Introduction

So, I occasionally have little burbling ideas that, erm, burble to the top of my brain. They get jotted down on random scraps of electrons, often in the midst of other data.

Let’s see… the initialization routine is being called, but it’s being passed a null pointer, except, it shouldn’t be null, it wasn’t null at the call point, so something else is happening here…

Idea: Downton Abbey+Gormenghast+Rogue Trader

Maybe something further up the hierarchy is overriding the value.

That’s what my OneNote pages for “Work Notes” look like. (When I was working, I had two monitors, and usually had OneNote open on the second, to dash off any thoughts I might have, regardless of their relevance.)

Anyway, I have decided to try putting some of my random setting or theme notes up — not fully developed, not really intended to someone to use directly, just “Things I’m working on”.

Setting Seed: Bone Wars

This came to me while playing the Jurassic Park cow-clicker on my iPad, because I wanted to look up some of the dinosaurs, and that got me clicking links, and I remembered what I’d read about the “bone wars” of the 19th century.

What if they’re not hunting dinosaurs, but the bones of titans and demigods, in a vast wasteland still charged with wild magic from whatever cosmic battle destroyed said entities?

Perhaps this region, the size of a small continent, has been abandoned and neglected since the Big To-Do, but now, a discovery has been made. Maybe alchemists can extract tremendous power from the bones, leading to a gold rush atmosphere. Or, cults have discovered how to partially re-animate the bones, so rival factions seek to assemble a complete skeleton. In the meanwhile, there’s all sorts of locals who dislike the outsiders, shady businessmen setting up boom towns, and warped mystic effects throwing things into chaos.

(I can actually see this is a boardgame/cardgame concept, where players compete to complete a skeleton and sabotage other player’s activities.)