Satyr
2008-11-07, 10:29 AM
As mentioned in the current Gurps thread, I found it not that difficult as often claimed to play a high powered game with the Gurps Setting and since people mentioned their interest, I will share this campaign I am currently mastering. Feel free to comment and criticise.
We were there, when the heroes of Mycenae and Troy clashed on the battle field and we joined in their struggle and fought among those mortals full with passion. We were there, when Leonidas and his guard fought in their famous last stand and we filled their hearts with courage to stand against the Parthians, as well as when Salamis became the tomb stone of the Parthian fleet.
We are the witnesses of the raise of Rome, we battered Baal into submission while Scipio defeated his mortal thralls and we fought at Gergovia and Alesia and crushed the Gaulish Barbarians and their godbeasts. We followed the legions across the Rhine and clashed against Woden and Donar until exhaustion, while Varus’ Legions were crushed. Under our blessing, the Romans conquered the whole of Europe and made this world a better place, when they brought order and justice, peace and a remedy against old superstition and the demons that once ruled the night. We were
We were still there, when the Romans felt into decadence and important any and every god they could find, this bull-killing wannabe sun god or this carpenter from Judea and it hurt to recognize their treachery. Constantine’s cross, was more than the sign of his victory, it was the dark omen that signed the Apocalypse of Rome.
We are the Pantheon, the founders of the source of Culture and Greatness in this world. Greece and Rome became the cradles of philosophy, law, arts and science through our blessings and commands.
Once we ruled the world, and now, we are pathetic. Immortals growing old from within, bathing in the fame of days long gone and dreaming of a better time, when our temples where the corner stones of the world. Hades swallowed a shotgun and made that experiment where gods go when they die. Old Poseidon organises Whale Watch tourists with superficial tourists. And the last time I’ve heard from Aphrodite was when she ran a whore house in Marseille in the 1920’s. Not that I look much better now, I know. Would you guess that I once fought against the biggest, meanest gods of the Germanic Tribes and let the swallow their own teeth? Me neither.
But if you pay me another beer, I tell you the story of how we captured Bellenus and Teutates and let them watch Cesar’s Triumph.
-Ares remembers the good old times
Gods do not die without good reasons. But their power may wane, when they lose their worshippers. This has happened to the gods of old, the former rulers of the Olymp. Now, almost 2000 years after they were replaced through Christianity, they still hang around somehow, remembering he old days of their greatness and try to get along in a world that doesn’t need them anymore.
The gods are still powerful, but compared to the old days, when they were almost omniscient, they have become pathetic, trying to get along with the mortal world with normal jobs, more or less regular relationships (definitely less in the case of Aphrodite) and most of the time don’t care much about each other. After three millennia, most gods are extremely annoyed by each other and there are still old feuds between many of them.
With the decline of the gods came the decline of magic. Nowadays, the world is mostly free of it, and only the gods themselves and a few of their descendants still can use it – mostly because they are small sources of magic powers that they can tap. A god is well of magic, a source of arcane powers and forces.
This source of power has proven very useful in an otherwise magically dead world allowing to still use the powers of old or to manipulate the probabilities of reality. It is also a source of great troubles for the gods –somehow an organisation of mere humans has found out that there are still gods and demigods among them and started to analyse them – and later to vivisect and cannibalize them, to inherit these magic powers. Now there are people with an incredible budget, an equal determination and sometimes almost godlike powers that hunt the gods and their descendants and turn them into little more than batteries and fuel of their drive for magic.
Even worse, this organisation is subtle and understands that there is great distrust between the different pantheons and even within them, spraying rumours of a renewed war of the gods and claiming that one side or the other is guilty of the disappearance of the gods and their children.
It is about time that the gods – or at least some of them – leave their old hatred behind them and try to save themselves and their kind from the greed of mortals. Than even among gods, there are heroes.
This is pretty much the concept of our ‘Gods Murder Mystery Campaign powered by Gurps. The Characters are gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, now facing a threat no one of them ever even considered to take seriously – they are hunted and captured by mere mortals, treated like little more than cattle and natural resources. They are still gods who have quite dangerous powers at their hands, but the mortals have no reasons to fear them anymore (very frustrating when you still remember the old times where you just crushed or seduced them for fun).
After 2000 years of non-worshipping, their powers are not what they were back then, and today, technology is more than capable to let the gods’ powers look a bit weak. So Hermes can fly, but most Helicopters are faster than him. Ares is strong enough to shatter an elephant’s skull with a fist blow, but so can an assault rifle. The Organisation that hunts the gods have understood this – and slowly the gods start to learn this as well.
All Gods were created as Gurps characters with a point base of 1200 +X Character Points (in this scales, 20 CP more or less are pretty irrelevant) and are quite powerful individuals, with a huge list of skills, powers which fits into their ‘portfolio’ and a normal life persona – Ares is mostly a warrior (and an anti-intellectual misogynistic brute), Hermes runs a bicycle courier service in Amsterdam and can indeed fly and is the best Magic-User among the gods, etc.
For character creation, almost the whole spectrum of Gurps abilities are used, with a power based magic system. Normally, the world is a no-mana setting, but all gods are automatically Mana Enhancers, that raise the level of magic in their environment. Making it possible to use their supernatural abilities.
Likewise, we are using the mostly normal Gurps rules (not cinematic or such like), but the feeling is pretty cinematic (in one of the first sessions, Ares proved that he can crash a pursuing helicopter with a gully lid he used as a discus) only because of the sheer power gap between the gods and the mortals, but for once this gap is explainable and tolerable (and can be crossed with enough dakka).
The PC’s consist of:
Ares, the team bruiser, who is pretty much invincible in melee, but absolutely incompetent in the matters of magic (he is also a bully who loves to tyrannize other people and is quite chauvinistic)
Hermes, the tem intellectual who is a very competent magician and can fly (and thinks that literally everyone is intellectually inferior him, sadly, he is mostly right about this)
And Hephaestus, who is probably the only god who has understood what potential is hidden in technology and is a master of gadgeteering (he is also a bull-necked nerd with a clubfoot and a collection of golden Apple computers. The last aspect is a constant source of puns).
The fourth character, Tyr (some kind of an exchange student from the Aesir) was cut down in Automatic fire, because he refused to accept that mortal weapons can hurt him. He will be replaced through Heracles, but that character is not complete yet.
It should be mentioned that all characters are covetous bastards whio are in the best case callous towards humans and do not really cooperate that well. The group is very dysfunctional, but this is mostly used as a source of character-driven plot elements and thzey have little reason to like each other, mostly because of their dominantly obnoxious personalities.
The focus on the campaign is less on the action and more on the diplomay (unite the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon and perhaps form an alliance with other pantheons as well to fight against the Organisation) and in solving the secret who the mysterious Organisation actually is. There is still plenty of violence (mostly against the para-military mooks of the Organisation and some unlucky innocent bystanders) and sometimes some spectacular action sequences.
We were there, when the heroes of Mycenae and Troy clashed on the battle field and we joined in their struggle and fought among those mortals full with passion. We were there, when Leonidas and his guard fought in their famous last stand and we filled their hearts with courage to stand against the Parthians, as well as when Salamis became the tomb stone of the Parthian fleet.
We are the witnesses of the raise of Rome, we battered Baal into submission while Scipio defeated his mortal thralls and we fought at Gergovia and Alesia and crushed the Gaulish Barbarians and their godbeasts. We followed the legions across the Rhine and clashed against Woden and Donar until exhaustion, while Varus’ Legions were crushed. Under our blessing, the Romans conquered the whole of Europe and made this world a better place, when they brought order and justice, peace and a remedy against old superstition and the demons that once ruled the night. We were
We were still there, when the Romans felt into decadence and important any and every god they could find, this bull-killing wannabe sun god or this carpenter from Judea and it hurt to recognize their treachery. Constantine’s cross, was more than the sign of his victory, it was the dark omen that signed the Apocalypse of Rome.
We are the Pantheon, the founders of the source of Culture and Greatness in this world. Greece and Rome became the cradles of philosophy, law, arts and science through our blessings and commands.
Once we ruled the world, and now, we are pathetic. Immortals growing old from within, bathing in the fame of days long gone and dreaming of a better time, when our temples where the corner stones of the world. Hades swallowed a shotgun and made that experiment where gods go when they die. Old Poseidon organises Whale Watch tourists with superficial tourists. And the last time I’ve heard from Aphrodite was when she ran a whore house in Marseille in the 1920’s. Not that I look much better now, I know. Would you guess that I once fought against the biggest, meanest gods of the Germanic Tribes and let the swallow their own teeth? Me neither.
But if you pay me another beer, I tell you the story of how we captured Bellenus and Teutates and let them watch Cesar’s Triumph.
-Ares remembers the good old times
Gods do not die without good reasons. But their power may wane, when they lose their worshippers. This has happened to the gods of old, the former rulers of the Olymp. Now, almost 2000 years after they were replaced through Christianity, they still hang around somehow, remembering he old days of their greatness and try to get along in a world that doesn’t need them anymore.
The gods are still powerful, but compared to the old days, when they were almost omniscient, they have become pathetic, trying to get along with the mortal world with normal jobs, more or less regular relationships (definitely less in the case of Aphrodite) and most of the time don’t care much about each other. After three millennia, most gods are extremely annoyed by each other and there are still old feuds between many of them.
With the decline of the gods came the decline of magic. Nowadays, the world is mostly free of it, and only the gods themselves and a few of their descendants still can use it – mostly because they are small sources of magic powers that they can tap. A god is well of magic, a source of arcane powers and forces.
This source of power has proven very useful in an otherwise magically dead world allowing to still use the powers of old or to manipulate the probabilities of reality. It is also a source of great troubles for the gods –somehow an organisation of mere humans has found out that there are still gods and demigods among them and started to analyse them – and later to vivisect and cannibalize them, to inherit these magic powers. Now there are people with an incredible budget, an equal determination and sometimes almost godlike powers that hunt the gods and their descendants and turn them into little more than batteries and fuel of their drive for magic.
Even worse, this organisation is subtle and understands that there is great distrust between the different pantheons and even within them, spraying rumours of a renewed war of the gods and claiming that one side or the other is guilty of the disappearance of the gods and their children.
It is about time that the gods – or at least some of them – leave their old hatred behind them and try to save themselves and their kind from the greed of mortals. Than even among gods, there are heroes.
This is pretty much the concept of our ‘Gods Murder Mystery Campaign powered by Gurps. The Characters are gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, now facing a threat no one of them ever even considered to take seriously – they are hunted and captured by mere mortals, treated like little more than cattle and natural resources. They are still gods who have quite dangerous powers at their hands, but the mortals have no reasons to fear them anymore (very frustrating when you still remember the old times where you just crushed or seduced them for fun).
After 2000 years of non-worshipping, their powers are not what they were back then, and today, technology is more than capable to let the gods’ powers look a bit weak. So Hermes can fly, but most Helicopters are faster than him. Ares is strong enough to shatter an elephant’s skull with a fist blow, but so can an assault rifle. The Organisation that hunts the gods have understood this – and slowly the gods start to learn this as well.
All Gods were created as Gurps characters with a point base of 1200 +X Character Points (in this scales, 20 CP more or less are pretty irrelevant) and are quite powerful individuals, with a huge list of skills, powers which fits into their ‘portfolio’ and a normal life persona – Ares is mostly a warrior (and an anti-intellectual misogynistic brute), Hermes runs a bicycle courier service in Amsterdam and can indeed fly and is the best Magic-User among the gods, etc.
For character creation, almost the whole spectrum of Gurps abilities are used, with a power based magic system. Normally, the world is a no-mana setting, but all gods are automatically Mana Enhancers, that raise the level of magic in their environment. Making it possible to use their supernatural abilities.
Likewise, we are using the mostly normal Gurps rules (not cinematic or such like), but the feeling is pretty cinematic (in one of the first sessions, Ares proved that he can crash a pursuing helicopter with a gully lid he used as a discus) only because of the sheer power gap between the gods and the mortals, but for once this gap is explainable and tolerable (and can be crossed with enough dakka).
The PC’s consist of:
Ares, the team bruiser, who is pretty much invincible in melee, but absolutely incompetent in the matters of magic (he is also a bully who loves to tyrannize other people and is quite chauvinistic)
Hermes, the tem intellectual who is a very competent magician and can fly (and thinks that literally everyone is intellectually inferior him, sadly, he is mostly right about this)
And Hephaestus, who is probably the only god who has understood what potential is hidden in technology and is a master of gadgeteering (he is also a bull-necked nerd with a clubfoot and a collection of golden Apple computers. The last aspect is a constant source of puns).
The fourth character, Tyr (some kind of an exchange student from the Aesir) was cut down in Automatic fire, because he refused to accept that mortal weapons can hurt him. He will be replaced through Heracles, but that character is not complete yet.
It should be mentioned that all characters are covetous bastards whio are in the best case callous towards humans and do not really cooperate that well. The group is very dysfunctional, but this is mostly used as a source of character-driven plot elements and thzey have little reason to like each other, mostly because of their dominantly obnoxious personalities.
The focus on the campaign is less on the action and more on the diplomay (unite the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon and perhaps form an alliance with other pantheons as well to fight against the Organisation) and in solving the secret who the mysterious Organisation actually is. There is still plenty of violence (mostly against the para-military mooks of the Organisation and some unlucky innocent bystanders) and sometimes some spectacular action sequences.