2. in the past i've used the phrase "tense homeostasis" to describe my favorite #rpg settings, where the initial world state is like a water balloon waiting for the players to step on it in spike heels and have all the weirdness and badness and adventure sluice out. so i like settings like #FadingSuns, #Exalted, #Eberron, #Glorantha, #13thAge's Dragon Empire, #Threefold for #ModernAGE, #AlAmarja from #OverTheEdge, and the like. sorry not sorry i couldn't name just one.
but i think the crown goes to #FadingSuns, even though i don't talk it up much. FS crams so many genres into one vast passion play. it's got all the elements that the #StarWars bucket can hold -- swashbuckling space opera, mystic religions, weird aliens, nobles, diplomats and spies, scoundrels just trying to keep their ship together for one more run, a universe on the cusp of great changes -- without all the superglue and spackle that SW requires to get it to all hang together
#StarsWithoutNumber can also do this, but SWN doesn't really have a defined setting other than a few light sketches and implications, which is kind of the pointof SWN, the sandbox is left mostly empty so there's plenty of space for the extensive procgen tables to do their thing. part of the homeostatic tension of Fading Suns is the constraints implied by the limited jumpspace map.
the stars are numbered, as it were, and a new or rediscovered jump key is a powerful adventure seed, to say nothing of where it leads.
but i digress! onward!