Plot Ideas


-horror -

road trip

Two people on road trip.

“I’ve been having these strange dreams - dreams where my dad’s back, but he’s different. He’s worse, if you can believe it. Dreams of us, being swallowed by the road, of a woman crawling from the stomach of a dead deer. Dreams of that man, and those dead girls.
-I think they might be starting to spill out of my head.”

You and me, on the road and there’s so much of it before us and an eternity of sky overhead. Cars have a safety to them, when you’re hunkered deep in aluminum and metal and there’s rain hammering down or sun blazing through the windshield, and it’s all shied away by frosty AC while you’re barreling beside and weaving around so many other people, all in their own safe vacuums, all moving towards or away from something. We can take this car and go wherever the f*** we want to - we can especially take it away from here, away from that sick man, and the holes those girls are going to be lying in for a while to come. Yeah, we can go, we can blast away the night time silence with four chords on the radio, we can order plates of food and then skip out before the bill’s due in a town where no one knows our names.

You can bring your dog, and I’ll coerce Tommy, and Katie, and whoever else! We can make a caravan, we’ll move through this land the way the fathers of our grandfathers used to - only, trouble has a way of following, and our kind of trouble has a face to it. It’s a dainty-lined face with soft eyes and a gentle smile hiding rows and rows of sharp teeth and a voice that creaks like the floorboards of the attic in an empty house.
“Come to me,” is not a imploration, but a promise. It’s a story from the future. A spell that is reaching back and rearranging time, space, to form our story. The man that should be on trial for what he did to his students is gone. He’s waiting for you at the gas station, behind your counter at the diner. Sometimes he looks human; often, he looks less than. Through the static he leaves, other peculiarities crawl through too. Things like women who leave home, and keep leaving, only they never come back. Things like worms, and hands with too many fingers, and the vicious dreams of dogs. There’s a lot of sights to see on the open road, and nobody comes back from a journey unchanged. Some people don’t come back at all.

(An idea i’ve been hoping to work through is a sort of horror anthology RP. The premise I had in mind was two [or more, if you felt up to roleplaying multiple characters] friends, or acquaintances, go on a road trip and suffer through a bunch of occurrences ranging from simply odd to genuinely life-threatening. The starter I’ve worked out, and we can edit it in any way you’d like, is that the town the characters reside in has been pretty turbulent - a professor that had been rumored to be having skeevy relations with his younger students was finally charged with the murder of a student that had been missing for several weeks. The search for her body and the teacher’s trial put a lot of strain on the small town, so our characters decide to take a cross country road trip as a means of escape from the grim atmosphere.
On one of their first stops - a gas station just outside of town, they see somebody who looks suspiciously like the convicted teacher, who they’d seen on TV in chains, standing at a nearby pump. But then they realize it’s not somebody that looks like him, it is him.
Road trips have a sort of surreal quality by themselves; traveling at lethal speeds in hunks of metal and plastic alongside the temporary camaraderie of so many strangers, and I feel like its a setting that lends itself really well to horror. While the teacher sort of bookends events, it would be fun to roleplay different horror scenarios - taking a wrong road that leads to a strange town, staying at a small motel with weird chanting coming from the other side of the wall, etc etc)

vampire
“I’m mostly empty anger
My body is a blade
This isn’t blood in the water baby
It’s blood in the air”

This is a story about the pain of growing old. Only, we don’t have to. We don’t have to, because in this moment there is only me and you. You, a loner. And, me, alone. Ours is a story of punk rock anger and killer rifts. It’s my beat up Volkswagen and your crooked spine. I can see you, and your budding opium addiction from that corrective surgery so many years ago. And I know that you can see me too, me, down on all fours, my body coiled into a claw. My face is finally my own, a broken dam of finally released wanting and so, so much fury. You run, and I forgive you. Just as you will forgive me - this cycle of injuries and appeals is not new, has not been for many years. In the between time, I will wait, or watch, or stalk, to catch the next moment between us. To catch you inside of that moment. How many versions of you exist now, I wonder? And there is still only the one me. You are a loner, but I am alone. You are not well, and this is not real, but I do not have the words to help you. Or myself. I want to say a single word that means stop, sorry, don’t go. It’s not your fault. I wish it wasn’t my fault either. I am losing you.

-fantasy -

hero academy
A fantasy slice of life could be cool. The first thought I have is that our characters could be participants in a hero academy, this large school that’s responsible for training the world’s most prominent heroes/villains. Students have an actual curriculum that includes more mundane classes like written languages and aarithmetic to more fantastical classes like alchemy and monster gaming. Students at the school are organized into teams that they rely on for both studying and training, and the school organizes quests that students are expected to complete both individually and with their teams.
The city around the school could also be a cool setting to explore!

-sci-fi-

substance abuse
there's a new drug that's entered the market - at first, it creates this sort of ecstatic bliss in it users; this really light, really comfortable high that's comparable to an intense buzz (idk, the effect could be something else - something more impactful, like maybe it gives people a mental edge or something? like a reason why usage of the drug would be casual and widespread).
But after some time, people realize that extended use of the drug makes its users heavily susceptible to outside influences; they become these sort of husks that can be influenced into doing almost anything, if the would-be handler properly manipulates the husk. My idea is that this has resulted in an increase in crimes both violent and non, as a husk could be told to steal something - or even murder someone, and they would. I don't imagine husks would start appearing until the drug had become pretty prominent, but I think that the idea of seeing a friend or love one degenerate so quickly would be pretty horrific in itself.
Even light use of the drug is shown to have the potential to trigger dementia-like symptoms and vivid hallucinations in consumers.
On top of all that, there's vans that have been patrolling the city that seem to be connected to both the government and the source of the drug.

corpo culture
There’s an app for that. There’s an app for everything in this Brave(tm) new world.
Brave is a social media conglomerate unafraid to Push the boundaries. Using cutting-edge, proprietary software, Brave has solved many of the internet’s most pressing problems. Online bullying? Trolling? Simple! Push has made each other social media platform irrelevant and outdated through mandating Pushers to register their real identity with the platform. Push is integrated into the internet’s entirety; a person is no longer separate from their online presence, lending to more civil and honest interactions. And there’s so much yet to come! So many developments just around the corner.

Our characters are both newly hired Pushers - the campus is grandiose, it’s marvelous, but corporate culture may take some getting used to. From the campus parties to the mandatory social networking, the highly coveted position of Pusher is unlike any other. Let’s find out where we stand in this not so distant future and what, if any, differences our characters might enact on this goliath of tech.


intergalactic bonnie and clyde
our characters are star crossed lovers from a planet so poor they don’t even have a name for that sort of destitution, but they knew in their burning souls that they deserved more than what life was offering them. rather than working the rock farm or pulling dew from plants like their folks, the two took to running small time jobs for big time crooks. Weren’t long before this string of unfortunate decisions and novice screwups landed them in hot water with the law - and this wasn’t no small town force, either. This was Omega Corp, shield of justice on all civilised planets. The clink our characters see themselves thrown into wasn’t special by any means, ‘cept for the people inside of it. The people locked inside were hard, and mean, but they knew how to survive a life outside the law and that’s more than our rookies had in them. Wasn’t long then until the two found themselves breaking free with some ragtag group or another, and with the ship they boosted on their way out, it wasn’t just a world that made up their oyster - it was a whole galaxy. As long as they could keep ahead of Omega Corp, that is.
Only, here’s the thing, maybe they weren’t lovers and maybe they weren’t that poor, and maybe they lost a bit more than they’d like to admit in that escape. Maybe their story isn’t as cut and dry as the legend it turned into, carried as the words were across so many planets and solar systems. The planets the two visit are rife with their own ecological and political climates with their own cast of characters looking to use and be used by our outlaw heroes.



-weird west-

snake oil
your character is an anybody in the old west when a figure you recognize comes to town. It’s not his face or name you know, but his type. Fox eyes and a cart full of baubles and remedies, all of which will do no good for anybody. The drawing crowd recognizes him, too. It’s just that, this man surprises everybody by refusing cash up front, promising to take letters of promise to be fulfilled only after the town is satisfied with his products.
It’s a day, maybe two later, and now there’s no town left. The wafers he’d offered up for the town’s communion as a part of his good will, they did something awful to your neighbors. Turned them into drooling, spiteful things that bit and clawed at each other. The man might have had the courtesy to lie to the sheriff, to have you locked in this cell beside him, safe behind the iron bars and away from the terrors outside, but now he’s shimmying a thin piece of metal from the sewn fabric of his vest. There’s a horror there, in wondering how many times this has happened to how many other towns. He’s opened the gate to your cell and is waiting to see if you’ll follow. There’s nothing left here, but is a future with a figure as evil as this worth it?
Maybe you’ll wear off on him, make him into a more decent version of himself. Does it even cross your mind that he might just wear off on you, too?

-other-

direct messaging
Here’s another prompt that really interests me. Writing direct messages from the perspective of our characters, back and forth. This simple prompt could span any number of genres, from medieval lovers penning by pigeon to citizens light-years apart planning rebellion via ftl communication. This prompt could also just be realised as a simple modern slice of life, and could eventually veer into a more conventional RP should the characters ever take to meeting physically.
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11 | Oct 3rd 2018 10:50