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FreakyCheeseMan
2013-03-17, 12:21 AM
Just what it sounds like - games you'd like to run if you had the time, energy, players, experience, or whatever else you lack.

A Greek Tragedy
This one would require massive coordination with the relevant player, and the other players accepting his story as being the center of attention. But:
Player starts off in a position of high status.
Player has some defining flaw, sin or vice.
Through that flaw, the character is brought low, destroying something they cared about in the process.
The character realizes what they've done, and is utterly destroyed by the realization.
Too late, the character has a redemptive moment.


All of those elements need to come together for it to qualify; I think it would be an awesome experience, but you'd need to have a really good set of players with whom you were already familiar.

Heart of Darkness
Re-telling Heart of Darkness in a D&D setting. This would be by far the easiest to run - it would be almost a normal campaign. Players would be following some military or quasi-military figure into a wild and lawless land; preferably, it would be someone they had had experience before, either in-game or as part of their backstory. The focus would be on that character's transformation, mirrored by the moral choices the players had to make on their journey to find him.

The Foundation Trilogy 3.5
This one is less ambitious than it is insane, but it's still pretty ambitious. I imagine this one taking place explicitly in a 3.5 context, with planes instead of planets.

The plot of the books would be very difficult to mimic, so mostly it would focus on the setting. There would be thousands of planes, more than the players could ever actually visit; several centuries ago, all of those were under the domain of a single empire, but that's been slowly falling for centuries. No single massive calamity, just a slow fissioning, a series of revolts, stagnation, etc.... by the time the capitol plane itself fell, entire smaller empires would have risen and fallen.

For there part, the players would be planar travelers, probably part of a distant and seemingly unimportant plane which had a few subtle advantages. Play would largely be sandbox-style; it would be up to the players to either advance the cause of their home plane (The "Foundation"), or go off-rails and do as they like.

Above all, the game would be broken in all the best ways - the players would be expected to face challenges that could not possibly be overcome by raw force, despite being among the more powerful individual figures around. (So, the players might be level 10, 11, in a mostly E6 world, but they'd be trying to influence the course of entire nations with armies in the thousands or millions.

AntiTrust
2013-03-17, 12:45 AM
There was an anime called Baccano! I'd enjoy having players interact inside.
Its set partially in the 1700s, but mostly in the gang heavy 1930s. Its got information brokering, strange people who just don't die, mobsters, and a train robbery. I'm leaning towards SavageWorlds if I ever ran it.

Rhynn
2013-03-17, 01:54 AM
Oh, so many...

Aces & Eights: Just a standard Cauldron gold rush sandbox with a lot of random tables and the PCs making lives for themselves as they can. Very Deadwood-influenced.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten: Your regular zombie outbreak, starting in Coalinga, California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga,_California), with the overcrowded (160% capacity) Pleasant Valley State Prison and the Coalinga State Hospital (maximum-security mental hospital for sexually violent predators) right nearby...

Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu: A pulpy, globe-trotting Indiana Jones -style campaign in the 1930s, with the PCs trying to stop Nazi sorcerers from harnessing magical items and vile spells to their evil purposes.

Call of Cthulhu, again: The Great Tutankhamun Expedition. A Call of Cthuhu version of Carter & Lord Carnarvon's expedition, with semi-sandboxing in the Valley of Kings and a real mummy's curse.

HârnMaster: The Kaldoric Succession. The PCs are minor nobility, ruling one or more manors between them, and must deal with "everyday life" as the country becomes embroiled first in intrigues around the dying King with no heirs, then a bloody civil war between the many factions vying for the throne.

MERP, One Ring (modded heavily), or Lord of the Rings RPG: The Arnor War of 1409-1410. The PCs defend Arnor against the Witch King's hosts, fighting bravely but futilely against the doom of the North-Kingdom.

RuneQuest Vikings: A RQ6 viking campaign, with the PCs sailing down the rivers of Russia to Constantinople (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks). Yes, it's based on The Varangian Way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varangian_Way) by Turisas.

Stars Without Number: Just a perfectly regular SWN sandbox. I love, love, love the system/planet creation tables.

The Riddle of Steel: A 1665 Caribbean pirate campaign, mostly sandboxing.

The Riddle of Steel: A campaign in Conan's Hyborian Age. More sandboxing, because why not?

The Riddle of Steel: A Sengoku jidaigeki campaign, because the system is just perfect for it.

Pathfinder Eberron: I've always likes but never played Eberron, and I'd like to try Pathfinder. The two seem like a good fit (and what doesn't fit can be made to fit).

ArcturusV
2013-03-17, 02:08 AM
I always wanted to run a long term campaign for Prime Directive going from the years between the Four Powers War and the General War, all the way up to the Andromedan Invasion. Probably breaking into two generations of PCs.

But I could never find people who wanted to play Prime Directive.

Bastian Weaver
2013-03-17, 03:51 AM
A Marvel Superheroes: Days of Future Past campaign. Probably based on the MSX modules, mixed with GURPS Reign of Steel. Totally postapocalyptic. The world is controlled by machines, and those robotic monstrosities are hunting for you... because that's what they were built for, and because you just might be the one to set things right.
If you survive.

Waker
2013-03-17, 04:19 AM
Here are a couple random D&D campaign ideas I have:
Portcullis- The PCs find themselves in an underground labyrinth with no idea of how they got there. A disembodied voice informs them that they need to solve a series of challenges in order to return home. There may be promises of cake. Very puzzle heavy and survival based setting.
Wonderland- Where everything is made up and the rules don't matter. The landscape it filled with bizarre scenery and alien creatures. Deities include: The Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen.

Dimers
2013-03-17, 05:19 AM
I have a sorta grandiose idea for a post-apocalyptic game -- maybe Fallout setting or some such -- to explore all the possible answers to the question, "What's needed for human survival?" The game progression would include scenarios that highlight points like:

the value of arts
force of arms
planning
leadership
physical needs like WATER and AIR
contact and communication
training in crafts

I'd want to have the players build their own community based on what the characters learn and experience. Seems to me like that would require a LOT of player investment over multiple years of play, and I don't have a group like that at this point. I also haven't read a game system that would lend itself to that very well (probably because I haven't read many game systems).

Rhynn
2013-03-17, 06:46 AM
Oh, a really old idea I've had knocking about forever:

RuneQuest, AD&D, whatever.

The PCs are part of the very first awakening of mortal races in a fantasy world. They get no help, no background infodump, nothing. They're naked with a bunch of other people in the wild. They have to make something of it.

There would, naturally, be tons of things to discover - especially how magic works. Are there gods? Are there animistic landscape spirits? How do you worship them and get power from them?

I'd also like to run a slightly less fantastical version, probably in RuneQuest, where the PCs plain are Stone Age hunter-gatherers (something RQ supported already, cf. Griffin Mountain) trying to survive in increasingly hard times, dealing with simple survival (hunting, etc.), hostile tribes, and eventually more advanced tribes encroaching on them (maybe it turns out they're behind the curve and much of the surrounding region is Bronze Age already).

Beacon of Chaos
2013-03-17, 07:12 AM
I'd love to try running a sandbox game, preferably in Planescape or Eberron. They are the most interesting settings to me, and I feel like I know them well enough that I could come up with something interesting for the players to do regardless of what they choose.

I'd also like to give something like this (http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/3458846/) a try, but not only do I not have time to work out rules and stuff for such a setting, but my knowledge of that era is severely lacking.

Lastly, a Wacky Races style game where each character has their own vehicle and weapons would be fun, I think.

kardar233
2013-03-17, 07:48 AM
I have a game in mind where the players are thrown bodily into an established setting that they know well (I'm thinking Game of Thrones) and using nothing but wits and metagame knowledge make it to the top. Possibly with a prize of some sort (going back home, maybe?) to motivate them. I'll hope for a lot of PVP.

EccentricCircle
2013-03-17, 08:35 AM
I've got far more ideas than i've got time to run. Some which might happen at some point include:

Lord’s Legacy

It has been three years since the King of the Isles was deposed and murdered. The usurper was defeated and order restored, but there is now an empty throne with no clear claimant. For three years the machinations of the Crown Regent have kept the empire from civil war, but the politics of the isles are strained to breaking point and the peace cannot last. As the shadows lengthen all eyes have turned to one man. A man who commands the respect of the Hundred Lords and the authority to be, If not king, then kingmaker, he is Astarian Ravel, the Duke of Rafenbeck.

Unfortunately you have just been called to the reading of his will.

You are a bunch of adventurers who have worked for the Duke in the past. But it seems he has one last mission for you. The isles are divided and armies are marching to war. Soon father will fight son, and brother will fight brother. And the fate of an empire may be determined within the walls of Rafenbeck castle.

Eberron: The Prisoner of Dreadhold

House Kundarak is the dragonmarked house of warding, they deal in banks. Most of those banks are designed to keep people out and keep everything inside safe. However one very special bank has the opposite purpose.

It is designed to keep people in.

No prisoner has ever escaped from the hidden fortress of Dreadhold, until now…

Now a single prisoner is on the run, an assassin and murderer known only as the Man in Black. He must be returned to the House of Warding before he can kill again. He must be returned alive and unharmed, and the rest of the world must never know that he was free…



Eberron: Raiders of the Lost Continent.

“Professor Julius Tavar of the infamous Morgrave University is seeking adventurers to accompany him on an archaeological expedition to the dark continent of Xen’Drik! The exact destination of the Tavar Expedition is a closely guarded secret. But rumour is rife that riches beyond the dreams of avarice await anyone who accompanies him!”

You are those lucky explorers, but things aren’t working out quite the way you’d planned… The professor has taken you widely off course, far from the dubious safety of Stormreach. Now, as the mists roll in over the deck of your ship, and the shadowy shores of the Dark Continent loom in the distance you have to wonder exactly what you’ve let yourselves in for



Stargate 1845

Found in Giza, Egypt in 1798 the Stargate was captured by the English at the end of the Napoleonic wars and hidden in a disused stately home at the foot of Scarfell pike, Cumbria. Now the year is 1845 and Professor Nathaniel Jackson believes that he has discovered its secret. You are a team of Royal Navy officers who have been chosen to travel through the Stargate and find out what lies on the other side.

Stargate: Apocalypse

You are an SG team returning from a routine mission to explore the planet P4x573 however something has gone drastically wrong. Upon returning to earth you find that Stargate command is gone and earth is a post apocalyptic wasteland, torn apart by Goa’uld weapons. You soon discover the truth, the stargate intersected a solar flare, sending you forwards in time to the distant future. With Earth gone, you have no choice but to head out into a war torn galaxy seeking some sort of technology capable of sending you home.

Other Ideas include a game where characters closely based on the players themselves get caught up in the crash landing of an alien spacecraft and end up getting drafted into the Men in Black, and a game Called Snow White and the Seven Samurai.

Waspinator
2013-03-17, 09:22 AM
Five words: My Little Pony Kamen Riders.

ScubaGoomba
2013-03-17, 03:28 PM
I'd like to do some kind of Ultimate Star Wars, if you will, where the players are the "PCs" from the films (Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, etc.), but the players' actions dictate a new direction for the story to go, which alters the setting from that point.

I suppose that could work with anything, really, but Star Wars, specifically, comes to mind. May still try something similar for my Pathfinder group...

hiryuu
2013-03-17, 04:24 PM
Hmm. In no particular order!

A nWoD game set in Detroit designed for crossover/cooperative play. The place has 70% of its murders go unsolved every year - it's literally swimming with ghosts and the local shadow is probably pretty horrific, and the supernatural community really has to work together or die, not from mortal so much as an imbalance of factors run rampant. Actually, I just got the opportunity to start this one up (http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/detroit-dead-city/)! It's fun so far.
A hardish science fiction sandbox campaign about colonizing/mining/defending an extrasolar planet, probably using Silhouette CORE. Possibly with mecha (underwater! In space!) and involving leaving behind a polluted Earth for a pristine world and starting up the same mistakes all over again. Something that really showcases our two extremes as humans - our seemingly impossible ability to reach for the stars and pluck them down while simultaneously poisoning it all with greed and apathy.
A Legend of the Five Rings game set either during a time when the shogunate has taken over power from the Emperor, or a period in which the samurai caste is dissolving due to the needs of the state and spirituality is being openly questioned. As a follow-up, a pseudo-Meiji era in which gaijin sorcery has forced Rokugan to accept trade with outsiders and the entire country is being forced to "modernize" and accept the existence other faiths, magic, and social ideas into their midst, and the kami are mysteriously silent on the matter.
A post-apocalyptic retro/zeerusty animistic science fantasy thing, possibly also using Silhouette CORE or nWoD. It will have tall tale magic and be awesome - something American and nativepunk and with big Robby the Robot golems and aliens and I guess be like a cross between X-Files, Fallout, and Dreamkeeper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGLNfhtHqWs). Or something. There would be whirlwind riding and pink and chrome Cadillacs and ancient empires and dinosaurs and mesoamerican pyramids and learning about growing up and living in the culture. I want the system to feel gritty but I also want players to try crazy things.
A space opera setting that takes place almost entirely inside one ship, such as Red Dwarf, Blame!, or Children of the Sky. There'd be factions and locked doors and ancient mysteries and aliens.
The slow and destructive descent into a robot apocalypse, possibly using a combination of Microscope and FATE. Like MegaMan except with way more Player Character meddling.

Daxtreme
2013-03-17, 05:54 PM
There was an anime called Baccano! I'd enjoy having players interact inside.
Its set partially in the 1700s, but mostly in the gang heavy 1930s. Its got information brokering, strange people who just don't die, mobsters, and a train robbery. I'm leaning towards SavageWorlds if I ever ran it.

Ha! Baccano!

Great setting indeed. So many mysteries left... unanswered. :-)

@Dimers

Fallout is, also, a setting in which I would like to experiment playing a D&D :)

Jack of Spades
2013-03-17, 11:44 PM
I've wanted to run a Deadlands game that starts with the Battle of Gettysburg. The players would start as troops, a couple might die during the actual battle, but then the Reckoning would occur and the Harrowed would attack.

Lentrax
2013-03-18, 08:09 AM
Cyberpunk 2020: Set in the world of Snow Crash. The punks would be working for/against some of the FOQNEs.

Krazzman
2013-03-18, 09:41 AM
AFMBE:
Survival thing, no real concept since one of our group has a personal aversion against zombies (in the sense it would make her job harder if I run something like that) and I can't really plan beforehand. Maybe setting it in Aachen which would get pretty creepy quite soon or Colone/Bonn or maybe even Hamburg but I don't really know. Maybe we will just go for the USA IF I can plan for a campaign.

I'm currently running (haven't played this year I think) a Pathfinder Faerun Campaign with the party set in the icy north realms formerly known as Rashemen. No one really knows what time it is except they hate thayians, being a more barbaric/shamanistic tribe. Which I don't really know how to advance in terms of story/BBEG's and how to plan War/Ambushes and the rising of the Northern Hordes... inspiried with a Madara Ushia (yes the one from Naruto) style villain that plots to conquer the world by enchantments and illusions to get himself raised to godhood... but well it seems to be on hiatus thus far.

What I want to play in on the other hand... 3.5 or Pathfinder, Gestalt just for fun and/or this time going into high-levels.

Jay R
2013-03-18, 09:47 AM
In a game of Champions, I want to tell the players, "Design a 31st century super-hero, out to join the Legion of Super-Heroes.

"ONE low-level superpower. It must be innate, not a battle suit or utility belt or weapon. You won't be on your home planet, so no Perks, Rivals, Dependents, or Hunteds."

In the first adventure, flying in a space ship to Earth for tryouts, they are caught in a warp of unidentifiable energy. They crash on a planet that shouldn't exist. None of their technological artifacts work - no weapons, ship, radio, etc.

They are attacked by members of a race they do not recognize, using swords and spears.

Eventually they will realize that they are not playing Champions. They are actually playing Fantasy Hero, only they each have one low-level super-power, and they have no knowledge of the world.

prufock
2013-03-18, 10:17 AM
The Weird West, a setting (http://weird-west.wikispaces.com/The+Weird+West) I've been working on the last few months. It is what it sounds like, a frontier-type game with guns, trains, and magic all coexisting. Limited PC races, E6 rules, and "local" as opposed to "epic" adventures.

The Normals, a sandbox modern Mutants & Masterminds game in which the PCs awake the morning of the first session after a big birthday party the night before, with little memory of what happened after 11:11 pm. They slowly discover that they now have superpowers. The players decided that I would generate their power suites semi-randomly (using the superpower wiki's Random Page and crafting a theme around the results) and they won't know what their powers are until they emerge. Kind of Heroes-esque, but no "end of the world" scenarios.

The Godslayers, an epic-level campaign where the gods have turned their backs on humanity (even the "good" ones), and the PCs are prophesied heroes out for revenge. Obviously the "gods" here are not as powerful as in standard D&D rules - the most powerful will probably be a lesser or low intermediate deity. As they defeat the increasingly powerful gods, they gain divine ranks of their own.

The East Road, a very open-concept exploration game where the party are adventurer/explorers on the edge of society. Hoping for a "West Marches" feel to this, as it's location-based. There is an overarching theme regarding the origin of the road (which has deteriorated) and what civilizations may have previously occupied this land.

I also want to revisit my League of Hope supers game, in a one-shot adventure based on the Dark Avengers and Die Hard. At Halloween I plan to run Tomb of Horrors 3D: The Final Chapter, a mashup of Tomb of Horrors and the Saw franchise. This time I'm actually hoping they make it through to the end, so that next year's Halloween ToH game can expand beyond it to Tomb of Horrors: Endgame, which will involve time traveling - first to the past, then to the future, then back to the present in order to defeat the real villain. I have a Star Wars: Shadow game from which we're currently taking a break, which runs simultaneous to episodes IV-VI with the understanding that the PCs' actions can change the course of the films (already they've killed Jabba by siding with the Zann Consortium, resulting in Zann having more extensive control). Right now I'm running the first-to-epic-level (currently 6th) Band of the Rose Cross game, which is a world-wide catastrophe game.

Whew! I plan way too far in advance.

ShadowFighter15
2013-03-19, 01:22 AM
Might've mentioned this in a similar thread, but I've been wanting to run a mainly free-form game set in Eberron (Sharn, specifically) but with all of the player characters being grifters who play the long-con on various unscrupulous and otherwise deserving marks. Basically Hustle set in Sharn instead of London (or Leverage for those of you in the US - it's basically been described as the American version of Hustle, after all).

Main thing would be adjusting and updating the 'tech' a bit. Say; House Sivis has developed an equivalent to the mobile phone (albeit just the voice and text messaging, no internet searches or whatnot), the economy has advanced to the point where there's a stock market and the various world-ending or war-starting plots and threats have been taken care of by traditional adventurers, keeping the rest of the setting pretty close to what's in the books.

Oh; and shifting to paper currency for that traditional throwing-the-cash-into-the-air-in-victory shot. Trying to do that with metal coins like the normal version of the setting's just going to end in bruises and black eyes.

Two things with how it'd run though - I would design the marks, but the con would be up to the players to design. Meaning they'd have to do some legwork on the mark to find themselves an In. If they decided to break into their house, then I'd design the building once I was sure that they were going that way, though they wouldn't do that too often because they're con-artists, not thieves.

The second thing would be the Reveal. A staple of con-shows is that you never really know what's going on until the very end - where the show itself is conning the audience. But to preserve some of the dramatic use of such reveals, it would be a retro-active plan the character had. When the player wants to pull one of these, they'd inform me of what they're doing and when they got the idea for it. Has to be a plausible time for the character to think of it (ie. they need to have realistically expected the problem that the Reveal is fixing/bypassing) and to have plausibly had the time to implement it. As long as they can give me a plausible time for that to have happened, then I'd allow the Reveal. Would also encourage the players to add these little bits here and there to the con that might not make sense until much later.

As an example of these reveals - take the first episode of Hustle (you might be able to find it on YouTube somewhere if you don't fancy buying the whole season 1 DVD - although that is certainly worth it). At one point in the episode; Ash enters the apartment carrying a pair of watermelons. A quick hello to the rest of the crew and he ducks out of shot and isn't seen again for the rest of the scene. Much later on, at the end of the episode, a quick flashback shows that bit again and then cuts to
Ash in the bathroom setting off a tiny explosive inside one of the melons (which is sitting in the bathtub) and is shown to be him starting work on a fake skullcap for Mickey to wear to make it look like he'd been shot through the head - the detonator being hidden in a small remote Ash discretely used while all eyes were on Mickey.
The Reveals would also help present the characters as skilled grifters, regardless of the skill at planning possessed by their players, allowing them to account for things the character would predict that the players wouldn't.

The last element to it would be that I would have a GMPC, albeit one who doesn't take much part in the overall planning. To continue the Hustle comparisons - the GMPC would be Albert Stroller; the team's elderly mentor and Roper. He finds the Marks, 'ropes' them in and introduces them to the Inside Man. And his involvement in more than a few cons ends there or, like in the first episode, merely continues to be friendly with the Mark in order to help draw them into the con. Again, look at the first episode of Hustle; Albert found the Mark and introduced him to Mickey, from there he simply had to look like a business man willing to engage in the 'share offer' that Mickey was offering, giving the Mark the confidence to do the same.

kardar233
2013-03-19, 01:39 AM
Might've mentioned this in a similar thread, but I've been wanting to run a mainly free-form game set in Eberron (Sharn, specifically) but with all of the player characters being grifters who play the long-con on various unscrupulous and otherwise deserving marks. Basically Hustle set in Sharn instead of London (or Leverage for those of you in the US - it's basically been described as the American version of Hustle, after all).

I would totally play in that game. Consider making it a PbP.

DigoDragon
2013-03-19, 07:00 AM
I've been curious to try running a short Transformers Prime campaign. PCs get to be a team of Autobots transported around to fight the technological terrorist group MECH.

One idea that's closer to fruition is to run a "Walking Dead" kind of campaign. I've half-convinced my wife to play in that.

ShadowFighter15
2013-03-19, 07:44 AM
I would totally play in that game. Consider making it a PbP.

Dunno if I'll ever get around to running that - not confidant enough nor creative enough to consistently come up with Marks.

Also need to come up with incentive to not have everyone play changelings. Kinda takes some of the fun out of the long-con, really.

LCP
2013-03-19, 07:46 AM
I only GM message board games, which means the pace of the games I am running is way too slow for me to get to use all the ideas I come up with. I do have a few more speculative ideas that I'm pretty sure I'll never get to use.

(Warning: I GM exclusively Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Dark Heresy, so all the ideas I have are set in those universes. Skip ahead if you don't care for them!)

WFRP
A "historical" campaign, set either in the Time of the Three Emperors (leading into the Skaven Wars) or the Wars of the Vampire Counts. The plot the PCs engaged with would be about minor characters moving around the edges of the big canon events, but they'd get to tag along with armies on the move and join in with the big battles. Victory would be measured not in influencing the outcome of the war (that's already known) but getting to a point where their characters could tell their grandkids that they survived the Battle of Hel Fenn.
Path to Glory - a campaign where the PCs are part of a Norscan or Kurgan warband (perhaps during Archaon's invasion or the Great War Against Chaos), and the aim is to ascend to daemonhood. There can be only one champion leading the warband, so a big feature would be PC rivalry, particularly as they might choose different gods to follow. For those that reached champion status and started gaining the blessings of the gods, they would have to deal with organising their troops into a fighting force that can survive battles with the disciplined armies of the Empire, and also walking the tightrope between divine favour and Spawnhood. Heavily influenced here by the Dan Abnett novel Riders of the Dead. I would say "Black Crusade in WFRP", but I don't think that'd be quite right - there'd be no starting off as Chaos Warriors (analogously to how you can start off as a Chaos Marine in Black Crusade), and there'd be quite a bit of emphasis on exploring the identity and culture of the Kurgan/Norse. After all, these guys wouldn't survive as distinct ethnic groups if they were all killing each other all the time.
A Skaven campaign. I love the Skaven and the Children of the Horned Rat sourcebook provides rules for Skaven PCs. I don't think it would last long but I think it might be glorious.

40KRPG
Sink the Bismarck (real title pending) - using the Rogue Trader rules to make a game about an Imperial Navy ship pursuing a powerful enemy vessel in a region of contested space. It'd be quite Master-and-Commander-ish, with stern chases and such, trying to track the enemy vessel from planet to planet and put a stop to the chaos it sows in its wake. The big finale would be a battle to the death between the two ships. The enemy ship would outclass the PCs' ship, so there would be various adventures beforehand in which chances were given to damage or disable it in ways that levelled the playing field enough to make the battle possible.
Only War with an ensemble cast. Multiple 'parties' from multiple regiments (and at multiple levels in the command structure of the Guard), witnessing the progress of a crusade. The main idea would be to show worlds being won and lost, the strategic concerns of high command as well as the experience of men on the ground. Heavily influenced by Sharpe/Gaunt's Ghosts here.

General Ideas
I would really like to run a campaign with two separate groups on opposite sides of the same conflict. Pretty much impossible to do by PBP unless you can guarantee that both groups post at the same rate (and if you try to enforce that, you're going to throttle the speed of play to the speed of the slowest player), but it's still something I'd love to do. Quite possibly could be combined with many of the ideas above - an Empire party and a Kurgan party both fighting in the Great War Against Chaos, for example. Or a Skaven party and a party of foolish man-things foiling their brilliant schemes.

Negativethac0
2013-03-19, 11:10 AM
I've had this idea for a very long time, about a sandbox Planescape campaign called CSIGIL
It's pretty much supposed to be a crime-solving small group of individuals who solve various crimes and mysteries around Sigil, or perhaps just run it more like Sigil PI; private investigaters snooping around the streets for rich clients.

It's been in my mind for years, but I fear I'll never get down to it. Sadly.

Lost Demiurge
2013-03-19, 12:31 PM
Oh, lord. I've had this one idea for years, but the one time I tried to run it was with a very immature group. Kinda soured things, though I plan to put it down on paper one of these days...

Basically, start off with a bog-standard fantasy world. Awesome place, lots of wondrous sights, no dark lords around, plenty of ruins and dragons and whatnot, but overall it's a beautiful land.

Then after a few levels, toss a dungeon at the PC's that's full of undead, and at the very bottom instead of the dragon they were expecting, waits a single necromancer. Who congratulates them for passing the test, and proving themselves WORTHY, then kills them all, using powers they have no chance to resist.

And in a heartbeat, they wake up, each in what appears to be the shattered, smoking remnants of a runic crystal coffin. They're in what seems to be individual chambers in some grand tomb, empty, save for several more chambers with remnants of crystal coffins scattered around, and tracks of other people leading out.

Their only possessions besides unfamiliar clothing seem to be elaborate , darkly-runed amulets that are both unbreakable and unfamiliar to them.

Sooner or later one of them will remove an amulet, and then the full glory of that PC's individual UNDEAD form will be revealed, as the disguise is stripped away... Until the amulet is replaced, anyway.

And when they emerge from the tomb, past the slain guardians and the destroyed traps, they'll find what's left of the world recovering from a couple of centuries of darkness. Seems like a great necromancer rose up, and with the help of his thirteen undead generals, conquered half the world, slaughtered another quarter of it, and devastated what was left before being defeated by the heroes of light. Most of the gods are dead, the weave of magic has been permanently damaged, the elder races like the elves and dwarves are in FULL decline, and holdouts of the necromancer's armies still dominate the wastelands and empty places of the world that once were shining cities and beautiful uncorrupted lands.

But in the end, the heroes of light slew the necromancer, at great cost to themselves. But they did not have the power to destroy the Thirteen Fallen generals. They could merely imprison them in sheathes of crystal, sealed away forever in an impenetrable tomb, in hopes that they would never again trouble the world as it recovered from the reign of darkness.

Hey... 1...2...3... Yep, there were 13 crystal sarcophagi in that tomb you came out of. Now they're all bits, though.

No, you have no memory of the years between now and then. Yes, you're still at the same level you were when you died, you just have... Ah... A template or two. Perhaps adventuring and gaining experience will unlike... Memories? And hidden abilities? Worth a shot.

Because honestly? Those 7-9 who woke up and left before you? Who's to say that THEIR memories are in the same state? Maybe they remember everything. Maybe they don't. Maybe they're your friends, maybe not.

In any case, you're a nightmare to all civilized nations. YOU are one of the things that mothers use to frighten children. One of the old evils, one of the doom of kings and scourges of the living. Will you make amends for your actions? Can you? Or will you FINISH THE JOB, and reign over a world of bleached bones and broken servants?

You are one of the Fallen, and freed for the first time from the Necromancer's influence, under your own will once more, you must sally forth into the world you helped ruin and figure out what the future holds, both for it and for yourself...

stack
2013-03-19, 12:37 PM
Lost Demiurge - I'd play that.

Makes my bounty hunter game idea seem kinda bland though.

Daxtreme
2013-03-19, 12:44 PM
Oh, lord. I've had this one idea for years, but the one time I tried to run it was with a very immature group. Kinda soured things, though I plan to put it down on paper one of these days...

Basically, start off with a bog-standard fantasy world. Awesome place, lots of wondrous sights, no dark lords around, plenty of ruins and dragons and whatnot, but overall it's a beautiful land.

Then after a few levels, toss a dungeon at the PC's that's full of undead, and at the very bottom instead of the dragon they were expecting, waits a single necromancer. Who congratulates them for passing the test, and proving themselves WORTHY, then kills them all, using powers they have no chance to resist.

And in a heartbeat, they wake up, each in what appears to be the shattered, smoking remnants of a runic crystal coffin. They're in what seems to be individual chambers in some grand tomb, empty, save for several more chambers with remnants of crystal coffins scattered around, and tracks of other people leading out.

Their only possessions besides unfamiliar clothing seem to be elaborate , darkly-runed amulets that are both unbreakable and unfamiliar to them.

Sooner or later one of them will remove an amulet, and then the full glory of that PC's individual UNDEAD form will be revealed, as the disguise is stripped away... Until the amulet is replaced, anyway.

And when they emerge from the tomb, past the slain guardians and the destroyed traps, they'll find what's left of the world recovering from a couple of centuries of darkness. Seems like a great necromancer rose up, and with the help of his thirteen undead generals, conquered half the world, slaughtered another quarter of it, and devastated what was left before being defeated by the heroes of light. Most of the gods are dead, the weave of magic has been permanently damaged, the elder races like the elves and dwarves are in FULL decline, and holdouts of the necromancer's armies still dominate the wastelands and empty places of the world that once were shining cities and beautiful uncorrupted lands.

But in the end, the heroes of light slew the necromancer, at great cost to themselves. But they did not have the power to destroy the Thirteen Fallen generals. They could merely imprison them in sheathes of crystal, sealed away forever in an impenetrable tomb, in hopes that they would never again trouble the world as it recovered from the reign of darkness.

Hey... 1...2...3... Yep, there were 13 crystal sarcophagi in that tomb you came out of. Now they're all bits, though.

No, you have no memory of the years between now and then. Yes, you're still at the same level you were when you died, you just have... Ah... A template or two. Perhaps adventuring and gaining experience will unlike... Memories? And hidden abilities? Worth a shot.

Because honestly? Those 7-9 who woke up and left before you? Who's to say that THEIR memories are in the same state? Maybe they remember everything. Maybe they don't. Maybe they're your friends, maybe not.

In any case, you're a nightmare to all civilized nations. YOU are one of the things that mothers use to frighten children. One of the old evils, one of the doom of kings and scourges of the living. Will you make amends for your actions? Can you? Or will you FINISH THE JOB, and reign over a world of bleached bones and broken servants?

You are one of the Fallen, and freed for the first time from the Necromancer's influence, under your own will once more, you must sally forth into the world you helped ruin and figure out what the future holds, both for it and for yourself...

Wow. Epic setting haha. I would gladly play that. :P

Lost Demiurge
2013-03-19, 01:49 PM
Lost Demiurge - I'd play that.

Makes my bounty hunter game idea seem kinda bland though.

Bah! Not all games have to be epic-scale!

Some of the best games I've played have been for small stakes. All depends on the group, the story, and the ways your players take it.

Bastian Weaver
2013-03-19, 03:28 PM
It is a very interesting setting, I'd say. Fit for a novel or two.

Exediron
2013-03-19, 09:57 PM
It's an interesting idea, but with no warning I can easily see how a hypothetical player might be bothered by the part where they die with no ability to resist. A lot of people have some idea of where they want their character to go, and they don't always take well to the DM deciding on a different direction without their choice.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-03-19, 10:04 PM
There was an anime called Baccano! I'd enjoy having players interact inside.
Its set partially in the 1700s, but mostly in the gang heavy 1930s. Its got information brokering, strange people who just don't die, mobsters, and a train robbery. I'm leaning towards SavageWorlds if I ever ran it.
I actually put together a Baccano!-inspired setup (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co5dpf2asm4ctv8/Derailed.pdf) for Fiasco, which is actually a great system for running it, mainly because it's about creating a juicy chaotic mess of things.

Buddha's_Cookie
2013-03-19, 10:33 PM
I would love to play/run a game in a Mass Effect setting, taking place some time between Mass Effect 1 and pre 3. Either in using 3.5 or Rifts, depending on how much RP vs combat I want.

Waspinator
2013-03-19, 11:26 PM
One of the various Star Wars RPGs might be able to do Mass Effect well. Similar technology and biotics basically is the force with less mysticism.

ArcturusV
2013-03-19, 11:40 PM
I'd use RIFTS myself. From what I've seen Biotics aren't the pure powerhouse they'd be as Psionics/Magic in 35. RIFTS tends to get "Broken" a lot though. Mostly because people play pure warrior types who get insane stats at level 1... but cannot do basic math. Sometimes it's because people neglect prerequisites. Like I had a character who wanted to be a Mech Pilot. Had lots of combat skills, Mech Piloting, etc. But I noticed they neglected the skills "Basic Math" "Advanced Math" and "Read Sensory Instruments". All of which are prerequisites for Mech Training. And it wasn't as simple as taking just those skills, as he'd need the pre-reqs for those skills, including things like Literacy. And suddenly when you actually make people take the pre-reqs their power level drops pretty fast.

kyoryu
2013-03-20, 12:34 AM
I'm currently working on a Brutal Legend hack for Fate.

Because I want to run that game.

Lost Demiurge
2013-03-20, 08:35 AM
It's an interesting idea, but with no warning I can easily see how a hypothetical player might be bothered by the part where they die with no ability to resist. A lot of people have some idea of where they want their character to go, and they don't always take well to the DM deciding on a different direction without their choice.

Yeah, which is why I warned people ahead of time that bad stuff was gonna happen to their PC's, and to roll with it.

THAT part, they didn't mind.

They DID mind the loss of all their items, the switchover to a sandbox-type world, and the fact that it wasn't a hack and slash kick-down-the-door dungeon crawl.

Seriously, one guy stood up and said "Look, we want to roll dice, hack monsters, get treasure, and dodge traps. That's all. Do something like that, okay?"

Ever since then I only try the complicated game ideas with friends. College gaming clubs and casual acquaintances don't cut it, for the heavy stuff.

OverdrivePrime
2013-03-20, 09:27 AM
I'd love to run my players in the Rifts setting with Shadowrun 4 mechanics. Mechanically, Shadowrun 4 is my favorite system, and I've converted it to run a very fun and successful (but too short!) Bronze Age campaign a few year back. When we were kids, we used to play a ton of Rifts, but eventually came to passionately hate the system.
Unfortunately, I will never, ever have the time to rework even a tenth of the Rifts material to work with Shadowrun.

All of us except the new guy miss the seven year Immortal: the Invisible War campaign we played in college and the years after. When I have enough energy, I would love to start a new Immortal campaign that focuses on the characters as survivors of the 2012 supernatural cataclysm. There was recently a new (free!) 3rd edition released of Immortal (http://www.invisiblewar.com/downloads.html), and it looks great, but I haven't had time to gobble up all the new material to the point that I'd be comfortable running it again. Immortal is one hella involved, but hella rewarding game. It also has the worst website in the entire world, so you'll have to fight past that. Or just go to the wikipedia page on the game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal:_The_Invisible_War), which is much more bearable.
I get asked to run this game again every year... and every year I feel a little more ready.

And if I wasn't so terrible at running cyberpunk campaigns, I'd love to pick up my Shadows of Milwaukee Shadowrun 4 campaign again. Huge fun, but I just do not have a handle on the matrix and rigger stuff.


And if I do all of these things, maybe I can get someone to run a good Star Wars campaign. I suck at running space games, but desperately miss playing the old WEG star wars campaign my friends and I had.

Amphetryon
2013-03-20, 09:32 AM
In 3.5:

A Midkemia campaign, please? Pretty please?

Lorsa
2013-03-20, 09:43 AM
I would like to run a game for myself, mostly to see as a player how I am as a GM. It seems like it would be impossible without Eclipse Phase forking however.

Das Platyvark
2013-03-20, 10:29 AM
An idea for World of Darkness
A Hunter game set in one of the World Wars, in which the protagonists are the crew of a military submarine, and are sent of to locate and attempt to deal with Cthulhu-style aquatic abominations.

PairO'Dice Lost
2013-03-20, 03:09 PM
I've wanted to run a game for a while that mocks the stereotypical DMPC concept. The PCs hear before the game starts that there's a Dark Lord with his Evil Armies and Scepter of Power in the Land of Darkness and other Capitalized Evil Things. They hear that a powerful Hero of Light has arisen, fulfilled many prophecies, vanquished many legions of evil creatures, allied several lands under his banner, etc. Only the Hero of Light may wield the Sword of Legends and vanquish the Dark Lord! Really play up the Mary Sue-ness of this Hero of Light.

The game starts when the PCs are contacted by one of the good-aligned churches or organizations in the setting and let in on a little secret: the Hero of Light is indeed the prophesied hero of legend, and he is indeed the only one who can wield the MacGuffin that is needed to kill the Dark Lord...but the rest of it is a sham. The priests found the prophesied hero and put him through a bunch of tests to train him for the final battle, and he was awful. He sucks at swordfighting, can't cast a single cantrip, and can't even plan out a game of chess. Think a level 1 commoner who dumped Str, Dex, and Wis who's supposed to be a mid-level paladin or something. The only things he has going for him are that he's a people person and everyone loves him, and that he really believes strongly in the cause.

Up until this point, the organization has been basically faking all of his victories. Invisible archers help take out enemy armies, grey guards poison enemy leaders before important duels, and so forth. The Hero of Light doesn't know any of this, because to use the MacGuffin he has to be supremely confident in his own abilities as the Prophesied Hero, and believing that he's a terrible hero would ruin that; the organization has told him that he will grow into his powers (read: they're getting better at faking it) and that the people they've assigned to perpetuate the charade are merely his loyal retainers. Unfortunately, the Dark Lord is getting more persistent, and the organization doesn't have sufficiently powerful and inventive people to continue the charade against the new opposition; if the Hero, the Dark Lord, or the public find out what's been going on the plan will be lost.

So it would be up to the PCs, a mid-high level party with all the crazy lateral thinking expected of adventurers, to persuade the Hero that they want to help him on his noble quest and take over keeping everyone believing that the Hero of Light is a True Hero until he can find the MacGuffin and vanquish the Dark Lord.



This idea came about due to similar circumstances in a game I ran a few years ago: the party came up with a plan to take out a well-defended enemy fortress, but the copious amounts of magic (and explosives!) involved would be highly likely to kill the user, and getting back a body for resurrection would be unlikely. So this party, being highly morally-flexible, marched into a small village dressed as paladins and Pelorite priests, found a likely looking commoner, and acted as if they'd found someone very important. "Gasp! Joe? Joe the Farmer? Can it truly be you!? We have found him! We have found the Chosen One! YOU ARE THE CHOSEN ONE!"

They spent half a session or so convincing him that he was the "chosen one of legend" with some forged documents and magic tricks, gave him a "training montage" with some buffs and more trickery, taught him how to use their magic nuke, marched him up to the fortress, snuck him inside, and blew it all to smithereens, after which they returned to the village and very somberly spun a tale to his friends and family of Joe's incredible heroism and Joe the Chosen One defeating the Evil Lord of Evil for all time. It was so hilarious and required incredibly contrived plans on the PCs' part that turning it into a full adventure would be amazing to run.

Waspinator
2013-03-20, 07:03 PM
An idea I came up with in another thread: a campaign where the PCs run a circus in Eberron. Characters could include a bard as ringmaster, a halfling dinosaur trainer, and a warforged who ran away from the army. Plots could include hunting down rare beasts in the wild before rivals can, dealing with anti-competitive corruption in various cities they're trying to perform in, and figuring out the best possible performance for a trained pterodactyl.

Black Jester
2013-03-22, 02:48 PM
A mixed up Middle Earth game. Basically assuming that the Lord of the Rings is an inworld book, written by the victors of a large war to -literally- demonize their opponents. The whole 'War of the Ring' was a lot more ambiguous and a lot less fantastic, but after all if you portray your enemies terrible enough, you can justify pretty much any atrocity against them.
So, 'the real history' of the war was more about territory and resources, different social models (with the monotheistic, republican/theocratic multi-ethnic Mordorians on the one side and the polytheistic, monarchistic Elves and their dominion on the other side), and a lesser theme of magic vs. technology. The game would be set in the early fourth age, with an aging King Elessar on the throne in Minas Tirith, orkish survivors who fled the genocide after the occupation of Mordor and a rather bleak description of the 'free people'. The whole story would probably focus on political machinations and intrigues. I would use the Decipher Lord of the Ring RPG for this (MERP is too oldschoolish and clunky for my taste, and the new TOR game is just plain bad).

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-03-22, 03:31 PM
I just came up with another.

A very roleplay-rich Tome of Battle only game - everyone plays from one of the three base classes, though they can enter the PrCs at will, and even dip other base classes in order to gain entry. Setting would be quite eastern-themed, somewhere between Avatar and Samurai Champloo

...actually, I like that idea enough I may end up running it. Will have to wait a while, though, either for one of my current games to end, or for me to be more certain I can handle the load.

Black Jester
2013-03-22, 03:58 PM
I just came up with another.

A very roleplay-rich Tome of Battle only game - everyone plays from one of the three base classes, though they can enter the PrCs at will, and even dip other base classes in order to gain entry. Setting would be quite eastern-themed, somewhere between Avatar and Samurai Champloo


We actually played that, although in a gestalt campaign. Three characters, one for each of the three ToB classes, combined with appropriate secondary classes on the 2nd gestalt branch, leading to a Crusader//Bard, a Swordsage//Swift Hunter and a Warblade//Factotum (and a pet dragon, who was also a PC). It was one of the most fun campaigns I have ever played in D&D, partially due to a lack of spellcasters overshadowing awesome melee fighters.

Dimers
2013-03-24, 03:44 AM
I forgot one before!

oWoD Wraith. Wow. That rulebook (in addition to freaking me the hell out the night after I bought it*) introduced me to the concept of playing a game for something other than heroic adventure. I'd like to get to know a group really well and then start a game of Wraith for the self-exploration and psychology and catharsis. I noticed a couple dark corners of my mind for the first time ever, just reading through the rulebook.


* I got one with a special cover. There was glow-in-the-dark stuff intermixed with the black-and-white paper so that it wasn't obvious in normal light. So I turn off my light and realize that my nightstand is glowing ...

Mono Vertigo
2013-03-24, 04:45 AM
Changeling: The Lost.
Taking place during the prohibition.
... I'm lying, actually. I don't want to run it. I want to play in it. Come on, what's not awesome about Changeling mafiosi with the power to make even more cruel deals than the mundane ones? And the travels through the Hedge to deliver bootleg alcohol!

Sith_Happens
2013-03-24, 05:10 AM
D&D 3.5: Start in a pulpy high-fantasy setting with heavy psionics and Tome of Battle influence. The PCs, like many of the unluckier ones tend to do, get pulled into Ravenloft... And almost as quickly find themselves back on the Prime Material. This occurs somewhat regularly as the campaign goes on, until one day they realize that they've wandered back in without going through the Mists. And when they wander back out, they find the advance forces of [Dark Lord] on their home turf. At this point the "main plot" the PCs have been following turns out to not be what it seems. Because Ravenloft is bleeding onto the Prime, and if they don't find a way to stop it it will take over completely.

The problem with that setup being, I would want the shifts in and out of Ravenloft to be accompanied by an appropriate shift in mood and tone. Crazy, high-powered high adventure while on the Prime, dark, desperate horror while in Ravenloft (and eventually somewhere in between). Of course, once you've set things up to allow the former, it's hard to force the latter.

PairO'Dice Lost
2013-03-24, 05:26 AM
The problem with that setup being, I would want the shifts in and out of Ravenloft to be accompanied by an appropriate shift in mood and tone. Crazy, high-powered high adventure while on the Prime, dark, desperate horror while in Ravenloft (and eventually somewhere in between). Of course, once you've set things up to allow the former, it's hard to force the latter.

I can think of one way to make it work: set the campaign up as being heavy on divine magic, psionics, and ToB, with no or highly restricted use of other magic systems. Start at mid levels using gestalt, and encourage players to be fairly gishy (by having them be the military arm of a church, a group of aberration hunters, or whatever other main plot would work for that) so most of them will go divine//ToB or psionics//ToB.

Tule that Psionics Is Different while in Ravenloft. The Dark Lords and their important minions would have both divine magic and psionics, but the PCs would each most likely only have one of the two, making them more vulnerable than normal and the unexpectedness of changing laws of physics will likely make them more hesitant and wary. Then, as things go on, have Ravenloft's incursion start cutting off or weakening divine power: quells (the divine-interdicting undead from LM, one of my favorites) start spawning or being created in overlap zones, you can start building more enemies using the Ur-Priest and Defiant PrCs (both of which make them resistant to divine power and/or able to disrupt it), and perhaps add in the Elder Evils sign that starts disrupting divine magic. For psionics, perhaps epidemics of cascade flu break out in overlap zones to make manifesters a danger to themselves and their allies, wild psionics zones start appearing in places, and so forth.

Thus, in the first few trips to Ravenloft the PCs are somewhat outgunned by well-prepared enemies, putting them in quite a bit of danger and engendering a desperate mood. As the game goes on, they can compensate for this power disparity, but the increasingly erratic nature of magic and psionics in increasingly large regions of the world means that their powers are unreliable, and the overarching "The Dark Lords are coming, your gods are powerless before them" theme should bring plenty of darkness to the tone of the game. They'll still have their non-divine and -psionics resources to fall on so they're never shut down completely, and everything there can be fought back against (quells killed, cascade flu cured, weaknesses covered, etc.) so it's an uphill struggle against bad odds rather than a fiat-ed "you lose your powers in Ravenloft" scenario. Depending on your group, that setup can work very well.

Malrone
2013-03-24, 06:07 AM
Seriously, one guy stood up and said "Look, we want to roll dice, hack monsters, get treasure, and dodge traps. That's all. Do something like that, okay?"

Ever since then I only try the complicated game ideas with friends. College gaming clubs and casual acquaintances don't cut it, for the heavy stuff.

I'm... so sorry.

I'm pretty new to running the game, myself. Have been playing for a good while though. Not too much opportunity yet to develop a 'dream game' or any kind of plot that begs for development. Right now, the desire is simple but vague: I want the players involved in the story as much as I am. I want a robust open world where the PCs are entrenched in the flavor and the Players have an active stake. A right proper sand box where I may set the boundaries, but everyone helps to build the castle.

If nothing else, I want to be able to craft a story as well as the man I play under. To see a player tear up when a character dies, and not just get grabby for the 'new' loot, THAT is something I hope to see in one of my games down the line. A pipe dream, I know.

Jay R
2013-03-25, 10:17 AM
Seriously, one guy stood up and said "Look, we want to roll dice, hack monsters, get treasure, and dodge traps. That's all. Do something like that, okay?"

Ever since then I only try the complicated game ideas with friends. College gaming clubs and casual acquaintances don't cut it, for the heavy stuff.

Yup. It's important to play with people who enjoy playing the same game you enjoy playing. And the fact that you both enjoy the same edition of D&D does not guarantee that.

All of these games we want to run should be run for the kind of people who would like to play it.

thethird
2013-03-25, 10:33 AM
A mid level 3.5 game against a large army of greenskins who fight for the motherland!

Kazyan
2013-03-25, 10:42 AM
D&D 3.5. You've been Plane Shifted to the Kingdom of Loathing, and the only magic that can leave KoL is the astral rift. You're level 1. Have fun with silliness.

Selein
2013-03-26, 10:21 PM
I'd like to see Skies of Arcadia run in the 3.5 or PF framework. Flying Ships, Sky Pirates.. Itd be amazing!

zorenathres
2013-03-26, 11:15 PM
Ever since reading Roger Zelazny's The Amber Chronicles as a kid I always wanted to run a campaign in the Amber setting, maybe having the characters playing their favorite princes of amber (Benedict & Brand would have to be mine). Just the rich setting, the patterns, shadows, law vs chaos...

Rhynn
2013-03-27, 12:37 AM
Ever since reading Roger Zelazny's The Amber Chronicles as a kid I always wanted to run a campaign in the Amber setting, maybe having the characters playing their favorite princes of amber (Benedict & Brand would have to be mine). Just the rich setting, the patterns, shadows, law vs chaos...

There's actually a game called Amber Diceless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game). Probably the first published diceless RPG.

Black Jester
2013-03-27, 01:10 AM
Some ideas I had but never came to concretely implement them in any game:

Sarcosa '36 (For whom the Byakee calls): The player characters are volunteers/participants in the Spanish Civil War (as such, they can come from basically all over ther world and follow many different professions. The Anarchist/Republican forces in Spain were even one of the first modern armies to include women in combat units, so that even the usual problems of apparent discrimination and exclusion can be mitigated). Their unit has to retreat the the mountains, followed by Franco's troops and find some strange ruins of an old castle. PC investigate ruins, find old hints of cult, discover an old carving of a majestic figure carved out of a strange yellow rock... and when the Francist troops follow them, something big attacks them in the night (Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li).
and even when Pcs regroup, there is something strange about them. Suddenly, many factions have a keen interest in them, including a 'free mason' lodge, the NKWD, spies from various European nations, the Ahnenerbe... (and perhaps something stranger, like the immortal Torquemada or someone like him).
Eventually, the players may learn that they have found and what the strange yellow graffiti which appear all over Madrid actually mean.
So, it's basically a pulp/war story/espionage/Cthulhu crossover with rather competent characters (for a CoC game at least), a historical element not used that often, an awesome Hemmingway novel, and even its own theme song. I would probably run the story rather episodical, following the template of TV series, using a fixed intro song (surprisingly, for whom the bell tolls), and eventually a plot of events covering several years (from '36 to '39).

zorenathres
2013-03-27, 11:56 AM
There's actually a game called Amber Diceless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game). Probably the first published diceless RPG.

right on, I totally forgot about this one, as we tried to do it IRL, but never managed to get enough interest in the game, plus the whole "diceless" in the title seemed to scare off more players than it interested. I like the premise of character development over statistics, & was extremely confused with the XP system, but each system has its flaws.

AgentofHellfire
2013-03-27, 12:22 PM
Running off with the Body


Basically, the idea of the game's setting is, well, simple--there are a fair deal of powerful heroes running around in the setting. The game, however, starts off with a few dead, though no one knows this. Everyone in the game except you thinks they returned safely from some quest to foil an evil villain.

You, however, know differently. Because you are the villain (or perhaps a henchman), and for whatever reason you're walking around in the hero's body. You can't go back to your own people, because they saw you die, so...

What happens now?

SimonMoon6
2013-03-27, 01:01 PM
Cthulhu D&D

Yes, I know that there's a d20 Call of Cthulhu, but what I have in mind is more that just adding CoC to D&D. Instead, I envision the following:

The setting is medieval Europe (more or less, with historical inaccuracies allowed). The only true gods are the Cthulhu Mythos entities... which most people don't know about much less worship (and no PCs will start out worshiping them!). And you can't get clerical powers from worshiping a "concept". So, this has some big effects (mainly the medieval Europe part):

(1) There are no clerics. There are lots of priests, but they pretty much just worship the unreal (in this setting) Christian deity. So, they would be mere NPC classes. This will also limit what magic items can exist.

(2) There are no paladins. Well, some Fighters might think they are paladins, but they don't get any divine powers since there are no gods to give them divine powers.

(3) Druids exist, but are hated. They are considered heretics and are killed on sight by religious people (which is almost everyone). Anyone stocking up on mistletoe had better watch out.

(4) So where do decent people get healing from? Well, bards are okay. They're still a bit suspicious, but their charisma keeps them from being labeled as witches. And rangers can heal a little too.

(5) Oh, yeah, wizards. It's generally assumed that wizards are witches who get their powers from "the Devil," so wizards need to hide what they do. But they're occasionally tolerated as long as they profess to be members of the one true religion. Sorcerers however are *definitely* thought to be getting their power from the Devil, so they get burned at the stake.

And that's how the PCs are affected. Naturally, NPCs might worship deities that actually exist in the setting (like Cthulhu, etc) and gain real powers from doing so. Pretty much only NPCs will therefore have access to spells like True Resurrection.

And added to all this, we have lot of Cthulhu Mythos type fun with monsters that many players will be unfamiliar with. (Other generic D&D monsters would still exist too, but only in appropriate countries. Medusas are from Greece and so forth.) But unlike in a standard D&D game, the vast majority of people have only ever encountered human beings and non-fantastic creatures.

PoopStainMcGee
2013-03-27, 01:09 PM
I'd love to run a game that takes place in Tamriel at some point.

SimonMoon6
2013-03-27, 01:21 PM
I've wanted to run a game for a while that mocks the stereotypical DMPC concept.

Well, I had something like this in mind once:

The players are mere level one novices. Their mentor (high level guy who seems like a DMPC) goes with them on a "guard the caravan" mission just to watch and make sure things go okay. Supposedly, he'll stay out of any fighting unless things go south quickly.

However, the caravan gets attacked by a real bad-ass who kills the mentor in one hit. Now, the PCs have to decide what to do: fight the villain and certainly die? Flee? Hide?

The villain probably wouldn't actually kill the PCs, but might toy with them instead, before escaping with the caravan's treasure. And... then I never decided what would happen next. Would the stolen treasure be something that MUST be retrieved or ELSE? Would it spell the end of the world?

One possibility: the stolen treasure allows the villain to create city-sized non-mobile Spheres of Annihilation that he uses to wipe out all the major cities on the planet. So... no hoping for high-level help. No purchasing any magic item or spell that you want.

Dimers
2013-03-27, 04:46 PM
Cthulhu D&D

Yes, I know that there's a d20 Call of Cthulhu, but what I have in mind is more that just adding CoC to D&D. Instead, I envision the following:

The setting is medieval Europe (more or less, with historical inaccuracies allowed). The only true gods are the Cthulhu Mythos entities... which most people don't know about much less worship (and no PCs will start out worshiping them!). And you can't get clerical powers from worshiping a "concept". So, this has some big effects (mainly the medieval Europe part):

(1) There are no clerics. There are lots of priests, but they pretty much just worship the unreal (in this setting) Christian deity. So, they would be mere NPC classes. This will also limit what magic items can exist.

(2) There are no paladins. Well, some Fighters might think they are paladins, but they don't get any divine powers since there are no gods to give them divine powers.

(3) Druids exist, but are hated. They are considered heretics and are killed on sight by religious people (which is almost everyone). Anyone stocking up on mistletoe had better watch out.

(4) So where do decent people get healing from? Well, bards are okay. They're still a bit suspicious, but their charisma keeps them from being labeled as witches. And rangers can heal a little too.

(5) Oh, yeah, wizards. It's generally assumed that wizards are witches who get their powers from "the Devil," so wizards need to hide what they do. But they're occasionally tolerated as long as they profess to be members of the one true religion. Sorcerers however are *definitely* thought to be getting their power from the Devil, so they get burned at the stake.

And that's how the PCs are affected. Naturally, NPCs might worship deities that actually exist in the setting (like Cthulhu, etc) and gain real powers from doing so. Pretty much only NPCs will therefore have access to spells like True Resurrection.

And added to all this, we have lot of Cthulhu Mythos type fun with monsters that many players will be unfamiliar with. (Other generic D&D monsters would still exist too, but only in appropriate countries. Medusas are from Greece and so forth.) But unlike in a standard D&D game, the vast majority of people have only ever encountered human beings and non-fantastic creatures.

I would love to play that! You could set up a recruiting thread ...

kardar233
2013-03-27, 05:22 PM
I'd love to run a game that takes place in Tamriel at some point.

I had an idea for a Tamriel game based on the really cool metaphysics that Michael Kirkbride laid out for Morrowind. It was going to consist of Aldmer PCs who are thrown through time by the Maruhkati Selective's ritual and hit each of the Dragon Breaks on the way forward, slowly figuring out what is actually happening and culminating when the Ayleids return to Tamriel in a giant race for CHIM.

Unfortunately, it would require players with the mental acumen to piece together the pieces of the puzzle as they hurtle through time, and I don't know anyone like that; it took me a week of reading to figure the stuff out.

Lucid
2013-03-27, 08:33 PM
The Long Stairs (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?391379-setting-riff-Voices-From-Below-and-the-Long-Stairs)
The pc's could start as soldiers in the middle east, doing routine missions. When a bomb goes of and lays bare an entrance to The Dungeon, they'll have an encounter with beings that cannot possibly exist. When they overcome this they are immediately extracted, debriefed, recruited and get thrown right in the middle of all the strange research going on.

Ideally I'd like the players to think it's going to be a non-supernatural campaign and have them be as surprised as their characters. Have them be in the dark as to what they are facing, even as they recognize familiar D&D monsters still never really knowing what they are up against.

As for the system it could start as D20 modern, and then mix in 3.5 stuff.

Balain
2013-03-28, 12:35 AM
Bunnies and Burrows (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/82542/Bunnies-And-Burrows) Just need to talk my friends into play this

Aces and Eights (http://www.kenzerco.com/aces_n_eights/) - more likely able to talk friends into playing this

Stargate sg-1 in this case the party would be sg-12 or something.

Doctor Who (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doctor_Who_Role_Playing_Game) - just for some nostalgia.

Red Dwarf (http://paizo.com/products/btpy76vu?Red-Dwarf-RPG) - What can I say it's Red dwarf.

Rolemaster with Sea Law (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/96430/Sea-Law) - party is a group of hobbit pirates. for some nostalgia and hobbit pirates are awesome lol

DigoDragon
2013-03-28, 07:05 AM
I'd love to run a game that takes place in Tamriel at some point.

Will the campaign start in the same tradition of Elders Scroll where the PCs are captured/in jail? :smallbiggrin: An ES style game would be a fun fantasy romp and personally I'd to have it take place during one of the wars, playing it out in the spirit of "Red Hand of Doom" but with a stretched out timeline so the PCs can explore more.

Totally Guy
2013-03-28, 07:07 AM
I'm running a game tonight about the friendship of a kid named Leod and a giant named Umfredo surviving the cults of a town cursed with an encroaching jungle.

The Giant wants to be accepted into the town and sit upon the throne of trees in the middle of the town. He also wants to track down a poisoner from the town who has given his brethren in the hill a madness.

The kid wants to protect his family from those who are violently upset with him for bringing a giant to the town. He wants to win the mayor's approval of Umfredo and he wants to end the witches curse on the town which has surrounded it with a jungle like area.

Those are the two PCs I've made for the players. I've got all the antagonists ready too to see what'll happen in play!

AgentofHellfire
2013-03-28, 01:01 PM
Bunnies and Burrows (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/82542/Bunnies-And-Burrows) Just need to talk my friends into play this


Ooooh! What kind of messed-up game is--

Oh, wait, actual bunnies?

Never mind, then. :smalltongue:

Asmodai
2013-03-28, 01:50 PM
Ooooh! What kind of messed-up game is--

Oh, wait, actual bunnies?

Never mind, then. :smalltongue:


... Watership Down called. It said it was thirsty of your fears and tears.

brutticusforce
2013-03-30, 03:31 PM
Goblins on a leash
After a year of playing Ravenloft, our group needed some shenanigans. I volunteered to run Pathfinder. one of our players wanted to make a goblin barbarian, who would take Feral Gnasher and all of the racial bitey feats. The other players jumped in, one considering a gunslinger, and another thinking about an alchemist. The last player looked long and hard at a elf, half elven, or human witch. In the end, we didnt go with it (mostly because witch didnt want to do all the talking), but I had come up with some hilarious antagonists.

Long way home
based on a story i wrote inspired by the Canterbury Tales, the Long Way Home has two distinct plots and settings. One is a low magic setting, the on I used in the story. In this one, the heroes are normal people; tradesmen, merchants, what have you. They are a part of a trade caravan, a huge one that is making its way to the other side of the continent. On the way, the caravan is attacked, and the heroes are all that remains. There is no magic, nothing for them to rely on but each other as they merely try to brave dangers and go home. In the higher magic setting, magic itself is rare but magic devices from a more distant, long forgotten age are still around. The players are still normal tradesmen and the caravan opening is still a thing, but there are more sinister forces at work: The players have the opportunity to rise above their humble roots and become genuine heroes. In both, the players are all humans; Supernatural and Combat ability is capped at the start. In the high magic one, elves are around and uncommon; they are horrifying monsters, and the only ones that live long enough to truly master magic.

Cyber Vampires
Not really too much a real idea, but after playing shadowrun and vampire, i thought about combining the two. vamire: the dark cyberpunk future, i think. Essence transfers over well, and prevents too much abuse of cyber werewolves or mages for instance. Meanwhile, cyber tech gives normal humans a fighting chance (with super toughness and access to celerity via wired reflexes).

The rules where already there, but with a focus on Vampire controlled megacorps, the soul shattering aspects of cybertech, and various supernaturals instead of metatypes, its enough of a change, I think.

12 tribes setting
I was sitting around last night, lamenting how boring the Seder (passover ceremony) was. It can easily stretch out to 8 hours (at least the ones I attend) and most of that can be spent on the portion of the hagadah (prayer book specialized for the occasion) that is allotted for Magid (literally "story," the part of the ceremony with is devoted to telling the story of passover.)

As usual, i thought it might be an interesting way to attempt to trick my family into playing DnD. I wasnt sure how it would translate, but i think a campaign setting would be great. Im not sure how mechanics like character classes would translate. I might make it with WoD mechanics. Any ideas that anyone can give me would be awesome.

Sith_Happens
2013-03-30, 05:41 PM
12 tribes setting
I was sitting around last night, lamenting how boring the Seder (passover ceremony) was. It can easily stretch out to 8 hours (at least the ones I attend) and most of that can be spent on the portion of the hagadah (prayer book specialized for the occasion) that is allotted for Magid (literally "story," the part of the ceremony with is devoted to telling the story of passover.)

As usual, i thought it might be an interesting way to attempt to trick my family into playing DnD. I wasnt sure how it would translate, but i think a campaign setting would be great. Im not sure how mechanics like character classes would translate. I might make it with WoD mechanics. Any ideas that anyone can give me would be awesome.

Um...

...

Yeah...

I see no way of this going well.

Waspinator
2013-03-30, 10:15 PM
Based off of something in another thread, while there are stat requirements for PCs in 3.5 that make you unable to play animals, there doesn't seem to be anything that says that an NPC animal can't take class levels. So, I'm thinking a campaign where the wildlife is a bit more extreme than usual. You could even argue that it's the result of natural selection in a world where adventurers exist. Imagine a game where the PCs have to defend a trade caravan from laser-shooting flying bear warlocks and dinosaur Warblades.

Zweanslord
2013-04-01, 02:30 PM
Order of the Yellow Alcae

Trouble stirs within one of the three Major Houses, the House of the Blue Myosotis, and some predict the downfall of this Major House within the years to come. Lord Jedediah d'Obernai, one of the nobles in the large and similarly named Obernai town, sees the opportunity to elevate the noble line of d'Obernai and create a new House, the House of the Yellow Alcae. To do this, he has founded the Order of the Yellow Alcae, and the instructor Isaac Jacobs has sought out pupils to train. With the aid of the Order, the Lord seeks to secure his position in Obernai, so that when the time comes that the House of the Blue Myosotis collapses, amidst the turmoil the d'Obernai line can ascend to become the Minor House of the Yellow Alcae.

But before that time is at hand, there will be struggles to overcome. Even the relatives of the Lord have doubts, let alone the guild leaders and religious leaders. Trouble still stirs inside the town and the people do not know what they can expect. Can the Order of the Yellow Alcae protect the people of Obernai? Is the trust Lord Jedediah d'Obernai has placed on these men and women justified? Will their actions allow the birth of the House of the Yellow Alcae? Only time will tell how they handle the responsibility bestowed upon them and what impact they will have in the country of Floran make amidst these noble Flower Houses.

Note: The player's may chose another colour/flower instead of a yellow hollyhock to represent the House/Order.

The idea has been playing in my mind for a while, but unfortunately haven't taken the time to work this concept out more, but would still like to run it some day.

Fibinachi
2013-04-01, 03:45 PM
1: Battered Iron

The civil war is ending. A ragtag band of peasants, believers and scattered warriors from various noble houses met the foreign invaders near the border and instead of fighting, brokered peace. It seems like the world isn't ending after all. Now all that needs to be done is to get the country back together and, oh, waitaminute, when was the last time anyone was sent to the Wizard Tower to inspect the barriers that keep the other side out?
The players are tasked with navigating from one end of the wartorn country to the other, not cause too many diplomatic incidents (lest war flare up again) and check that the Wizards are still maintaining the barrier...
It's a relatively simple mission and it is easy to execute. And it's going to be made all the harder to manage when sects start showing up, the foreign army near the border wants to get in on the action, the zealous religious leader near the border with her own rag-rag army make a run for it too and eventually it should all be a haphazard race to secure the tower. Which isn't all that easy, since the Wizards might disagree with your attempts to control their institution. Well, they would, if they hadn't almost all been killed off by the Other Side.

3.5 or Pathfinder would work gloriously.

2: Last Days of Fall


You made the deal and now you're marked. The city is being throttled by plague and diplomatic sanctions, unrest and scheming ne'erdowells. With your mark, you have a small measure of power - and you know how to get more, if need be. You could turn this entire thing around if you tried, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to clear your debts, find a loophole in the contract with Elsewhere and spend your second chance on something good.

The players are various people all marked by an Outsider (who does this kind of thing on a lark) and thus given a few abilities that most others don't have access to. The various factions of the city have their own agendas, and the players should get swept up in a bit of intrigue and wonder as their abilities become known and that's where the complications set in. They could end up ruling it all, or scavenging for rotten food while the Emergency Response Gearheads hunt them through the streets.
I need a system with a fairly high lethality, and a non standard progression to simulate people gaining more skills, being harder to touch but still essentially being people. Mortal. Other people should be easy to deal with one on one, with a leg up from various marks, but the consequences of doing things should be important. And no single person, no matter how much probability they can twist or teleportation they can do can win a shoot out with the armed forces. Dark Heresy might work with some reworks and a bit of messing about, but you can't really separate that from 40k.

3: A Complication


You are this close to striking it big time. All you need to do is get to the Trade Prince's office, get your contracts signed and you'll finally offload your latest expedition loot for more coinage than there's water in the ocean. You all deserve it, too, the Crater is a hellish place to scavenge and you've done hard work to get this far. And while you were down stairs, celebrating with a fine wine, a street rat broke down the window, stole your strongbox and made off with your contracts, your keys and your identification.

As you race after him, an explosion sounds in the distance. Your city has just been invaded.

The players play highly skilled Adventurers who are in town to offload their latest gains, a relic they've gotten from a nightmarish location at cost of life, limb and sanity. And just as they're about to be able to retire for the next many decades, everything goes wrong. Sort of a high speed, constant downwards spiral that goes from thievery to foreign invasion to hopefully, at the very end, legging it out of there on a ship with your pockets stuffed full of cash and a sassy grin.

Lupus753
2013-04-01, 04:00 PM
Since I'm a big weeaboo, I'd like to get my hands on Big Eyes, Small Mouth 3rd edition. It's a shame that physical copies cost hundreds of dollars, though I might settle for PDFs. This old Tri-Stat system sounds interesting, even if the Soul stat sounds overpowered.

If not I might be able to jury-rig GURPS (or Pathfinder, if it comes down to that) into an anime-like setting.

My campaign would be about a global war fought between nations for scarce dig-sites. These dig-sites contain monstrously powerful weapons and tools from thousands of years ago. So, basically Xenogears. Except the cosmology is based on Vishishtadvaita Hinduism. The players' job is to find out what caused this war, the origin of these ancient machines, and stop all of it.

Actually, that sounds waaaaaay too ambitious for a beginning GM. But I guess this thread is about want, can.

cosmicAstrogazr
2013-04-01, 06:54 PM
I have a game in mind where the players are thrown bodily into an established setting that they know well (I'm thinking Game of Thrones) and using nothing but wits and metagame knowledge make it to the top. Possibly with a prize of some sort (going back home, maybe?) to motivate them. I'll hope for a lot of PVP.

Oh man, that sounds so fun. No, really, it does. I'd play it in a heartbeat, if the setting were one I'm familiar with. I've wanted to run something similar for a while, but a lack of mature, genre savvy players has stymied me every time...

Arbane
2013-04-01, 07:20 PM
2: Last Days of Fall

(SNIP)

I need a system with a fairly high lethality, and a non standard progression to simulate people gaining more skills, being harder to touch but still essentially being people. Mortal.


Dishonored, Tabletop Edition? Cool.

GURPS or RuneQuest might work for this - no matter how skilled you are or how good you are at magic, an arrow through the skull will usually ruin your whole day.

Phippster
2013-04-01, 08:12 PM
I've always had a few games I've wanted to run, but never had the chance to actually get a group together that was either willing to play these games, willing to play anything at all, or had the time to play anything other than one-shot adventures.

DnD 3.5
Dark Sun: I really, really just love the idea of the Dark Sun setting. While the people I run games for are typically not people who enjoy going crazy with casting, Dark Sun offers me the tools to severely limit their access to high-level magic, which often instantly makes the game feel more grounded. Bonus points if I can swing it as an E6 game so they aren't eventually killing the Sorcerer-Kings.

Aquatic: A friend of mine once decided he was going to make an aquatic campaign, and I never really forgave him for cancelling it without any real reason. I was going to be a pirate hunter and the whole group was excited... and then it was gone. I'd love to try something like that myself, with the PCs perhaps being pirate hunters hired that get in way over their heads.

Xen'Drik Expedition: Eberron has also always been an interesting setting to me, and having the PCs trapped on an expedition to Xen'Drik would be really interesting, especially because I could get a chance to really use one of my favorite villainous races to their full effect; the Drow.


Star Wars Saga Edition
Yuuz'han Vong Invasion: Ideally, I'd have the players guarding some outpost that gets attacked by Yuuz'han Vong, and have them flee for their lives before realizing that they themselves are simply the survivors of their first massive invasion force. They then get sent out on various missions for the New Republic due to their "expertise" with dealing with the Vong.

Fall of the Republic: Wouldn't matter if it was the New Republic, or the Republic from I-III, or even the Old Republic, but New or Prequel era would be best. Have the PCs on board a ship that gets blindsided by the first attacks of the Empire, which has their ship crash land on some Outer Rim planet that is largely uncharted. PCs are required to fend off the Imperial Troops sent deal with survivors, as well as get off the planet themselves without the aid of the Republic as it comes crashing down.

hiryuu
2013-04-03, 11:52 AM
Um...

...

Yeah...

I see no way of this going well.

I ran this once.

And it was AWESOME (http://www.warehouse23.com/img/full/GRR1019.jpg).

Sith_Happens
2013-04-04, 12:07 AM
I ran this once.

And it was AWESOME (http://www.warehouse23.com/img/full/GRR1019.jpg).

Well then.

Tvtyrant
2013-04-04, 12:30 AM
I have a sorta grandiose idea for a post-apocalyptic game -- maybe Fallout setting or some such -- to explore all the possible answers to the question, "What's needed for human survival?" The game progression would include scenarios that highlight points like:

the value of arts
force of arms
planning
leadership
physical needs like WATER and AIR
contact and communication
training in crafts

I'd want to have the players build their own community based on what the characters learn and experience. Seems to me like that would require a LOT of player investment over multiple years of play, and I don't have a group like that at this point. I also haven't read a game system that would lend itself to that very well (probably because I haven't read many game systems).
I was just thinking about something like this. My plan is to crib D20 Future and D20 Modern stuff. Power Armor, Mechs, Mutations, etc. while dumping the magic/psionics.

Crossblade
2013-04-04, 12:56 AM
Pathfinder's Kingmaker.
My group finished the first 2 books, but then one member went away for a few months, and now that he's back, we can't seem to get together for more games.

Though lately we're looking into Star Wars Edge of the Empire, but can't get the whole group together, the last few times we've gotten together over the past 2 months we've been playing strange board games like Battlestar Galactica or some indie board games one of the players kick started.

kyoryu
2013-04-04, 02:25 AM
I ran this once.

And it was AWESOME (http://www.warehouse23.com/img/full/GRR1019.jpg).

Nice! I hadn't seen that before, but Scott knows his stuff when it comes to RPGs.

The_Admiral
2013-04-04, 02:44 AM
U.N.I.T New York Office

United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, you play as unit agents in the 70's. Just after the third doctor wandered off. UNIT has gone public and international. You play a team of agents sent to set up shop in New York and defend it against alien invasions that mostly don't involve the rest of the world. Silurans in the sewers, Cybermen in the metro, and why do they have their guns drawn and fired?

DigoDragon
2013-04-04, 08:59 AM
Bunnies and Burrows (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/82542/Bunnies-And-Burrows) Just need to talk my friends into play this

One of my players who is on an indefinite hiatus due to medical issues has recently told me that next time he visits, I must start up a My Little Pony game based on the Amazing Screw On Head setting.

Hmmm, ponies in a cthulu-lite dark steampunk world at the onset of a civil war? Sure, why not. I'd run it, but the difficulty is trying to convince the other players to join. Ponies scare them or something. :smalltongue:

atomicpenguin
2013-04-04, 01:19 PM
Oh so many ideas. I'll see how many I can fit in this post:

-Megaman.exe RPG: I know that there's an ongoing project to homebrew this for d20, but its a horrible fit for this system. I'm thinking more along the lines of a homebrewed Fudge adaptation. Also, I want to make it less kiddy and more realistic.
-Candyland RPG: Just picture this: a party consisting of a Gumdrop fighter, a gingerbread cleric, and a molasses sorceror adventuring to seek audience with the King of Candyland. The geography can be loosely based on the original boardgame too.
-Heroes: Gods Among Men: This is essentially my idea to apply the design of NWoD to a super heroes game. In this game, the more powerful your character is, the less connection you feel with humanity and the less likely it is that you will use your powers to help "inferior" humans. Think Dr. Manhattan.
-Call of Cthulhu Supers: Running a super heroes game in Call of Cthulhu. The supers would get their powers from Old magic that would force them to risk insanity and corruption whenever its used.
-Heist: the game: a campaign that captures the spirit of the Heist movie. Players take roles like "greaseman" and "hacker". They're given a job and have to gather information, make a plan, and then execute it, maybe with a few surprise twists along the way.
-Midnighters: Has anyone read these books? I love them and it would be fairly easy to adapt to Savage Worlds. Midnighters have the Arcane Background: Super Powers edge with only one power. Also, as they mention in the books, the powers can be almost anything, not just the five that we see.
-La Resistance: It's a shame that people don't think of Nazi occupied France as a setting more often. There are a whole slew of unsung heroes who fought from the shadows to free France from Nazi control. Throw in a healthy dose of Nazi occultism and you've got an awesome campaign.

Arbane
2013-04-04, 02:06 PM
-Heroes: Gods Among Men: This is essentially my idea to apply the design of NWoD to a super heroes game. In this game, the more powerful your character is, the less connection you feel with humanity and the less likely it is that you will use your powers to help "inferior" humans. Think Dr. Manhattan.

My first thought is "Aberrant"? But this sounds a bit different...



-Call of Cthulhu Supers: Running a super heroes game in Call of Cthulhu. The supers would get their powers from Old magic that would force them to risk insanity and corruption whenever its used.


This RPG.net thread (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?398547-necro-Mythos-Supers-Oh-what-may-be-wrought-with-this-hideous-might) might give you a few ideas. And by 'ideas' I mean 'nightmares'. :smallbiggrin:



-Heist: the game: a campaign that captures the spirit of the Heist movie. Players take roles like "greaseman" and "hacker". They're given a job and have to gather information, make a plan, and then execute it, maybe with a few surprise twists along the way.


There's a Leverage RPG that would probably be good for this, and I've seen a free game called "Chalk Outlines" made for this, but I can't find it now - looks like the author took it down for some reason.

kyoryu
2013-04-04, 02:17 PM
There's a Leverage RPG that would probably be good for this, and I've seen a free game called "Chalk Outlines" made for this, but I can't find it now - looks like the author took it down for some reason.

Leverage would be awesome for this, but you need to get it quickly as MWP is losing the license.

The showrunner for Leverage also made something that will be part of the Fate Core Toolkit (available if you were on the kickstarter). It. Is. Awesome. Worth the price of admission just to translate it to other systems.

puctheplayfull
2013-04-04, 03:01 PM
Bunnies and Burrows (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/82542/Bunnies-And-Burrows) Just need to talk my friends into play this

I would totally play in this game. Strangely enough, I've wanted to try B&B since I first read the GURPS 3rd ed book for it. Have you considered starting a pbp?


One of my players who is on an indefinite hiatus due to medical issues has recently told me that next time he visits, I must start up a My Little Pony game based on the Amazing Screw On Head setting.

Hmmm, ponies in a cthulu-lite dark steampunk world at the onset of a civil war? Sure, why not. I'd run it, but the difficulty is trying to convince the other players to join. Ponies scare them or something. :smalltongue:

This also sounds like it would be crazy fun, with an emphasis on the crazy. Are you talking only earthbound ponies, or would you have the pegasi and unicorns of Equestria as well?


As for a game I've wanted to run...
I've had an idea for a 1920's-30's Call of Cthulhu game centered around stopping a Cthulhu cult from summoning everyone's favorite tentacled horror from the deep. The idea was pretty simple: One of the PC's had an uncle who owned a book/antique/curio shop that dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances. As part of his inheritance, he receives a key for a bank lock box. Inside the box he finds a Cthulhu statuette, a notebook written in code, and a collection of newspaper clippings and letters detailing his uncles investigation into the Cthulhu cult, similar to Francis Wayland Thurston from the games namesake. The main difference is, the PC's uncle had found the cult and managed to sneak away with and hide the tome containing all their secrets in an attempt to save the world, or at least give it a fighting chance. The PC's would have to decipher the notebook, follow the trail of clues, and eventually find and translate the tome. The whole time they are dealing with cultists and evading the various horrors sent after them. They would then have to find a way to stop the summoning of Cthulhu by confronting the cult and using what they found in the tome.

One of the main reasons I haven't ran it yet is I just don't have the time and resources to set everything up. The way I see it, the only reason to run/play CoC is to immerse yourself in the setting and actually try to feel fear and dread as you play. To accomplish this, I'd like to be able to hand the players the bank lock box, complete with cyphered notebook, statuette and period accurate newspaper clippings from around the world. I'd also like to have them dig up a homemade mythos tome when their PC's find and dig it up in the game. I think adding tangible props like these, the right mood music and decorations should really help pull them into the game and get them more involved and thus more susceptible to actual fear. Does that sound crazy to anyone else?

SimonMoon6
2013-04-04, 03:32 PM
Oh, yeah, something else I've considered (but it would take way too much prep time) is a post-apocalyptic Cthulhu game by which I mean: oops, the stars were right and Cthulhu woke up. Now what?

The PCs would be part of a small community of humans who are trying to survive as monstrosities roam the Earth. Every day is a battle for survival (and sanity).

Waspinator
2013-04-04, 03:37 PM
MegaMan Battle Network could be a neat idea. Whatever system you use, it's probably best to just have everyone make two characters: a human and an AI. Maybe do it with Mutants and Masterminds? The rules for the human side probably don't matter too much since most of the action takes place in the AI side. And the AI side could be modeled pretty well with superhero rules.

Hyooz
2013-04-04, 04:32 PM
I have three games I'm fleshing out right now in hopes of someday using.

Scion - I love the Scion system, it allows for so much awesome/silly stuff.

The first game I have in mind takes place in the Wild West. Obviously, some mechanics need tweaking, but the general idea is that the players are a group of Scions called in during the dying days of the Wild West (when civilization is slowly encroaching on all of it) to accomplish one goal: interrupt Ulysses S. Grant's play for godhood. Borrowing from a lot of Americana and such, the group would meet up with Johnny Appleseed at one point, battle with the titan-renewed machine John Henry raced, and generally engage in old west action in a bid to put a stop to Grant's machinations.

The second game is a more modern setting, but sort of a unique mythology unto itself: The SCP Foundation. The party would be a group brought in under a new directive known as the Icarus Initiative as a strike force with unique properties and capabilities that may just be the edge the SCP needs against the forces of... whatever these monstrosities are. This game would be heavier in intrigue, with a more horror-oriented tone, and a looming threat that maybe they aren't quite as free as the SCP would have them believe, and even while they stave off the darkness, they are faced with the constant doubt that maybe, just maybe there's a file somewhere with their picture on it next to a number with "Containment Procedures" explained in clinical detail.

The other game would be in Shadowrun and really the idea is just a Cthulupunk style game where the runners discover hints of the looming conspiracy and threat that humanity just might not be able to do anything about.

atomicpenguin
2013-04-04, 05:47 PM
The first game I have in mind takes place in the Wild West. Obviously, some mechanics need tweaking, but the general idea is that the players are a group of Scions called in during the dying days of the Wild West (when civilization is slowly encroaching on all of it) to accomplish one goal: interrupt Ulysses S. Grant's play for godhood. Borrowing from a lot of Americana and such, the group would meet up with Johnny Appleseed at one point, battle with the titan-renewed machine John Henry raced, and generally engage in old west action in a bid to put a stop to Grant's machinations.

That's a really neat idea and touches on another concept I've been stewing over: In the additional material, the makers of Scion tried to make an "American" pantheon and toyed with other examples of "modern gods". Unfortunately, they missed entirely what it means to be a god and the execution of this vision leaves a lot to be desired. Instead, they should have read American Gods by Neil Gaiman and really thought about what a god represents.

Which brings me to my point: The American West is perfect for a new pantheon of gods. My requirements for a god are that they have at least a decent body of myth surrounding them and represent a concept that is higher than themselves. The wild west is perfect for this, absolutely rife with folklore. For example, imagine Johnny Appleseed as a new fertility god or Paul Bunyan as a new adaptation of the warrior god, perhaps a god of the forest or more likely a patron of blue collar workers. I suggest you look into wild west folklore and really tear it apart for inspiration.

Hyooz
2013-04-04, 06:00 PM
Oh yeah, I'm diving into old folk tales and stuff. Paul Bunyan and his ox, Pecos Bill, heck even jackalopes have made their way in.

Rhynn
2013-04-04, 10:59 PM
Oh, yeah, something else I've considered (but it would take way too much prep time) is a post-apocalyptic Cthulhu game by which I mean: oops, the stars were right and Cthulhu woke up. Now what?

The PCs would be part of a small community of humans who are trying to survive as monstrosities roam the Earth. Every day is a battle for survival (and sanity).

This was published as a setting framework/outline in the Finnish RPG zine Magus years ago. I think I actually have all the issues with it. (I have most of the whole run of Magus - my FLGS started handing out back issues they had in stock with every purchase, at one point.)

Also, the slightly notorious Carcosa (for OD&D and retroclones, easily adapted for anything up to AD&D 2E), by now republished by James Edward Raggi IV (of Lamentations of the Flame Princess) is this in a gonzo fantasy world.

DigoDragon
2013-04-05, 07:09 AM
This also sounds like it would be crazy fun, with an emphasis on the crazy. Are you talking only earthbound ponies, or would you have the pegasi and unicorns of Equestria as well?

I don't see why not to have Pegasi and Unicorns in the setting.

BoredAshley
2013-04-05, 07:58 AM
If I would have better PC I would play Crysis 3.

Hyena
2013-04-05, 09:02 AM
It does not matter if I will play or DM this one. It does not matter if it will be fantasy or space opera.
I wish for a game, where the party will not sell a little girl to the cultists for the monetary gain. I wish for a game, where the cleric will not sacrifice people for gaining rebuking undead, which is more powerful then turning. I wish for a game, where the party won't zombify people, who disagree with them.
I wish for a game where the party is not evil. Pity my wish will never ever be granted.

Totally Guy
2013-04-05, 10:38 AM
Pity my wish will never ever be granted.

There's a game called FreeMarket where you live on a space station where you gain currency for making friends, giving things away, cooperating with others and fulfilling contracts. You spend your currency on making stuff, creating art, influencing people and otherwise changing the status quo. Most people aim for a big business. You can kill people too but everybody has backups.

You can play an evil character but you'd be likely to be destitute and perhaps evicted before too long.

It's one of the weirdest games I've played. The game rewards the opposite behaviours to the ones you describe.

EccentricOwl
2013-04-08, 12:44 AM
Trail / Call of Cthulhu
"City of the Damned" Vampire: The Requiem campaign
World of Darkness: Innocents
Aliens / Halo / Starship troopers "Bug Hunters" RAndom **** going on with lots of blood and pain
Eclipse Phase (However, it's really hard to write adventures for EP!)
Fallout (Savage Worlds / BRPS)
Camarilla: Rome
American Revolution

Felandria
2013-04-08, 01:23 AM
An epic level Pathfinder campaign (level 25) based around Greek mythology.

The characters are children of the gods desperate to prove themselves worthy of the pantheon.

There's a third party class called Godling, usable as a base class for those who are born into it or a prestige class who find out about their heritage later.

Either way, it would be somewhat less combat based and more about the party facing epic challenges put forth by their parents to test their mettle, advancement would be a little slow, obviously, but since they're ridiculously powerful as it is, it matters less.

(The character I have built for it has almost 500 HP and is crazy powerful, and she's not even remotely optimized, most of the Godling powers she has are pure story flavor)

The gods could have them fight in epic battles or have them compete to gain followers, or have them serve as proxies and answer prayers made by worshippers.

It would be RP heavy, but also have insane fights mixed in.

(But you would NOT win prizes just by watching)

The main goal, obviously, would be to ascend to the pantheon and become true legends.

Asmodai
2013-04-08, 07:23 AM
Felandria, you might want to check out Scion or Exalted for that instead of D&D. It will work out better if you want it to be based more on the story then the nuances of the D&D system and its treatment of high levels.

puctheplayfull
2013-04-08, 10:03 AM
Another option would be to use the 3.0/3.5 (can't remember which it was released for) Deities and Demigods. You could give them a divine rank of 0. This would make them Demigods, and still allow them to select any class/archetype options they would like, instead of forcing them into one of the 4 godling classes. They would still be heroes of legendary power, but could play something like a demigod bard or magus.

Felandria
2013-04-08, 10:09 AM
Another option would be to use the 3.0/3.5 (can't remember which it was released for) Deities and Demigods. You could give them a divine rank of 0. This would make them Demigods, and still allow them to select any class/archetype options they would like, instead of forcing them into one of the 4 godling classes. They would still be heroes of legendary power, but could play something like a demigod bard or magus.

Although like I said, Godling is also a prestige class, allowing you to take fifteen levels in another class followed by the ten levels of a prestige Godling.

Plus I also like the additional flavor of loosely basing the gods around creatures you would find in the Pathfinder books, usually giants and the like.

So Zeus would be a Storm Giant, for example.

puctheplayfull
2013-04-08, 10:24 AM
Although like I said, Godling is also a prestige class, allowing you to take fifteen levels in another class followed by the ten levels of a prestige Godling.

True. So it really depends on whether you want them to start as demigods or not. If no, Godling is a perfect prestige class for introducing it later, or building up to it. I'm just suggesting, if they are starting as demigods, that divine rank offers a little more flexibility than the Godling base classes.

Felandria
2013-04-08, 10:29 AM
True. So it really depends on whether you want them to start as demigods or not. If no, Godling is a perfect prestige class for introducing it later, or building up to it. I'm just suggesting, if they are starting as demigods, that divine rank offers a little more flexibility than the Godling base classes.

If you go to the OGC, they have all the stuff there, it's pretty cool.

Heck, one of the powers is basically immortality, you stop aging and cannot be aged magically.

puctheplayfull
2013-04-08, 11:04 AM
Heck, one of the powers is basically immortality, you stop aging and cannot be aged magically.

Not being subject to magical aging is a handy one you miss as a divine rank 0 deity. Some of the other paramortal abilities go a little above and beyond what a rank 0 deity gains as well, so I can definitely see the advantage of the class over the template (I'm guessing it would be considered a template).

hiryuu
2013-04-08, 05:44 PM
Oh, yeah, something else I've considered (but it would take way too much prep time) is a post-apocalyptic Cthulhu game by which I mean: oops, the stars were right and Cthulhu woke up. Now what?

The PCs would be part of a small community of humans who are trying to survive as monstrosities roam the Earth. Every day is a battle for survival (and sanity).

I just did this! Used Hell on Earth as the system, it was fantastic. Some scientists working on new energy sources managed to jumpstart an old Elder Thing transport hub and it started bringing other gates back online, Even allowed magical backgrounds - Doomsayers became "gatekeepers," people watching gates for intrusions and who slowly mutated into monsters that hid away from public eye. Junkers remained mostly the same, except instead of "spirits," they were using Mi-go/alien technology. Psykers were people exposed to the worlds on the other side of the transport network. Harrowed weren't undead - had to refluff or change powers, since they were ghouls. Stuff was awesome.

Had one player who kept failing mutation rolls slowly turning into a Glaaki hybrid.


You can play an evil character but you'd be likely to be destitute and perhaps evicted before too long.

It's one of the weirdest games I've played. The game rewards the opposite behaviours to the ones you describe.

My primary setting has magic working a little like this way (http://mr-author.deviantart.com/art/Some-Basic-Magical-Information-363011652). It's based on a fusion of American and Pacific/Australian mythology, and people who are jerks and misapply their mana end up paying for it. Screwing people over and stealing mana winds up creating a death spiral.

Dragonfire
2013-04-09, 02:59 PM
Well I could probabley fill up this entire thread with campagin ideas but I will try and narrow what I have down into something that is not obscene.

World War 2 in Space!: Estentially the 1930's in space, the PC's would be merc's cribed rather heavily from battletech doing contracts during this time period. The system would be modified Shadowrun. Did I mention it has the DND races as well? The game would focus mostly on the players and the parties contracts with the political machinations of the major powers as a backdrop.


Fallen Star: Set in my homebrew setting, the players are adventures in the last haven of humanity. The rest of the word has been overrun by fey or demon worshipers. Will the players restore humanity to it's former glory? Or will the fallen star of humanity burn out in the long night?

QuintonBeck
2013-04-11, 12:18 AM
Fantasy...No wait! Sci-Fi! You start in a tavern or some other equally stereo-typed location with a simple quest to go crawling through some ruins to get some magical device for whoever. You set out and everything seems pretty normal fantasy. You arrive at the dungeon and as you're spelunking it you come across some things you recognize from the modern day. IE office chairs, broken computers, etc. Except their described in the way a complete layman might describe them so as to try and keep the players confused. The item you were after turns out to be some sort of technological marvel of the modern age, now a rare and wonderous 'magical' artifact. Yep, this isn't the fantasy world you thought it was but rather the post-post-apocalyptic wasteland of a nuclear war that saw the near extinction of the entire planet and this is so far after the war that the vast majority of guns and other such manufactured goods have been used up and society has literally restarted and you're in the middle ages of that. Either it was nuclear war or I steal SM Sterling's idea and electricity and gunpowder just stopped working setting the world back quite a bit and it's been so long most people don't remember the 'modern' world.

Not sure what I'd do about fantasy races, maybe there are none or maybe this world had reached modernity with them, and while I intended for magic to instead mostly be the usage of ancient/modern tech it could also be a reemerged force since the other stuff stopped working. Hell, maybe the world shifts every few millenia between being based on magic and being based on tech and the last shift was from tech back to magic. Dunno, but I just want to run the concept.

Felandria
2013-04-11, 01:32 AM
I'd love to have a D&D party make first level characters, go through a dungeon, have everything go smoothly.

A bit too smoothly.

Suddenly, a fog rolls in and they all fall unconscious.

That's when I have them take their visors off and sit up.

Then I will welcome them to Seattle, in the year 2073.

And hand them their new Shadowrun sheets.

Mnemophage
2013-04-11, 02:06 AM
Elder Scrolls Scion. This is a thing that has been lurking around in my head for far too long, but like one other guy in my usual group has even played so much as Skyrim and, alas, it is not to be. I'd like to set it after the Oblivion Crisis, when things are slowly going to hell (and Jyggalag is available as a potential patron). I'm running on the idea that the Dovahkiin is not the only Scion running about and Mannimarco isn't as dead as people like to think he is. I'd like to set this during the Void Nights, a period of two years where the two moons vanish, about fifty years before the Great War, but I haven't done much thinking about a potential storyline as I've spent a lot more thought on mechanics. Would it even be possible to involve Scions of both Daedra and Aedra? How would this affect them both? Would Daedric Lord Scions be able to regenerate from the waters of Oblivion like the other Daedra? So many questions, so much desire...

Stargate. I have a great love of exploration and mission-based games, and that's Stargate's prime description. Doesn't help that I went insane over Atlantis... in any case, I'd like to either involve a stranded SG team skipping between gates in a cut-off pocket star cluster ruled over by a more esoteric idea of mortal divinity, or a plucky non-American, possibly multinational SG team making discoveries in the name of Earth rather than the United States. And based out of Toronto. Because Canadian pride.

Pathfinder: A Collapsing World. I have a strange addiction to creating weird physics and areas in my worldbuilding where the environment doesn't behave like you'd think it does. I've come up with an idea of a world where one of the four major deities got herself killed, with drastic repercussions - gods aren't just exemplars of an idea or repositories of power, they are an integral portion of the universe, and now that one is dead that universe is beginning to wear. Slowly, but with increasing momentum, reasonable reality is tearing at the seams. Sections of the world have acquired bizarre attributes, whose areas of influence grow wider and stranger as a symptom of the universe sliding into chaos. There is a city where everything you think is written on your skin. There is a valley where every dream is a vision. There is a section of open ocean where no one needs to breathe. There is a glade where any thing buried in the earth will grow to gargantuan size. Each wonder is a symptom of the world's death, and things will get stranger still before the end.

And y'now, I don't want a major save-the-world plot to be present, at least not at first. I want to treat the world as something inherently diseased, something that might not be there in three hundred years. I want to think about how societies - especially old societies, like those of elves and dragons - would react when faced with the inevitable end of history. I want to contemplate how that would affect the ephemeral, if the fundamental forces of good, evil, death and the afterlife would also react to this weakening of reality. I don't want there to be an easy solution, a go-here, kill-this-guy, rub-this-rock solution. I want people to have been working on it to no avail. I want constant prayers around the corpse of the dead god, which itself is beginning to manifest some odd effects, but ultimately to no real good. I want whatever person(s) did this to be this world's Stalin McSatanhitler, whatever their initial goals or intentions. I want a world where things are wonderful, and uncertain, and possibly the one because of the other. I also maybe want a floating rock dungeon with screwy gravity like in Legend of Dragoon.

kardar233
2013-04-11, 03:38 AM
I'd love to have a D&D party make first level characters, go through a dungeon, have everything go smoothly.

A bit too smoothly.

Suddenly, a fog rolls in and they all fall unconscious.

That's when I have them take their visors off and sit up.

Then I will welcome them to Seattle, in the year 2073.

And hand them their new Shadowrun sheets.

I've done similar, except it was a freeform game. I told them to make characters for a near-future Deus Ex-kinda game.... and then they wake up in a little room in low orbit over Mars, reinstantiated into 10 AF.


Elder Scrolls Scion. This is a thing that has been lurking around in my head for far too long, but like one other guy in my usual group has even played so much as Skyrim and, alas, it is not to be. I'd like to set it after the Oblivion Crisis, when things are slowly going to hell (and Jyggalag is available as a potential patron). I'm running on the idea that the Dovahkiin is not the only Scion running about and Mannimarco isn't as dead as people like to think he is. I'd like to set this during the Void Nights, a period of two years where the two moons vanish, about fifty years before the Great War, but I haven't done much thinking about a potential storyline as I've spent a lot more thought on mechanics. Would it even be possible to involve Scions of both Daedra and Aedra? How would this affect them both? Would Daedric Lord Scions be able to regenerate from the waters of Oblivion like the other Daedra? So many questions, so much desire...

As with the Elder Scrolls game I want to do myself, I'd look at getting into the metaphysics of Tamriel; an extremely interesting but very arcane subject. Try here (http://theskyrimblog.ning.com/group/lore/forum/topics/dragon-breaks-daggerfall-and-the-warp-in-the-west) and here (http://web.archive.org/web/20120119054212/http://s1.zetaboards.com/TESFU/topic/2694183/1) to get started.


~EDIT~ Also, another game I want to run:

In some modern setting, the characters are all retired action hero actors who get swept up in a real-life Die Hard-esque plot. Meanwhile, as they take on their movie identities to solve the crime, the world around them starts changing too... the laws of reality being replaced with the laws of action hero movies.

AgentofHellfire
2013-04-11, 08:19 AM
One of my players who is on an indefinite hiatus due to medical issues has recently told me that next time he visits, I must start up a My Little Pony game based on the Amazing Screw On Head setting.

Hmmm, ponies in a cthulu-lite dark steampunk world at the onset of a civil war? Sure, why not. I'd run it, but the difficulty is trying to convince the other players to join. Ponies scare them or something. :smalltongue:


Ponies in 1984.


"Friendship is magic, and the magic of friendship must be kept out of the hands of those filthy proles! It must only be pursued along orthodox lines. Or you die. Or worse.

Hyooz
2013-04-11, 11:37 AM
Another idea I recently had for a setting like Mutants and Masterminds where mad science and strange powers aren't unusual.

Basically, the player group is a band of mercenaries of sorts. Not really supervillains unto themselves, but not full of scruples. They mostly go where the money is and don't ask a lot of questions. One day they get a job from a client who identifies only as "The Lady in Red."

There are a few minor jobs leading up to the main affair. They have to steal some tech from a major conglomerate as well as doing some other preparatory stuff before arranging a series of devices at key points around Ellis Island. Sure, it seems strange, but nothing about the tech seems destructive. Their tech dude can't make hide nor hair of most of it, but at worst, it seems to be monitoring equipment. And since the money is good, they keep not asking questions and just get the devices arranged.

With one more message of congraulations from the Lady in Red, and their payment coming through, they are invited to hang around and "watch the show." Even if they decide to leave the island, it's hard to miss what happens next. The devices power up, and the Statue of Liberty starts to... shrink? Suddenly, a helicopter comes out of seemingly nowhere, a woman in a long red coat and oversized red hat dangling beneath to snatch up the shrunken statue, and in a brilliant flash of light, the woman, helicopter, and statue vanish again.

It isn't long before the party finds themselves under arrest. Every government agency is interested in talking to them, and they all have one burning question that needs to be answered:

"Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?"

Feddlefew
2013-04-11, 11:58 AM
I considered running a game where everyone gestalts as a sorcerer. The catch, however, is that no other spell casting classes are allowed, and they only get to cast from one school of magic.

The reason I haven't done this is that I only have the core 3.5 books (MM, DMG, PHB) and PHB II. I also know I need to do some re-shuffling and re fluffing of the schools of magic for this to work, like adding modified healing and resurrection spells to necromancy.

Sith_Happens
2013-04-11, 12:26 PM
[snip]

"Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?"

http://www.reactionface.info/sites/default/files/images/tumblr_lo2zqb6h5P1qzsyre.gif

Silus
2013-04-11, 12:39 PM
Break the World
The world that the players live on is planarly locked and has been for the last 1000 years and devoid of 99% of all fantasy creatures (save core races, centaur, Drow, orcs and a few location specific species). All records of the time before have either vanished or were destroyed, and only a handful of creatures from that time have survived. Since there are no Gods, dragons (or dragon gods) or demon incursions threatening the world, technology has been able to increase to the Industrial age. Steam and coal power cities as much as magic does, basic firearms are commonplace and the world is (mostly) at peace.

But then strange things start happening. Monsters not of this world start appearing. A zombie plague takes over a city. Waking nightmares stalk the streets of another. And in the center of it all, a strange, robed figure with cloven hooves, claiming to be from some far off place called "Leng". The players are tasked with stopping him from tearing down the planar barrier, thus preventing the world to shine like a freshly polished bauble of unclaimed souls to the multiverse.

Fearan
2013-04-11, 01:56 PM
Well, I still want another run of my Adeptus Evangelion campaign. It's based on the Angel Notes and Nasuverse in general. For the sheer sake of trolling people with "Oh, and there's Gilgamesh bound in the Terminal Dogma", and various Aristoteles as Angels. My first run... ended pretty bad.
And I want a Fate/Whatever game too - though that I'd prefer to play.