"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." — John Steinbeck Anyways, here are a couple of things I currently have floating around as half-finished fragments. Sundown in the Realms of Adventure: inspired by reading about mostly abandoned, formerly popular sites like Neopets, the shut down of Club Penguin, and people trying the keep their Aibo robot dogs "alive" long after Sony stopped releasing patches or repairing them. Realms of Adventure (placeholder name) was the biggest, most realistic virtual world ever created - twenty years ago. Now the VR technology has moved on and you can't find parts for the old sets any more, and the servers are being shut down. The story would follow the last player as he wanders the world, reliving memories of his achievements and his friends, conversing with the game's AI as it contemplates its own mortality. Since it's more slice of life, I'd keep this to a one shot short story. Long Way Home. MC is a warlock class who doesn't go on adventures, he prefers being a master necromancer's minion and getting to sit around crafting spells and potions all day. Then a bunch of meddling do-gooders attack the necromancer's fortress and disrupt the MC's escape spell so it dumps him - and a dumb orc guard & spoony bard - in a dummied out portion of the game where he has no way to restore his magical energy and can't log out. The place is filled with hazards and monsters that were deemed to unbalanced for normal play. The three non-adventurers, who don't particularly like each other, have to work together to reach the only portal back to the regular game, with a ticking clock of the warlock's mana draining away. Living dungeon stories, which I quite like and want to write: Basic living dungeon story, except that in its former life the dungeon core was a dotty old cat lady and all the monsters are based on kitties. Of course this would include things like manticores, sphinxes, displacer beasts, gryphons, rakshasa, weretigers, wampus cats and so on, and she REALLY doesn't like it when adventurers hurt her babies . . . . comedy short story.I don't think the concept could sustain it more than three chapters. Dungeon of Misfit Dragons. This one has novel-length promise. Another living dungeon story, but this one manages to attract weird, mutant and offbrand monsters and has to use them cleverly. I like bizarre monsters and want to go beyond the usual goblinoids and slimes and such. Thrill Ride. A living "dungeon" that's actually an amusement park, in the style of Roller Coaster Tycoon, with sentient rides that have to thrill customers in order to thrive - their positive emotions crystalize into a sort of "joy fragment". The king of the park is a anthropomorphic roller coaster who has to build his protectorate and defend against the Scream Machines that utilize a darker energy derived from scaring, harming or outright killing human guests.
I like them! Also, I love that Steinbeck quote. I'm gonna have to add it to my signature! I love the idea of a dungeon being a grumpy old cat lady! And the "Misfit" dungeon sounds really neat too.
I would very much like to see a cat lady dungeon. She HAS to be dotting on them and have 'desert' rooms with 'treasures' and 'landmines' hiding in them.
Living dungeon idea: light novel style. Main character is a school-aged pixie who's studying to be a dungeon sprite at magic school. Some calamity ensues during her final exam, when she's supposed to be bonded with her designated dungeon, and she wakes up as the dungeon core instead. Hijinx ensue.
Welp, actually writing the Dungeon Sprite novel novel now. Another idea: Worldkiller - ok, this takes place in a world where total immersion games are fairly common, and run by AIs. When companies retire games, though, they need to hire a player to go into the game and "take over the world" - level up to become basically a god within the game, take it over from the AI's control, and then terminate it. The main character would be a worldkiller doing their regular duty, but of course there would be some complication. Not sure why the companies couldn't just pull the plug - perhaps in this world AIs have some legal rights similar to humans, and the older AIs that run the games can't be "reset" to do other things, and so have to be terminated on their own terms?
The dungeon sprite and worldkiller fics sound awesome (crazy cat dungeon sounds hilarious also, I just got this image of killer cats slink around behind a couple of litterbox golems...)
I really like this one. To lend support to the reset, maybe they can't just pull the plug because the AI has backups on other servers that can only be removed by administrative access. They were taught to preserve their world at all cost, so they could be a digital hydras. The AI can't act outside of their parameters, so they adapt the game play for them and punish the Worldkillers once they become aware of their intent. Every death they incur could alter memories, indue pain, maybe even murder the Worldkiller.
Idea: Reverse LitRPG AI escapes into the real world by downloading itself into a physical wetware or robot body, and interacts with things as if it's in a game (seeing stat overlays, etc.).
Dang, it's hard to be original isn't it?!? How about this: go for a trading places riff. AI downloads itself into a human fleshbot, leaves a human to run the game world's as its AI/god?
Something very similar to this is slated to happen in the third book of my series. If I ever get there.
If you want to go for a meta title, you could change it to Dunkin Steel. They just changed their name from Dunkin Donuts to just Dunkin lol...
