I've been thinking about two of my Gamechef 2006 designs: <a href="http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/The_Marriage_of_Persephone.php">Marraige of Persephone and <a href="http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/One_More_Hour.php">One More Hour, as well as some (as yet still offline) setting and story ideas. I'm about ready to take my 2006 designs and start rebuilding them, and one of the critical elements that I want to preserve is the potential synergy between these games. On one hand you have the heroics of One More Hour and on the other the idea of your return from the dead (and the time you have left in general) being based on the more "mundane" actions of Marraige of Persephone.

The basic idea is two distinct systems, joined at moments of death and rebirth. Now I see several ways to work these two games:

1) Underworld first, as a fever dream for the heroes, bringing them resources which can escape even certain death.

2) Heroics first, with the underworld as a follow-up to see if the heroes paid the piper or if they only dreamed their victory (this seems less enjoyable to me, if only because it can remove an otherwise satisfying conclusion).

3) Interspersed, when a character dies they pass into the underworld. Logistically, this would suggest a game that rapidly tends towards total party kills, just to keep the players in one system or another.

Reasonably, I can see any of these working, I'd like some suggestions about which approach might be best, and generally any thoughts on syngeristic pairs (or multiples) of RPG systems.

  - Mendel S.

Hey Mendel.

I once created a game which ran over quite a few roleplaying systems.

Our first game, happened in the jungles of cambodia, in a Recon game, as soldiers ( vietnam veterans ), this game quite quickly ended, in a large end scene. this was the passage to a Vampire the Masquerade game, where they played through the embrace, and the act of becoming a vampire.

the vampire game stopped, as the vampires where brutally slain by their vampire progenitor. from this system the same characters where changed to Wraith characters. After their wraith scenario they should help save the universe, and get to the pearly gates, in order for them to become angels.

Unaffortunately for them, they where cast from the pearly gates, they had in a previous incarnations been vampires, so they where cast to the pits of hell, and therefore was for ever barred from heaven. Now should follow a game like Spawn ( which we never came around to playing ) having fought in the great wars in hell, they where to be reincarnated into a game of Cyberpunk 2020 ( or equivalent ) at the end of this game, the world would have a great leap in technology, inventing the hyper drive ( strangely enough recreating them as star Wars characters )

the order of the circle should have come to a conclusion as their interstellar freighter should touch down on a strange planet, with orcs, dragons, elves and dwarves, and humans. A game of regular Advanced dungeons and Dragons.

This never came to bear, though, as my gaming group split up before we even could start on the game.

I came to think of your idea.

Could you play the underworld sequences as their dreams? and in some way making the underworld sessions giving them strange clues about the things happening in the heroics game?

Chris

Chris,

I've done my share of the linking disparate systems / settings. In this case, part of the interesting element is designing two games with distinct goals for the sense of play, but ensuring that they seemlessly link to produce a larger game itself, meeting the full design goals. I admit the dream idea (nominally #1) is enticing. I'd need to be careful about foreshadowing, as it stands the games are GMless.

This is by necessity for the Game Chef entries, but I like to carefully examine how the GM role fits, and whether and in what specific way they are empowered - rather than just leaving part of the game open and saying the GM does everything not assigned to someone else.

  - Mendel S.