That idea that gnaws at you in the night.

[Blackwell121]

Hello

Not sure if anyone else has that kind of quirk/issue that I'll talk about below, but I figured I might as well drop a post about it.

Night/evening is the time when the imagination in my brain is running on all cilinders, I can lay in the bed lost in thought for hours before I drift off to sleep. Best part I remember most if not all details of the nightly brainstorming, but come morning I loose any and all motivation to pursue it or find 101 excuses why what my mind spawned was too weak/edgy/cringy (take yourr pick). 9/10 times it focuses either on fiction I would want to write or quest I would try to run. Problem is there are so many things that take away energy and focus during the day that most of it would come out dead on arrival once my smoothed out brain tries to create in the afternoon.

I can drop three most frequent ideas that have been scratching at my skull's walls every other night for the past 2, 2.5 years I think.

1. Dystopian Earth in the far future where humanity managed to fuck Earth to the point it is unable to sustain life on its own. Goverments collapsed, corporations run the show, wealth makes right mindset. Continued human survival is dependant on exploitation of other realities using stargateesque wormholes. It would be rush for Africa 2.0 where PMCs are the are arm and mouth of corporations. In my eyes that had potential for quest/story.

2. ROB jumpchain story, where MC looses his soul as collateral, MC would have to jump hurdles to get it back, only to find his soul is being kept in ground zero that both connects all fictions together and provides energy to prime engines. Energy is created by burning lost souls like MC. In a race against time he would start hoarding the resources and manpower to breach into that area and along the way piss off ROB who would facilitate MCs demise by gathering all his enemies at final battle. Being souless MC would be ruthless and apathetic meaning there would be no shortage of people/beings wanting MC's head. That one part at the ending when soul is recovered only to cause disonance between mostly pure soul and nearly deranged mind that caused a lot of suffering, is the point when MC 2ould become sucidal and decide to end it all, by destroying the engines.

3. Borderlands corporation quest. Jack recently bit the dust on Pandora, Hyperion scrambles for CEO position, other corporations are circling like vultures, but that gives small fry like you a chance to rise again. S&S Munitions might have went bankrupt, but there is a lot of eridium on Pandora now that will let your company get back on its feet. That quest would have been in timeline between borderlands 2 and borderlands 3.

Those three are most common. Maybe one day I'll get myself together and do something about them, maybe they will become something more then recurring phantoms of my mind.

If any of you have something simikar feel free to share here.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Ok, I've got a 'core' idea that would likely make your blood freeze:

The future is only war. All this fantastical technology, and yet mankind is still killing each other. Over ideals, over trade routes, over resources, over righting wrongs real or imagined. While governments are still a thing, megacorporations are major players in geopolitics and have waged war on an unheard-of scale. All factions have pretty intense restrictions on information and media (to the point that news networks can't do things like post opinion pieces, cover something that is 'still developing', and sell deepfakes and memetic weapons to the highest bidder), privacy is outright outlawed (all factions have an electronic surveillance state to end all surveillance states), and most people are on a UBI. Work is fuck off rare, automation made civilian work practically extinct outside of supervising the automation itself, and most of the work is the military. Bioweapons have developed to the point that a certain bioweapon from SB was created (and put all of Rome into a biosphere, not a dome but a literal sphere) alongside a litany of others in one's basement (which is why privacy has been outlawed). Cybernetics are ubiquitous alongside genetic augmentations, causing a few episodes of supremist-wet dreams of literally one ethnic group superior to the other...

Oh, and there is a madman who wants to destroy the meme that is civilization so completely that it will never exist again... and he's just the worst of the single-man insanity.

 

[Nerx]

All of this happened because a fish suddenly decides to see what the surface is all about.

 

[Blackwell121]

I'll be frank that first idea keeps looking more and more appealing. I even spent some time getting gif done out of youtube video. Idea was to get close enough picture of a corporate wetwork squad.

Spoiler

<div style='position:relative; padding-bottom:calc(100.00% + 44px)'><iframe src='https://gfycat.com/ifr/DistortedEthicalAmazonparrot' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' width='100%' height='100%' style='position:absolute;top:0;left:0;' allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

Squad

Edit: Not sure why embedding options don't work on mobile version.

 

[ShogunTrooper]

I got one.

The first is something I've been working on for the better part of this year, but never really managed to actually sit the fuck down and properly start writing, and is basically a Fantasy Mecha Setting, in the vein of Break Blade, Knights and Magic, or Escaflowne, with a shot of 40k's Imperial Knights thrown in. You know? Mech Pilots as Knights and Feudal Lords, riding self-aware, pilotable Magitech Golems into battle, worship of Machine-Gods, weirdly schizophrenic technology, soldiers still primarily fighting with sword and board (Even if they wear power armor), lack of Firearms, that sort of thing. A crazy, but fun, setting, in a genre that I don't see alot of works in (at least ones that don't go full Super Robot), which is a shame.
To be honest, I've actually started writing on it multiple times, but I've never gotten past the first chapter/prologue, and rewrote it at least three to four times, never really satisfied with it.

I got dozens of notes scattered all over the place, in Google Docs, Campfire, that Nebulous Software, and some other places, and already got a rough map, but the drive to properly write just doesn't come to me. Every time I sit down, full of vigor, only to stare at the blank page, with my brain going "Herp-di-Derp!" and shutting down. It's threatening to become my white whale!