u/Eithrotaur

Arcadia(American Arcadia):

American Arcadia is essentially the Truman Show on an exponentially larger scale. An entire fake city with over 20 thousand residents, all of whom are completely unaware that they're on a TV show, and all of them being somehow convinced that it is perpetually some year during the 1970's for multiple decades. Not only that, but all of those citizens live in relative luxury, with large, stylish houses and apartments, advanced automated robots taking care of many everyday tasks and robust functional infrastructure throughout the entire city. At least with the Truman show all they had to do was keep track of and convince one singular lower middle class guy that his small town was real, making Arcadia work successfully for around 50 years as they've apparently been doing would be orders of magnitude more complex, and that's just to convince the people inside that it's real.

Setting aside the no doubt astronomical cost of building the city and developing the many novel technologies we see inside of it, the company also has to pay for the overhead on all the city infrastructure and maintenance, all the energy it and its surrounding systems draw, running an entire fake local government and economy, multiple fake corporations and businesses for the citizens of Arcadia to work for, providing top notch healthcare, sanitation and education for the citizens in the city, all the imported clothing, vehicles and consumer goods that must be brought into the city for citizens to spend their fake money on, the mountains of food that must be brought into the city to stock grocery stores and restaurants(most of which is likely wasted just like in any real American city), the legal costs of constantly fighting off human rights activists and groups, all the maintenance workers and backstage personnel to handle all those other costs, a state of the art and completely invisible surveillance network capable of tracking every Arcadian citizen 24/7 without their notice, a massive private security force keeping the citizens inside, and not just full time, but round the clock salaries for god knows how many actors living in Arcadia alongside the citizens born in the city to sell the illusion and steer their lives in interesting directions.

And their revenue to pay for all these ridiculous costs comes from what, tourism from fans visiting the city and the advertising revenue from people watching the lives of these citizens on a free phone app and website? Lives that are likely incredibly boring most of the time outside of occasional moments of drama or romance I should add. There's a reason that IRL there are so few round the clock reality TV shows, most of which fail, and that's because it just does not make for good entertainment.

Just to be clear, I really like American Arcadia for its high concept, aesthetics and writing, but as a way to generate profit the project would be the equivalent of setting your money on fire as a means of generating electricity.

Aperture Science and Enrichment Center(Portal):

In this instance the stupidity of the project is intentional and done for comedic effect. Cave Johnson, previously a shower curtain salesman, decides to use his money to buy a salt mine and build a massive labyrinthine science facility inside of it without any real idea or plan of what that facility is supposed to do or produce, then they simply start doing science stuff in the hopes that they'll stumble onto something profitable. Further compounding their expenses, the company then trucks in the most expensive test subjects they can find, astronauts, war heroes and olympians, in order to do that vaguely defined science.

By some miracle, this whole gambit actually works, and Aperture Science stumbles upon handheld stable wormhole technology, exactly the revolutionary discovery they've been looking for to sell to the world and make back the millions they've spent on all this. But then, they simply don't sell it, instead spending the next several decades endlessly experimenting with it, performing pointless tests that prove nothing except a person's ability to solve 3D puzzles with the portal gun, and following whatever vaguely scientific whim the founder of the company comes up with next like buying several tons of moon rocks or trying to make sentient AI.

By their own admission, Aperture Science spent a century throwing science at a wall to see what sticks, something stuck, but they just ignored it and kept throwing science at that same wall until a megalomaniacal AI killed them all. It's honestly incredible that their creditors and investors didn't come for the company first.

I'll go first. It might be a bit obvious but my pick for the worst possible Shard/Vessel combo would be the Lord Ruler as the Shard of Odium. Now, the Lord Ruler holding any Shard would be disastrous, and Odium is dangerous no matter who holds it, but I think the two together would make an incredibly potent combination. The Lord Ruler's delusions and megalomania would feed into Odium's intent perfectly, and the Shard wouldn't even have to manipulate him to make him kill every other Shard, conquer the Cosmere and turn it into an objectively much worse place to live.

I absolutely love the setting of Ravnica, the factions, the technology and magic, the urban intrigue, all of it, but at heart I'm a world builder and so for my home games I decided to make my own take on a massive magical city setting, which is how I came to make Lazvara. I've been tinkering on and off on Lazvara for years, and today I wanted to share it with some fellow fans of Ravnica and get people's thoughts on it, either in comparison to Ravnica or as it's own standalone thing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GJBbdY4dIQ8ateaVEN2FXkTC0eB7vw__u2xjoWtYxTw/edit?usp=sharing

Please enjoy and let me know what you think.