Inspirations:
Primarily the artwork of Simon Stalenhag.
Setting Synopses:
People try very hard to stop things from going awry.
The year is 2002. The resource war that took so much of society apart ended two decades ago. What's left is ravaged. Collapsing. If not collapsing, then just near enough to collapsing for it to matter. What time people don't spend inside hedonistic escape headsets is spent neglecting the issues.
America is different, now. The environment turned unkind five years back, and got worse from there. When the headsets came out, people were already adjusted to tiny glowing screens. A tiny glowing world was the escape that so many wanted. No time for politics. Or work. It was over. Some people can't wait for the world to end with everyone else, though. I can't. But I also refuse to.
In what's left of the Independent Republic of Oregon, the headsets are illegal. Destroyed. They care, there. So that is where we must go. It needs to be different. Things need to be better.
A small group of school friends, three or four, abandon their hometown of Gauley, West Virginia to head West. Everything is falling apart around them. They'll make do. What choice is there other than to make do? If they don't then everything falls apart with them included.
Character Style:
Characters will be created in relation to the story-hook, a nineteen year old with seizures triggered exclusively by Neuronet Headsets preventing him from seeking escape from the terrors of the real world in the virtual world, and their relation to each other. From there, characters will be created in relation to each other collaboratively. To this end I will create a Discord for discussion of the characters and their designing. There will be no official approval process for characters. Once the team is happy with them then those characters will be used. The only things I'll enforce will be world and game related. The story-hook will be removed at the first quarter mark to allow for the characters created by the players to act independently of the game master. No stats or skills will be used due to the priority focus on character interaction and storytelling.
Scene & Content Style:
Any skill-based activities will be judged by the game master, myself, to push the story in a more fruitful direction. For the most part this can be trumped by creativity. There's a point where I will yield to good planning and character interactions due to the effort and writing put into an action being superior to the development and writing that would result from the failure.
Scenes will be Game-Master proposed using a twenty-five scene maximum with an additional ten scenes being reserved for story-events based on the world and how it is changing around the characters. In between scenes the Game-Master will offer a choice of at least three scenes, then the story and interactions will progress through the player group's choices.
