AfterFrame: A setting
I have been engaging in some level of worldbuilding for coming up on a decade now. However, after reading 17776 by Jon Bois, I realized my greatest mistake. I have made, in fact, very few artifacts. Every bit of the hundreds (or thousands) of hours of worldbuilding and settings I have developed have culminated in Almost Nothing. I've run a grand total of 2 RPG sessions in settings of my creation, despite most of those hours going into DND-esque fantasy settings. I figured this has to change. I have this swanky website now, so this will be a starting point.
I've chosen not to start with any of my Fantasy DND-setting thoughts, due to their sheer size. Instead, I’ve developed a small handful of interesting but undercooked settings over the years. This is one of those ideas.
AFTERFRAME
AfterFrame is a post-apocalyptic setting inspired by JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Pacific Rim, Real Steel, and Jia Haixia and Jia Wenqi, two Chinese friends, one of whom is blind and the other paraplegic, who work together to plant trees.
The base aesthetic of this setting (as seen in the generated image above) is: what if mechs were more like backpacks? Incredibly powerful and useful, but at a scale that makes it feel like two separate entities, requiring the cooperation of both. Below is a first pass at a storyline that would lead to this.
In the year XXXX, before the catastrophic Z Event occurred, humanity split into two camps about the best way to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse. The first group thought rapid advancements in cryogenic technologies was the best bet. Humans would go down into bunkers, be placed into cold storage, to be released upon the earth bouncing back from the effects of this catastrophe. The other group thought that the widespread uploading of human minds was the greatest solution, to evolve from their corporeal forms and live out their lives as digital minds on servers deep underground. Fortunately, these technologies were not at odds with one another. The same facilities that stored the frozen bodies of the remaining humans could keep the servers and processors necessary for the digital minds. Unfortunately, partially due to the focus on two technologies rather than one, neither was at full maturity when the Z Event occurred.
In many cases, the cryogenics ended up killing their wards outright. In many other cases, timers failed and released their hosts far too early. In all known cases, due to a mix of cryogenic failures and byproducts of the mind uploading process, the inhabitants are left with varying levels of retrograde amnesia. As for the uploads, computation limitations meant not all parts of the brain could be saved. Many portions responsible for locomotion were excluded. And thousands of years of idle processing in a relatively empty digital space can change personalities greatly.
So survivors emerge from their frozen cocoons, the only tools at their disposal leftover emulated minds in the same bunkers they had been sleeping in. Technology had gotten to the point that embodying these bots with scrap parts was trivial, especially with faster-processing emulated minds guiding the assembly. While a robotic super-buddy with agency would be incredibly helpful to survive the wasteland of what was once Earth, the lack of fine motor function (and lower-body locomotion as a whole) meant that the best survivors could do was develop the AfterFrames: a cross between an independent robotic body and a hiking backpack.
Because of the cryogenic amnesia, no one can really remember what the Z Event was, let alone how to rebuild the world afterward. While the emulated minds don’t have the same specific amnesia, not much space was allocated to things like “What happened?” and “How do we save the world?” due to the assumption that the EMs would just live a perfect digital existence in perpetuity.
So the survivors, geared up with their AfterFrames, wander the wasteland, attempting to stake out some level of life in the world. The beings they carry on their backs are theoretically someone they were in the bunker with, who may or may not have made it. In the case of the main character, the EM is actually his own uploaded mind. But with stunted memory and centuries of divergent evolution between them, what does that even mean?