ideas

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Campaign Seeds

I love coming up with little campaign seeds. It might be my favorite forum activity other than accessing information and benefiting from others’ wisdom.

There is a Story Games Thread.

Here are mine so far…

Some D&D stuff:

Githyanki Silver Swords – Red Dragon Riders scout over prime material worlds and get into adventures, seeing worlds as extended dungeons filled with treasure.

Siege to Hell – A tight posse of paladins and priests gather their holy symbols and weapons in order to destroy hell once and for all, a 1-30 D&d 4e campaign.

Darkpages? With Great Power…? Capes?:

Punch the World – Iconic high powered super heroes punch newspaper headlines, making a better today.

And this one’s obvious:

The Last Watchdog Over the Faithful – A solo campaign in a wild west that never was and has moved on, starting off in a ghost-town called Bridal Falls, winding through what is left of the Desert Territory and ending Back East.

Man, I really want to run this last one. I dig on that a whole lot. The Last Dog…

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SotC Idea: Change the Century

From this thread.

Okay, characters don’t get better over time. That is fine with me. We did some suggestions in the book for character advancement and they felt flat to me when we played. I suggest we ditch ’em.

You don’t change your character, you change the world.

After every game (or after each arc, if you don’t finish a pulp novel’s worth of adventure per session), you see who spent the most Fate Points in the course of play. That player gets to add an aspect to the world or change the wording of an existing aspect

This means that world aspects will quickly add up. But only a few are used in each game. At the beginning of each game, each player (GM included) can choose one world aspect that is in play in order to avoid ten world aspects just kind of falling on top of one another in a clutter.

World Aspects can be anything that is inspired from the game’s play, from anti-vigilante laws in Gotham to flying cars become affordable to Gorilla City’s first ambassador greets U.S. president. They work just like aspects.

Pulp characters do not change but dammit, at the gaming table, they should change the world.

So, here’s how I’d picture it working.

You have been playing for a while, a dozen adventures, a dozen different aspects.

Let’s say they are:

Flying cars
Ape City Embassy in NYC
Tyrian Deathlord Spies are EVERYWHERE!
Dracula’s Children want revenge
Cthulhu is no longer dreaming
Century Club has the Queen’s ear
The Hellfire Club controls the U.S. Government
Colonized Mars
Rocket-Packs for every Boy Scout
Vigilante-ism illegal in U.S.
Americans love science heroes!
Zeppelin City draws the finest scientists in the world

Okay, when you start play, you do not play with every single one of those Aspects in play. That’d be nuts.

Let’s say you are playing with four people, three PC’s and a GM. Each player (GM INCLUDED) chooses an aspect to go with the adventure. Hopefully, the players know the pitch.

The aspects might or might not play into the adventure but they are there to be tagged and such if it comes up.

So I tell the players, they will be playing Zombie Kong and the Lightning Zombies attack New York City.

They choose:

Dracula’s Children want revenge
Rocket-Packs for every Boy Scout
Ape City Embassy in NYC
Americans love science heroes!

See, they didn’t pick Vigilanteism Illegal in U.S., so it won’t be an issue in this game. Sure, it still exists but the cops look the other way, especially as Zombie Kong is rampaging through their city, on his way to the Empire State Building during a thunderstorm that could make him nigh invulnerable, plus, the guy who plays the Shadow-inspired character couldn’t make it that week.

Also, I’d want the players to be able to zone in on an Aspect and ask that it be the center of an adventure, resolving it somehow.

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Sorcerer on the Brain

Aaron, Pete and I got together and made characters for the colonized sci-fi solar system setting I have been tinkering with. I am pleased with how it turned out.

Link to AP thread here.

Now to gaze at their character sheets like a fortune teller stares at bird guts and cook up some bangs.

Also, James Nostack PMed me about this setting that I had entirely forgotten about. I stuck it into my google doc files for later tinkering.

Looking back at it, I am interested in making this setting with pre-made demons, a set list to draw on and summon with relationships between them including Desires and Needs that play off one another.

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Feudalism and the Solar System’s Demons

I am loving the games I am playing lately. The D&D game, though intermittent, is good, solid fun. The Burning Wheel orc game is gearing up towards an epic conclusion in the next few months. The Burning Wheel game with Aaron and Pete is a great way to welcome them both back to Ithaca, not to mention, the game play is fucking keen. Aaron knows BW really solidly and it is a joy to be able to game with Pete again after so many years apart. And the Houses of the Blooded game is going well, with a few new system hiccups (mental note: write about last week’s game) but still solid stuff.

But man, am I growing sick of nobles, lords and swords. I am excited about each game in turn but lawdy, medieval feudalism is driving me nuts a little bit. I think my frustration with it will drive me to write a setting about the transition from a king to a republic, something like Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy (mental note: finish reading the Westmark trilogy).

To everyone in any of those games, I am not sick of any of those games. I want to keep playing them. I am not punking out or looking for something new and shiny, just venting.

This frustration got together with listening to Richard K. Morgan’s Thirteen on audiobook, reading Christopher Kubasik’s Traveller ala Sorcerer hack and coming up with a science fiction Sorcerer hack of me own, The Solar System’s Demons.

I love the idea of the Solar System as a setting; it tickles me. Between planets and moons and just asteroids or planetoids and so on, it is a rich place.

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DarkPages: Zeppelin City Imprint

“A few friends of mine are moving back into town and I was excited to read that DarkPages prefers a GM and one or two players. I have been enjoying those smaller groups lately quite a bit.

So, I jotted down notes on an old idea, Zeppelin City and modernized it, taking the optimistic Spirit of the Century shine off of it.

Rather than Z.C. being a place of gleaming super-science and post WWI hope, it has become a floating slum where the various over-used comic book tropes rub up against one another.”

Link to Forge post here.

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Let me tell you about my character…

Bret posted setting notes for our soon-to-come house game of D&D.

Paladins of the Raven Queen exist in order to facilitate the end of the world in a graceful manner.

There is one consort to the queen per generation and my character is driven to be the one. Once he has been sworn in as a demi-god lover to the Goddess of the Apocolypse, he will petition her for one more glorious golden age, one more chance for humanity, for the children of the gods.

I think his name is Elias Corvus and he has black feathers on his armor.

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Posting Mad Ideas

One of the things I used to like about posting a whole lot on RPG.net was posting threads where we could share our mad ideas, threads that provided space for others to create or asked others to make something mad to toss on the gaming table for more madness to occur.

I missed that kind of stuff.

So, I posted one.

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The Masks are Always On

This isn’t Gotham or Metropolis or D.C., this is Los Angeles. The super-heroes out here are different. They don’t take their masks off after saving the world. Instead they go out to the Viper Room, do a line of coke and sleep with a starlet. Old, traditional luchadores culture has mixed with Hollywood glitz to create a strong brew of capes, cowls and punching all manner of shit for justice.

Leave that phone booth shit or that playboy act for back east. Out here, everyone’s wearing a mask, whether you see it or not.

I’m reading here and there about luchadores, making a booklist on my goodreads page with things I want to look up and read over.

It is unclear to me where my recent interest in these masked Mexican wrestlers started from but it has reached a fever pitch while reading Hoodtown, a delightful noir novel where the protagonist is a former heel, now middle-aged has-been with a bum knee luchadora. I’ll write more about this delightful book later. It deserves its own post.

Luchadores are pretty much super-heroes. But there is a crucial difference. They don’t take their masks off. They don’t eff around with this secret identity Peter Parker/Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark bullshit. They save all of Mexico from vampires, martians or Dracula and then go out to dinner in a suit, tie and their mask.

They wear it out to dinner with a dame on their arm. Of course they wear the damned mask. Why take it off? It is a sign of their good deeds and often, a family heirloom handed down from their fathers.

I’m sure this has something to do with mask’s place in Mexican culture, something to look into later.

What interests me about it is how it differs from gringo super-heroes and in a way how it feels more honest. If you saved the day with a mask that was handed to you by your father, that made you feel like a better person and reminded you to always wrestle for justice, why would you take it off?

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Authority meets Ex Machina

Every once in a while I get a hankering for some super-hero gaming and we just never quite get around to it.

My newest idea is The Authority meets Ex Machina. The players are world-shaking political leaders in their secret identities and are world-shaking super-heroes when they put their capes on. At the start of the game, they are keeping their secret i.d.’s but I’d expect the world will change radically when the character’s mild-mannered identities are presidents, prime minister and maybe dictators all part of the same super-team.

I like the idea of a Tony Starkish guy, sneaking away from the Secret Service, putting on their armor and doing their thang. Prime Minister of India, an west Asian take on Wonder Woman, a warrior-queen with powers granted from higher powers. The Mayor of Moscow putting on cape and cowl to fight the Russian underworld during an election year.

They rule the world and in their free time, they fight crime, punch aliens and banish demons. Justice League and Avengers meets The West Wing.

I’ve been eyeing With Great Power… for ages and this would be a nice match with that game. And I’d love to hack on FATE some but it’d be a while before I had time to really get my fingernails dirty with Stunts as super-powers. Aspects as super-powers?

Something to think about.