Dumping old RPG campaign ideas, part 1

It's the year 2045. Infotech and biotech have been constantly booming for over a century now, and the world is getting stranger by the day. Computers are ubiquitous, to the point were it's difficult to live in the developed parts of the world without implanted infosphere-connected computing power. For the well-to-do, disease is something of the past. Biological upgrades, organs and body parts that work better than the natural ones, are just hitting the market (but if you buy one you'd better not forget to keep up your license payments for the DNA, you really wouldn't want it to get repossessed). The economic and cultural gulf between the rich and poor parts of the world has never been greater.

Lesosibirsk is a city in central Siberia, one of the hypercapitalist states left behind by the fallen Soviet Union. It sits right on the border between the ultratechnological world and the still-wild taiga. It's one of the few places where the infosphere-connected and the bare-minded regularly meet. The taiga still holds biological secrets to be exploited, and DNA-prospectors employ natives to help find them.

It's late July, and there are rumours that a DNA-prospector has found and brought back something strange. Some say she found it in an old Soviet military lab. Some say she found it in fragments fallen from the 1908 Tunguska meteorite. Some say it's a infosphere virus that managed to infect a biological substrate and evolved. Some say even stranger things. What's certain is that the DNA-prospector came into a bar in the small hours of the morning, desperately looking for someone. While she was there, the local infosphere started acting up and the bar actually lost power for several seconds. When the power returned, the prospector was slumped over the bar, quite dead. From the look of it, her implants had exploded. It was quite the online sensation for several hours.

The morning after, a number of people who'd been in the bar (the player characters among them) wake up after a night of very strange dreams, full of geometric shapes, half-heard whispers and unfocused dread. Around them, all electronic displays capable of displaying at least alphanumerics have stopped showing what they normally should show and are instead displaying a single word.

"GODFIRE"

Dumping old RPG campaign ideas, part 2

It's the year 1796, and King Gustavus III rules what's left of Sweden. Ten years ago, magic returned to the world. All the critters of myth and folklore suddenly showed up again. Wizards and witches found their magics suddenly much more effective -- as long as they stay on dry land. For some reason, magic doesn't work over large volumes of water. Routed by the troll forces of the King Under The Mountain, Gustavus III's regime retreated to the archipelago outside Stockholm. It's close enough to water that gunpowder stays dominant and the trolls won't go there, and enough dry land that some simpler magics still work (which was lucky for the King when he was shot by the arch-traitor Anckarström; without healing magic he probably would've died). The old capital is still inhabited, but these days by a fair mix of humans and oknytt ("little people"). King Gustavus III rules the islands outside the Swedish coast and some of the coastal areas. The King Under The Mountain rules the inland of Sweden and the mountainous parts of Norway.

The player characters are members of a fairly new military force of King Gustavus III's that's been trained in the use of some magic as well as sword and gunpowder. As we start, they're preparing for a long-range reconnaissance patrol into the inland. Their primary target, to find out exactly who the shadowy King Under The Mountain really is, and why all the troll and oknytt seem so terribly afraid of him.