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View Full Version : Multi-genre campaign idea sci-fi and fantasy



Ichneumon
2009-06-21, 09:55 AM
So basically I had this idea for a small campaign. Each character comes from a different world, entirely his or her choice what kind of world it is. When the character is experiencing something highly emotional (the particulars are chosen by the character during character creation), such as losing a life-long friend during an epic battle between elves and orcs or fighting on board of a star ship, everything suddenly blurs and the character wakes up inside a cell, chained and with unfamiliar clothes. She is greated by strange looking psionic aliens who do scientific research on different kinds of creatures and how they respond to certain situations by erasing and replacing their memmories and letting them experience completely different lives within their own heads by the means of powerful illusions. The alien in the cell greats the character and tells her he is disappointed she "broke lose" as it means they will have to start the experiment all over again, starting tomorrow. Different characters have awoken and they need to try to escape and discover how the "real" world looks like.

You could even make it more confusing to let them eventually discover that their "breaking free" was actually also a scientific experiment to see how they would try to work together and escape.

I would have to choose whether or not to allow certain things in the "real world" such as cybernetics or magic and in what way, but that could also give interesting RP possibilities: how would someone react if he had lived all his life as a powerful warlock when he suddenly learns it was all just a dream?

Oslecamo
2009-06-21, 10:14 AM
You're sure on the right forum section? You want to create a whole system for scratch, or you want to know wich system would worck best for this with some tweacks?

Ichneumon
2009-06-21, 10:21 AM
You're sure on the right forum section? You want to create a whole system for scratch, or you want to know wich system would worck best for this with some tweacks?

No, I don't want to create a game system. I just want to know if you like this campaign idea. What system I would use for it is a separate, but also interesting question.

BlueWizard
2009-06-21, 04:23 PM
I've done this with D&D and d20 stuff, but it seems most of my players hate the sci-fi part. I love the idea of it.

I just watch Krull and enjoy the spaceship on my own.

mikeejimbo
2009-06-21, 06:34 PM
No, I don't want to create a game system. I just want to know if you like this campaign idea. What system I would use for it is a separate, but also interesting question.

GURPS was practically built for this.

I like the campaign idea. I played briefly in one with a similar premise. Dunno what happened to it...

Ichneumon
2009-06-22, 03:57 PM
GURPS was practically built for this.

I like the campaign idea. I played briefly in one with a similar premise. Dunno what happened to it...

You did? You don't remember how it turned out?

mikeejimbo
2009-06-22, 04:01 PM
You did? You don't remember how it turned out?

I have to admit that it was my fault that I don't know how it turned out. It was going well, but then I sort of dropped out for a while, and by the time I came back I didn't know what was going on so I kind of called it quits.

In the game I was in, we were all from different worlds but forced to interact in one world, though, so it wasn't exactly like your idea.

Yakk
2009-06-22, 05:22 PM
If you want to have more fun with this...

Start with a strait-up SF world. Hard SF even -- no FTL travel, etc.

Your characters are investigators or marines or something professional. They do the job, they get paid.

Then have weirder stuff happen.

After the first adventure FTL drive is invented. The PCs are recruited to scout out nearby stars. They find ancient alien ruins (tm).

After the second, it turns out that there are aliens pretending to be human, and have been for centuries.

After the third adventure, someone discovers psionic powers. And blows up the Earth using them.

After the forth adventure, someone builds a giant robot space-combat device, and it kicks the crap out of any other ship. It fights using swords even.

All along, you have NPCs (and maybe PCs) going on about how it makes no sense.

Then someone wakes up. They are captives in a mad wizard's laboratory, who is using a captive mind flayer to induce a fake reality. They see their friends also all hooked up to strange contraptions, plus many other captives. They then fall back into the sci-fi world.

The person who 'knows' that the world isn't real starts being able to bend reality. So do the other players. The wizard sends beings into the reality to shut them down -- but so does the mind flayer.

They rip themselves out of the fake universe, and end up being mid-low level characters in an D&D world. The mad wizard was trying to create a pocket plane, using the captive's souls to fuel the spell, which required that he make the souls believe they are in the pocket plane before snuffing them out. You broke free during a test run of the system.

And before you ask, the D&D world is the real world.

Right?