The Resplendent Majesty sits upon the throne, and lives with everyone’s attention on them. The Drab Majesty lives in the shadows, and nobody knows they’re there until there’s something they need to deal with.
A team make their living through resurrecting people by assembling the scattered fragments of their personality construct from the far-flung corners of cyberspace. But some of these people don’t want to come back. And some aren’t actually dead.
In a calm and stable Empire, the first step on the Hero’s Journey is … Finding any challenge at all
Crash Stations – On a planet where the sun has become wildly overactive and the surface world is a hostile place, city-dwellers construct gigantic walking machines to attempt to make it to the ocean and find safety in the depths
The Malevolent Catch – In the midst of the terrible weather of a crabbing season, boats start to notice things which are almost, but not quite, crabs in the catch. Then the imitation crabs start to notice them back.
A dead fish rotting on a beach is nothing new. A titanic slab of imitation crab, on the other hand, will attract attention. And scavengers.
A derelict & barnacle-encrusted ship washes up on the coastline; The locals have heard of steel, but they’ve never seen several thousand tonnes of it floating before.
People live at the very edge of the world, where the ocean falls over the lip & falls into the void, gathering all of the strange things which drift their way from the mysterious places further in. One day they spot something new; A gargantuan metal ship, belching smoke, and heading their way.
Being a Colonist on the water world of Oceania will be great; All the advertising talks about the friendly natives and well-equipped floating colonies. Reality is a little different; You’re stuck in a new settlement in the hurricane zone, and the inhabitants, native or no, hate you.
Retired supervillains open a restaurant, very much trading on their criminal past and the nostalgia for a gentler age of super-shenanigans. Can they sit by when things get bad out there?
Quantum Gastronomy: Gathering increasingly bizzare and impossible ingredients for the refined tastes of super-futuristic food snobs.
An famous Alien chef launches a competition, with the goal of finding something alien that Terrans will actually eat.
Despicable Fusion Cuisine is a front for a money laundering operation. They don’t want customers, and are unsure how to cope with suddenly becoming ironically popular.
Once access to the Earth was taken out of the picture by orbital debris, the travelling workers known as Space Hobos became a vital part of the community, who help to solve problems & keep things running out there.
Space transport is cheap enough, and space survival technology ubiquitous enough, that hitching a ride on a string of cargo containers going somewhere useful is a viable, if unauthorised & illegal, way to get around if you don’t have the money. It also means that you’re in a place that nobody expects someone to be, and that can cause problems if folks are up to things they don’t want people to see.
Once you’ve shifted some asteroids into regular orbits, moving around the system becomes a whole lot easier; Assuming you can match vector, or course.
A fantasy setting of little worldlets, each just big enough for a single field or Hobbit burrow, floating serenely in an endless sky.
Vast cargo ships ply the spaceways. Too big for anything other than full automation, they don’t seem to react when people climb aboard for free transport, or even make their homes there. It’s not clear whether they don’t notice, or they just don’t care.
On stage at a club, interrupted by the occasional solo, the band recount the tale of their experience with the supernatural.
For safety’s sake, nanotech is very tightly limited in scope, and will shut down if it goes out of bounds; So the container of unconstrained nanobots you’re holding is something that everyone wants, and that could be a problem.
An insidious Alien conspiracy plots to blow up the Sun, because it’s the only way to make our TV transmissions stop.
Sentient food items mount a daring rescue mission for a comrade who’s due to be cooked before their time.
The Queen is easily enough of a bad-ass to defeat intruders & rescue the court all by herself. The tricky part is getting enough of her adventuring gear together quickly enough that she can do it with style, instead of losing her temper and tearing the attackers apart with hands and teeth.
A member of a high-level adventuring party becomes Royalty, and discovers that it’s made their life terrible.
The Kingdom is in deep trouble, the newly-crowned King & Queen are still teenagers, and the King is, at best, totally useless. In the early hours after a long drinking session, a member of the Guard remarks that Queen would be a much better ruler, and a terrible plan forms.
When there’s a conspiracy against the King, but the King simply won’t believe it, it’s up to the Queen & her Guard to counter the threat to the Realm.
When the Queen takes an interest in the entirely fake Pagent of the Dead, and commissions a Command Performace to contact her beloved late husband, the very real supernatural entities running the show have a fine line to walk between exposure as frauds, and exposure as undead.
Mac has an awesome idea for how to do the ‘multiple iterations of the same team in the same time period’ time-travel game.
Best Served Cold / A Sweary Murder She Wrote – A Celebrity Chef solves murders while attempting to drag failing restaurants back from the brink.
The indentured staff of a Dark Kitchen try to call for help via the only means available; Inexplicable items in the orders they send out.
Technicians trying to fix a fully-automated Fish & Chip shop find themselves in the middle of a drug distribution operation.
By pure fluke, your massive order from the auto-takeout perfectly matched a shipment of contraband. Now you’ve got an enormous bag of something illegal, the bad guys have a catering-size order of deep-fried food, and things are about to get very exciting.
Produce Noir – In the grimy spray-misted aisles of The Big Shopping Cart, lit by flickering flourescents, sentient food items investigate a murder.
