A locomotive vision

 Every time I put my pencil to paper, I find myself drawing a train.

It’s a curious thing; looking down at your hand in puzzlement as it whips around the page. What is it up to? Ah, damn blast it, another train. I’ve already drawn umpteen of them, but for some reason, the brutish id sees it fit to bestow upon me yet another steam engine. When it’s not a train, it’s some tight-lipped conductor staring into the distance, or a lithe opulently-dressed figure who I know would be most at home in a first-class car.

So I write this now to release me from the train cycle. I will free-association the shit out of this idea until I am dry, and can leave it to rest. Maybe I should do this with that Full Throttle game I was going to write, that’s been haunting me too… anyways. Let me know if this intrigues you and if you want more.

IDEAS

• A train of interminable length, each car the size of a warehouse, each window looking out to incongruous but equally bizarre landscapes. Have you ever seen the tracks?

• The inhabitants are the third generation of traingoers; all previous rituals of transportation have been cargo-culted and integrated into cultural mythology.

• Your ticket determines where you can be, who you can speak to, what you can eat… levelling up is finding a higher-class ticket.

• Recent resource shortages make Scrapping, hopping from car to car to loot the resources you need for you and yours to survive, the most sure way of staying alive.

• Clockwork automata dubbed Angels, seemingly extensions of the train itself, patrol and guard train cars to inscrutable ends with an eternally-wordless smile.

• A two-direction depthcrawl to procedurally generate the train, one way working its way towards the engine car through hellish heat and massive machinery, the other towards the caboose through decadent chambers of opulence.

• The campaign opens with a rival group of Scrappers decimating your train car with superior machinery looted from cars Coldward (the high-class direction); you don’t have the means to combat them immediately, do you follow them Engineward or see if you can loot cars Coldward and get a leg up on them next time you meet?

• The train is seen like a Gaia-like god, and the Conductor is a trickster-god who achieved enlightenment through skill in artifice and upkeeps the train at any cost. Some people claim to have met the Conductor, or seen them in dire dreams…

• Timeline until the train runs out of food, fuel, life support, air, and/or gets to its destination. Which of these are real threats, and which of these are empty assumptions reified by the anxieties of the inhabitants? Which of these lies are useful to the people Coldward? ...Engineward?

• Coldward: Mahogany, cosmetic surgery, elves, mirror maze, deep freeze, clone pods, open bar, meat hooks, melted gold, motion sickness, living mummies, insane AI, magitech, gilded laser guns, third eyes, crystal farms, bloodstained handkerchiefs, murder parties.

• Engineward: Heat, machinery, coal, breeding pits, dwarves, cyborgs, chained star, first-generation murals, exposed wheels, blood iron, orreries, embryonic engineering, skeletal mechanics, syringes, possessed Angels, the train-soul.
  
  

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming. GLoGtober content is coming as soon as tomorrow, I promise.