Yeesh. Unique settings. Well, I love Anno Dracula, which is basically a world based on the premise that Dracula won in the events of the book Dracula, and went on to marry Queen Victoria and turn a large segment of the population into vampires. The books jump through history, with the first examining the impacts of these events in the years immediately following Dracula's victory (including the ramifications of Jack the Ripper murdering vampire prostitutes), then forwards several decades for the second book, the Bloody Red Baron, to seeing how the presence of vampires changed the First World War (it includes a shapeshifting Baron Mannfred von Richtofen turning into an enormous bat-thing and tackling planes in midair), and then forwards again to something approximating a spy drama in Rome in the 1960s for the Judgement of Tears. Fascinating look at vampires and how they'd actually fit into a society, especially if they came saddled with many of Dracula's inherent weaknesses. It's rather telling that the average lifespan for a new vampire is considerably less than the length of time they would have lived had they stayed human. And this is in a society that isn't actively trying to kill them.
However, I do think the Day After Ragnarok tops it for uniqueness. The basic premise is that in 1945, the Nazis summoned Jorgmundr the World Serpent to bring about the Ragnarok. However, before it could grow to full size, the Americans nuked it in the left eyeball and killed it. The corpse, at that point long enough to wrap around the entire planet, fell to earth and crushed a huge swathe of Europe, including all the armies fighting in Germany at the time, beneath it. The tidal wave caused by the collapse wiped out the entire east coast of the US, not to mention many, many other places. The serpent's rise meanwhile has awakened the magic of the world, leading to many creatures thought to be mere myths to come crawling out of the dark places of the earth. Three years later and the British empire, now based out of Australia (Britain lies almost entirely under the Serpent's bulk) is now engaged in a game of espionage against Stalin who, with the aid of the ice giants, has fashioned an army of ape-men and psychics and laid claim to all of Europe behind the Serpent Wall. In the US, a handful of states are trying to reestablish the country and pull the many rogue cities back into line, while fending off incursions from the KKK slave raiders and the even more monstrous mutant creatures that dwell in the Poisoned Lands. The Serpent's blood has many corrupting effects, but it has been found that it can also provide some interesting technological benefits. It's a fascinating setting with everything from Nazi U-boats still operating out of a secret base in Antarctica to air pirates raiding along the African coast to an island in the Pacific populated largely by zombified US marines, cannibalistic Japanese guerillas, and dinosaurs. Time to go dragon hunting with a submachine gun. Never read anything remotely like it.
However, I do think the Day After Ragnarok tops it for uniqueness. The basic premise is that in 1945, the Nazis summoned Jorgmundr the World Serpent to bring about the Ragnarok. However, before it could grow to full size, the Americans nuked it in the left eyeball and killed it. The corpse, at that point long enough to wrap around the entire planet, fell to earth and crushed a huge swathe of Europe, including all the armies fighting in Germany at the time, beneath it. The tidal wave caused by the collapse wiped out the entire east coast of the US, not to mention many, many other places. The serpent's rise meanwhile has awakened the magic of the world, leading to many creatures thought to be mere myths to come crawling out of the dark places of the earth. Three years later and the British empire, now based out of Australia (Britain lies almost entirely under the Serpent's bulk) is now engaged in a game of espionage against Stalin who, with the aid of the ice giants, has fashioned an army of ape-men and psychics and laid claim to all of Europe behind the Serpent Wall. In the US, a handful of states are trying to reestablish the country and pull the many rogue cities back into line, while fending off incursions from the KKK slave raiders and the even more monstrous mutant creatures that dwell in the Poisoned Lands. The Serpent's blood has many corrupting effects, but it has been found that it can also provide some interesting technological benefits. It's a fascinating setting with everything from Nazi U-boats still operating out of a secret base in Antarctica to air pirates raiding along the African coast to an island in the Pacific populated largely by zombified US marines, cannibalistic Japanese guerillas, and dinosaurs. Time to go dragon hunting with a submachine gun. Never read anything remotely like it.
