A setting idea I came up with

[Bannanachair]

I came up with an idea for a location, possibly for a story, possibly for an RP if I ever decide to do that again, maybe for a tabletop RPG of some kind.

Enter the city of Ostrava, NY, located on the Moose River (probably somewhere that, in real life, is a state park or just wilderness). A small, very upstate, college city with a five-digit population, maybe two or three blocks total of downtown, a half-a-dozen bars, some shops and an art museum, the city's economy is basically built around the main university there, Quarterday University (placeholder name), which has maybe three thousand students. But, the way I want to build this setting is less like the upstate NY college town and small school I live in, but more like a mix of it and a complete fever dream. The genre of story it would tell is... Maybe fantasy or horror of some kind? I'm uncertain.

I've already worked out, weirdly enough, a ton of details about the school, designed to give it a slightly surreal feeling. The architecture is in the standard Cornell-inspired ivy-league brick building style, with perhaps a slight gothic flair. Traditional athletic teams are somewhat de-prioritized; rather, there's a focus on "sports" such as chess, debate and bridge, with these activities taking the prominence of (American) football, basketball and lacrosse that you would typically see at an institution of this size and in this place. The school is right on the river; across the river is just empty forest, with the town in the other direction. There's train-tracks that run along the river for a while, and sometimes when people are in their dorms or in class they can hear the train go past, but it's always gone by the time they look out the window, and nobody who goes out for a walk on the tracks ever sees it.

I've been having a hard time working out the academic calendar. I know that, rather than American holidays playing a large role, I want traditional Christian holidays/feast days to be celebrated. That is, important days would be Christmas, Halloween/All Hallows, Michaelmas, Candlemas, Annunciation, Martinmas, Whitsun, Pentecost, Easter, Loaf Mass, Walpurgis, etc. I think that would give an almost medieval feel to the school, which would lead to a weird, cool atmosphere. That said, I almost want to keep these traditional but secularize them slightly; Michaelmas is just celebrated by eating stubble-goose and blackberries, etc.

The departments, and popular majors and minors, are going to be a bit bizarre too. For any story I'd like to tell involving the class side of things, I want the material covered in the classes to basically always be genuinely interesting - so, the undergraduate students would all be taking what are in real life graduate-level courses, with majors far too specialized to be majors at any real school. For instance, rather than a math major, someone might be an algebraic geometry major, or a differential topology major; rather than being a history major, someone might be a Viking history major. That said, any story told would be more on the speculative fiction side; all this is just for flavour.

Anyway, I thought of this setting, a slightly bizarre, dream-like re-imagining of the upstate NY liberal arts college I go to mixed with the upstate NY or New England grad school I'm likely to go to, and don't know what to do with it. I feel like it might make a good setting for some kind of fantasy story; I'm thinking either vampire fiction or a soft fantasy sword-and-sorcery setting just nearby in the forest. Maybe a bit of both, if I can somehow incorporate both into one story, but that feels quite complicated.

[Bannanachair]

I feel like I've put too much thought into the mundanity of the school, and not enough into the surreal elements of the story. That said, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do. I want to do one of two/three things with this:

One option is a pure sword-and-sorcery story, somehow taking place in an upstate NY college. I originally came up with this idea while sitting down and thinking, "what kinds of settings have not yet been used to tell a Lieber, Moorcock, Burroughs, Howard or Smith style sword-and-sorcery novel?" - alien planets, an ancient version of earth, a secret underground world, etc. were all out, and then I realized, just setting it in modern America hasn't been tried. I'm not sure how that would work; the main character goes to school, it starts vaguely dark academia, then the character's love-interest is kidnapped and has to go on a quest to rescue them? An issue with this type of story is it often involves characters traveling places and getting caught up in adventures on-the-way; hence why I decided the school has a traveling chess team and debate team and so forth that compete with other schools.

Another option is some kind of pure vampire horror. I'm not entirely sure how I would want to play this; I think there's been too much emphasis on making vampires relatable and sexy and all that in recent vampire literature. Maybe the school has its own graveyard, or chapel, or crypts, or catacombs, and the vampire is a long-dead dean or professor. That is, despite the fact that the story would likely feature college-aged students, it would be more Dracula or Salem's Lot than Twilight. I think particularly an old university setting is quite isolated, has enough history and atmosphere and ambiance, to make things really quite interesting.

A third option is I expand somewhat, and go for a general European mythology-inspired horror/fantasy, inspired by lesser-known folklores from all over Europe, from Wales to Latvia. This would require more research and reading on my part; I wouldn't want to just go for the super-popular things. I would fictionalize a bit. Ultimately, I would try to strike a tone similar to that in comics like Sandman, Lucifer and Hellboy, but more from the perspective of ordinary people. This would lean perhaps into slightly pre-Christian themes.

I would also want to do something with the forest and the river and the old, almost-abandoned train tracks and the sense of isolation that comes from being in a small city over an hour away from the nearest medium-sized city with no public transportation anywhere around. Especially when almost everyone else goes home for the break, but you're stuck on campus. I want to do something with a town that was once a booming city but which hasn't experienced growth since the middle of the 19th century. I want to do something with an academic institution founded by some old white dude in the first half of the 19th century that's so far up its own ass with outdated traditions and bureaucracy and self-importance despite there being no budget and students not being supported and buildings still having leaded paint. A school setting small enough that everyone knows everyone, especially once you limit yourself to your own clubs and sports-teams and your department of choice. Basically, the liberal arts college experience.

I also want the characters to be exploring themes of queerness and disability and neurodivergence and alcoholism and drug use and mental illness, because that's basically what my social circle and extended social circle and every goddamn friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance I've met has been doing. That is, the things that to me seem quintessential to the college experience despite no college-themed popular media really portraying them, or exploring them beyond a surface level of depth. Characters who day-drink in order to survive the mundanity of TA-ing calculus for the umpteenth time, who keep going to debate practice because they're so socially isolated that it's the only time outside of class they talk to other people, whose self-destructive impulses have serious consequences instead of being portrayed as cool, who are rejected by everyone they ask out because their crushes are all either straight men or lesbians, who go days forgetting to eat or sleep; because to me, things like that are what college is, but not what college movies are.

Ideally, I would try to find a way to synthesize all of these - but, they seem (to an extent) somewhat irreconcilable. I also think, perhaps, this idea for a setting/story is more personal to me and less widely appealing. Still, I'll try to work on it, to make it something interesting.

[Bannanachair]

Rather than what I've done in the past with my writing projects, large epic fantasies with set-in-stone lore and all that, I want to do this as more of a pulpy series of short stories, highly episodic, with the worldbuilding and lore accumulating slowly and possibly even being somewhat contradictory in places. The stories won't be much longer than 5,000 or so words each, I think, but I also don't really know the extent to which I'm able to write things that short. If pulp magazines are still a thing, I think I'd try to submit to some of those. If not, I guess I could try Wattpad or Tumblr or something like that?

I dunno, I feel like original writing isn't super popular on the internet. Fanfiction, based in the lore of an existing universe, is certainly quite popular. Webcomics, based on original ideas, are popular. But I'm not familiar with any large story-blogs or long original continuing prose fiction anymore, like the kind that existed in the pulps decades ago, or the prose version of popular webcomics. This makes me a bit curious about where to put it.

Anyway I have time off from school now, so I might work on this for a while and see what I come up with.