'Nother Swap Meet: Game Concepts

[Shreyas Sampat]

I know that a bunch of us have some idea for games that they just don't want to write. Throw it up here, see if someone wants to claim it and do something to it.

My offering:

An Art Nouveau technofantasy that's gotten over that period of optimistic scifi madness, and is slipping into high fantasy decline. The great empires of the past - Jesusland, The United States of Canadia, what have you, have fallen into disarray at the proliferation of self-modifying technology. The PCs are from one of those anti-technological religions, driven underground for a while and just now reemerging, strangers in a strange land, torn between the familiarity of their old cultural ties and the slick, effortless, foreign world around them, that threatens to alienate them from everything they have loved.

[Jonathan Walton]

I'll play.

So there's this limited series-style game concept, called like The Beasts of Eden, or something like that.  And you play the animals in the Garden before and after The Fall.  So like I'm Female Moose and Male Moose, and you're Male Mongoose and Female Mongoose.  And there are a series of pre-planned events that take place over the course of the game: the animals' Creation, the Creation of Man, Adam's Naming of the Animals, the Creation of Eve, Satan sneaking into the Garden, the eating of the Apple, sickness and death entering Eden (some animals become carnivores), Adam and Eve getting expelled, and, eventually, the animals' choosing to leave Eden and go out into the world.  And the point of the game is how the animals choose to respond to these events (inevitably, by making their own plans).  It is also about the changing relationship between the animals and God, who favors the humans so heavily and places them above the animals.

[Sean]

In his capsule biography of Isaac Babel, whose Red Cavary stories I recommend highly, Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

In early 1921, Babel joined a Cossack regiment. Those blustering and useless warriors (no one in the history of the universe has been defeated more often than the Cossacks) were, of course, anti-Semitic. The mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain and spite. A couple of well-timed and flashy exploits enabled Babel to make them leave him in peace.

I can think of at least two role playing games I'd like to write based on this quotation.

I would add that based on my limited knowlede of Babel's actual physical condition and biography Borges' inference about his virtu is likely false. That's only relevant to one of the two games though.