Setting Style

A general thread to describe how your story setting is, is it a future setting, a fantasy world? Is the tone bleak, optimistic, realistic? Can we expect fancy spaceships or retro looking computers?

In short how does your world feel in story, is it a World Half Full or a World Half Empty? What is your setting like?

Your prompt is kind of sparse and nonspecific. Are you looking for people to describe where their settings fall in terms of genre, or do you want to hear about the tonal/thematic focus of their settings?

Tonal and Thematic Focus. They could talk about what Genre it is if they wish but definitely tonal and thematic focus.

My setting is called the cosmos. It's an anachronistic universe that is explixitly magical but cosplays as science fiction

The mood is one of pervasive dread and the atmosphere is one of vast darkness. The theme is that the mystery of the magical sciences is terrifying. It's heavily inspired by Warhammer40000 and Exalted.

My setting is called the Yggdrasil Galaxy. The world ignores all natural laws of space. It's a Space Fantasy where Space is an Ocean, taking elements of both sci-fi and fantasy and putting them in a big pot to boil. (Stir clockwise and lightly season every five minutes.)

It's a rather light-hearted mood, though it does have it's hidden dark depths...but they're few and far between. The biggest theme, is vague as it sounds, is the adventure. It's to discover and explore the universe. If not obvious, the world was inspired by Norse Mythology, but it also has elements from the Spell Jammer universe from D&D.

edited 20th Mar '15 10:30:01 AM by HydraGem

Even if I'm writing a TEOWAWKI scenario, I don't do "bleak". I tended to Post-Cyberpunk in my Cyberpunk games and stories (didn't even know it was a thing until I read it on TV Tropes and saw that it better fit the mood of my "Cyberpunk" stories.)

No matter how "bad" a setting is, there is hope and there will be people who strive to handle the situation as best they can - a team of Personal Protection Specialists operating within and out of the slums of Post-Cyberpunk New Zealand 20 Minutes into the Future, a group of families dealing with a world-wide catastrophe that leaves much of the population without power and the infrastructure on which they relied for food, water etc, a bunch of people lost in the wilderness, a world where sexism and classism are rife and you can still be hanged or sentenced to hard labour...

People are the key in my settings. Some will feel hopeless, others will strive because I like to pit good people against bad things and show how hope, determination, skill and perseverance can triumph over adversity.

No situation, no matter how dire, is ever "hopeless". You could say A World Half Full for a lot of places - which is pretty much how I view our own world - despite disease, pollution, dwindling resources, extinctions of wildlife, gross disparity of wealth, uncaring divorced-from-the-problems-of-everyday-people (if not downright greedy, corrupt and nasty) politicians and all the woes of our modern world, we have achieved great things, and people have hope, help others, and just get the fuck on with things.

Tone: optimistic in the face of adversity, per ardua ad astra and a' that.

edited 20th Mar '15 1:59:26 PM by Wolf1066

Quite interesting setting feel actually.

I think this is the case for any story worth reading.

I'm not sure that it really makes sense to talk about the feel or tone of a setting on its own, divorced from the story it serves. Plenty of people have written grimdark shit set in the world of My Little Pony, and there are comedies set in Warhammer 40,000 floating around out there.

Fan Stuff is a bit different than where it originated, and Warhammer 40k was apparently originally meant to be over the top black comedy from what I hear.

A general talk of the setting tone can give us insight into how the characters react and feel.

The setting for my Camp Nano story right now is… basically, I like to think of it as borrowing the aesthetics of a Victorian-era Egyptophile's daydream.

Or like… Avatar: Legend of Aang and even Legend of Korra where there's Japan-but-not and China-but-not and Eskimos with a proud tradition of Tai Chi and Western Elements but whatever, it works, right? And then Pagoda skyscrapers and drag racing in the 1920s but not.

It's the "But Not ; Still Works" that I want to capture in my sort of North African Graeco-Roman Steampunk world. There is no Egypt and there is no England and there is no Queen Victoria and there was never a Roman Empire.

But my main character does dress like one of Emilie Autumn 's less imaginative chorus girls sometimes, and wears togas at other times.

There's steam power and clockwork and dirigibles, but no magic, even though there might have to be some sort of magic to make my floating "island" civilization work in case any non-magical engineering will conclude that it can't or doesn't (the flying island is basically a dirigible designed to never land.)

One of my stories is the result of noticing that "North America never really had a Medieval period," and then asking "what would a medieval North America look like?"

So now the setting is a pseudo-post-apocalyptic future where the United States, Canada, and parts of Mexico fell apart, different (smaller) nations emerged from the ashes, and the world-at-large ignores the continent entirely.

I'm gonna try to use the series itself to explore American culture and values with a fresh eye.

Influences include American culture (of course), some theories I've heard about the country, plenty of historical extrapolation (like independence movements both current and past), and regionalism.
Fiction-based influences include mythology (both American and worldwide), Medieval European Fantasy, Anime and Wuxia, plenty of sci-fi, and a good chunk of internet culture (since I'm hoping to make it a web series). For a while I thought of it as "the Anti-Game of Thrones," but now I realize it's just its own thing.