Re: VAGUERY :: M/F&NB :: Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk, Vampire: the Masquerade, & More

[Barding]

Tiles line the plaza floor and climb the walls a while before stopping. Sunlight slants boiling hot between the empty buildings; heats the tiles so hot their colours change and he can feel them through his soft soled boots. Blue and eggyolk yellow like the colours of a Byzantine icon, yellowing-white like plastic gone bad, the tiles flow and stagger round each other in seams and veins like steam or clouds. They tessellate, but time's ruined the pattern. Must've been someone's idea of elevating the neighbourhood once. A colourful communal no-man's land between the four concrete housing blocks all standing in each other's shadow. A cheap way to make the workers feel they were moving onto something better, soon as they moved in. He looks round, sees how that turned out. The grout's gone to dust, self-sown with weeds. Hands have pried up loose slabs for roofing, flooring, recycling, reingestion by the city, and lichen grows in the gaps between: soft strange geometries, like a streetmap, or circuitry. There's no neighbourhood to elevate. Maybe there never was. In places like this, the sprawl wears thin. People leave or are made to leave, and come back only to hide or steal, here where the colours change, and silence takes on a new texture. Rhythmic sawing of unseen cicadas; wind through empty streets. Scars in the city's skin. Maybe where he lives will be a place like this one day. He thinks about it, shakes it off. Places like this get you thinking strange, get you superstitious. Shake it off and move on. Years of graffiti reskin the walls, hidden under years of growing green. Ivy, Japanese knotweed, clusters of climbing purple wildflowers whose names he doesn't know with his optics running offline. The shell of a public access point lies overturned and overgrown, gutted for cables, circuitry, transmitters, elements. Half-drenched in their own shadow, the blocks crowd out the blinding pale sky. Broken windows wink down, blind-eyed from the upper storeys, the uniform serrations of balconies. They were monoliths for living in, these blocks. And again there comes that whispering suspicion, that superstition: maybe they still are. So he tries not to look up for too long, like you try not to meet anyone's eye on the metro. Don't see and you'll stay unseen. Still, it's got him uneasy. He doesn't know if he'd rather know or not if someone's looking back. He picks wild greens from between the tiles. The day's heat lies like a fluid on everything; like a shimmer of sweat on the air. It muffles his movements, but all the same his footfalls feel suddenly very loud. It gets him hurrying. A mistake. It only makes things worse. He breaks into a shuffling almost-run, learnt years back in night-long bar-shifts. Slings the mesh bag over his shoulder; cinches it tight on its strap to stop it jouncing on his back. It's not full yet but he's had enough. Wild mustard greens, purslane, broadleaf plantain, eating nettles, welsh onion. He recites what he's found and filled his bag with, like a charm to keep his mind from running. Doesn't know the names of those purple flowers but he knows what he came to look for. Has since he was a kid, and his mama taught him that what grew out of the dirt of the deadzone east from their apartment could mean the difference between eating and starving. She made it like a game. That's what you do with kids: don't ask if they want to starve or not, ask if they want to win. He's been playing ever since.

:: Some Vague Cravings ::
from Barding

This is gonna be a pretty general thread. Just a grab-bag of what I'm into, who I am, what I'm craving. Because I've always got ideas, cravings, promising odds and ends knocking around in my head and jiving for primacy. Homebrews and halfmade characters. But they're not always finished or specific enough to warrant threads of their own. So this is where I hang them out to see who bites. I'm not looking for a particular setting or plot or pairing here. I just want good cowriters. Someone to give me a reason to get excited, get to work, focus my efforts. Someone to share some hype with.

Who I Am / What I Want

I've played around as a writer for most of my life now. Some of that's been writing solo. I've written short fiction, published a novel and a tiny bit of poetry, and put out some long-ass long-form fiction in serialised chapters. Enough to know how to carry a plot, a cast, a setting by myself. But also enough to know there's just something satisfying about collaborating with someone.

Writing's a big deal for me, and I like to think what I turn out is pretty high quality. My prose is lean, fast-paced, but highly descriptive, glittering with glimpses of character psychology and worldbuilding. At least, that's what I aim for. Whether as a reader or a writer, what I really love is detail. Punchy specificity. That's what I try to impress with, and what really impresses me.

I play male characters and masc-leaning non-binary folks as my mains. They might be slinky and pretty, or strange, or grizzled and rough around the edges. They might feel strange and alien in their gender and what it expects of them, or they might feel comfortable and confidant. 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.

That only applies to my main characters though. I can write in any number of side characters and NPCs, and they'll be a lot more varied. (I 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. Whatever their identity and however they express it, make them complex and convincing — no laziness, no caricatures. Your real life gender is your business, and has no impact on whether I'll write with you. What I care about is your ability to create and play interesting, balanced characters, every bit as psychologically complex as any real person worth a damn.

Above all I want quality writing. Lately, I like writing in the third person, present tense. (Those strong, clipped verb forms. That sense of immediacy, time, place, but also how much easier it makes things when writing about memory and the past.) That's my preference, but I'm easy, adaptable, and happy to experiment. I won't, however, budge on quality. And by that I mean more than just good grammar and a fluent grasp of English. I mean detail and a grasp of pacing and rhythm. A sense of style, preferably appropriate to the story's tone and your character's mind. If you hadn't guessed, I try to write how I'd like to be written to. 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 stretches of introspection, the passage of time, or characters spending time alone.

I want collaboration, both of us pulling our weight. I want creativity. Imagination. Ability to improvise and create on the fly with confidence and flair, and throw out your own ideas. Enthusiasm, because I thrive off it, and offer plenty of my own. A love of brainstorming and worldbuilding, perhaps. I like to leave a bit of that still to do even with my premade original settings, so they don't end up feeling like they're just mine but ours. Excitement about the same things that excite me in a setting, a genre. Good communication, clarity over what we both want, and what does and doesn't work for us. Shared interests, sexual and otherwise. Those certainly wouldn't go amiss. Nor would a willingness to research, and get your hands dirty with details as necessary.

I'd love a partner with good taste in visuals, maybe similar aesthetics to me when it comes to settings. 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, and that'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. Prove your potential! Get me keen!

For more details about me, what I want, and what I like, head over to my O/Os page.

Always On The Menu

Homebrew and Worldbuilding. Pretty much always. Even when I'm loving an established franchise, the way my brain works is to take what I love from it and run. Make something original inspired by it. Hell, even on the rare occasion I wanna write within an established setting, I wanna make it my own. Add details, flavour, and go beyond the limitations of the canon. I have a bunch of original settings and a lot of the ideas below hint at them. But with the right partner, I also love throwing things we both love into a pot and taking turns to stir. That way we'll end up with something not just original, but uniquely us.

Slowburn/Earning It. For all my talk about grit and grimdark, I'm kind of a sap. I love to write stories about characters developing feelings for each other, but it's the developing part that really excites me. I love the chase, the struggle, the banter, the arguments. Characters who are hard to like, and who may find each other hard to live with. Characters with trust issues, rivalries, awkwardness or secrets between them. I like to walk those characters down the long and bumpy road to something better: begrudging mutual respect, appreciation, codependence, love, forbidden love, whatever form it might take. But I want to feel like they've earnt it, and like we've built it up naturally. And hey, we get to enjoy the simmering sexual tension along the way! 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 friends to... You get the idea.

Inverse Slowburn. At least, that's what I call it. 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. Either way, it's awkward or casual; was never meant to mean anything or say anything about either of them. Maybe it wasn't their choice. Maybe there were never meant to be any consequences. A one-time thing, that's all. But circumstances tangle their lives together. They're stuck working, living, surviving together: strangers who know each other intimately and not at all. The fun here is starting with a bang, then immediately dialing back to awkwardness, abrasiveness, and building back up into sexual and personal tension, getting to know each other — feelings getting involved where they were never meant to. Things start casual or meaningless, get awkward or tense or complicated, and so here we are, back on the bumpy road to feelings. (Maybe 'Horseshoe Slowburn' or something is a better way of describing this?)

Vagabonds, Adventurers, Mercenaries. Stories about drifters, scum, nobodies getting by in an uncaring world. People of the underworlds and outer fringes of society. Stories about struggle, ambition, hope, survival, adventure, told from the perspective of low-powered protagonists. Stories about doing what it takes to enjoy a little glimpse of the good life, even if only for one night. Stories about money and the lengths people will and won't go to for it. These characters may not be bad guys, but they're sure as hell not heroes. I've got a particular love of mercenaries, and workers in dirty bloody gig economies. Sellswords, scavengers, guns for hire, hedgeknights, witchers and witcher-adjacent monster hunters.

Homes That Aren't Houses. Spaceships, seaships, skyships, mech cockpits, etc. I love stories where these are a touchstone. 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. Anything that feels a little bit like a Forged In The Dark game, or a little bit XCOM.

Improvisation. Playing To Find Out. I love to take my time getting to know potential partners, and I love to take my time with worldbuilding, brainstorming, before getting started. So this might seem contradictory. Honestly, it kinda is. But good rules sometimes have great exceptions. For me, it's the mark of a really good writing partnership when I can feel confident in our ability to just wing it. When I trust and respect a partner, and we have enough shared interests, and I like the kinda bullshit they spin, and they like mine, I love to start with a vague sense of our setting, genre, characters, and a hook to drag them into the action...and then just improvise. 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". I like a bit of grimdark in terms of the worlds I build. But one of the big reasons for that is that it makes the points of light shine all the brighter. I like stories about people finding each other, supporting each other, connecting in hard, cruel, indifferent worlds. Characters coming to be one another's chosen family; each feeling like home to one another. People who are one another's "one good thing". Friendship. (And probably making each other cum occasionally.)

Clever Bastards. Characters who are educated, or cunning, or both. 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, with kind deep eyes and a small black heart.

Plucky Kids. I guess I'm nostalgic at the moment. This might mean playing characters in their late teens, early twenties, old enough to think they know it all, young enough to not realise how young they are. Or it might mean characters who've known each other since they were younger, since before our story starts. Shared memories of messier, simpler times, when they were still becoming who they became. Plucky, naive, enthusiastic youngsters striking out together into difficult worlds. (Obviously any adult content will occur after characters are of age.)

Defamiliarised And De/Reconstructed. This one's tough to explain, but I'll try. Settings that definitely aren't our world, or any variation on it, but are made of bits and pieces that feel familiar. Surreal urban settings. Worlds that look 20th or 21st century, and aren't exactly fantasy or sci-fi, but all the same aren't set in the real world. Worlds that use the same words for things as our world, but don't always mean the same things by them. Worlds that contain a lot of the same concepts as our world, but with new roots, new histories, making them grow in unfamiliar ways. Real stuff, familiar stuff, shuffled and turned on its head. Disco Elysium is a fantastic example of this. It's set in a strange and original world, but one that's made from a kind of cannibalised collage of 20th and 21st century history, politics, philosophy, culture. It recycles and reconfigures and reconstitutes all that into something new that feels a little like our world but isn't. A lot of novels by China Miéville, and the ttRPG Electric Bastionland also do this brilliantly, but to more outlandish extents.

Current Cravings
In roughly descending order...
Feel free to mix and match.

Space Mercenaries In Space. I have a whole original setting written up around this idea. (Link for a pretty thread with more info and a potential plot.) But really, it all grew from wanting to tell stories about sci-fi bastard badasses doing violence for pay. Dealing with the trauma, the shakes, the scars, because hey, it's a living. Bursts of luxury when the money's good, when the checks come in, and when they don't: scrounging in warzones for supplies, eating noodles and mysterious protein in greasy spacestation diners. Drifters, belonging nowhere for long. Clawing whatever joy, whatever living, whatever camaraderie and intimacy you can from a bitter, everchanging frontier. And wondering if doing it together is better or worse than doing it alone.

Mecha. Big damn robots – in the vein of Titanfall and Lancer and Battletech – and the traumatised hard-bitten aces that pilot them. Could tie into space mercenary stuff. Could be the gimmick for a post-apocalyptic wasteland setting. Or an imperial space opera setting full of powerhungry skirmishing aristocratic houses, like some cross between Dune and Game of Thrones. Or something a little more like Anthem: custom exosuits or mechs, used to traverse, explore, fight, and make deliveries across a strange, hostile, unpredictable world of wilderness and ruins.

Gritty Space Stuff. I have the beginnings of an original setting in mind here. Humanity started to colonise the solar system, but lost Earth in doing so. Now we're a people scattered and divided between orbital stations, migratory ships both vast and small, remote planetside homesteads and outposts, patches of terraformed ground and breathable atmosphere on Mars. But what happened on Earth? Disaster, mystery, exodus. Climate change and war were just the beginning. We set something free and it ran wild: a virus both biological and digital, affecting mind and body and machine. Earth's atmosphere is a quarantine zone, and beyond it humanity's first home is abandoned, forbidden, a place where no one goes. Well, almost no one. This setting's all about life in the bleak and alien places that were never meant to support or sustain us. Mystery, uncertainty, and isolation; the slow days, weeks, and months it takes to move through the emptiness of space. The virus that took Earth used networks and dataflow to spread. In response and in paranoia, human technology ran off on a retrofuturistic tack. This is a world without wireless, 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. Other inspirations include the Eclipse Phase and Mothership RPGs, The Expanse, Cowboy Bebop, and kinda sorta Mass Effect 3 and Dead Space.

Cyberpunk. 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 in a blender and hitting the 'on' button. I've been hankering after and working on an original cyberpunk setting that does the same for millennials and gen-z. Good, scuzzy street-level cyberpunk that focuses on, funnily enough, cyberpunks. People on the peripheries, living, working and surviving in a neon gutter. Cyberware and social media. Climate chaos. The gig economy hustle. A vibrant, buzzing, diverse underworld. Black markets and street gangs. Sex, drugs, violence, and loud fucking music. To trot out a stolen tagline here: "High Tech, Low Life."

Vampires. I 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. We don't have to use the rules. If we do, I'd like to slim them down even more, or use them mostly to keep us honest about what is and isn't possible: what's risky and what's easy. We don't even have to use the lore, though it's a bonus if we do. If you're a promising cowriter, but you're unfamiliar with VtM, then I'd be just as happy to invent and define our own kind of vampires. Either way, I want a dark, sharp, contemporary world: counterculture and discontent, cities deep and dense. Keep it punk. Younger vampires, still adjusting and learning. A horror story, first and foremost. Fear and awe at the monster inside you, sorrow for the old self you're shedding night by night like skin that no longer fits. Fear (and maybe envy) at the real monsters, your elders and 'betters', whose long shadows and grand designs you scheme and struggle in — or against. Sensuality and hunger; ancient secrets and ancient hidden wars. Anarchs waging a guerrilla war against their city's Camarilla? A pair of thinbloods, or a caitiff and his ghoul, given a chance at the big leagues when a bloodhunt is called? Couriers running type- and handwritten messages between the city's Kindred now that the Second Inquisition has forced them all offline? The remnants of a Sabbat pack, fending for themselves, defining themselves, now that the hand that held their leash has disappeared eastward?

Blades in the Dark, kind of. Let 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 BitD 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. 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! But here's the thing. 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, yes, but built from more eclectic influences. 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. Youth culture and immigrant diasporas. Dishonored and Peaky Blinders and The Lies of Locke Lamora, sure, but also Perdido Street Station and Disco Elysium and whatever the hell else we want. Straightforward steampunk/victoriana leaves me kinda cold; I'd like to work together to build something more nuanced and complex.

Dark Academia. Sharp and hungry minds venture down the rabbithole, deeper than sense or caution says they should go. Pride and greed are the central sins of this trope. 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, too 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? Burn the candle at both ends to get there; burn yourself down to outshine the night. Collegiate austerity; student poverty and excess. Long nights, bad choices; coffee, sex, wine stains. A demimonde of academics, revolutionaries, occultists, and criminals. Inspired by The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Cultist Simulator.

Dieselpunk Skyship Shenanigans. An original setting. A broken and anarchic world below, and a sky filled with ships of metal, held together by rust, jury-rigged repairs, and their dysfunctional crews. The vibe would be a blend of the golden age of piracy and the Wild West. For the aesthetic, imagine things with the shape, size, and vibe of Star Wars starships and speeders, but designed by crazed World War II aircraft engineers. Riveted gunmetal and painted pin-ups, blast-glass cockpits and bristling machineguns, autocannons, rocket pods. Roaring jets and droning propellers. The sky is an ocean, is danger, is freedom worth clinging to at any cost. (Inspirations include: the Ketty Jay series by Chris Wooding, Red Dead Redemption 2, Black Sails, and Firefly. Because obviously.)

Not Currently Craving

Modern Supernatural Strangeness and Horror. I'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. I'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. Like walking in a labyrinth filled with an infinity of locked rooms and you can only ever look through the keyholes into them, see corners, shadows of their contents. You see pieces, but you'll never map the labyrinth itself, and you'll never escape. Our characters would be 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 warp, and the further you go, the harder it is to turn back. Vague right? Yeah, I know. (Maybe that's appropriate.) So here are some inspirations and touchstones to make things a tiny bit clearer. 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 — all that makes for great reading and inspiration, but it's not the point here.

Postapocalyptica. Wastelands, ruins, and survivors. Dust and madness. Raider clans and hardholds. Body-paint and cured scalps. Functional weapons handed down the generations and cared for like treasures, like heirlooms. Caravans and scavengers. Zones, in true Tarkovsky style. Maybe a side-order of strange half-forgotten technology. Colourful, crazed, vicious. Something along the lines of the Apocalypse World and Mutant: Year Zero RPGs, the Mortal Engines books, and of course Mad Max. A pair of survivors bump into each other, and circumstances force them to work together. They cooperate, and maybe attraction blunders in, brash and inconvenient, but trust  is much slower to come. A pair of plucky kids (read: late teens, early twenties) raised in the raider clan of a wasteland warlord make plans to leave the sameness and safety of the hardhold behind and go their own way, out in the wastes.

Lovecraftian Stuff That Has Nothing To Do With Actual Lovecraft. Here's a controversial take that shouldn't be controversial at all: H.P. was a hack and generally 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. But in spite of that, I love a lot about some of the seeds he planted, and the genre he created. Not the Cthulhu Mythos itself. I'm just feeling stories about brushes with the impossible and sublime and unknowable. Brushes with a supernatural that is horrifyingly corporeal, horrifyingly physical; things that should not be but are. 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. (Shouts go out to both John Langan's The Fisherman, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and, to an extent, Moby Dick for reminding me of what I love about the genre.)

Medieval Low-Fantasy. An original setting. In mazelike cities and castletowns, in isolated outposts and wooden palisade villages, the weight of human habitation sinks deep into the earth and wards off the strangeness outside. Beyond those walls, in the wilds and wastes of the world, and the deep sleepless woods, the fens and the moors and the steppes, the Winds hold sway. They are the forces of creation and change yoked by God to make the world, or so claim the three churches of the Lay. But the churches are relics of an empire that dried up, shattered, rotted centuries ago. They cling to power over the thrice-three-hundred petty fiefdoms orphaned by the empire's fall, and their monopolies on truth are not what they once were. What can you say about the Winds? That they rise and they ebb, but their touch is felt everywhere, and in the world's wild places they make minds mad, and men and beasts into monsters. This is me trying to do medieval fantasy the way I wish it was done more often. Historical accuracy, where accuracy looks strange and original in a genre so mired in the 19th and 20th century racism, sexism, and others misunderstandings so often spliced into fantasy and people's ideas of the Middle Ages. Weirdness, where weirdness is more fun. It's grimdark, done my way. The jostle of tensions, envies, and injustices that hold feudalism together and threaten to tear it apart. Alchemy. Rare magic that offers power at a steep and dangerous price. Ruins of the last age. Monsters and those who hunt them. Inspirations include everything I love and hate about A Song of Ice and Fire and The Witcher, everything I loved and hated about studying medieval literature at university, Wolf Hall, and that one incredibly grim and beautiful adaptation of Macbeth with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.

Historical Fantasy. As far as fantasy goes, I'm into strong historical analogues at the moment. Real historical places and times but with a subtle element of the supernatural to them. Or fantasy written in other worlds but feeling more like good historical fiction. Hilary Mantel and Mary Renault are good examples; worlds that feel familiar, but shifted or strange at heart. Guy Gavriel Kay also pulls this off brilliantly. Right now I'd be down with echoes of classical antiquity, Greece and the ancient Mediterranean: painted and perfumed, all oil and blood and bronze, strange and pagan. Or the Late Middle Ages. Or Byzantium, or Mamluk Cairo, or Samarkand and the Silk Road.

Medieval(ish) Space Opera. An original setting. Long ago, humanity spread among the stars in a growing diaspora. But stretch something too thin and in time it'll snap. A dark age descended. Technology stagnated; its greatest miracles stopped working. The hundred thousand human worlds all forgot they weren't alone in the galaxy. Now one small corner in the vastness of space is slowly waking from that dark age, uniting under the banner of a growing empire: the Concomitance of Free and Thrall Houses. It's an empire, but not in the Roman or American sense. More like the Holy Roman Empire, at its medieval zenith. A patchwork of principalities, fiefs, territories, city-states, written across a few dozen stars. Think the visual vocabulary of the late middle ages, written in terms of sci-fi. Serfdom, knighthood, fealty, dogmatic religion. Land as wealth. Bomber jackets with the lines and cuts of gambesons and arming jacks. Armour, longswords, mud. Illuminated manuscripts and handwritten treatises. Solid floppy disks older than the oldest monk in the monastery; a church-sized computer with walls of muttering tape decks and braided wires trailing heavenwards from its spire. A plough pulled across a field by a draft-drone looking something like a small Star Wars speeder. A slow-reloading beam weapon, heavy and clunky and only about as useful as an arquebus. A thick data slate that contains and displays one book, or that functions as a commonplace book or almanac. A machine grafted to a tree like mistletoe that slowly feeds off that tree's nutrients and spins silk. Think Battletech via Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire. Think The Witcher via Star Wars. Maybe a dash of Dune, Anthem, and Destiny. Wanna know more?

Sound Good?

If you think you might be what I'm looking for and what I'm into's what you're into, take a look at my O/Os page. Drop me a PM! Tell me what appeals, where our interests overlap! Tell me which ideas in this thread stood out for you. Let's talk.

[Barding]

Reserved in case I want to add a separate post for plots.

[Barding]

Clarified some stuff.

Reordered my cravings.

Added two entries about 'What I'm Into': Slowburn and Inverse Slowburn.

[Barding]

Reordered my cravings. Added a new one: "Blades In The Dark, kind of."

[Barding]

Updated my cravings. Added a new one. Reordered the whole lot.

Please note: I'm only searching very very tentatively. I don't have a lot of time or energy these days, so I'm being very careful with my enthusiasm, but I do want a reason to be enthused! I'm gonna be hard to impress or excite, but please, excite and impress me!

[Barding]

Reordered my cravings. Clarified a couple things. Reformatted the thread and its sections to be more accurate and readable.

Added (and added ideas to) a separate section for the general themes I'm always into, versus the more specific things I'm craving more currently.

[Barding]

Cravings updated and reordered. An official monthly bump.