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Originally Posted by impfireball
I have an idea on the setting.
Basically, it's a world where trans-humanism has taken a foot hold and has existed for hundreds of years (or thousands). It's a bit like brave new world in the sense that everyone has genetic modifications.
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Actually, I don't think that people were genetically modified in Brave New World; the differentiation between alphas, betas, et. al was accomplished by splitting zygotes at the 8-cell stage or so (alphas are made one at a time, but the lesser classes were made in sets of fifty or so 'artificial twins'). Alphas were likely given their physical and mental fitness through some kind of eugenic selection*, whereas the deltas and epsilons had their mental faculties crippled by artificially-induced fetal alcohol syndrome.
*that would count as a kind of genetic
engineering, but not "modification".
Sorry, this is all beside the point. But BNW isn't really a good example of trans- or post-humanism (that would be Kurzweil and Nietzsche, respectively). BNW is about the dehumanizing effect of treating people as though they are just another industrial product. Now, if humans in your setting ARE just another industrial product, colour me intrigued.
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My idea is that it's not just a fantasy with science fiction slapped on
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Not that it's my place to challenge the OP, but isn't your setting edging very close to SF with some magic slapped on?
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Think of Arrakis and the fremen (from dune)
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Now, that's a setting in which fantasy and SF exist very close together. You might also look at something like James Alan Gardner's
Trapped, which has magic technology in the form of symbiotic, alien nanobots that give humans powers like pyro-kinesis and are effectively magic because we really haven't a clue how they work. Could also be that in this setting/future, someone managed to re-code some fundamental rules of reality (say they ran a timing attack on the fabric of space-time, like in Charles Stross'
Accelerando). The changes propagate through space at lightspeed (or faster), and all of a sudden Things That Should Not Happen happened.
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Expensive star gates (funded by planetary government bodies or mega corporations) need to be erected for FTL travel that is efficient enough for inter stellar operations and industry (that's borrowed from eve online).
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FTL is exactly the kind of thing that (with our present understanding of physics) looks a lot more like magic and a lot less like technology (of course, at some point they become indistinguishable, yadda yadda yadda...). Good thing we have magic in this setting to take care of it? The guild navigators of Dune aren't a bad example of a hybrid magic-technological solution (the guild navigators don't bend space themselves; ships in Dune have a space-folding drive that only a human with precognitive powers can navigate effectively - it's like podracing)
Of course, using the guild navigator as a model for FTL travel may or may not be a little too WH40K for comfort. Of course...
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A magic-user's ability to use sigils is due to an advanced genetic modification at birth - a mutation that has the unfortunate side effect of total blindness.
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Blind, magic navigators might be too poetic NOT to include.
The only other thing I would say at this point is that there still aren't enough rules in "our" rulebook for this system to need a particularly well-defined setting. Again, you're the OP and this is your thing, but I think you may even consider allowing the campaign setting to be built up one line at a time, like the rest of the rules. Not that I don't enjoy writing paragraphs of text (I mean, look what I'm doing now), but making a ruleset one or two sentences at a time without any real way of knowing what comes next, or how others will interpret what you've written is, in and of itself, a fun game to be playing. And I think that I - and perhaps others - would like to play that game a little longer before you start designing this game from the top down.