Games You'd Like To Run

[Rob MacDougall]

We have a thread going of games people would like to design. This thread is even less ambitious: what are some games (one-shots, campaigns, miniseries, whatever) you're planning to run or just idly imagining?

It's a staple of RPG.net and other non-Forge forums. I'd love to hear some of your fine twisted ideas. (Or if you're running something cool already, you can talk about that, but in that case why not post to Actual Play?)

Here's my list, as recently posted on my LiveJournal. You needn't feel compelled to write anything this long - these posts were originally written in order to recruit players from my gaming circle.

Spaghetti Eastern (Trollbabe without Trollbabes)
I've wanted to return to Trollbabe ever since we played it. It's true that some of our group said "fun, but what's the big deal?" after I ran one game of this. I respect that, but I do think there's something powerful in the rules that our one session didn't bring out. It's a game where failures do not postpone the story, they create it, and where the characters are defined entirely by their choices and their relationships, rather than by their equipment and their skills. It seems to me a powerful engine for generating stories, particularly in the wandering ronin / gunslinger mode. But the fact that's it about giant women with horns and big 80s hair distances some people and opens the door to goofiness. So my current samurai kick, and in particular the Tomoe Gozen books, make me want to go back to the source, and use the Trollbabe engine to play the feminist samurai classic Kurosawa never made. Minimal in setting, intense in execution—a ballad of honor and blood as sparse and affecting as a zen haiku. The player characters would be masterless samurai in a mythic minimalist Japan. I would drop the trollbabe angle entirely, although I would keep the rule that all PCs are female: a) in order to problematize genre fantasies of gender and power, and b) because sword-fighting Asian babes are teh h0ttiez!

Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Wuxia Charnel Gods)
But there's another way I could get my Asian gaming fix. If Spaghetti Eastern is a haiku in Japanese steel, Battle Without Honor or Humanity is a Chinese opera of thunder and gore. Here's one of the original blurbs for Charnel Gods: "Imagine a fantasy world built on the backs of dead gods. Imagine that vile, unimaginable horrors are trying to claw their way up through that mound of divine corpses, to burst forth into the mortal world, all wet and glistening from their grisly journey. Imagine that the last gift the gods left man was an arsenal of sentient weapons, whose one driving goal is to keep piling corpses upon the world, so as to hinder the progress of the blasphemous things from below." Which isn't actually an accurate description of what the game is about, but it's a vivid image, and it does get across the testosteroney, heavy metal carnage, Elric and Stormbringer pomposity of the game. I'd set it in the swollen capital of a mythic decadent China, make the players masters of mighty monkish clans, and unleash every demented nightmare of wuxia horror on the world.

Starchildren: The Musical (Glam-Rock Alien Revolution)
No, I haven't forgotten my promise to run this: the game of glam-rock alien revolution against the dystopian thought controllers of 2074. And I still think I want to use Hero Quest for the system. But I'm definitely in a state of having too many ideas about the style, not enough ideas about the plot. I'll have to have a powwow with the players over what kind of stories people want: scrappy garage rockers reaching for their first big break? Decadent rock idols on the long pills-and-booze slide to the bottom? Musical-memetic revolutionaries determined to smash the synarchist state? Spacey androgynous aliens straining to comprehend this thing called love? Heck, some of the PCs could side with the bad guys: the beautiful fascists, Mother's Little Helpers, the secret police and agent provocateurs of the dreaded Ministry of Sound.

The goal for this would be to recreate the lush illogic of a rock opera in RPG form. So it's all about sounds and visuals. The canon setting is 70s glitter—Ziggy Stardust et al, though one could also imagine the P-Funk or some kind of heavy metal Monster of Rock along for the ride—pitted against that dreary 1980s dystopia the British do so well—1984, V For Vendetta, The Wall. I have a vision of an entire society dressed in British school uniforms: 50-year old salary boys trudging to work in short pants and beanies. But then other style elements keep trying to slip in: the P-Funk cosmology, Darkness videos, those 80s club kid pictures narcissime posted, the Harajuku / Fruits fashion scene, some kind of lush Bollywood Sutra-Funk dealie. (And if all this just sounds like a random mush of terms to you, well therein lies my challenge.)

Father of Night (Soviet Hellboy Delta Green Dark Supers Pulp)
In the trackless wastes of Siberia, in the coldest days of the Cold War, in the paranoid mirror land that was Stalinist Russia, the players are Spetsialni Viedotstvo 8, a more secret than secret team of Soviet mutants, oddities, and altered humans. They fight a desperate double war for the Motherland against both the black science of the West and the eldritch evil at the heart of the Soviet state. So it's like Hellboy's BPRD or maybe Doom Patrol set in the Cold War USSR. The world of Delta Green spliced with the tone of Hellboy—pulpy, but dark. This springs from sneech515's discussion of Soviet superheroes, from Bruce Baugh's observation that silver age comics worked best when they were still part horror comics, and from my desire to do something new with the Delta Green secret history, which I love. Can't you just see the crumbling hidden passages of the Kremlin as rendered by Mike Mignola? Or Baba Yaga, embodiment of Russia's darkest forests, as our heroes' secret patron? And looming over everything, the grim mustachioed visage of the Father of Night—Stalin, whom the corpse-eating ghouls worship as The Great Provider.

(I'm not sure about system. This would seem to be perfect for Wild Talents if that ever comes out (I have the playtest rules) and if some of the alleged hiccups in the One Roll Engine have been ironed out.)

Black History Month (Hitean Reality Quake Elseworlds Sci-Fi Superspies)
This is reality war. There are thousands of alternate worlds, none of them fixed. Quantum events create superimposed alternate histories whose champions do battle across time and times. The PCs hop from alternity to alternity, firing clioactive depth charges into the past, shattering some realities, defending others, seeking to unwrite their enemies' very existence before the same is done to them. But the histories that created them are never solid. The past is a battleground and each eimic shockwave changes everything.

Basically this is the alternate earths game, the time-shattering hyper-action movie I've been polishing for ages. I broke Jeremiah's Rule of Ten Mentions some time ago. So I really do have to run it. I just hope it hasn't become a solipsistic obsession that interests only me. I can't explain the game as well as I can picture it—so can I run it? Put less dramatically, this set up lets me indulge every wild alternate setting I can invent or steal, while the players get to be parachronic bad-asses, playing god with history, as long as they can remember who they are and what they're fighting for. So often the goal in time travel stories is to set things back the way they were. But I think that takes half the fun out of it. Who says this is the best of all possible worlds? Originally I imagined the PCs for this as overpowered superheroes a la The Authority. But Chris' magisterial Omega Event game covered that ground so nicely I'm now thinking of the heroes as shiny 21st century super-science-spies with a power level closer to Planetary.

...

Happily, both the Charnel Gods game and the Starchildren/Hero Quest game seem to be going ahead. And while I may never play Black History Month, our recent Lexicon of the Last 500 Years was practically a game of it.

So how about the rest of you?

Rob

[Marhault]

I'd have to say Legends of Alyria tops my list.  1st runner up is definitely My Life With Master.

[xiombarg]

I posted my list on Livejournal a while back:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/xiombarg/460774.html

[Rich Forest]

My Life with Master: Every day I don't run it, my Self-Loathing increases.

Rich

[Marhault]

Ah, Hell.  I forgot Great Ork Gods!

[GreatWolf]

Sorcerer where the demons are analagous to the Shadows of Wraith and sorcery is calving off suppressed portions of your own personality and giving them power.  All demons are Possessor demons, but they are all you.

This would, of course, require a dark, Gothic, urban setting to go with it, where Bad People do Bad Things in the dark, where it is always raining, and....  Well, you get the idea.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Doyce]

My d20 group is (finally! at long last!) wrapping up and (at least vocally) open to trying some 'new stuff', so I've lined up a number of ideas I want to try with them (their only request is that it be mostly fantasy genre).

[list=1]Donjon, in a tribal jungle setting (which, if it continues successfully, I like to turn into a Donjon supplement) -- I'd like to run the gamut of Lost World tropes with this: dinosaurs, talking animals, sentient great apes, animal shape-shifters... the whole nine.

A classic, Tolkien-meets-Record of Lodoss Wars high-fantasy thing using Sorcerer (at the risk of being reviled by the Forge at large, Ron specifically :).  I'm working out the Lore and Past descriptors and figuring out example characters for inhumanly-creepy High Elves and the other classic archetypes, including working Sorcerer demons to (also) handle Magi and the orders of the Priesthood.

The BPRD, using Trollbabe (look for a write-up soon on the Adept Press forum).  PCs play original 'freaks' recruited by the BPRD.  Ideal for the 'lone wolf, seperate scenarios' concept of Trollbabe.[/list:o]

Unrelated to the d20 group: A standard Sorcerer scenario using a relationship-map from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with some Tomoe Gozen mixed in.

[Simon W]

Well, I am rather taken with Legends of Middle Earth (by Jeph) so I want to give this ago soon - probanly with one or two minor changes ( I just can't help myself).

I am also interested in the new Blue Rose setting (Green Ronin) - I know it is d20, but I believe it uses some of the Mutants & Masterminds rule changes - and I'd probably tinker before I start anyway.

Lastly, I still haven't got around to playing Troubadours of Verticaille (John Laviolette) yet, but want to have a go. There is just something holding me back about the rules and I can't quite figure it out. I suppose I should just go straight in and see how it goes, but I don't want it not to work out! So, I will look at the game some more to see what I think is bothering me about it.

Simon
http://www.geocities.com/dogs_life2003/

[joshua neff]

There are too many games I want to run. I simply don't have time (these days) to run them all.

* I want to run more, more, more HeroQuest. I frickin' love HeroQuest.

* I also want to run more, more, more Sorcerer.

* I want to run an Art Deco Melodrama Sorcerer game.

* I want to run my "Children of the Masque" Sorcerer (& Sword) game. It's an attempt to mesh the things I like about Exalted with the create-it-as-you-play Sorcerer & Sword idea with superheroes.

* I want to run a Clicking Sands-meets-John-Carter-of-Mars Sorcerer (& Sword) game for my girlfriend, Julie.

* I also want to run more Trollbabe for Julie.

* I want to run Clinton's Shadow of Yesterday, which is really nifty. I particularly like the Gift of Dice mechanic & the way Keys work.

* I just started reading John Laviolette's Troubadours of Verticaille, & damn, now I want to run that, too.

* I want to run more Hero Pulp stuff, but probably with Story Engine instead of WW's Adventure!

* I want to run some Burning Wheel.

* I want to run The Riddle of Steel.

See? Too many games...

[Mike Holmes]

And you want to play PTA, too, right? :-)

Well, I'm obliged to, and I think it would be cool for us to play.

Also, there's Court of the Nine Chambers that we've sworn we'd play. And Donjon (I still have an adventure prepped). And I'd still like to get around to some In Nomine (whatinthehell system did we make characters with anyhow)?

Oh, but no Story Engine, please. I'll explain later. I'm thinking we can do the pulp game with maybe a stripped down HQ, or something with more director stance stuff.

Yeah, we have waaay too many things we need to get to.

Mike

[joshua neff]

And you want to play PTA, too, right? :-)

Well, I'm obliged to, and I think it would be cool for us to play.

Also, there's Court of the Nine Chambers that we've sworn we'd play. And Donjon (I still have an adventure prepped). And I'd still like to get around to some In Nomine (whatinthehell system did we make characters with anyhow)?

Oh, but no Story Engine, please. I'll explain later. I'm thinking we can do the pulp game with maybe a stripped down HQ, or something with more director stance stuff.

Yeah, we have waaay too many things we need to get to.

Oh, I was just going with games I want to run. Getting me started on games I want to play...

Yep, PTA. And yes, Co9C. And Donjon. TROS. All sorts of stuff.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Me... I just want to run my "Hardest Working Band in Sartar" HeroQuest game. I can see all the characters:

- A huge, hulking, scowling axe-man with a mess of tangled black hair, devoted to one of the Thunder Brothers.
- A whip-thin, philosophical, straight-edge singer, dedicated to studying the mysteries of Issaries, and spreading the message of freedom.
- A sexy, slightly chubby, purple-haired bass player named Violet, and an initiate of Yinkin. (Since this is the birthday forum, I can publicly fantasize, right?)
- Lastly, the drummer, an angry, dark, brooding devotee of Humakt - and a dulurz, of course.

They travel Sartar playing punk-folk, and fighting the Reds!

[Anonymous]

Hm. I want to run My Life With Master.

I want to run my backwards chronology game, The Time Commandoes, where each session leads into the previous one. I'd probably use OTE or maybe Everway rules.

Classic CoC, with some of the best adventures Chaosium published.

Delta Green, with some of the creepiest adventures from Pagan Publishing, especially anything John Tynes ever wrote.

7th Sea, with some system that is simple enough for me but lets the players have fun with all the crunchy bits and really buckle a swash.

L5R, with a seriously epic sweep.

Tribe 8, with a system I can get a handle on.

Blue Planet, ditto.

In larps:

Jamais Vu, which I'm doing the 3rd draft of, and will be helping to run this month.

Dark of the Moon, which my cohorts and I have been working on for, I think, nearly a decade.

Colonel Sebastian T. Rawhide's Circus of the Spectacular, which we may be running in the fall at Columbia University.

I may be an old fashioned plot centered power hogging gm, but at least it's a far cry from the days when my ambition was limited to running the G1-3 D1-3 S1 AD&D modules.

-Lisa

[DannyK]

I want to run a Sorcerer spies game inspired by Tim Powers' Declare.  

I want to run My Life With Master as a pirates game.  

I'd like to run Sorcerer again, this time with Mafia necromancers.

Finally, I'd like to run a post-apocalyptic superhero game, just to say I did.  

Since I only play PBEM these days and have an ongoing campaign, check back with me in 2005...

Danny

[hix]

Tunnels and Trolls with an Amazing Race format for each session.

Alyria - because I've delayed on it for so long.

A hyper-intense campaign of Robots and Rapiers, with the reward system geared to go through a full character transformation in 4 or 5 sessions.

MLwM - because I just bought it and it makes me smirk.

My "You start as kids of demigods and explore a frozen world of evil and travel to a parallel universe" game using old Al-Qadim supplements and the Manual of the Planes, but transporting everything into the Heroquest system and playing everything much looser than the almost-novel I've got plotted in my head.

Steve.