisualise: Impossible worlds of enormous oceans, endless labyrinths, bleeding into the 'real', 'normal' world in lost and forgotten places. Secret and ancient knowledge, the knowing of which is a kind of truth and a kind of madness. God-beasts, too vast to understand, beneath the earth, or in the oceans; not spiritual, but literal, made of flesh and blood and bone and awe. The hidden and the forbidden. Nature, sublime and beautiful and awful.
hypehypeCharacters: Seekers. That is, people who're caught up in hunting, fleeing, researching, interacting with, or trying for power through mysteries and the numinous. Obsessive, desperate, fearful, curious, cursed, blessed people. It's a dangerous and mindbending path to walk. The further you go, the harder it is to turn back.
hypehypeInspirations: Disco Elysium. The Magnus Archives, or some of it anyway. SCP, in bits and pieces. Twin Peaks. True Detective, Seasons One and Three. House of Leaves. China Miéville's fiction, like, generally. World of Darkness, but mostly its mood and my nostalgia for it, not its tendency to provide lore and answers and truths — that's not the point here. John Langan's The Fisherman.
Lᴏsᴛ Gʀᴏᴜɴᴅ: an original setting.
Sci-fi. Space. Postapocalyptica. Horror.
hypehypeFor a while, humanity had everything. Prosperity, immortality. The solar system, shrinking into the palms of our cupped hands. Now we're a people scattered and divided: orbital stations, migratory ships both vast and small, remote planetside homesteads and outposts, patches of terraformed ground and breathable atmosphere on Mars. Earth is lost to us. We live the dreams our ancestors had about their species' future. Those dreams are all we have left.
hypehypeWhat happened on Earth? Disaster, mystery, exodus. Climate change and war were just the beginning. We set something free and it ran wild. Mad AI, first contact, or something stranger. Speculation, conspiracies, and a name: the Chimera.
hypehypeIt worked like a virus both biological and digital, affecting mind and body and machine. Warping, combining. The rest of the solar system watched as Earth went quiet and devoured itself. The fighting didn't last long. The first waves fled their homes. The second waves fled their bodies, casting out their consciousnesses as far from Earth as they could. The rest were left behind, trapped on Earth, body and soul.
hypehypeEarth's atmosphere is a quarantine zone. Kill-sats, deep ICE, a total digital embargo. Whatever the Chimera is, it would leave if it could, by any vector available. We changed and exchanged our world to stop it.
hypehypeVisualise: This is a world of wires, where everything relies on hardwired connections or shortwave radio. Where buttons click, screens blink densely with command line code, and communication between pockets of humanity is slow and haphazard as mail across the Wild West. Think of the chunky, industrial look of technology and design in Alien and you're on the right track.
hypehypeConsider: No one dies anymore. Not if they can afford to avoid it. (Even those who can't are not allowed to die. The corps give them bodies – mechanical, industrial, temporary – and an opportunity to work their way back to the land of the living.) The ego is an object, embedded between spine and brain: a complex lump of plastic, filament, metal, crystal.
hypehypeConsider: No one dies anymore, but billions are lost on Earth and out in the black between worlds. The soul is legitimate salvage. What would their loved ones pay to have them back? What would the corps pay to have them in their pocket: labour and processing power, souls bought and sold.
hypehypeCharacters: Who does the dirty work of prying the lost from the places that forgot them? Raiding the wrecks of abandoned ships. Descending to Earth against all laws and logic, to steal the dead from Hell, Chimera be damned.
hypehypeInspirations: Alien (duh). The Eclipse Phase and Mothership RPGs. The Expanse. Cowboy Bebop. Kinda sorta Mass Effect 3 and Dead Space.
Sᴘʀᴀᴡʟ: an original setting.
Sci-fi. Cyberpunk. Postapocalyptica. Slice of Life. Dystopia.
hypehypeWe killed the world. No single moment, no time of death you could single out. Just things getting worse, a slow creep over the horizon. Smoke choked skies and sour rising oceans, growing deserts and dustbowls: the Burn-Out. The World Wide Web fragmenting, breaking, blinking out along with everything stored in it: the Bright-Out.
hypehype2112 now and we've built a world to replace it. This is the world of the sprawls. Wildernesses of steel and concrete, brick and glass, sun-boiled road tar and microptic wire. Data in the air like hanging neon, and everything for sale. Built on the bones of what were once cities, the sprawls are what rose when the world's old nations fell, built from populations where everyone, some way or another, is an immigrant, a refugee. Every sprawl is alike, and every sprawl is unique: islands separated by deserts and oceans and wastelands, the Black Zones where no traveller goes and no data flows.
hypehypeTechnology makes the world. Hell, technology saved the world, just like the tech moguls always said it would. Question is, who was it saved for? Not them. Not the billionaires of the twenty-first century. They’re long forgotten, long dead, and before they died they watched what they’d built turn to dust and compost. And not the old nationstates and their ruling classes either.
hypehypeThe Houses are who came out on top. Saw the moment, seized and survived it. They started out as businesses, but the twenty-second century shaped them into something old, familiar: dynasties, households, mandates. A new feudalism, claiming that if you look out for them, work for them, pass up what you owe, they’ll take care of you, shield you from the storm. Same promises that built the sprawls in the first place; same promises they’ve been making for decades.
hypehypeQuestion is: do you choose the yoke, or do you choose the storm?
hypehypeVisualise.
hypehypeConsider: Every sprawl has its own net, homegrown and self-contained. Smartdust in the air overlays that net onto everything, weaving it into the everyday. Filters and augmented reality UIs, work comms overlaying your rest time. Commercials vye for real estate in the air above the streets, in the sky above the cities. The interconnectedness of things buzzes and flickers in the street like summertime flies, so thick and loud you can touch it, and it can touch you too.
hypehypeConsider: I feel like one of the best and worst things about sci-fi is how bad it is at predicting the future, and how good it is at expressing the present. (And how often people get their priorities twisted up between the two.) Early cyberpunk like Neuromancer and Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2020 was great at throwing the mood and anxieties of the 80s and 90s in a blender and hitting the 'on' button. (That's why a lot of it has aged pretty badly.) What does cyberpunk built on Millennial and Gen Z anxiety and anger look like?
hypehypeCharacters: Gen Zero. Working six gigs at once, swapping them in and out like slot-chips. Urban courier on your way to and from your gig as a line chef. Grow and sell green or tomatoes out a little windowbox you got, or eggs from the hutch on your roof. Run a media-feed in the time you got spare, hoping it'll go somewhere. Sell nudes when you feel cute. Stream it out from your implanted eyeballs when you get in fights, when you fuck. Look tough for your cousin on grey market runs. You're a dozen different people from day to day, and all of them all at once.
hypehypeCharacters: Gen Zero. Chip-slots in your skull and streamlinks in your eyes. Speaking three half-remembered languages and swearing in twelve. Genes from all over the world, all tied in knots by after-echoes and unforeseen combinations of the genefixes their grandparents and great-grandparents dabbled with, back in those hazy days of yore.
hypehypeCharacters: Gen Zero. What the fuck is a bank? Invest in yourself, in connections, in favours, in experiences. E-ink, augware, gear, night classes, gene-grafts, slot-chips. For every Zero that's trodden flat by life there's another that's hungry for whatever it can offer them. For every Zero that drones for one House or another, hoping something will trickle down, there's another Zero that's living hand to mouth to stay out of their net — take what the Houses give, but never give a scrap of themselves back.
hypehypeCharacters: Gen Zero. Cyberpunks, basically.
hypehypeInspirations: Isn't it obvious?
More To Come... - 𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐕𝐄
-
Ideas that aretakenor not current cravings.
Eᴀᴛ Tʜᴇ Rɪᴄʜ: canon or original setting.
Supernatural. Modern. Horror.
hypehypeI recently got into Vampire: The Masquerade V5. A little late to the party, I know, but the earlier editions were pretty formative for me, and I love the lore updates (and streamlined rules) of this new one.
hypehypeWe don't have to use the rules. If we do, I'd like to slim them down even more. Or just use stats without actually rolling, to keep us honest about what is and isn't possible: what's risky and what's easy.
hypehypeWe don't even have to use the lore, or the canon setting, though it's a bonus if we do. If you're a promising cowriter, but you're unfamiliar with VtM, then I'm happy to intro you. (The plot I've got in mind suits that. Lets me induct you as we play.) But I'd be just as happy to invent and define our own kind of vampires.
hypehypeVisualise: A dark, sharp, contemporary world; our own, through a mirror darkly. Counterculture and discontent. Cities deep and dense. What does gothic horror mean in the 21st century? Yes, the old blood has its vaults and towers and puppet-strings, but new monsters are born every night. Hiding from the sun in powered down freezers, bathtubs, cardboard and duct tape on the frosted window.
hypehypeConsider: Keep it punk. Younger vampires, still adjusting and learning. Fear (and maybe envy) at the real monsters, your elders, your 'betters', whose long shadows and grand designs you scheme and struggle in — or against. The rats-in-a-barrel turf wars at the bottom of the hierarchy of the night. Plots against the Ivory Tower.
hypehypeConsider: Sensuality and hunger; ancient secrets and hidden wars. Every feeling is a species either of hunger or fear.
hypehypeCharacters: Anarchs waging a guerrilla war against their city's Camarilla. Couriers running type- and handwritten messages between the city's Kindred now that the Second Inquisition has forced them all offline.
hypehypeCharacters: It's customary to dig a pit, and let that serve as a womb for monsters like him to be born. For him and the others like him, it was a shipping container. Mad and half-blind, they turned on each other like eels in a trap, until a kind of balance established itself. They were given food they had to chew, leaving them no choice but to admit their teeth were sharp and their throats dry, and their bellies all howling with the same red thirst. Clanless. Battle-fodder for a secret war already lost. He is a weapon that survived past the end of its usefulness.
hypehypeCharacters: She is making her way into the same long night. Promised it, perhaps; longing for it, perhaps. Addicted to him, as he's still addicted to six long-gone half-strangers, born in that same hot metal smelling shipping container. Into her he pours all that love that no longer has any place to go. She's his left hand that works by daylight. The red-black wine is sweet and heady as the panic of new love, every time. If she could only get enough – if there ever could be such a thing as enough; if love could have limits – then she could be young forever. But he's promised her more. A more that, one day, he says, she'll understand.
hypehypePlot: Ticks on the belly of the city night, but perhaps not forever, perhaps not for long. They can be more. He wants belonging, and a birthright. To thicken his blood till it takes the shape of a name. More, maybe. She wants better, brighter, sharper, forever. Life eternal, all her own, not just from the monthly kiss of his wrist. And what do they want together? Opulence, yes. Power, yes. Truth, yes, and secrets. A throne, one day, or a home at least — built on stolen blood and souls chewed up and devoured, pleading as they are sucked down. Gnaw the city to the bone and break it; suck the marrow and grow strong. In short: Eat The Rich.
hypehypeInspirations: Let the Right One In. Mongrels, (yes, I know it's about werewolves, but it's about werewolves in the way I wanna be about vampires). Lost Boys.
Tʜᴇ Aʀᴋ Aᴛ Tʜᴇ Eɴᴅ: an original setting.
Postapocalyptica. Weird Fiction. Exploration. Survival. Sci-fi. Retrotech.
hypehypeThe world ends. Of course it does. Climate change shifted gears, getting serious fast. Cities trying to scrabble away from the oceans drowned slowly, down the decades. The global economy? Crumbling. And then the White Plague hit humanity right in its birth-rates, in the health of its newborns. And suddenly a world with less hope for tomorrow fell apart over who should rule today. "Limited nuclear exchange." Who ever thought that'd be a phrase to find its way so often into the news, spoken as if it wasn't insane?
hypehypeThe rich and powerful tried to escape. The great towers of unassailable concrete. The great mazes beneath the surface, safe in the dark. The orbitals amongst the stars and the habitats beneath the ocean waves. The great ships, never meant to touch shore after they left it for good. For most there was no way out.
hypehypeThe world fractured. Silence. Wind through deserted streets, carrying yesteryear's silent leaves. Forests invading cities and silently settling in. Oceans lapping salt up the sides of skyscrapers, and silently claiming the land, year on year on year. Maybe there's something left of humanity as it was, beyond its ghosts and remains. Maybe in the towers or the mazes. Maybe among the stars or at the bottom of the ocean, or out on the starving shivering sea. We don't know. The stories don't say. All we know's the Ark and the Fringe.
hypehypeArk is a sliver of what was, and a shadow of what was, too. It's also a settlement. A few hundred souls, at the edge of the world – on the fringes of the Fringe – getting by. A few hundred souls and not quite human. A little more, a little less.
hypehypeThe White Plague twisted human genetics against themselves. Humanity twisted back, trying to heal the rot that had got into their species. The survivors that live in Ark are mutants, misfits, some in small ways, some in big ways, some in clear ways and some in hidden. They are also fragile, defective. Young, and doomed to die that way. No one in Ark is over 31. No one in Ark has ever been older than 31.
hypehypeThe Fringe is everything else. The whole rest of the world, so far as the Arkers are concerned. It's cruel and mysterious. Empty and full. Full of threat and danger and opportunity. And Ark relies on it. For food, for materials, for commodities, for artifacts and stranger things. For decades now, almost everything in Ark has come from the Fringe.
hypehypeConsider: What is Ark? Ark is whatever we make of it, and wherever we decide it is. Ark is what's left of a maze shelter, underneath the earth. Ark is one of the safe-ships, veered off course and crashed into a coastline. Ark is a tower-haven, atop a vast pillar of concrete. Ark is a sliver and a shadow of what was.
hypehypeVisualise: A new world out there, built on the bones and haunted by the ghosts of the old. Mongrel nostalgia. Walkmans and cassettes and VHS coincide with minidisks and CDs and early brick-sized MP3 players. Manila plastic computers, laptops the size of a pizza box. Automated radio broadcasts everyone listens to as they play the same six songs in the same order every week, one of which is "Holiday" by Madonna, bookended by the message to remain calm and hopeful and stand by for assistance. 80s and 90s touches and 70s echoes.
hypehypeVisualise: Nature, sometimes beautiful, sometimes idyllic, and usually only on the surface. That river is toxic. That forest is deadly, and slowly consuming all in its path. The long thick grass flourishes where nothing else will, and only weeds have any real hope of reclaiming the world.
hypehypeVisualise: Places in the Fringe where Something Happened, and now reality is different amongst the ruins and rewilding land where the calamity occurred. It takes up more space than it ought to, contains more land than seems possible. People who cross inside it come back changed. It contains wonders that the desperate try to fetch out. At its heart, people say, there is a place where whatever you want most can be found?
hypehypeCharacters: Walkers or aspiring Walkers. The people who venture out into the Fringe, fetching what they can back to the Ark. Seeking new hope, answers to old mysteries – salvation and truth, or just cans of food, seeds for plants, samples of scav and scrap – in the Fringe. The story's undecided, but this is the beginning.
hypehypeInspirations: Mutant: Year Zero. Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and The Roadside Picnic. Fallout and Metro 2033. The art of Simon Stålenhag.
Dɪᴠᴇʀ // Tᴇᴛʜᴇʀ: an original setting
Fantasy. Sci-Fi. Solarpunk? High Weird. Exploration. Mecha.
hypehypeOld, strange, and teeming with life, the world has always been in flux. Beyond our enclaves and havens, the world remakes itself every day. Dreams new shapes for itself. New clades and species; new threats and wonders. No map stays accurate for long.
hypehypeWe call them Tides: these patterns, storms, and spasms of change. We build our homes and outposts, our hermitages and communes in places where the Tides are slow and quiet. Still, we live at their mercy, and live off their bounty.
hypehypeSo yeah, Bioware's Anthem was a hot mess, but the concept was golden. Cool art style, cool concept, writing that varied from decent to good. It sparked something in me, and I was sad it got cancelled before it had the chance to live up to its potential. Someone's trash is someone's treasure, right? This setting is me taking what I liked about what Anthem offered and running with it, hard.
hypehypeA vast, verdant, wild world: everchanging, strange, full of wonder and ruins and mysteries. Explore, adapt, scavenge, forage, in mech suits that are treated like relics, like art, like magic, like handmedown legends. Fantasy adventure plots, trappings, aesthetics, and opportunities, but seen through a sci-fi filter. Gimme.
hypehypeConsider: The what and the why of the Tides. Is this planet on the edge of an event horizon, exposed to the bleedoff of raw possibility and creative energy? The leftovers of a failed attempt at terraforming this planet to make it human-habitable, long before the beginning of recorded history? A self-aware biosphere, dreaming troubled dreams? We don't need to know. We shouldn't know. Mystery is the point here.
hypehypeVisualise: Old and new; handmade and machined. Buildings of carved stone, smoothed wood, mirrors of polished bronze and copper. Stained and mullioned glass in the windows, whorled and distorted, imperfect, handmade. Draped with cables, lit with electric lights, encrusted with solar panels. Scan something with a gadget that bathes an object in dusty amber light to analyse its molecular makeup; write down your findings in ink on parchment. Illuminated manuscripts in a room full of databanks.
hypehypeVisualise: Call them heirlooms. A little larger than a person, a little harder to kill. A hollow inside, where the person, the pilot slips in, and becomes more — becomes part of a legend older than them and likely to outlive them. Forged metal, quilted textiles, carved and varnished wood, ceramics, lacquer. Cables and servos, jets and power cells. They are works of art, passed down, repaired, preserved: made to endure and explore a vicious and wondrous world.
hypehypeVisualise.
hypehypeCharacters: He is her diver. Broken and exhausted, worldweary and raw; unfit for polite company. Scarred and graceless, harsh and abrupt, but inside the second skin of his heirloom he is beautiful, and useful, and necessary. Explorer, researcher, warrior, mercenary. The tool in her hand.
hypehypeCharacters: She is his tether. Sensitive and cunning, educated and gifted; a scholar and a socialite. She was born (bred?) and trained from childhood to have a mind that touches minds, sees beyond sight. In an uncharted, undefined world, she is his navigator and his beacon home. Prophetess, seer, agent, dealbroker. The voice in his mind, the wisdom behind his action.
hypehypeCharacters: Assigned to a small and remote outpost, new or rundown and recently reclaimed. It depends on them. It will grow with them.
hypehypeConsider: The raw, disquieting intimacy of two minds interlinked. The societal pressures and expectations placed on divers and tethers. What's casual and what's taboo, and what's outright forbidden?
hypehypeInspirations: Obviously Bioware's Anthem. The blended fantasy and sci-fi aesthetics of Star Wars. Dune. Annihilation.
Mᴀsᴋs: a theme and/or original setting.
GrittySuperhero Shit. Modern. Crime. Slice of Life But The Lives Are A Mess.
hypehypeFirst the insurrection. In the insurrection, the siege. Shortages and shellfire, the powerless nights and the heatless Winter. Chaos took the city in its arms; held it close and never let go. The insurrection ended, but left its scars. The siege lifted, but what it took will never come back. The rich returned but prosperity failed to follow.
hypehypeThe city was wounded and healing or dying and rotting, depending on who you asked: sick with division and deprivation. The darker the times, the quicker people are to make heroes, as places to pin their hopes. The Mask was what people needed — at least, that's how she's remembered.
hypehypeShe lasted all of three years. On the streets, night by night, she barely scratched the surface. The real difference came after she died. The night that the Pigfarmer cracked the seawall open, doing what even nine months of rockets and shelling couldn't. The night that the Sunken Quarter sunk, but the city survived.
hypehypeThey called her the Martyr after that. Forgot her government name, and the now-open secret of her dead face. She was dead Lady Justice; she was Joan of fucking Arc. In the wake and ruin of that night, in the long shadow of her sacrifice, the city caught a madness even ten years haven't cured.
hypehypeThe city is a corpse, a boneyard, a garden overgrown. The police, the courts, the companies, the politics: all heads on the same hydra, looking out for itself. Mob justice moves faster than law. The militias and gangs, at least, look after their own. In the streets, the slums, the clubs, the ruins, alleys, and the underbelly of the internet, violence plays out and solves itself like theatre. All the actors – hero, criminal, vigilante, serial killer, celebrity, gang-leader, terrorist – go by the same name: masks.
hypehypeSo: gritty but stylised not-so-super-not-so-hero shit. I don't think I want powers. If we choose to include them, I want them low-end, subtle, costly and uncanny or kind of gross. (Bodyhorror, breakdowns, and psychic nosebleeds.) A fictional city we can shape and ad-lib into existence. Near-future enough to be flexible. A city still seeded with the military hardware, homemade firepower, technology, and thriving black market of the insurrection and the siege. Not full sci-fi, just license to make shit up.
hypehypeConsider: The Mask/Martyr was a cypher, an emptiness. People read whatever they wanted into what she did and stood for: politics and principles of every kind. No trust for institutions or elections. Freaks rule the night, and the city's hearts and minds.
hypehypeCharacters: Masks, duh. Heroes, vigilantes, criminals, monsters: it depends on where you stand. No lycra here, no spandex. Hoodies, balaclavas, athleticswear, grease paint. Sports pads and spraypaint, plate carriers, tazers, duct tape. Parkour, krav maga, muay thai. Guns, or a sneering disregard for them. Masks, obviously.
hypehypeCharacters: Jaded rich kids. Street kids. Union-busters and union legbreakers. Radicals and nihilists. Thrillseekers. Copycats. In a mask, someone can be no one. In a mask, a nobody can be somebody. Dysfunctional, deluded, disaffected, disenfranchised. You'd have to be, going out and getting the shit kicked out of you – shot out of you, stabbed out of you – every night you can. Not so much living a double life as a nightlife and a halflife. Dancing on the blade's edge of burnout, or worse.
hypehypeCharacters: In it to make a difference? In it for the next big score? In it to make them pay? Follow a code, or do whatever it takes? Goals? Or just a deathwish, or a taste for dark celebrity?
hypehypeCharacters: Rivals, partners, enemies? A little of all the above?
hypehypeVisualise: The streets, the ruins, the shadows. Smoky sodium lamplight, cutting floodlight, unreal neon. Scaffolding creaks on a half-repaired tower that'll never be finished. The Sunken Quarter's flooded foundations. Graffiti, weeds, rust, growing and spreading, thriving. Clubs like catacombs, hyperventilating to their own bass. Squats and houseshares like cathedrals: to common cause or desperation.
hypehypeVisualise: Stylise it. Make it goth, make it punk, make it sleazy, make it fashion. Make of this mess an aesthetic. See it through rain and smog and smoke. Greasy glass, dirty water reflections. See it at dawn, at dusk, by night. The day is something you've lost; you live through it when you can't sleep through it. It never quite feels real.
hypehypeVisualise: Shrines to dead masks, new martyrs every week: all post-it notes and flowers. The cult of personality surrounding some masks spawns copycats difficult to tell from the real thing, and new subcultures and extreme fashions and extremist movements, more all the time.
hypehypeVisualise: The vibes of noir without the time period. The themes and flavour of cyberpunk without the technology. The strangeness and stylisation of superheroes without the superpowers. Almost-but-not-quite-postapocalyptica. Improbably neo-gothic architecture crushing up against concrete brutalism.
hypehypeInspirations: The Batman, to a shameless extent. Watchmen. Unironically, kinda sorta The Crow.
- 𝐅𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒
-
The white sky alleges a sun but has not the inclination to deliver it.
Cow Tools. Worldbuilding through questions, not answers. No exposition, no attempt to make sense given or needed. The author can throw out seeds; the reader, asking questions, makes them grow. Questions are invitations into the world. They make you think through it, draw suppositions, get involved. Paradoxically, the fact that no answers are given puts across the impression no answer is needed: they're self-evident within the world you, as a guest, are looking in on. And the best thing about it? The author doesn't need to know the answers to the questions. They don't even need to know the questions they're inviting you to ask. They just need to make you ask them, and the world feels deeper for it. What's the Kessel Run? We don't need to know, but the world feels deeper for containing it, somewhere out-of-frame. Cow Tools.
Mid twentieth century Modernism. Late twentieth century Modernism.
Concrete made creative, ambitious, monolithic. Soft Brutalism? Soft, as in draped with hanging and climbing greenery. Soft, as in the raw harsh character of concrete, designed in a way that's intended to age, patinate, erode beautifully over time.
Futurism made of the past. Cassettes. Smooth plastic in primary colours. Imagine a world where plastic – durable, protean, imperishable, and made from the modern age's most precious commodity – wasn't used for cheap and disposable things, but things of lasting value. How much of the slack and the shape of contemporary mass-communications and media can be picked up just by radio?
Monoliths. Towering structures and sprawling structures. Castles built like cities. Future arcologies built like castles. Labyrinths. Trackless depths. Places where the built environment starts to feel like nature, like wilderness, unknown and indifferent to you.
A house is a body. When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth. What does a house think when it stands empty? How long before loneliness turns bitter and pools like gall in its cellars, crawlspaces? A house's love should be an open, a giving thing. What happens when it becomes closed, desperate, greedy?
What is a city but a house writ large? It remembers like a muscle, like an organ remembers: every life, every death, every joy and cry. Every trace. How enormous, how indescribable must be the ghosts and hauntings that make a city haunted.
Architecture. Places that are states of being. Places that are minds. Landscapes that are bodies.
Sweat on skin. The sun on sweat on skin. Thirst. Hot and harshly golden days. Blue cold nights. The joy, the dread of water. The lust, the loss of water.
Tunnel networks. Leftovers from the war. Rebel weapon caches uncovered sometimes, from over half a century ago. Ruined neighbourhoods, waiting for the gentle hand of gentrification. Bullets buried in walls, long since plastered over and re-whitewashed. A seafort on the seacliff overlooking the ocean. And, among the intelligentsia, lipservice over champagne and good coffee and spiced hot chocolate paid to the revolutionaries, the independence movements, the communes, the barricades...but tutting about how they all just asked for too much too quickly. Of course they did, of course.
Bulky jacket, snatched waist, sleek strong legs. Swan-neck curve of a spine. Expressive, over-honest hands.
Cultural mainstays, claimed, reclaimed, subverted. Americana romance tropes but turned around or inside out. Burger, milkshake, drive-in. Sharing fries. A big jacket round smaller shoulders. Lift it out of white suburbia or smalltown paradise and these things are reborn as rebellion. Let them happen for those these ideals excluded. Folks who don't fit the cookie-cutter. Places and scenes that match the template only if you squint. I like cheesy date-tropes and turning them on their head a little.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but Southern European instead of Northern/Eastern. Balkan specifically. The bleached mountains watch you. The blue sea rushes the land. In the scrub, cicadas scream like saws, and the bees drone like anger. Scent of cypress; scent of burning beyond the horizon. Ruins of the war in concrete; ruins of the ancient past in limestone and marble, as old today as they've ever been.
Bronze Age Collapse. Post-Apocalyptic feeling antiquity.
Active Stories: 2
FRONTIERSPACE || Breathe Deep/Descend :: With Praxis.
SELF CONTROL :: With Lydia.
Nᴏᴛ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ sᴇᴀʀᴄʜɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ɴᴇᴡ sᴛᴏʀɪᴇs ᴏʀ ᴘᴀʀᴛɴᴇʀs.
Accepting compliments, friendship applications, book recommendations,
recipes handed down through your family for generations,
and earnest requests for future consideration.
Please get in touch by PM. Do not post here.
- 𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐎𝐔𝐓
-
Outside in the Greywater Flats night, a statue-sized soligram of a gogo dancer stutterstops through a few swaying steps. She's a colossus in grainy sepia and blazing neon, straddling the nightmarket's forecourt. 27 seconds of light and motion, like a firework, then the emitter drones give up, disrupt, and disappear her like she was never there.
This complex was meant to be an autofactury once, fabricating fuck-knows-what. (Build it and they will come. Same reasoning as the rest of Baumsworld. With everything only half-built, those who come half-wish they hadn't. Sometimes more than half.) It's huge and dead and half-gone to decay, but like with anything big and dead, life teems out of the rot.
It's a horseshoe shape. Kiosks and dives and public toilets honeycomb the interior. Out here, a guerrilla garden of greymarket stalls, tents, inflatable domes and prefab huts has grown over the pockmarked concrete. Hot air, dry heat. A flare-up of chemical flame underneath a wok. The nightmarket mills and steams and smokes with the scents of cooking food. The shouts of hawkers fight to be heard, each against each other, and all against the music.
Pounding bass from a half-dozen different sound systems. (Every party in Baumstown feels panicked: desperate, or just desperate to forget.) Wind that whines like an animal dying; black tea sky, scummed with dust.
A man in a hot-pink wetsuit perches on a rusty shipping container. Scoops out ladlefuls of saltwater shrimp, crawling shuddering, from the steel box where they were born and grown and ate each other in darkness.
A kid from out in the badlands stands on a crate, wide-legged and chest puffed out, next to a heap of woven reed baskets. No, cages: one jumps, shudders, sudden motion from inside. A wrapped scarf on the kid's head; on her fist a thick gauntlet. Something perches there, hooded face and claws grasping her knuckles, that is almost but not quite a hawk.
There are no paths here. It functions like a forest: the stalls and shops and underbelly boutiques make room where room needs to be made, and leave you to find your own way. Teo snakes through. Ruck slung round to fit under his arm, hands thrust into the lining of his jacket, he can feel everything he owns: touch it, safe or at least safer. The cost is looking like a fucking tourist. A kind of camouflage, he tells himself.
Teo stops. Finds a stand selling panipuri. Pays with money he can't spare. Leant against the counter, he wolfs down six, barely tasting the tang. Real fresh cilantro, but the thought comes after the flavour's gone. All that's left is the heat on the sides of his tongue, and the uneasy beginnings of adrenaline, rising in him, starting to spike.
"Who were they?" Teo doesn't look up at the five hanging corpses. Just hunches over the countertop with both elbows, indicates with a tilt of his head.
The panipuri cook fixes him with a stare, dull and heavy. His hair is a salt and pepper stormcloud above a lime-green sweatband. His face is slumped, humourless, slack at the cheeks but weirdly smooth. (Grafted.) He doesn't even bother to say the answer sign; just waits for Teo to follow through on his part.
"Sons and daughters?" Teo continues. Feels like an actor trying to prompt someone else's swallowed line. Embarrassment and resentment rise hot up his neck. "Lovers and sch—"
"Fell behind," the cook interrupts him. "Shit happens."
Last edited:
