scattershot pitches

[Marshall Burns]

Ok, I've been trying to hold back from doing this all day, but I think I might explode if I don't.

The following are abstracts of game concepts that I have.  For some of these I have already done some design work, in some cases a Considerable amount of design work.  But what I want to know is, off-hand, off the top of your head, given only the information here provided, which ones do you respond to, if any?  Why do they (or don't they) appeal to you?
I'm not design input on them per se (at least at present), just trying to figure out which ones are most evocative and eye-catching.

(See, the problem is I've gained a wash of inspiration & insight just here recently, and I'm having difficulty deciding which one to focus on at present--so I thought I'd just take a random sample of what seemed interesting to other people)

The Rustbelt
Play an inhabitant of a lawless, mostly abandoned land, where the Rust slowly eats not only the old machines and ghost towns, but the laws of science and reason as well.  For the people left here, life is nasty, brutal, and short.  How long can you survive, and what are you willing to do to make it?  What will you do to give your short life meaning?


American Wizards
You are a student at the American Institute of Wizard Arts, where you will take courses on not only magical arts but every art known to man (and some unknown to man).  Compete for scholarships, participate in generally inadvisable research projects, go on wild and crazy inter-planar summer road trips.  Will you pursue sheer Power, the beauty of the Art itself, Prestige and the respect of your fellows, or the Total Freedom, freedom from death, time, and the body itself, of a true Master?


Grim
In this gothic fantasy tale of horror and adventure, you find yourself stranded in the isolated village of Grimstadt, deep in the unknown Grim River Valley, somewhere in mainland Europe.  The Valley is ruled by a widowed sorceress who, in her grief and madness, has unleashed hordes of unspeakable creatures into the Valley.  Only if she is stopped can peace come to the Valley.  The people of Grimstadt believe you were sent by heaven to help them; do you have what it takes to do it?  Or are you concerned only with getting out of there alive?


Big Top
You are a clown in a traveling circus.  An evil clown.  You feed on the fear of children like a vampire feeds on the blood of innocents.  You and the other clowns must keep your despicable activities a secret from the other members of the circus, but your hunger burns and won't let you stop feeding for long.  Plan, plot, politick, manipulate, and backstab your way into a position where you may feed freely and no one can stop you.  But watch your back:  it's lonely at the Big Top.


Witch Trails
A rough-ridin', rip-snortin' journey through the part of the West that they don't tell you in history books; where the frontier was still wild and magical, where a man had to know not only how to sling a gun but how to sling a hex.  They struck their claims, made their bets, and fought their battles with invisible forces—and when the dust cleared, they were gone.  Take a look behind that curtain and see how the West was really won.


Ignorant Armies (inspired by the works of William S. Burroughs)
A surreal, violent, hardboiled game of secret ops and intrigue, where the agents are all double agents twice over, and agents come to believe their own cover story.  As one of these agents, the glaring question of "Who is really in charge here?" leads you to more questions.  Search for the answers without alerting Control to your suspicions – who/whatever Control really is.  But are you prepared to go where those questions take you?  Can you withstand, subvert, or defeat Control?  You are walking the edge, where reality is fragile as an onion peel; can you face what lies beneath it?



So there they are.  What are your first thoughts regarding these first thoughts?  Gimme your raw, visceral reaction -- or lack of it.  I wanna know whether this stuff sings.

[earwig]

The two that catch my eye are Big Top and Ignorant Armies.  (more on them in a sec)

The American Wizards one might be interesting, but the tone of the game would definatley make or break interest in the game.  Is it straight, a farce, a spoof, etc?  I can see it as this as an American Harry Potter (which means it would be much like Harry Potter with more swearing), a Miskatonic type setting, or something kind of whacky like Teenagers from Mars (which is kind where I think you're leaning.  In this case, it could be a whole lot of fun.  Especially playing up the sterotypes (jock, nerd, cheerleader) but through the eyes of American wizards.

As for Big Top...I like the idea.  Is this for a one-shot type of game or an extended game?  The reason I ask is that if you see it as more of a one-shot, you might want to expand the idea to encompass more concepts of character.  Rather than just clowns, perhaps you can design your own "circus folk" from Clowns, to Sideshow Freaks, to The Strongman, or what ever.  I'm seeing "Something Wicked This Way Comes" RPG. 

The Ignorant Armies idea could be fun.  Would this be a set conspiracy or just a generic web of conspiracies for the players and GMs to create, investigate, and take apart? 

[JohnG]

Rustbelt:  Very cool idea, is this meant to be a game of short campaigns?  The challenge will be keeping things dangerous enough to be interesting for experienced characters while not making things super hard for new PCs.  How bad will things be?

American Wizards:  Same questions as the ones earwig posed, what kind of theme and mood would you be shooting for?  Sounds like a fun idea though.

Grim: Here's a game with an ending built in, is this your plan or do you want to expand beyond it?  I just worry the game might end up feeling more like a complicated campaign than a game.  Premise is very interesting though, perhaps this is a problem that is afflicting more than one location and allows continued play, unless you want it to be a game with an obvious end?

Big Top: Looks very competitive, what about the other side of the coin though?  Who's out to stop these guys?

Witch Trails: Just make sure you take a look at Deadlands because this idea will be compared to it constantly.  Not to say yours might not ultimately be very different, just thought I'd let you know where people's heads are going to go and what you'll want to stand apart from, or try to be better at.

Ignorant Armies: Interesting, it would be fun to run a whole campaign only for the PCs to find out they really were working for the good guys and now they're the bad guys!!  LOL

All in all good ideas, will be interesting to see how they evolve.  I know my project Ember started out as something totally different from what it is now heh.



 

[earwig]

I was thinking on the American Wizards idea, if you are going for a more comedy approach, it might be pretty cool to add some LARP rules in there as well.  After all, who wouldn't want to LARP Animal House with magic?

In all seriousness though, if you were going with the Wizard School idea, you might want to consider allowing the gaming group to design their own school.  Something similar to desgning a Chantry In Nobilis.  Once characters design their own schools, set up a Forum/Wiki/WebSite to support this and let them go at it.  Rival Schools and what not.  Your entire world could build itself through fan/player input.

Just a thought...

[Ken]

Of the lot, I'd say American Wizards is the most intriguing to me. As a whole though, I'd say you have the seeds to some really cool games. One of the things I do when I come with game ideas is jot them down and then pick at them when I get tired of looking at my current project. Its a nice diversion when I get blocked, and sometimes taking a break and coming back allows for a more creative perspective.

Good luck with all of them.

Ken

[Marshall Burns]

All right, thanks for the response, everyone!

I'ma address you one at a time, to keep from confusing myself.  K?

earwig:

American Wizards has a good deal of humor, even silliness, in it, but I hesitate to call it whacky (certainly not Teenagers from Mars whacky); most of the humor is ironic.  But, seriously, if you read the pitch and the first thing you thought was "Harry Potter," then I've got a problem, because it's not really similar at all (if I was going to compare it to any literary school of magic, it would be Terry Pratchett's Unseen University);  people who were into Harry Potter would be disappointed when they got the game into their hands, and people who hate Harry Potter would avoid it on principle.  Hm.  Gotta think about how to word that one.

As for LARP, I've never understood how it works.
And I have a very specific school in mind, with very specific policies and a very specific character to it, and even rival schools (the arch-rival is BIWA, the British Institue of Wizard Arts, where they still wear robes and wave wands around; that stuff is so 15th century).  What I mean is that I have a clear vision of the setting and I'm very egotistical.  However, although several features of the school will be established by the text (for example, the Franklin Tower of Natural Science, nicknamed the Lightning Rod; the labyrinthine Borges Memorial Library, where students sometimes get lost for days; and Lovecraft Tower, home of the Department for Cthonic Studies, nicknamed the Forbidden Tower -- which adjoins, via a bridge at the upper levels, the Dreaming Chambers of Castaneda Tower), there's always room for adding more to it.  AIWA is a very colorful, sprawling, free-form place.

Re: Big Top, I was thinking of an extended campaign.  I also invisioned the PCs all playing clowns, competing for the right to feed among other clowns, while simultaneously deluding and manipulating the non-evil members of the circus to their own ends.

As to Ignorant Armies, hell yes the GM and players would get to establish their own conspiracies.  The more layered and convoluted the better.  Bonus points if you can work in black marketeering, drug trafficking, the Vatican (or any other religious group), lots of foreign nations, Interpol, MJ-12, the Masons, and the alteration of reality on a subtle and fundamental basis.  To get an idea of what I'm going for with this, rent the Cronenberg film Naked Lunch and imagine that all the intrigue was real and not just the result of the protagonist's drug-addled mind (alternatively, you could read the entire, or at least most of them, works of William S. Burroughs, but that would take a lot longer).


StrongBadMun:

Yeah, the Rustbelt focuses on short scenarios.  But the power curve is very low, and advancement is skill based, so there's not terribly much difference between fresh characters and experienced ones.  How bad will it be?  Pretty rough.  The combat is especially harsh; a bullet or slash in the right place can kill you right off, or maybe you'd just lose a limb (it's encouraged to avoid combat whenever possible).  The Rustbelt is the kind of place where people stop up bullet wounds with wine corks just so they can go that extra mile before they die.

Grim is intended for one-shot play.  However, there's a process that has to be gone through to take down Genevieve (the sorceress), and this can be altered or replaced outright for each game.  Plus, you could try playing it with different characters (this is the only one of these games with a class-based character system).

I'll be sure to check out Deadlands.  Although the past few days, Witch Trails has not let me think about anything else (so it's probably what I'm going to focus on now), and it's already developed into a more focused concept.  See the new pitch below.

Your remark on Ignorant Armies is exactly one of the two outcomes I would love to see in the game.  (The other is very metaphysical and, well, Burroughsian).


Ken:
I do the exact same thing with my projects


new pitch:
Witch Trails: the Invisible History of the American West
Blending the darkness and mystery of a Washington Irving tale with the virility and tension of a Sergio Leone film, this game tells the story of the Hex Rangers, created by secret order of President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, to curb, tame, drive out, and otherwise eliminate the heathen spirits inhabiting the Louisiana Purchase and the rest of the American wilds.  As the Frontier went west, the Hex Rangers went with it, before the settlers and before the pioneers.  They cut their trails, layed their bets, and wrestled with invisible forces--and when the dust cleared, there was no sign they had ever been there.  From the night shadows, they kept a safe watch over us until they were disbanded in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt.  Take a look behind the veil of history and find out how the West was really won.

[earwig]

Don't just go by my comments on American Wizards.  I thought Harry Potter, but no one else brought it up.  So maybe it's just me.  Ironically, I don't know anything about Harry Potter other than it made some woman very rich.   I saw the first movie when it came out, and read the first half of the first book.  So, my assumption was an assumption based on other assumptions.    Seriously, don't worry that people might confuse the two because I did.  I don't know what I'm talking about.

Now Burroughs, I know what I'm talking about.  If you want to play the closest thing out there that I've found to a WSB rpg, look into Over the Edge.  The Edge (the city that is the primary setting for the game) is someone's idea of Interzone.  However, it also has some of the most original and downright cool stuff I've seen in an RPG.  If you haven't already, check it out!  You wont be disappointed.

I thought Deadlands too when I read Witch Trials.  There is a bit of difference, right off the bat.  From what I read of your pitch (especially in the new one) is that these folks are kind of clandestine, right?  They really existed but we never heard about them because no one wanted us to know.  A sort of X-files in the wild west.

Deadlands is an alternate history, where magic and monsters are pretty much commonly accepted.  There's really no need to keep it all secret.  But I do agree with StrongMan, people will probably compare the two immediately.  But don't let that discourage you!  It would be near impossible to create anything that someone wouldn't inevitably try to compare to something else.  Your strength seems to lie in your solid vision, so stick with that vision and you'll be fine.  If I were you, I might not check out Deadlands until after you finish Witch Trials.  Let your creativity take its course.  If you approach it with fear of it resembling aspects of another game, you may cut out things for the sake of integrity, while in reality those concepts were perfectly unique in their own right.  By having nothing to compare it to yourself, you know that your game is 100% your creation with no influence (one way or another) from another.  Look at my assumptions about your American Wizards idea.  I latched it to something that I know very little about.  I went ahead and made a paralelll betwem a game I have not seen or played (that hasn't even beeen created yet!) to a series of books and movies that I've had minimal contact with.  After your response, I see that you are going for something completely different, but I immediately compared it to a solid piece of pop culture, whether I was qualified to make that comparison or not.  Long story short-Make the game you want to make how you want to make it, because inevitably someone will come along and make those comparisons anyway.  Just my 2.5 cents.

[Castlin]

I gotta say I thought Harry Potter for American Wizards at first glance too. I think anything set in a school of magic is going to be in Rowling's shadow for quite some time.

Grim sounds like it could be a good board game as well as an RPG, particularly if you gave it some RPG elements.

For Rustbelt.... you mentioned that Rust is eating the fabric of reality? Can that ever work out in the players' favor? Might you, for some reason, not die when shot in the head?

Ignorant Armies sounds like it would be very tricky to make good adventures for.

I had other comments but the cat has decided to displace the laptop... I'll get back to you

[Marshall Burns]

earwig:

I already checked out Deadlands, and I immediately said "Aw, dammit," until I realized that the similarities were only superficial -- the big one is that both use playing cards and poker chips, but in very different ways.

I gotta admit that "sort of X-files in the wild west" is, in a nutshell, what Witch Trails is about. 

And, yeah, maybe you're right, I probably shouldn't worry about the Harry Potter comparison.  I mean, I've read all the Harry Potter books (as well as numerous other books that included schools of magic), and *I* know that it's unrelated to American Wizards, so that's good enough.

You must direct me to where I can read about this Over the Edge.  I gotta check it out.


Castlin:

The Rust has allowed certain things that were impossible before, like magic, and people also sometimes discover objects of great value or power in the least likely of places, as though they were placed there randomly.  Other than that, the Rust is malignant.  Although it's still possible to survive being shot in the head.  It just depends on how good the shooter was and how big the gun was.

Yeah, Ignorant Armies probably will be tricky.  I'm holding off on developing it until I get a few finished games under my belt.


Everyone, thanks again for your thoughts.  Even if I don't let on about it, they have been very helpful.

[earwig]

Sure thing.  Here's the publisher's website:
http://www.atlas-games.com/overtheedge/

Trust me, if you're a fan of Burroughs, you are going to LOVE this.  I believe WSB is actualy quoted on the first couple of pages. 

However, there are only two issues with this game (and only one is realy legit):

1) The main book is not entirely complete.  It refers to other supplements quite a bit.  Don't get me wrong, you will have NO problems getting a game going with only the main book, there's plenty of stuff here to mine for ideas.  But to me, after a few times of looking up a character or locations and seeing only (See Other Supplement, pxx), I felt like the game was kind of incomplete.  As far as I know, they have not realeased these as a PDF, and I've never seen them in a FGS, so they have to be ordered.  So it's really more of a pain than a real problem.  But I still HIGHLY recommend this game, especially if you are a fan of Burroughs, or surrealism in general. 

2)This is the one that isn't really a legit problem, but most of the book if for GMs only.  There are three major, and several minor conspiracies, happening across the island.  Of course, there's always room for more.  However, if you are not a GM and you read most of the book, you will miss out on a lot of the fun.  Some of the things on the island are so amazingly cool that a GM can't help but smile at the possabilities.  Unfortunately, the coolness of a lot of these concepts is contingent on the players being in the dark about them.  However, if you are planning on GMing this whole rambling is moot, anyway,   The system is so easy that your players will get it within minutes if not seconds.  They also offer a players guide which includes just the rules and some basic info on the setting.  Then again, if you're a fan of WSB, you're probably going to want to GM this anyway.

[earwig]

I take that back, about the PDFs.  They have two PDFs available for download:

http://e23.sjgames.com/search.html?keywords=&publisher=&author=&gsys=Over+the+Edge&genre=&type=&price_lo=0&price_hi=&sortby=alphaAZ

[Marshall Burns]

Wow.  That is definitely next on the list of games that I have to buy.

But I am way off-topic.


Anyway, I've decided to develop Witch Trails first (got a rough draft of rules written up already, will hopefully be playtesting tonight), so I guess this thread's served its purpose.