Okay, here's what I want from people joining the game. I view storytelling games as a collaborative exercise. I want you to be invested in the world, and as a lazy person, I also want you to take some of the workload off of me for creating that world. One solution I've found to neatly tackle both of these problems is asking for some additional world information from players at character creation. Not all of what you supply will necessarily be true, but it will at least be believed to be true by a not insignificant portion of the setting.

1) I'd like you to detail 2 famous people. These could be a young pop starlet, a prestigious engineer, the head of a multi-million dinar tech company, a famous athlete, or the navel commander for the realm's south-western fleet. Don't worry about whether or not they're secretly an infernal or not. The goal here is to create interesting faces that will be recognizable and give color to the setting. A great pitch, however, will leave room for that sort of reveal, or hint that something like that could be hidden just beneath the surface . . .

2) Detail 1-2 conspiracy theories. These can be large scale or small. They can be outlandish, or relatively mundane. The theory might be very developed and specific, or just a mysterious event. Ex. "The Coral Confederacy are deploying a toxic chemical derived from captured water elementals into our waters to create mind-controlling agents in our fish," vs. "A lot of people seem to be going missing after Ms. Sterling concerts . . ."

3) Give me a paragraph about one of the other city-states in creation outside of the blessed isle. Our game will largely be set in the Isle or its immediate satrapies, but both travel and international politics will probably come up at some point. Just take an existing city in creation like gem, chiaroscuro, nexus, etc. and tell me what it's like now. We're aiming for everything from modern Hong Kong to Mirror's edge to blade-runner here. The cities more directly under The Thing Infernal's control will probably seem more prosperous, but more orwellian and controlled (even if people don't know it), while as yet independent city states will struggle more. Either way, Creation has at least modern levels of technology, with all that this entails.
This message was last edited by the GM at 17:54, Fri 09 Oct 2020.