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« on: January 06, 2023, 04:34:23 PM »
I kinda think you have some good bones here to work with.
An "entropic sun" that degrades the things it's light touches (or just degrades everything within it's aura) is a cool concept, and provides a foundation for the setting and why it would be a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Some ideas for how this could come about are: 1. The arrival of an alien artifact/being like The Traveller in Destiny; 2. Some sort of particle collider experiment altering the radiation of the sun; 3. A random inversion in the universe (maybe caused by some absurdist god flipping some Discworld-esque switch); 4. A second Sun appears and just has this weird effect; 5. it is just the way things are.
Then you have the "super-power" to create objects. It pairs nicely with the setting because anything created willl necessarily temporary. But I think you really need to nail down what it is you want this magic system to be and what you want characters to be able to achieve with it, because at the moment it sounds very wishy-washy. For instance, if someone could materialize any item they want then why would they arbitrarily not be able to create weapons? If it is some intelligent god or alien thing that is causing the entropy then perhaps this is a rule that it can just enforce, but otherwise it seems a little silly. A justification I can think of is that highly ordered materials break down quicker than less ordered ones. Therefore things made of metals, crystals, maybe hard plastics and hard wood degrade to dust within moments; whereas less ordered things such as rubber, soft plastics, gels, and foams take longer to break down. In a way this adds a skill floor and ceiling to using the magic system: someone very proficient and quick could perhaps make and use a weapon within the minute amount of time it has form, whereas other, less skilled people would only be able to manifest and/or use rubber objects.
Another small issue perhaps is why humans, animals, plants or microbial life wouldn't degrade also? A part of me thinks that seeing some devolution into more entropic beings would create an interestingly unique flora and fauna for your setting, like floppy trees and crabs that are more like slimes.
A different way you could take things perhapse is to tweak the magic, so that instead of creating things from nothing, people are instead able to turn one object into another object, like a basketball into a sunhat, or a table into a boat, but then they disintegrate to nothing afterwards. This could play into the angle of human self-destruction and overconsumption, with people using stupid things like whole buildings to create rockets in the past until there was basically nothing left but random tat to use, and overdrawing from the world's natural resources to replenish things until they too ran dry. Something you can do with this form of the magic system is have it so that individual characters can turn stuff into only one thing. Like one person can turn everything they touch into frizbees, whereas someone else turns everything they touch into grenades, and someone else turns everything they touch into teddybears. Allows you to give individual identity to characters through their powers, and focuses the power system down a bit.
I'm not sure I get why humans would necessarily become less social however. As far as I can tell people would still need to eat, and to produce food at scale for a population generally requires farming. Although a thematically you could contrast a character who lives a solitary, materialistic life against a group of people that choose not to mess with the magic and live together.
In terms of plot ideas, the most obvious direction is a character with a mission to revert things back to the way they were, to restore order and permanence to the world (another theme that can be used is what happens psychologically when people lose a sense of permanence in the material world - when you can build anything, or sculpt or paint anything etc.). Another thing I can think of is just the scientist documenting the entropic apocalypse, treating it as an inevitability and making oservations about the world as it breaks down.
Last thing I have to comment on is the Lolicon thing. Personally, not my flavour... but if its what you like to draw then knock yourself out I guess. If you wanted to tie them to your setting then I may suggest some more absurdist logic; something like people turning into lolicons as a result of the entropy because they represent the most chaotic form of humanity.
Hope there is something useful to you in all of that. Best of luck!
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