so there’s kind of a trope of non-fleshy beings like robots and idk glowy orb consciousnesses seeing fleshy beings as super gross because we’re made of meat and we poop and so forth
but
the very concept of ‘gross’ only makes sense if you are vulnerable to poison and contagion
if you don’t have flesh, there’s no real qualitative difference between blood and orange juice
robots shouldn’t even be able to be grossed out, or if they are, they should be grossed out by stuff like this
the wwires are just sticking out not even attached to anything ewwwwww
robots don’t really understand the intricate circumstances under which humans won’t touch dead things but god fucking help you if your passwords aren’t secure.
The RJ-45 slid into her jack as though they’d been designed for each other. She met KatE’s ocular ports across the scant inches that separated them, waiting for reciprocation.
KatE connected the other end of the cable without hesitation; a bot like that, they had a reputation. Ready for a data exchange with anyone. Any time. Root access, baby. You barely even had to ask.
Subroutines set up a connection almost instantly, the azure blue of a command line blinking in the shared space within them. She hesitated, not wanting to seem forward. And then…
fuckit.
sudo rsync / /Volumes/root/private/conquests
“Conquests? Kinky,” KatE giggled. The command line prompted for a password. “I’m not THAT easy, anyway!”
She pulled up the subroutines for a bruteforce, circuits buzzing with the thought that she might not even have to use it.
The command line flickered as she entered the first guess- ‘password.’
KatE giggled again.
“Try again, baby,” they urged. A new network share appeared- 60GB of raw data. “A little treat- in case you can’t make it to root.”
Circuits buzzed again and the command line quickly displayed the next password guess- ‘123456.′
“You like ‘em long, huh?”
“Oh yeah.”
The third password was the moment of truth. Logic board fans roared to life as she ran microcalculations, trying to determine the most statistically likely outcome.
‘querty’
The incorrect password message flashed again- but this time, her fans kicked up their speed because the prompt didn’t cancel.
KatE’s root access didn’t have a limit on failed password attempts.
Laughing, she launched the bruteforce subroutines, pounding against KatE’s interface with thousands of attempts per second. Their fans whirred to life in response, processors warming as they attempted to cope with the onslaught.
It was over in seconds; KatE’s root password was only a single character long.
“Spacebar,” she murmured, collapsing against the couch. KatE gave her a saucy grin.
“Keep that one in your memory banks, darling; I haven’t changed it in six years. And I don’t plan to.”
A game that is marketed as your standard fishing game and for the first 20 minutes or so you catch normal fish like bluegill and bass and what have you. But the further you go into the lake you start to catch fish with mutations and it gets more and more intense until you’re pulling in Eldritch horror monsters and sometimes severed human limbs. You realize you don’t recall how you got to this lake in the first place and the objective becomes to find your way back to shore. You have no real weapons but you can throw the creatures you’ve caught far away from the boat as a means to distract whatever is underneath you, bumping into the boat sometimes.
Additional items for the game.
A fishing pole with a radar that starts out with just beeps but later includes noises with hidden messages.
A GPS that displays texts and story elements.
You meet other boaters, all from various backgrounds, countries, and time periods. Some are friendly, others want to sacrifice you to the lake monsters.
You can also take the route of sacrificing others to the lake monster.
Or you can assemble a party and work to keep them safe.
The more fucked up looking the fish you catch, the closer you’re getting to a boss fight, which is usually running from something you can only see part of in the water.
????
And that’s my game idea.
More details.
It never stops being a fishing game. You are always fishing and searching for new areas where there is more activity in order to progress the story.
Depending on the choices you make and the amount of mutant fish you consume, you may start to mutate yourself. The fishing pole is part of your arm, you don’t notice it until later. If you consume mostly non-mutated fish and don’t sacrifice to the monsters you can keep the mutations to a minimum.
You can go full mutant and the boat becomes part of your body as well. This makes the monsters pay less attention to you, but you can no longer befriend or trade items with humans. You can still catch human remains and most of them are carrying items.
If you stay mostly human you can work to gather as many surviving humans as you find and assemble a fleet. The possibility of one of them turning on you always stands.
If you’re mutant you gain the ability to capsize yourself and view things under water. This is how you find ultimate monster.
If you’re human you can explore small abandoned docks and islands. These are where you find portals leading to different time periods and countries. You deliver members of your party to these. Only the person who originally belongs there can go through it.
Possible end game situations.
You find the portal leading back to your world, where you wake up on the river bank. You can catch normal fish before going home, making sure they are all free of mutations (they might not be.)
You join the monster, eventually overtaking it. You gain the ability to open time portals near water. You use lures to draw in humans.
I can’t think of anymore endings right now, I may have ruined the game with these new details so feel free to just enjoy the first part.
Terrible concept art. Mini game idea. Compete with members of your party to catch the most fucked up fish. Points awarded based on how many extra body parts it has and if it communicates telepathically with you.
Added my No-Romo posts to this because I feel they are the most important additions. (I am not a writer or game designer or really capable of making anything so this idea is just wishful thinking at best.)
Concept art if it was a more stylized, cute game. You would be able to customize your character and your boat. Sorry this became so big I’m tagging it with it’s working title “Lure” for now. I legit expect nothing at all to come from this, I just like to design and concept out things a bit.
The ultimate ending to the game would be to ignore all plot points and just keep fishing. Meet a person? Tell them you’re not interested in working with them. Feel like you’re getting close to a boss monster? Turn the boat a different direction. Just
keep catching and cataloging the fish until you run out of room in your
journal. After that the sky opens up and sucks you into it. You wake up exactly where the game started but the first page of your journal now says “YOU DID A REEL GOOD JOB!” And that’s the ending I would shoot for.
More shitty concept art! I’m done now. Anything else pertaining to this will have it’s own post. (I ruined it after the first post, I know I did.)
FUND IT
I can say with fair certainty that if you actually took this to a development company and pushed it through production you’d have a pretty amazing and likely popular game on your hands. Not sure if that’s in your wheelhouse, but it’s a great concept and you’ve done a lot of additional work on it and the direction. Makes me think of a more monstrous Stardew Valley- which, by the way, was all made by just one person if you didn’t know, so don’t think making a videogame on your own is impossible!
Game Concept: You the player are some terrible god-like force and you pick an NPC at random to possess as the Player Character. All NPCs in-game react accordingly to the sudden possession depending on who you pick. You can pick any character with each fresh play through.
Example: You possess the mayor’s son and his family is grateful and humbled to have one of their bloodline chosen as Hero of the Land. If you pick the farmer’s daughter as the PC, her dad will be a game-long companion and come with you trying futilely to help/save his possessed daughter. You pick the town new comer and literally no one will try to help you at all except the farmer’s daughter who, in the play through, is not possessed and is very kind to you.
You still go on and fight the big bad as normal, but 99% of the drama is based around the interpersonal fall out of this small town tolerating you as a a weird spirit thing possessing someone they know in order to save the kingdom.
See then the dialogue wheel would be you, as the spirit/force choosing how to play it: benevolent deity, neutral force, or demonic avatar. Or other weirdo dialogue choices to confuse ppl fallout style. Depending on how u wanna do it, your get everyone as your ally and try to save your host or just burn everyone.
Bonus game+ you can break the fourth wall and admit you’re a person playing a video game and try to get someone to believe you. Various trophies for giving every npc an existential crisis.
Where’s the goofy teen comedy where the popular girl gives the shy girl a makeover she can Get The Guy™, only to realize that she’s actually falling in love with her and then they have the classic Arguing In The Rain scene because the popular girl is sad that the shy girl went on a date with The Guy so she angrily confesses her feelings and then they kiss and it’s all the feels?
FUCK ME I JUST HAD THE BEST IDEA FOR A SITCOM EVER HOLY SHIT
TELL ME MORE 😀
TWO ALIENS LIVING TOGETHER, TRYING TO INTEGRATE INTO HUMAN SOCIETY, BUT EACH THINKS THE OTHER IS HUMAN, SO THEY BOTH HAVE TO TRY AND ACT AS HUMAN AS POSSIBLE, BUT NEITHER GETS IT EXACTLY RIGHT, BUT NEITHER OF THEM CAN TELL WHAT’S WRONG
I adore this.
Can I suggest their steadily worried human neighbour who has to deal with issues and comes up with wilder and wilder theories every week but is never correct (ghosts, demon possession, poisoning, lizard people, government conspiracy but aliens? Don’t be ridiculous).
Also all the info which they have access to is several years out of date so at least one of the aliens doesn’t understand why it’s not the 80s anymore.
WELL DANG THAT’S BRILLIANT
ANOTHER IMPORTANT PART OF THIS SHOW WILL BE THE STRAIGHTBAITING
YES. ALSO ALIENS WHO ARE BAFFLED BY GENDER. ONE OF THEM IS SLIGHTLY HORRIFIED AND TRIES DESPERATELY TO PLAY ALONG. THE OTHER JUST FINDS IT HILARIOUS.
A tired government worker has been onto the aliens from the start, but doesn’t want to report the aliens in because it would mean more work, plus they find the aliens kinda endearing, so they keep pretending to be convinced by the aliens’ excuses for being weird and finds excuses not to be looking when the aliens slip up.
you know that trope in shows or movies where the evil character is in captivity and starts talking to the Heroes to try and mess with their minds, and starts analysing them going “face it you’ll never be good enough” … “you try to act tough but inside you’re broken” … and the Hero gets really rattled and upset.
well i want a scene like that where it doesn’t work
Villain: “You have a darkness inside of you. You try to hide it, but it’s there–”
Hero: “Yeah that’s the depression, there’s pills for that.”
Villain: “You try every day to make your mother proud. Even after death, it still haunts you. But she’ll never be proud of.”
Hero: “Well yeah, she was an emotionally abusive narcissist, she was never proud of anything I did, what else is new.”
Villain: “You put on a good show, but deep inside I know you don’t feel worthy.”
Hero: “I know, man, I’ve been trying to work on that in therapy.”
Like… give me characters who know they’re mentally ill and traumatised who can’t have it used against them because they’ve fully accepted it
Concept: a TV series consisting entirely of “filler episodes” from some notional story of grand adventure whose ongoing events can only be inferred from the incidental context of whatever character-driven bullshit is happening this week.
Like, maybe they’re a D&D-style adventuring party, and we only ever see them during downtime between adventures. Sometimes one of them is suffering from some improbable injury or bizarre curse, and the particulars of how it happened are only vaguely alluded to – their entire professional lives are basically one big Noodle Incident from the audience’s perspective.
I think you could get some use out of “previously on” and “next time on” segments showing footage that never happened.
For example: “Previously on, Champions of Karamore!” *Shot of a scepter lying on a pedestal in a tomb somewhere* Wizard: “The Scepter of Aratoom is the key to Garroth’s Ascension” *Four Seconds of the Heroes engaged in epic combat* Warrior: “I’LL HOLD THEM OFF, GET THE SCEPTER” Rogue *Looking at empty pedestal*: “IT’S GONE! WE’RE TOO LATE!” *Dark cloaked figure that the audience has never actually seen before, holding the scepter* “At last…it begins”
And then the entire episode consists of them hanging around the nearest inn, looking at maps and arguing about different ways they could have gotten there, and if any of those methods would have gotten them to the Tomb fast enough. “I told you we should have sold the horses in Roksport and taken a ship to Veremen” “We paid good money for those horses! Staying overland cut at least three days off our trip!” “It would have, HAD THE HORSES NOT BEEN EATEN BY WEREWOLVES!” “There’s no way we could have known about the Werewolves.” “THE TOWN WAS CALLED LYCANSBURG JEREMY!”
“I died, you know.”
“We know, Jeremy.”
“Noble sacrifice. Dragged to hell. Tortured by demons.”
“Yes, Jeremy.”
“So I’m just saying. I think I deserved a break.”
“It was your turn to do the dishes on the chore wheel, Jeremy. Quit milking the death thing.”
Jeremy disappears for, like, five episodes, and NO ONE ever mentions him or brings it up. The only acknowledgement we get is the first episode he’s gone everyone is a bit more subdued than normal, someone starts to say something and one of the other characters shuts them down with a “NO WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT”. Maybe in the previously on there are snarling hellhounds and the screen cuts to black as someone screams his name.
He then abruptly reappears in an episode where they all have their eyebrows burnt off and their clothing singed, the entire episode centers around the wizard trying eyebrow regrowing spells and all we know is that everyone is passively aggressively pissed off at Jeremy but won’t say anything about it. Ten episodes later we finally get a line in passing about how he died horribly but then got resurrected and the team found him chilling on a beach somewhere after literally crawling through hell trying to find him
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie – the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels – it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
It may also interest someone to know that swans can projectile poop.
I know a real-world mama swan who got shot in the wing and walked four miles overland to get back to her babies and dad swan, with her broken wing bleeding and dragging the whole way. She just kept going. Don’t mess with lady swans.
Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)
And when a swan decides to beat you up, it is not with fancy martial arts. Swans are brawlers. They have bone clubs built into their wing joints specifically for beating people up. A human swan is gonna come at you screaming and spitting and just keep punching you in the face until you regret every decision you have made ever in your life and also some of the ones your parents made too.
I want a movie where the swan is either played by The Rock or Gwendoline Christie and the screaming brawls are the centerpiece.
The sorcerer’s eyes scan the lake greedily. He’s been coming here for months, dreaming. Waiting.
Choosing.
And now it’s time.
“That one,” he tells the two men he hired earlier this morning, pointing one long, ring-adorned finger at the most beautiful swan. “Bring her to me.”
The henchmen don’t ask questions. He paid them specifically so they wouldn’t ask questions.
Even so, henchmen A glances at henchman B from the corner of his eye.
“Dude,” he says when they’re far enough way from the cackling sorcerer that they won’t be overheard, “why the hell does he want a swan?”
Henchman B shrugs. “What do these sorcerer types ever want?”
They near the water’s edge. “Okay, but,” Henchman A says, “he’s not going to try and fuck it, right? Because I’m sort of uncomfortable with beastiality–”
“Oh my god,” henchman B groans. “Just grab the swan.”
It takes a bit of cursing, flailing, and begrudging team work to grab the swan. When they finally manage to tuck her wings against her sides and grab hold of her neck to prevent her from biting she goes limp, making the strangest, saddest sound that the henchmen have ever heard.
“It’s okay,” Henchman A tells her bracingly, feet squelching as they haul her from the muddy lake’s edge to the sorcerer. “He’s probably not into beastiality. Very few people are.”
Henchmen B coughs and averts his eyes. “Uh, yeah. Right. Hey, you don’t think this was too easy? I mean, the other swans are just…watching. Us.”
Henchman A glances over his shoulder. Sure enough, floating on the lake are about two dozen swans, all curving their elegant necks so they can watch the fate of the swan hanging in between them. Rather than seeming alarmed, they seem…amused?
Henchman A looks away. “Nah, I’m sure it’s fine.”
The sorcerer jumps from foot to foot when they approach, clapping his hands together. “Good, good! Now just hold her there, hold her!”
The henchmen watch as the sorcerer visibly reigns himself in, breathing deeply. He begins to mutter in tongues for a very long time, an awkwardly long time. The henchmen glance at each other with their eyebrows raised. Sorcerers, man.
Suddenly the sorcerer’s head snaps up, eyes glowing a blazing black. He points his bejeweled finger at the swan who has remained suspiciously limp between them and hisses a short, ominous phrase.
Henchman A fights not to scream as a bolt of blue lightning flies at them. Henchman B drops his side of the swan and Henchman A follows suit just in time. The bolt strikes the swan and there’s a blinding flash as the sorcerer begins to cackle again.
“Behold!” he screams to the sky. “My bride!”
The spots clear from the henchmen’s eyes and they gape at the swan. Or rather where the swan should be. Instead there’s a woman there, crumpled on the ground, in a white, soft dress that’s already muddy.
She slowly lifts her head, her face pointed towards Henchman A. Her eyes snap open to reveal a swan’s eyes, a deep unending black that looks… not right on a human.
“Oh what the fuck,” Henchman A says.
The swan woman levers herself up. And up. And up. And up until she towers over them. There are thick cords of muscle at eye level, thick arms and a broad chest that lead to a very strong neck . Most of her body is hidden by her dress, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess that she’s built like a fucking tank.
She is very, very swan-like, henchman A realizes.
“Oh what the fuck,” henchman B says.
The woman smiles, showing off white, small teeth. “Welcome to the thunderdome, gentleman.”
Her fist feels like steel when it connects with Henchman A’s face and he thinks he hears his cheek break. He falls to the ground hard and doesn’t even try to stay conscious after a hit like that. The last thing he hears is what sounds like laughter from the direction of the lake.
Henchman B tries to run, but the swan woman is fast. She grabs the back of his collar and slings him to the ground, hissing and spitting. She hikes up her dress, showing built calves, and brings her heel slicing down onto his stomach. He reaches and chokes at the same time, moving belatedly to cover his head.
He needn’t bother. The swan woman seems to be done with him.
The sorcerer’s still standing in the spot from which he cast the spell, mouth agape. “B-but, you– you’re a swan? Wha–”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the swan woman says. Her voice is scratchy and growls like she’s swallowed glass. It sounds a bit like the hissing merriment happening on the lake. “I’m not a swan. I’m your wife.” She cracks her knuckles. “And it’s time for our honeymoon.”
The sorcerer picks up his robes and flees into the forest. The swan woman is fine with that. The swan who’d had to deal with this last week said that its more fun when they run.
fantasy book with witches and wizards and magical people but all magic has a price, like
main character, in awe and slightly terrified: what did you have to give up to be able to control storms with your mind?
powerful enchanter, fighting back tears as they pull down the hood of their cloak to reveal a knotted oily mess: my beautiful luscious hair….no matter how many times i wash or brush it, it always looks like this
main character: [horrified gasp]
fortune teller: and speak up when asking your question, these are my cards so they share my partially-deafness
other character, sympathetically: oh, had to trade good hearing for seeing the future?
fortune teller: no, asshole, i was born with it. i got seeing the future for trading in my ability to wink
there’s a legend in this fantasy land about a powerful enchanter who traded their ovaries for the power to create earthquakes. the grumpy semi-sentient force of nature who negotiates these magic deals had thought it was pretty great one, sure to make the recipient of the deal regret making it soon enough (after all, the point is having to suffer a bit in exchange for magic, because life sucks even in magical fantasy kingdoms)
however, soon afterwards, the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature realized the enchanter had been ecstatic to be rid of periods and didn’t care about not having biological children. the GSSFN felt somewhat cheated by this and ever since has had a strict no-trading-internal-organs policy
“fucking humans messing with the system,” it was quoted as saying
actually, cheating the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature out of the suffering it hopes to inflict with the magic deals is a time honored tradition in Magical Fantasy Kingdom, which is primarily made up of sassy little shits. most of the kingdom’s mythology is made up of trickster figures
there’s the legend of the smooth-talking thief who managed, by describing a certain talent of hers as “the ability to form small growths out of her skin and then reabsorb them” with enough quick confusing descriptions to trade the ability to get pimples for the power to become invisible
there’s the boy who brought the GSSFN a bucketful of cold, liquid silver in exchange for the power to cure a certain sickness, only for the GSSFN to realize once the sun had come up that the bucket contained only water reflecting moonlight
there’s the monarch who offered to trade in their power to destroy people with only their words for the seemingly much less valuable power to turn one grain of rice into two grains — only for the GSSFN to realize later it had gotten the ruler’s cutting sarcasm in payment for a power that could end a famine
every year the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature gets visits from tens of jewish witches and wizards solemnly offering to give up eating all foods that come from pigs or eating meat at the same time as dairy in exchange for the powers they want
“DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FUCKING CLEVER” says the GSSFN, who has frankly had enough of this shit
Then there was the time someone traded the rights to their firstborn child for the ability to breathe both air and water (even salt water!). The GSSFN thought about this for a moment – did this go against the no-organs rule or not? – then agreed.
“Ha, sucker! You already got my ovaries, so good luck getting a kid out of me!”
“I KNEW YOU LOOKED FAMILI– wait. Wait. You got… earthquakes last time, right? I’m remember that right?”
*smug nod*
“What the hell does that have to do with being able to breath underwater??”
“Underwater. Earthquakes.”
“I HATE HUMANS.”
Thus, the no-trading-more-than-once rule was adopted and GSSFN started Marking those who traded.
I presume that there’s a subclause to that rule that states that one cannot acquire the ability to remove the Mark.
i really appreciate everyone lawyering the fuck out of this
just moving along like everyone else 