Okay, as seen in the Designer Forum, I'm making a Final Fantasy-stylez game using the Exalted rules (more or less).  The setting will be very heavily influenced by the world of FF VII, since I am playing that game and I'm really into the sequel movie (Advent Children).  So it's a fantasy world, with somewhat steampunk style technology.  Airships will, of course, be very prevalent.  

Because of programming limitations, FF worlds have a few cities and towns in each world, with the rest of the world totally unpopulated.  I'm taking that limitation and making it a design feature of the world.  There are only ten or so cities, but they each have tens to hundreds of millions of inhabitants.  I've even got a half-decent reason for this -- though that is part of the plot, so I'm not going to reveal it here.  Suffice to say that it is a world with massive urban centers surrounded by total wilderness.  

The first city in FF VII is Midgar.  It's a huge, circular city with an upper section that is literally above the lower city.  You don't get to see a lot of it (programming limitations again), but the upper part is a world of riches and light, while the lower part is a world of squalid darkness.  I'm pretty much taking that straight from the video game, but I wanted a slightly different look.

I spend a lot of time on Lileks.com, and there I stumbled across the following picture:



...and then I knew I had "my" Midgar.  That is an airship-level picture of Alezhin, the greatest city in the world, showing its good side.  The side it wants people to see.  Unseen, far below, in the shadows, are the masses of the oppressed.  I get jazzed every time I think about it.  Crappy place to live, but it should make for a damn fine setting.  

Okay, you just proved you are one cool cat. I don't know much about Exalted and even less about Final Fantasy, but I really like where you are going with this. This is what I like to see in gaming forums.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David ROkay, you just proved you are one cool cat. I don't know much about Exalted and even less about Final Fantasy, but I really like where you are going with this. This is what I like to see in gaming forums.

Regards,
David R

Thanks.  I've been so overwhelmed at work that it's taken me two weeks to have the time to post this.  

Exalted is an epic setting where characters can shape the world to their ends.  (Potentially, at least.)  Final Fantasy is much the same way.  If you're familiar with OD&D, from the Basic Set to the Immortals, or the Rules Cyclopedia, it's kind of similar in scope.  In both Exalted and FF, though, you can be sure entire cities (and maybe even nations) will be leveled by the bad guys before the heroes are powerful enough to stop them.  


Alezhin is the primary city of the planet Theona.  Theona has a twin sister, Hecuba.  It is known that both worlds were colonized but, a thousand years ago, Something Bad happened and both worlds lost their ability to travel in space.  (I'm still working on the exact details of the "Something Bad" at this point, so I can't get more specific than that.)  Even now, there is only limited contact between the two worlds.  I was originally going to have it be *no* contact, but then it occured to me that FF VII has radio and TV, so that won't work.  So this part is still a work in progress.  They will definitely not have any *physical* contact between the worlds before the game starts.

Seems like you're going for Art Deco Cyberpunk. Those enormous cities seem a lot like one of cyberpunk's tropes, the arcology.

Now that I think about it, "Metropolis" (the 1927 movie) could be seen as Art Deco cyberpunk.

Definitely on the art deco.  I won't fight the cyberpunk label -- I'm going for steampunk, which is close enough.  I won't have the cyberware or gadgetry of cyberpunk, but that's not what you're referring to, anyway.

I hadn't even thought about it, but Alezhin is *totally* like Metropolis!  I'll have to have Carrot and Mad Hatter put that on their Netflix list if they haven't seen it yet.  Thanks, btw -- I haven't seen that movie in years, so I wasn't thinking of it at all.  

Quote from: CyberzombieDefinitely on the art deco.

Haha!  I gave you teh art deco!!!!  :heh:

Lookin' good, btw.  

When I use this setting, I'm going to base the look of a few cities on movies such as  City of Lost Children, a stripped down, more steampunk Bladerunner, maybe even the tone of City of God,Burton's version of Gotham maybe, and off course the look of a few Miyazaki films - Howls Moving Castle etc.

Regards,
David R

Cool.  Those all sound like great influences for Alezhin (at least for the ones I'm familiar with).    The one thing to remember is that the PC are Hope -- and pretty much the only one, too.  As soon-to-be-epic characters, they can save the world -- and if they don't, the world will be overtaken by evil and/or destroyed.  Which is another reason why I'm using Exalted.    A lot of dystopian settings don't have hope and don't have any way out, so that is one real difference between this and the feel of cyberpunk.  In cyberpunk, the protagonists are rarely heroes and rarely really win in the end.  Here, they are Heroes, and they'll either win or die in spectacular fashion trying.  


Theona has three continents: Amycus, Mimas, and Eunoë.  Amycus is the largest continent and is in the northern hemisphere.  Alezhin is set in a huge plain on the northeast corner of the continent.  The plain gradually becomes arid and then desert as it goes to the west and south.  In the west, it ends at a range of mountain (unnamed at the moment) that makes the Himalayas look small.  Coming down from the mountains is the Sangarius River -- the largest and deepest river in the world.

The rapid flow of the Sangarius has carved its way into the very bedrock of the desert, creating a Grand Canyon hundreds of miles in length.  The citystate of Doocharin is built into the walls of the canyon.  I have yet to fully detail the people of Doocharin, but they live with and are guarded by the Nanaki.  The Nanaki are a non-humanoid cat people with punk haircuts.  (Red XIII from FF VII is a Nanaki).  They can't really manipulate objects without magic, but that's only a minor handicap in the FF setting.

I have yet to fully flesh this citystate or its people out, but it is a considerably brighter and happier place than Alezhin.  Because of the influence of the Nanaki, this is the one citystate in the world that is really ready to handle a war.  It doesn't give anything away to say that the whole world will be plunged into war -- that's just expected in Final Fantasy.  

I can say that the Doochara have a somewhat middle eastern feel to them -- part Egyptian, part Turkish -- with a dash of US southwest in there, too, since the terrain is most like Arizona.