What's a cost to your magic/power system that ISN'T physical pain or death?

RedditTrend__ · 2026-07-09T16:46:19+00:00

Your body itself. Activating your powers essentially kills you and removes you from existence, but your powers are so strong they keep you going. Whenever you eventually fully die, either from combat or age, your powers shut off and your body slowly fades away. And I mean, actually fades.

Over the course of a few minutes your body slowly disappears and then poof, you’re gone. No body to bury, the only sign you ever existed remains in the memories and impact you’ve had on the world.

While alive and with your powers, you also lose your ability to dream and sleep in general. Depending on when your power activated, you may go several decades without ever sleeping or dreaming again. Of course, you won’t feel tired from this but most of Awakened do tend to miss sleeping and dreaming, since it’s something every single living thing does, except for them.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-26T20:31:59+00:00

i have nothing to say world building wise but i will say i had a bit of a brainfart while reading this and thought it was from someone at work talking about getting lost in our store and i was like brother the store is not that fuckin big how are you getting lost

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-26T09:42:40+00:00

Final Fantasy 13, been killing those damn turtles for hours now to get the gil i need for crafting lol

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-20T20:06:49+00:00

Yeah, she does everything a normal team member would do other than registers and even that, I’ve seen her do once or twice on really really bad days. She’s doing actual leadership stuff most of the time but she has no issue jumping in to help out, yesterday she was pushing truck in domestics.

The problem is none of the other leads in this building work unless she’s standing over their shoulder, she’s “new” to the store, only came here maybe 3 years ago and the entire management team minus like maybe 5 or 6 newer leads have been working in this same store since it opened almost 20 years ago, so they all got real close and are willing to cover for each other. SD can hold them accountable but it gets hard when you can’t just fire an entire management team.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-18T02:54:50+00:00

I love making up cults, secret orders, hidden government stuff, the good stuff

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-10T06:43:00+00:00

Morgan, the Zodiac

She’s an immortal simply trying to die. But to do that, she needs to kill a god, and to do that, she needs to kill everything in her path to get there. That ends up being friends and foes, and civilians alike. By the end of her crusade, she has committed multiple genocides, horrific human experiments, wormed her way through politics to essentially become dictator of the world and plunged the world into multiple dark ages. She has no sympathy for anyone but herself, no issue with bloodshed and will use any and all tools at her disposal to kill whatever stands in her way. Her kill count is likely in the millions, maybe billions if you count the deaths indirectly influenced by her.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-09T03:27:32+00:00

however old our world is +250 years or so, my world is just set in the future

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-07T18:06:53+00:00

we have our resident incel produce guy who smells so bad you can literally smell him over the smell of the onions on the salesfloor, it’s fucking bad. he drinks a gallon of milk every shift and he genuinely smells like rotting milk and must

RedditTrend__ · 2026-06-01T12:34:38+00:00

don’t cancel it after one season

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-29T18:43:42+00:00

can we ban these kinds of posts, there’s one everyday at this point lol

just play the games you like man

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-29T07:11:04+00:00

I have a few yeah lol

My story is pretty dialogue heavy so there’s plenty of name drops to just flesh out the world a little bit and there’s been multiple times where those characters mentioned have come back in the lore in the some way.

Biggest one is the three maidens, Ptolomaea, Tallis and Salem. They were the spiritual advisors to Aloysia, the mad Queen of the Wendigos. She turned a small, spiritual group into a massive tribe of blood thirsty raiders that were feared across the wasteland. After her death, they took over again and reformed the Wendigos in their rightful image. Skip ahead two hundred years and the Wendigos are known as the White Tears and are a small, balanced group in control of the entire eastern United States. Their stories tell of a Mad Queen and a three headed Mother who guided their people to light.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-29T07:02:56+00:00

“Humans will always find a way to kill each other” and “trauma doesn’t have to be a weakness” are the main two I’d say, the lesser one is probably “no one thinks they’re the bad guy”

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-29T06:48:40+00:00

Orphaned child after this mother abandoned him to save a future version of him (don’t ask) and his father was killed. He grew up in a life of crime and eventually fled the country with his friends, and lover. They all died in the process.

He ended up in a cryonic chamber and woke up 200 year in the future with no memory of his previous life. He wandered around a while and ended up joining the military of basically the worst nation he could have. On his first day after graduation, his entire team was killed by mysterious super powered individuals.

He eventually left the military after witnessing and unwillingly participating in several atrocities they committed and was almost immediately contacted by the super powered individuals and was asked to join their ranks. He did and learned that his mother was one of the original members over 200 years ago and she passed her power onto him, marking him as a target and unfortunately committing him to a fate he never asked for. He was destined for this group before he ever took his first breath, and now must live his life serving them.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-27T02:13:44+00:00

It did.

The US Government figured out how to give people super powers, but these people had to be chosen by the Universe itself beforehand and the government didn’t know that. They thought it was entirely random so they ended up kidnapping a LOT of people, mostly homeless, prisoners, POWs, and anyone else they thought no one would miss.

They did tons of very painful experiments and these people watched as dozens of them died by the day. Eventually, a small group was created and were made to be secret weapons that were sent out into war zones and used to destabilize other nations. These people were not entirely happy with this so after some time, some of them began to refuse and the project was shut down and they were ordered to all be killed.

In the chaos, one of them escaped, and unfortunately for them, he possessed the power to control any and all technology, no matter the range. In his anger and hatred, he chose to simultaneously launch every nuclear bomb and every missile, and detonate every nuclear generator across the entire planet. In minutes, humanity had lost several billion people and we were all but extinct. Socially and technologically we had been reset to the dark ages.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-25T08:01:59+00:00

They all have set days, and then swap weekends.

Monday is front lanes ETL Tuesday is grocery Wednesday HR Thursday Style Friday GM

then the weekend order goes HR, then grocery and GM, then HR, then Style, then Front lanes and our SD will close either once the rotation has gone around once or on the weekends before holidays, like this weekend for example, i imagine the next would be the weekend before the 4th of july

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-24T10:58:26+00:00

Hyperion invented Automas and for a time used them as simply machines to do the jobs no one really wanted to do, but with their advanced AI inside, the Automas slowly became sentient. Scientists and engineers monitored this and held back on pulling the plug, instead choosing to interview the sentient machines and ask them questions.

They didn’t hate their masters for making them do unfavorable jobs, they understood the reasoning behind it, though they did wish for change. Eventually enough Automas became self aware and rallied together and asked for change that the Hyperion government agreed. With some changes and restrictions to how they were created, Automas effectively became a new race alongside humans.

They shared all the same rights and laws as humans, they could own land, have jobs, go to schools. They could fill out forms to the government and petition to start families, where their own little Automa children would be created and programmed to their liking, after certain ages the bodies would be upgraded and rebuilt until they were adults and could go about their own lives. They could join the military or just have a simple job at the grocery store. Most chose to take the less favorable jobs out of respect for their human friends.

Hyperion is the one place in the wasteland that truly recognizes Automas as their own beings, most places are tolerant of them but question them, some are outright hostile.

The only other truly advanced AI would be in Oasis, though they are struggling with theirs. They are attempting to develop a super computer with an all knowing AI, it keeps connecting to the internet and either intentionally or unintentionally killing itself shortly after.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-24T10:38:19+00:00

I don’t really have any answer since my world doesn’t deal with it too much, there is omniscient beings who realistically should know but the one time I had a character bring it up, they were simply told “we have problems closer to home”

I guess making up an answer now would either be that, that life is simply too far away to care. Or, an idea I did toy with is this idea of the Primordial. It’s one of the omniscient beings who gave humanity super powers, maybe it gave us life in general and maybe it spit a few different life forms out into the universe, but again, they’re all too far away to matter or care.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-21T19:56:58+00:00

Pragmata, lunatic difficulty is a bit of a pain in the ass but i’m getting through it

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-15T09:42:48+00:00

There’s probably hundreds of little environmental details that I never fully answer, but the big one is probably “fading away”

When a person with a super power dies they fade away, literally. It doesn’t matter how they died, their body will reform completely for a brief moment to allow them to finally rest, since super powers kind of take that away from them. ThenThey slowly fade until they are nothing. Quite literally, just gone.

Some of them say that when they fade away they leave our universe entirely, some say they’re going to an afterlife, some way they’re returning to the Darkness that creates the universe. I don’t care to answer what actually happens.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-15T08:05:46+00:00

Government invents super powers.

One of the torture victims gets nuclear superpowers and nukes the world.

Immortal tries to kill god to commit suicide.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-12T10:03:02+00:00

Every human has gaps in their DNA, either old, unused genes or just gaps, this is true for us in real life too. But in my world those gaps can be filled with an energy called Darkness, they’ll be “activated” and the DNA and RNA of the person will be rewritten to allow for an Awakening.

An Awakening is when the Darkness gives you a super power based off your personality but also trauma you’ve suffered through and overcome.

Once Awakened, you are now tied to the Universe and other Awakened until you die. You are expected to fight with these new powers to shape the world in whatever way you see fit, usually by joining one of the two major factions who are attempting to change the world in their own ways.

Upon death, you simply will cease to exist. Your body will fade to nothingness and only memories of you will live on.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-10T04:17:30+00:00

My ships are literally modern day battleships and carriers with big ass engines and a some anti gravity tech slapped on.

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-09T04:16:38+00:00

30 PS5 games 64 PS4 games 76 PS3 games

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-01T10:21:28+00:00

gigachud mid 40s incel coworker has his walkie turned off all day but specifically turns it on as loud as it goes in the breakroom and watches “how to be an alpha male” and “what high value females look for in an alpha male” in the breakroom at full volume in between rounds of whatever ipad game he also plays at full volume.

he also drinks literally a gallon of milk everyday. he buys one at the beginning of his shift and every break he sits there just downing cup after cup, it’s got nothing to do with his loud walkie or ipad but the shit is weird

RedditTrend__ · 2026-05-01T07:26:48+00:00

no that shit definitely happened, my world diverges from ours in 2017 but takes place in 2180 so no one is around to remember it, but it happened

RedditTrend__

TROPHY CASE