This is not an idea for an Age. It's my notepad of ideas for things to put *in* Ages. (They're mostly visual, which is why I'm posting here, but some puzzle ideas are mixed in.)
I expect to do a lot of tiny little example Ages which contain just one element each. Mini-museums, sort of thing.
These ideas are open to anyone. Steal, mutate, reuse, recycle.
--------------
Terrarium format: a series of identical small islands, floating in void. Each is a walkway around a ten-foot circular area, which can contain anything.
- A diorama of a field with a stone fort in it. Glowing diagrams appear above it, with circles and arrows and lines, showing a sequence of assaults and counterassaults. (Narrative by diorama.)
- A forest of fungi. Gradated textures and colors on upright blooby things.
- Layers of frost, receding downwards.
- Still pool of dark water. Occasionally a drop of water falls in, leaving ripples.
- Cracks, with light shining upwards.
The Starship of the Imagination. Simple swept white lines and sketched control panels. Overhead (or ahead?) layers of stars zoom past. Maybe you can see the stars ahead from the bridge, and to the sides from a walkway extending rearwards. It may be useful to restrict side-to-side movement, to keep the illusion strong.
Tiffany lamp. Do something with this.
Dichroic pane of glass. Blue transmission, with red/gold environment reflection on top. (Ideally, mutate the reflection specially, so that lights come out gold on top of a general deep-red tint.) The glass stands freely in an area with strong light-dark contrasts around the edge (pillars?) so you can compare the effects.
A true prism? (Another optical effect.) Can we get refraction as a variation on environmental reflection? Throwing in a cast rainbow would be amusing, if not really consistent.
The simple mirror would be the first optical effect. If we can reflect the player, all the better, but that's probably not in the cards.
Iridescence: dark surface with three colored-highlight overlays whose brightness varies serially. (Based on angle? Position?)
Electrical landscape. Saddle-shaped island; the high points nearly meet overhead. Charge builds up on them (faint blue glow, humming sound) and then discharges with a lightning bolt and falling sparks. Probably there's a wooden deck extending out to the side, so you can get a good view upwards.
Two-phase maze. Identical layouts, in two different worlds. (Yellow sky above reddish mist; ultraviolet sun above grey mist with blue-glowing currents.) Books scattered around (same layout) let you link back and forth. Towers stand above the mazes (different layouts? Or the same?) They happen to lack front railings. Some let you fall down to the maze paths. One lets you switch phase.
Spiral "maze". Doors are placed slightly less (more?) than every 360 degrees around the spiral. Shortcutting through the doors brings you to one result. Spiralling around the whole path, no doors, brings you to a second. Reverse-spiralling, but cutting through doors so that you reach the center, is a third. (Only that doesn't work. However, you could have two spirals with opposite curvature, each tilted slightly on a common horizontal axis, so that they interpenetrate.)
Clusters of shiny black crystals sticking up. Some have a faint colored glow inside. (Visible only when you're close?)
A bridge, with lights coursing down the span.
Blinding light as an environmental effect? Boring area, then blast of light.
Different illumination effects: sparks of light circulating along a tube, instead of one spark stuck in a lantern. Rod-shaped lights (curved, free-standing).
Light-image projected from a lens down across walls/floor. Change periodically, or turn on/off.
A metal sphere rolling beneath a magnetic rail.
A marble-clock made of spheres rolling in tracks.
A flattish cone of crystal (crystalline surface, anyway). It is surrounded by an apron of the same crystal. When you walk on the apron, light flows from the base up to the apex, at that point. Run around the apron and you can get a whole sheet flowing up.
Colored shapes of light (polyhedra) hanging in the air. Some are at ground level; if you walk through them, they flare up. Or, if you don't want slow graceful drifting, have them pop up out of the ground and dance around in a mad-puppet way for a few seconds.
Baskets. (Striated or woven texture; lay in a curved or knotted stripe. Get fancy -- trefoils, mobius strip... Texture could be partially transparent?)
Also, big earthenware pots -- because we like them. Heavy red pots; modern black pots. Korean "moon jar" celadon pots.
Big blobby white ceramic shapes with colored light shining out of the holes. (Continuous funnely holes.)
Different lighting cycles? A sky which is reddish on one side and bluish on the other; but over time, the red and blue light concentrates in the middle. At "noon" they focus to a thin white band, with the rest of the sky starry black.
Panels with light radiating out from behind them. Because they make good lamps.
Also, a geode slice with light behind it. Make it flickery candlelight -- moving slightly, changing intensity.
"Garden in motion" -- heavy balustrades and posts which move around you, slowly, along tracks.
Ganzfeld: a rough, heavily textured area (stone columns) with a featureless magenta circle on the far wall. If you enter this, it turns out to be an open area with featureless magenta illumination. (Try to get some sense of "glow", rather than flat polygons!) Maybe stuff hidden on the rear faces of protrusions.
Also the "dark ganzfeld", which is black but has dynamic elements. Transparent black "fog" moving and countermoving, maybe.
Light garden: an area of pathways laid out over dead (nicely textured) stone. When you turn the lights out, glowing foliage slowly appears. (Over the course of a minute or so!) The light switch, of course, is on the far side of the maze.
Or light-foliage which appears slowly, over a few minutes, after you link in. Your eyes adjusting to the dark!
Painted desert: wind over sand dunes. (Particles streaming off the dune ridges.) Every few minutes, another layer of sand peels away, revealing a new color.