Alistair wakes up in a waiting room.

It's almost aggressively nondescript - in fact, the most notable thing about it might just be how empty it is. There's a wall across from the chair he's sitting in, with the phrase Reincarnation: your next metaphysical step written on it at eye level, and a closed door off to one side, and a water cooler in the corner opposite the closed door.

The door opens quietly, showing a person with hair the color of aquamarine and wheat-colored feathery wings on the other side.

"Alistair? Come on in."

What.

Did he die in his sleep.  

Apparently reincarnation is real! Hopefully this is good news.  He's sure his parents will be distressed when they figure out why he's not coming out of his room, but right this moment he can't actually be bothered to care about what his parents feel.  He sort of hopes they have the decency to feel bad.

He gets up and walks towards the apparent angel. (He didn't think those went with reincarnation.)

The angel smiles professionally as they let Alistair into their office.

It's obviously a room in the same style as the waiting room, but it's got hints of personality to it: a pale chartreuse accent wall, a desk with mostly-organized papers, folders, and binders on its surface, and a faint smell reminiscent of cilantro. The angel takes a seat at a chair designed to accommodate their wings and, if Alistair hasn't already done the same, gestures invitingly towards a chair designed without any specific wingy accommodations. They glance down at a sheet of paper before once again looking up with a smile.

"Welcome to the reincarnation office. It looks like you died in your sleep - overall, not the worst possibility, especially since that means we didn't need to blur any traumatic memories. Now, we've got a lot to go over and all the time in the world to do it in. If you've got any pressing questions, I'd be happy to hear them before we start."

He sits down, silent for a moment.

"What does it mean that I'm going to be resurrected?  Is it like Buddhism or whatever where it's like, a cycle and you get a better next life if you were virtuous or a worse one if you weren't, or is it just... another life?"

The angel grins.

"It's just another life, really. Most souls are processed pretty quickly, and either have their memories erased or not depending on whether their target world is cleared for that. Which actually segues really naturally into the topic at hand!"

They slide a folder over to Alistair. It's dark red, like - well, like the petals of a rose.

"Target world?  So I'm not going to be reincarnated as a baby on earth?  Do I get to choose the world?"

He pulls the folder the rest of the way and opens it up.

"In a sense, yes and no. The world itself has already been assigned, but since it hasn't been created yet, you get to choose some of the details, particularly as pertains to your own life."

The first page in the folder is a glossy advertisement with roses on it.

Congratulations! Despite the odds, you have been accepted to the prestigious Royal Academy of the Kingdom of Villarosa. While attending this academy, you will rub elbows with the nobility, gain the skills required to move up in life, and even find love. But beware! Your beau is already engaged to an underhanded villainess who will do everything in her power to maintain control over her betrothed. Can you beat the odds and foil her plans? Step into the world of The Roses of Villarosa to find out!

"Ah - you can ignore the 'villainess' part. You see, The Roses of Villarosa is a visual novel that doesn't actually exist yet, and you're going to reincarnate into the role of the antagonist. By default, the antagonist is a woman engaged to the man the female player character romances, but if you'd like, you can change the genders of those three roles."

The angel has done their required reading.

"A customizable world?  That's better than I could have imagined.  Do you create entire new worlds for people often?  Will the other people in the world be reincarnated too, or will they be new people?"  

He reads the brochure.  

"Oh, I get to be the villain?  Excellent! I will take you up on that genderswap, thank you.  At least for me, I don't know if I care about everyone else's gender?"

He's talking fairly fast at this point, clearly a little overexcited.

The angel laughs.

"Not often when compared to all the reincarnators our organization handles, but, well, this is my day job. It's a mix - there are new souls being created all the time, but there will certainly be several people in your new world who have lived before. Most of them won't have previous memories, though."

They're quietly pleased at his enthusiasm.

"All right; we can stick to the defaults for everyone else if you don't have a strong opinion. If you change your mind at some point, that's fine. None of the details are fully cemented until we send you off."

"And I will have my memories?  Do people reincarnate multiple times?"

He shakes his head slightly.

"Right! Custom world! What limitations are there?"

"It depends. Some worlds have afterlives or immortality mechanisms or both, so souls that land there typically stay put. But yes, most people's multiversal lifetimes pass through many different worlds."

The angel adjusts a lock of hair.

"So, the world basically needs to be able to support the events of the counterfactual Roses of Villarosa novel. World design isn't entirely freeform - you're given a set of options, but the options themselves are pretty open-ended as far as these things go. There are three main roles that you'll get to customize - yourself, your fiance, and your rival. By default, you'll regain memories of your past life and of this planning session at the beginning of the plot, as well as memories of the plot itself. During this plot, you attend the royal academy, your rival and fiance fall in love with each other, you try to stop this, and at the end of the plot you experience some sort of bad end. The memories you have of the plot can be in the form of having played the game, watched an adaptation, or of having experienced them. You can use these memories to try and avoid the plot events, such as your fiance calling off the engagement or your bad end punishment, but fate will be pushing the plot on you in the form of coincidences and, mm, incentives. Once you hit the bad end or the point where the bad end can't actually happen, fate will back off and you'll be free to live out the rest of your life - well, as long as you didn't choose Death as your bad end and get executed, of course."

"Alright! I expect I'll want to remember the story as if I'd played it.  Is there anything else it's important to cover before you start giving me my options?  I think you've answered all my major questions!"

Another smile.

"I think you've got the general shape of things! So, I like to start out with the bigger story and world options first - begin with the big picture and work inwards, you know? So the next page is going to describe the main options for the world and its… I call it flavor."

He'll flip to the next page! After reading the whole thing about 3 times, he'll look back up.

"I definitely want an Epic story.  I think Interstellar sounds like the best option.  I definitely want some magic, either medium or high.. it says I get to be a magic user by default in the high magic setting, can I be a magic user in a lower magic setting, and can I be a more powerful than normal magic user in the high magic setting?"

A hologram appears:

Genre: Epic

Time Period: Interstellar

Magic Level: Medium to High

"Yes, although at a Magic Level of Low or Medium you need to use an advantage to be a magic-user. You get four of those 'free,' by the way, as well as any that are granted by other choices. After the 'free' advantages, you need to balance out each new advantage with a drawback. There's also a special case, called Flexibility, where you get one 'free' use outside of the first four. We're already applying the free instance of Flexibility to your character's gender, so currently you still have four advantages open. Being a more powerful magic user than normal at a Magic Level of High is its own advantage."

"I think I'll go with high magic, and be more powerful than normal."

"Excellent, good to know. All right, did you have any further specifications for how you'd like the world to be? If you've got a magic system in mind, or things that you'd like the magic to be able to do easily, I can forward that input to the design crew."

He thinks for a little bit, and then answers.

"I want the magic system to be complicated, requiring years and years of study to fully understand, even if most people get by with just some.  I want there to be different types of magic, that all work a little bit differently.  I want immortality to be possible, but not easy.  I want the magic system to be the sort of thing you can have innate power in separate from spending years of study to master it.  I want there to be some sort of dark and forbidden magic." He pauses for a moment, and thinks again.

"This isn't to do with the magic system, but you asked for further specifications for how I want the world to be.  We're going for the interstellar time period, so I really really want there to be aliens."

The angel nods along.

"That definitely sounds doable - I can already think of several ways that being a Magical Prodigy would present: maybe you'll have a high level of innate power, or a more natural intuitive understanding of the complicated systems at play, or being able to cheat with the dark and forbidden magic. That dovetails nicely with one of the drawbacks, by the way - it's called Dark Secret, and 'is a practitioner of dark and forbidden magic' certainly qualifies. It's going to be pretty serious, something that you'll have to hide very well lest you face disastrous consequences, but I find that it's relatively appealing as a drawback for reincarnators who want to squeeze in an extra advantage."

They make a couple of notes.

"Aliens are definitely an option, and that actually segues into the question of Species. See, you can either have a world with one Species, or you can split the population into Baseline and Enhanced, which is - essentially what it sounds like. By default, the Baseline species is human and the Enhanced species is elves, but you can pick anything you'd like for either as long as they're roughly humanoid and can meaningfully be said to have hair and clothing. There needs to be something about the Enhanced species that's just plain better than the Baseline species - they can be stronger, more intelligent, more magical, more beautiful… I'm sure you get the picture. When we've got aliens in the mix, you can still select either option, we'd just need to workshop a bit. If you want there to be no species inequality, then the aliens can all have, mm, RPG-style balanced stats, so you'll have one species that's extremely intelligent but frail, another species that's strong but dumb, and so on. If you want there to be a division between Baseline and Enhanced, then you can either have there be only two species present in Villarosa, or you can do a version of the RPG stat balancing where there's a Baseline category and an Enhanced category."

Pause for breath.

"Mechanically speaking, if you opt for species equality, then you don't get any advantages or drawbacks. If you choose to be Baseline, you'll get an extra advantage, and if you choose to be Enhanced, you'll take an extra drawback. Also, most of the stuff about enforced balance or lack thereof only needs apply up to the point that the plot concludes, so if you'd like for the Star Kingdom of Villarosa to discover a wider world of aliens that don't necessarily fit into the plot restrictions once the plot ends, that can definitely be done."

"Okay, first thing, can I get a bit of paper and something to write on?"

After he gets the paper and pencil, he spends a little while scribbling on the paper and scratching things out, before speaking again.

"Alright. Let's go with Baseline and Enhanced, and I'll be one of the Enhanced species.  I like most of the species being mostly humanoid, but I want at least 1 or 2 weird rare aliens that aren't human at all.  I don't want to be one, I just want to know that out there in the kingdom there are some really weird, absolutely bizarre things.  If they have to be discovered after the main plot, that's alright.  I want to do RPG balancing with baseline vs enhanced categories, and I want to be an enhanced species who's thing compared to other enhanced species is intelligence.  Being enhanced requires me to take a drawback, instead of counting as one of my four free advantages?"

The paper, pencil, and clipboard appear at the same time as the angel nods.

"That's an interesting question - I've never been asked about the species substituting for an advantage or drawback before personally, although I'm sure someone in my department must have. I can forward the question to my supervisor, although my gut feeling is that they'll turn it down. They've got a certain sense of - fairness and balance. But they're not actually one of the more inflexible ones in the organization, so they might surprise me!"

Fiddle fiddle. 

"All right, I've put in the question. While we wait, do you want to move onto the Roles, or hammer out more details?"

"Lets move on to the Roles!  Unless you think I'm overlooking something important in terms of worldbuilding details."

Grin.

"Honestly, we don't require any amount of worldbuilding from reincarnators - our worldbuilding crews are good at both working under the guidelines you establish and at improvising. Plus, if something occurs to you later, you can definitely bring it up. On to Roles. As the villain, you're going to start out with a degree of relative social advantage, though the exact degree and kind is up to you. In order of descending priviilege, the Social Roles are Crown Prince, Noble's Son, and Incipient Heir. You've all got social weight to throw around, as well as something to gain from your engagement and something to lose if you fail at your goals."

The paper in his folder gives a little more detail, although obviously in a way that reflects the male version rather than the female version.

He spends a moment looking over the options, muttering quietly to himself as he does so.

"Not the Noble's Son, I don't want other people's plans relying on my social skills.... I don't think I want all eyes on me all the time like the Crown Prince, even though that would be tremendous future political power...."  he trails off in his muttering, before looking up from the paper and speaking to the angel again.

"I think I'll go with Incipient Heir."

"Okay! In addition to your Social Role, you've got a Story Role. The three options for this are Snake in the Grass, Bad Boy, and Mustache Twirler. The Snake in the Grass is someone who looks more innocent than they are, for whatever reason. He usually has a clean-shaven, almost babyfaced appearance. The Bad Boy is like the mirror version of that - someone who definitely comes off as intimidating, dominant, and rough. He can have a soft side, but he can also just be mean. There's loads of different appearance options for this one - you can have the long-haired look, the grizzled motorcycle jacket look, you name it. And then the Mustache Twirler is a classic villain - dramatic, upfront about being evil, may or may not literally have a mustache to twirl or a lapcat to pet as he ties damsels to train tracks or monologues about his plans. He's more likely to have facial hair, whether it's the aforementioned evil mustache or a goatee or whatnot."