>>5221232>>5221236>>5221243Understandable complaints, this is my one and only statement on an argument that has nothing to do with quests. That being said I learned all this from the patterns I noticed in the rising and falling of various civilizations while researching things for my quest so to make up for it I'll impart some advice on dystopian settings. A lot of great dystopian settings are built around a core tragedy of the human condition that will rear it's head to either prevent good things from happening or bring an end to a prosperous age.
One of the large problems of a dystopian settings especially with one-off books like 1984,Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World is they exist solely to showcase the tragedy and lack little flavor outside of it. Even the most sociopathic and repressive regimes such as Soviet Russia, the CCP, North Korea or smaller but equally sadistic entitles such as Hollywood have a sort of culture and methodology to them that sets them apart, even if on a surface level they actively shun such things.
A dystopian setting needs some small things to make it feel more lived in and human, being an entity that only pays attention to active threats to itself anything that emerged naturally that either doesn't have a negative impact or actively benefited it would be left alone or even encouraged, of course if it ever began to morph into something that made the entity feel remotely threatened it would be stamped out quickly and ruthlessly.
Ultimately these little details is why a setting like 40k while almost certainly less philosophically engaging then these other works of fiction has so much lasting appeal. Rather than the drab, sterile quite honestly repetitive aesthetics and setup of creating xyz dystopia with the cliche gray pants were everyone has le 1900's factory job they also have human flesh machines, BDSM Murder Elves with their own dystopian society, local lord shenanigans and Rape Demons.
Having a single homogenized cabal control everything is boring. Real world examples have show consistently that tyrants don't give a shit what their subordinates are doing as long as it doesn't threaten them. This leads to all sorts of wacky power struggles where truly bat shit insane things happen as each layer of the hierarchy feuds with each other forming their own factions within the entity.
TDLR if you're running a quest in a dystopian setting
#1. Give it some weird traditions like Chinese Ghost City investing, things that just sort of happened but didn't pose a big enough problem for the feds to care.
#2. Conflict is part of the human condition, no matter how autistic a regime is there will always be some infighting, the more powerful the entity the more violent the conflicts are to control it. Spice up the story by having it be in conflict with rival dystopias.
#3 Don't retread old ground, try and find a combination of fucked up parts of being human that nobody's ever tried to make a story with before.
