Now that's a fine thread.
Different ideas, maybe not all for one setting:
1) The Thirty Years War, Grim Tales style. I always wanted to start an adventure with the siege of Magdeburg.
2) More political factions like the real world where you spend half your time trying not to be outmaneuvered by your friends.
3) Colony of an Ottoman Empire-like regime. The colony is a dumping ground for troublesome peoples (following the ancient practice of transplanting entire peoples) where and sets its cruelest governors to keep them in line. The landscape is rich in ruins and deadly in and of itself. Then one day, the ships from the home continent stop coming. Now all these tense factions that were kept in line by a Stalin-like fist are free to pursue their own agendas.
4) Tunguska event, only it leaves in its wake a plague that empties the cities and leaves them occupied by crazed, life-hating shades, and the survivors are the only ones who are immune. Stay close to the fires at night...
5) A world like C.S. Friedman’s Erna (Coldfire Trilogy, at least the first book was great) where the world is reactive to its sentient occupants, and your dreams can actually take shape and life. Your sword master makes you hunt down and kill all the things your overactive imagination brings into being.
6) Something like the Haiti described in The Serpent and the Rainbow, where shadowy voodoo groups enforce the social order through threat of zombification, while letting the government delude itself into thinking its really in charge.
7) An early modern era (circa our 1650) Atlantis, where Amerigo’s land is a fable just waiting for heroic souls to exploit. An Atlantean Indiana Jones exploring a half-sunken new world.
8) A setting that is Earth but certain places, like crossing fast running water, takes you into a fantastic mirror world, maybe something like the Star Trek episode where they went into the evil Empire and Spock had the cool beard. Some shadowy organization has learned the secret of crossing between the two and is doing something that threatens both.
9) A setting based on ancient Bactria (Central Asia, northern Afghanistan), where you had Alexander’s colonists living among Persians and dealing with wild tribes in the mountains we call Hindu Kush and Indians on the other side. Two far from the major powers for them to have real influence but right smack on major overland trade route. An experiment in compelling disparate cultures to get along. Wait, that sounds like my home brew…
10) A setting where my sister’s lack-wit ex-husband is always the monster getting slaughtered in new and exciting ways each session. Now that’s a cool setting.
