Eh, a campaign I’m in is winding down.* I’ve thought about running a game for the people. I may not actually do so, because every game I’ve previously tried to run have been destroyed** by them, but I suppose I can waste some time with it.
Option 1: A combination game which is basically Planescape mixed with a homebrew world and rules set so people can use a wide array of magic, and where fighting, duels of the will, and socialization are lagely the same.
Option 2: Let’s play Warhammer 40K: the Role-Playing Game (except with rules plucked from another game, not their official game). The “Its so GRIMDARK it’s hilarious game.” Y’know, where the elves are all brooding goths, and the militant Adepta Sororitas barracks are strip clubs starring the battle nuns with chainsaws, and the Slaaneshi Chaos Marines are rock stars who charge into battle attacking with their chords and then meleeing by smashing people with the guitars.
Option 3: I’ve been kicking around the idea of a very symbolic game where attacks, socialization, and spells are largely the same. I dont" really have a world set up, but the rules are based around characters having 1-to-many “focuses”, which are symbolic objects which let them create effects.
*Plus, my character created the [Spathi voice]ULTIMATE EVIL[/Spathi voice], made it become Buddha, then was killed by the all-powerful aura of the Buddha he created. It probably wouldn’t have been eccessary except another character stuffed the two of them into a temporary pocket plane, which my character would not have survived. I was not realy amused, since I am now out of the game anyhow. I get to sit around and fiddle with my laptop until it’s over.
That said, all of your ideas strike me as trying too hard to be unique and clever (or uh, unique and silly, in the 2nd case). A little more subtlety would suit me better. Of course, I’m not -playing- in these games, so that’s not really a problem. Just floating a suggestion that might help make the mood of the game more manageable. And sustainable. Idea #2 would be fine for a oneshot or very short series, but I think would get tiresome rapidly after that. I don’t know anything about Planescape, so can’t offer anything on #1, and #3 is too vague to really say anything about.
Have you tried maybe shopping around for a published system? There’s a lot of really clever indie games out there these days.
I know somebody put out an Indiana Jones RPG, saw the rulebook in a game shop one day. I bet that would lend itself well to a generic pulp adventure game.
Well, there’s Spirit of the Century - it’s a Fate rules variant for playing… well, turn-of-the-century to sometime-pre-nazi pulp. It’s an excellent system and a lot of fun.
I’m a huge Planescape afficionado and am currently running an epic campaign there (my players managed to get hold of an abyssal layer and are trying their hand at demon lording. They find it… challenging), so if you want any specific pointers there, I’m your guy. I always think that yugoloths make great hooks to base a story on, and you only have to browse Faces of Sigil to get a plot idea. What kind of players will you have?
I’ve always liked the Space: 1889 setting (Think: British Empire on Mars), but the RPG system itself is completely useless and I’ve never met anyone who has actually played the game- just marvelled at the setting.
There’s also a Hong Kong Action Movie RPG (called Feng Shui) that I’ve heard good things about, too- but again, I don’t know anyone personally who has actually played it.
I’ve always thought these would be good settings for a RPG:
aboard a U.S. warship during the War of 1812 or the Civil War
something built around Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Starship Troopers
ditto, for Clarke’s Rescue Mission (lots of cool and/or offbeat aliens)
ditto, for Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series (interstellar war with genetically-engineered soldiers and some very nasty aliens)
ditto, for Martin’s Tuf Voyaging (going planet to planet, offering/threatening to tinker with their ecologies, end their wars or upend their societies)
Some or all of these might already be commercially available, but I don’t follow the biz too closely, so I don’t know.
I played in a Feng Shui game once. I don’t remember disliking it, but I also don’t remember much of anything about it. So I guess I barely count as having actually played it. I do dimly recall finding the initiative system a little punishing for people with low initiative scores though.
My system (which never got finished) was more “late medeival/early rennaissance”, on a seemingly more normal setting, but taking some of the classic fantasy tropes seriously. As in, there’s a lot of social complexity about dealing with spellcasters, but they are seen as perfectly ordinary. Even ordinary folk might know a couple magical tricks, although it’s not common. There’s racism ( between species). Elves and dwarves are few in number because they’re only hanging about to collect on a debt. They can’t collect on the debt because the King-Dragon-God got killed.
His great center of worship is now the “Sigil” of the setting, with numerous weird factions which have developed strange powers, some more flashy than others, but intended ot be a bit more playable (as in, no raging psychotics or “completely out-of-touch with reality”). This, unfortunately, is less fun than playing the crazies in PLanescape, but a bit more practical to run.
Other gods are based on various real panetheons, plus some I blatantly stole from DnD after changing the names. I was bored when writing that section. Unlike most settings, thought, you might well meet a God someday. They frequently hang out, and many are prone to running of with pretty girls or getting caught by cunning mortals. People worship them largely by telling embarassing stories about them.
The system was inspired by Legend of the Five Rings and Brave New World. I wanted to take those one step futher, though, so that no matter what you do with your character you can use it affect other things. There’s basically Combat, Will, and Social challenges. Success in one can (with the right choce of options) give you a better chance of success in another. The point is that you can have a character specialized in one area, or not, and still make a useful contribution in any situaton.
OK, your ideas are a huge deviation from the ‘standard’ Planescape setting, so I don’t know if the following idea fit in your campaign or not, but here it is nonetheless:
One stream of adventures I had with a group of rogue like players was when a group of githyanki came to Sigil to track one of their members who was on the run. This guy was due to be sacrificed to their god-queen, but decided that probably wouldn’t be very fun. He hid out in Sigil for obvious reasons (no access to gods) and became pretty high up as a factotum for the Takers. The githyanki trackers set up shop somewhere (in my camapgin it was a slaughterhouse, because it had a portal to the Astral plane to dispose of the refuge, but anything wil do) and went looking for their fugitive. Unfortinately, their actions were misinterperted by Shemeshka as a rivaling thief guild, and she hired the PCs to get rid of them. What followed was a James Bond/Mission Impossible-like adventure, where the PCs went undercover in several locations. They decided to help the githyanki get rid of the fugitive and the show down was in the Sigil Opera House, which was the only place where he was vulnerable to capture (by the way, the PCs were evil).
I was planning on writing up some more ideas, but I have to leave now. Maybe later this weekend I’ll post them.
Sure, that works. Despite the seemingly-“normal” setting, most monsters come around because Tiamat is eternally pregnant (her priests are utterly dedicated to exterminating her offspring and try to get them at the source). But the monsters can be anything at all. Meanwhile, there are the occaisional dimensional visitors, and it’s hardly unprecedented to see a weird-looking humanoid wandering about. The setting has various Native Americans (but weirder) and the city is common contact with semi-oriental nations.
And there are indeed all kinds of organizations, from rings of crooks and theives to merchants and so forth, and almost all are somehow spondored or alogned with a faction. The City has the most important aspect of Planescape: it’s a crazy near-anarchy run by a collection of insanely obsessed factions.
1889 I played once. We made it through the ‘make your character’ stage before figureing out the GM had no plans for an actual adventure.
Feng Shui, on the other hand, we played about 5 sessions of and had a blast. Player-types are important, though; you have to be able to embrace the ‘mindless action movie’ over-the-top-ness. My character was a cranky old ghost who was a sidekick to a time-travelling luchador. The fact that we were -not- the most bizarre thing in the game says a lot, I think.