[Creative Exercise] Worlds in a word, planes in a paragraph


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The Galaxy - It's millions of years in the future and humanity has spread across the milky way. There's no aliens as such but there's an incredible variety of planet-specific lifeforms all derived from humans or o e of a handful of domestic animals

Immense Heaven - Billions of years in the future humanity has spread across the Laniakea Supercluster and finally makes contact with an actual alien intelligence, which hails from a different supercluster
 

I could see that as an RPG’s original setting and its expansion supplement.

FWIW, there was a short story I read YEARS ago that was a take on the first idea. Humanity expanded into the galaxy in 2 directions, encountering no other sentient life. Then, after thousands of years of expansion, both frontiers reported First Contact!

The reveal: the frontiers had actually encountered each other on the other side of the galaxy, closing the circle. The extreme isolation of the twin frontiers had caused genetic, cultural, technological and linguistic drift so immense that neither exploration group could recognize each other as human.
 

Operation Clippy - Cyberpunk setting. Genocidal rogue AI superintelligences have made a bid for global domination and failed. But those very same rogue AIs are still around; snapped up or copied by the major world powers after being subdued. I came up with the title first and then the setting.
 

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