The very short game spans a six day journey to go put a Magical Girl to rest across a forest, a valley, and a dungeon, with a subsequent trip home in reverse.
I started trying to design some small compelling locations that fit the motifs on my flight home. I think our setting is gonna be kinda... 1930's Midwest America in feel. I am a touch worried it'll just be Fuga or Stand By Me.
To keep my Magical Girl / Local Hero relevant and important, I think I am gonna have each of the players pick a facet of their life so the characters have a thing they associate the body they are laying to rest with, good or bad:
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"Forest" Adventure Segment
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Ashlind:
Consumed by a wildfire two summers ago, this dense pine forest is now a collection of tightly packed black spires. Swaths of the ground are smooth and glassy with ponds of boiled sap. Ash whips softly across the ground without any trees to break it, and the wind howls dolefully.
The Stumpyards:
A desolate stretch of felled trees and coppiced stumps. Remnants of the industries that pre-dated the city. Without canopies to break the rain, the roots — dense, wide nets of underground veins — have been exposed. The old sawmill is silent and toothless.
Stark's Crossing:
A stretch of waterlogged heath. The city used to cut peat to burn in their fireplaces here, before coal had become more accessible. Even now, over the last five years, some are abandoning coal for electricity. A place forgotten by two generations, and now reclaimed, unpredictable, and overgrown.
Husker's Glen:
A derelict farmstead collapsing under its own weight. A dense, abandoned cornfield stretches in all directions, dry upon its stalks and cumbered with weeds. Woody, deer-eaten pumpkins grow messily from untended patches and crows circle ominously overhead.
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"Valley" Adventure Segment
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Grand Middens Landfill:
Halfways between anywhere, as all landfills tend to be. A sprawling ravine of refuse and junk. Sun-bleached bones and rusting cans litter the footpaths and beached traincars cling to the shade like cicada shells beside splintered furniture. A place of lawlessness, neglect, and danger.
Devil's Thimble:
A stark red outcropping full of uneven sandstone buttes and plateaus. Seasonal riverbeds of cracked salt-mud stretch like fingers through its deep furrows and stark faces, which provide perch and shade to monsters and creatures alike.
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"Dungeon" Adventure Segment
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Heileigh Cleft:
A lonesome mountain range that separates the city from the Moongrave's touch. An occult and superstitious place where one can purportedly see souls escape to the heavens by night. Shrouded in a perpetual rain, stacked stone gravemarkers give eternal dignity to other wayfarers who have failed to lay their Magical Girl to rest and so have joined them in death.
