Scraping By on the Belt

Sean Gugler treated me with: progress striking unscrewed heinous kilt free sunshine

For an RPG setting, there are some very simple words to work with here. Oddly, "free" is a tricky one, because it's overused in so many settings. The combination of "kilt" and "striking" suggested immigrant labo, probably in a colonial setting. But it was working on the odd inclusion of "unscrewed" that made things start to click.

And I really want to dive so deep into this setting.

The Land of Tannir

Adam Tannir gave me the kind of mess of obscure words I was expecting out of this challenge: pelagic, ruffian, underwear, niveous, coffee, elk, riparian. Due to a bit of a snafu with his submission, I have the option of trading out riparian for green, but I love the word riparian.

Of all of those, underwear gave me the most trouble. Go figure.

After a couple days of apocalyptic visions, let us go now to the dawn of civilization. A gentler time, with gentler people. Until things change just a bit, of course.

Every Silver Lining has a Cloud

Crickett Hutchinson gave me: ostrich, June, purple, octopus, cellular, daffodil, banner

Given that collection, I naturally thought cyberpunk. No? Well, I did. I may also still be in a bit of an apocalyptic mood from yesterday. As such, the bright and shiny world of 2045 suffered The June Events.

Do Not Go Gently

Jason Roop provided me with the seven words: "A man, a plan, a canal. Panama."

Canals suggest one of three things: Panama (which I wanted to avoid for being a bit too on the nose), Venice, and Mars of the old science fiction epics (e.g., Barsoom, Out of the Silent Planet). I chose to start with the latter.

Challenge accepted!

So, in another place, in another time, and under another name I made a boast. I claimed to be something of a wizard at setting creation. I claimed that I could sit down and create a new setting out of whole cloth in less than a day. Not in extensive detail, obviously, but with enough of a framework that players could get character ideas sparking and a GM with some improv skills could just start running with it.

It has always itched the back of my brain that I have made this boast, but never actually proven it one way or the other. I dislike idle bragging. So, now I'm going to put it to the test.

One of the variants of the concept was doing a sort of Game Chef competition, but solely with the setting rather than a whole game. Given a set of "secret ingredients" and a restricted time period, I would generate a setting. It would need to be coherent, interesting, and gameable. I would like to do a dedicate four-hour period, but that's not really viable with my general schedule. So I figured I would give myself 24 hours, with time in there for work, sleep, and other necessities.

Giving myself secret ingredients isn't really a workable idea. So I need input from others. To that end, I posted this to my Facebook:

So I'm going to try a writing exercise. Specifically, I made a boast a few years back, and I want to see if I can actually live up to it. It's an Iron Chef sort of thing. I'm not going to go into more details, because I don't want to skew the input.
What I need from you fine people are sets of seven words. These seven words will be keywords in the output. You can enter multiple times if you'd like. Each entry must be seven words (or short phrases), though.
Go.

I nearly instantly discovered a couple of things. First, I have some friends who really like to screw with me. Second, I should have specified "nouns, adjectives, or verbs" and not merely words. I have a LOT of articles, prepositions, and especially pronouns in the results. That's going to make this, to say the least, difficult. And, as you can see from the very first submission, I should have specified seven different words.

So now I have 13 sets of words. Four of them I already know are going to be ridiculously difficult. But I will do my best. If they aren't difficult, it's not really a challenge, right?

• A man a plan a canal Panama.
• ostrich June purple cellular octopus daffodil banner
• Pelagic ruffian underwear niveous coffee elk riparian 
• progress striking unscrewed heinous kilt free sunshine
• frustrating, angry, remote, forever, freezing, beyond, control
• I yes um my he such daw!
• sharing oh always I you warning PETA
• Contemplate poison triangle outrage perplexed resilient allegiance
• blond(e)*, hellebore, melee, nervy, rising, drinking, tink
• the devil went down to Georgia. ..again 
• Dune Game Code Hunger Wheel Stranger Wizard
• Coordination, manufacture, insubordination, envy, solace, fecundity, compromise.
• Couplet haiku quatrain limerick sonnet villanelle sestina

(That last one is the most likely to defeat me. Coming up with a setting based on seven different forms of poetry? Ouch.)

 Look for the results over the next two weeks. There are a few of these that are going to be very difficult.