Good Settings for Free-Roam RogueLikes

[Pueo]

    Basically what the title describes: what are some good settings for free-roam roguelikes, where you can just wander around and carve your own path, eventually progressing towards the final boss/quest/goal?

    I've thought of the usual Fantasy set in Middle Ages kind of idea, plus a post-apocalyptic America, and a sort of 1650 - 1680's Golden Age of Piracy buccaneering type thing, where you sail around on your ship looking to make fame and fortune.
   
    However, I feel like fantasy is just too over-done, post-apocalyptic settings are too politically/emotionally charged, and piracy is largely a team effort, which I don't feel fits with roguelikes in general (one hero that, against all odds, defeats the bad guy). 

    I really like post-apocalyptic settings, but I don't want to turn it into an allegory of how we need to downsize our nuclear weapons departments, or stop global warming, or protect the koala bear because without it this certain tree will grow too large and take over our cities, etc.  It's not that I don't think those things are worth talking about, it's that I want my game to be fun, not a secret anti-nuclear-weapons speech.

[requerent]

Crash landing on an alien world with sub-par technology. You have to fashion weapons out of their bones as you hack through every last one, drowning their children in the rivers of blood that your wrath hath unleashed.

[Pueo]

Crash landing on an alien world with sub-par technology.

Who has the sub-par technology here?  You or the aliens?

[requerent]

Crash landing on an alien world with sub-par technology.

Who has the sub-par technology here?  You or the aliens?

The aliens. That's why you have to use their bones to slaughter every last one of them. They don't have anything better... or at least more creative. Maybe the hero is just a little insane and needs to indulge occasional fits of creativity in between mass slaughters.

[Alex E]

Well everyone likes a good zombie apocalypse.

[Darren Grey]

You could have an alien invasion apocalypse.  World has been attacked, aliens are in control, you're part of the resistance.  Wander around various desolate places on your own quests, or take on the main quest of liberating earth.  Has the advantage of adding weird alien tech to the mix.

[kraflab]

How about something that hasn't already been cliched to death.  Just think of anything.  The gameplay will be more important than the setting.

[Krice]

Well how about a jungle roguelike. Hack your way through jungle. Never seen one, but the idea is cool.

[Holsety]

Desert survival. Spend hours trudging through monotonous sandscapes before the sun and/or dehydration consigns you to a horrible death.

[Omnomnom]

"I really like post-apocalyptic settings, but I don't want to turn it into an allegory of how we need to downsize our nuclear weapons departments, or stop global warming, or protect the koala bear because without it this certain tree will grow too large and take over our cities, etc."

Then don't.

[Pueo]

"I really like post-apocalyptic settings, but I don't want to turn it into an allegory of how we need to downsize our nuclear weapons departments, or stop global warming, or protect the koala bear because without it this certain tree will grow too large and take over our cities, etc."

Then don't.

    Even if I don't explicitly mention it, how can you make a setting where half the world was destroyed by nuclear weapons and not have it come up somewhere, somehow?  Or if the setting is a world where the oceans rose due to all the ice on Earth melting, how do you not bring up global warming?

   I also like the ideas about desert/jungle survival, but how do you implement things like quests if you're all alone?

[guest509]

  Stone age survival? Jungle, desert, islands, swamps, etc...megafauna like Sabertooth Tigers and Mastadons. Beavers the size of horses. Flash floods.

  You aren't alone, per say, but there are only a few Cro Magnon around, and they aren't necessarily friendly. They'll tell you about what direction the enemy camps are. You can also save their kidnapped children and what not as a side quest.

  Quest: Save your daughter who has been kidnapped by the evil Neanderthals. You can make them numerous and tough but dumb as a box of rocks. Falling off cliffs and stuff. That's your advantage.

  Shit I should make that one...:-)

EDIT: You can include other semi mythical type things. Man eating plants, for example. Or go full on crazy and add a few dinosaurs here and there as bosses.

[Pueo]

 Stone age survival? Jungle, desert, islands, swamps, etc...megafauna like Sabertooth Tigers and Mastadons. Beavers the size of horses. Flash floods.

    That's pretty good.  I also thought of another "all-alone" kind of setting, where, by unspecified (so far) means, you end up in the ruins of a centuries-, millennia-, or even eons-old civilization (maybe with awesome advanced technology) and must find out what happened (or maybe you're just there for the gold).  You have to fight rats, spiders, maybe ancient machines, etc in order to reach your goals. 

[Leaf]

Even if I don't explicitly mention it, how can you make a setting where half the world was destroyed by nuclear weapons and not have it come up somewhere, somehow?  Or if the setting is a world where the oceans rose due to all the ice on Earth melting, how do you not bring up global warming?

Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, and Sterling E. Lanier did it without becoming political.  But their books were far far far post apocalypse.  The world was destroyed.  Nobody remembered why.  It just was.

[Ari Rahikkala]

One day I want to play a roguelike made by a historian of the medieval era. Or at least a developer who could play one on TV. You know, less automaton horses (warning: tvtropes link) and sword-wielding adventurers, more debate over whether the dog-headed men of the east have souls or not. Less grand castles and kings and knights, more barons with maybe one good warhorse. Less generally Anglo-Saxon countryside, more Kievan Rus' or Sultanate of Rum. Or something even crazier like Mali (with salt as the game currency, of course) or China or the declining Maya civilization... it's really a sin to use a word like "medieval" without qualifiers to describe a setting when there are so many cultures, so many societies, so many mythologies to draw from.

For a taste of what I'm trying to get at, try Alamut as a straightforward example of forming a setting based on medieval history, or UnReal World which is all about survival in Iron Age Finland. I don't think people should knock the idea of developing a setting by just choosing an underused historical place and time and rolling with it. Where there are people and societies, there are stories, there are dangers, there are myths, more than enough to make a game out of.