This week's musing - what's the campaign you've always wanted to play in or run that hasn't happened. This can be a particular genre, or a setting, or just an outre concept that you think is really cool that no one else buys into.
Obviously this blog is an attempt for me to spear, or at least spot, some of my white whales, such as last months Legion of Super-Heroes game that I've been musing on in one form or another since the DC Heroes RPG came out in 1985. Others, however, might be to massive and wily for me to consider even here.
As a player I don't think I've ever had a chance to really play RuneQuest. OK I played in a few sessions of big rubble looting after college with some RQ true believers but it didn't last long and I don't think the GM ever conveyed the real mythic feel of the place. (He was, to his defense, a player from a different long standing group who was trying to start up a new one with a bunch of relatively inexperienced gamers and not a lot of GMing experience under his belt, and I was a later addition to the group.) RuneQuest may be the first 'culture' RPG and as such I'd love a chance to actually get a sense of that culture in play rather than just reading snippits here and there.
As a GM, Hrm, I think I have to go with my mad 'Whispers in the Twilight' campaign concept. It's a Twilight 2000/Psi-World/Cyberpunk mash up where the game starts in the standard T2K frame of the players being the last remnants of a NATO unit in Poland at the end of WWIII having to fight their way home. It turns out the residual radiation/bioagents are slowly awakening psi-powers in people. Some members of the company, naturally, start to show evidence of these powers. Eventually the group (or some remnants of it) make their way home.
At that point the campaign shifts to 20 years in the future, where the T2K world has become the cyberpunk 2020 setting but with psi-powers. In that every man for himself environment the PCs are linked by their wartime experiences even as they have otherwise drifted apart (into various Cyberpunk archetypes of course). I don't have a major plot in mind for the back half of the game, just the feeling of of these setting meshing together with the bonds between the characters being tested by the harsh Cyberpunk society. Alas, I've never found a player group interested in it.
That's mine. What's yours?
Plans for 2024: Creation of an NSR setting for super-heroes; My D&D 3E campaign as an example of sandboxing via published adventure, and likely more.
The two I've pitched several times but never got enough votes to run are:
ReplyDelete"The King's Merveilleux" -- Superheroes in Musketeer France!
"The Raven Project" -- this is one I've been thinking about for years: an attempt to do a roleplaying campaign that's explicitly a novel. My template is modern thriller plus Lovecraft with the serial numbers filed off. I may just have to write the damned book instead.
"The King's Merveilleux" sounds pretty cool, actually.
DeleteAs a player, I regret not playing in some specific Call of Cthulhu scenarios ("Fade to Grey") and campaigns (Masks of Nyarlathotep, Tatters of the King, Beyond the Mountains of Madness...)
ReplyDeleteAs a GM, I regret never running a Legend of the Five Rings campaign. I think the window for that has passed, and I'm more interested in running other things. So it goes.
If memory serves you've run some of those CoC campaigns, just not played in them, correct?
Deleteas to L5R, yeah, I can see that both in the initial interest and the current lack thereof. I know a few people who still play it now and again but somehow it feels like a game whose initial flare is past. The idea of why some games do that is an interesting thing to ponder....
I have run some of those campaigns, yes, which is why playing in them probably isn't happening for me.
DeleteThere are few white whales for me. I love the idea of ARS MAGICA with the troupe play and the extended saga reminiscent of PENDRAGON, but I've never had a proper try at playing in or GMing an ArM campaign. That's about the only long-standing game I've never run that I'd love to try with the right group. In a sense I've speared the PENDRAGON white whale, but I never reached the end of the grand campaign, so my strength failed before I landed the beast.
ReplyDeleteSince college I have tended to flit from game to game and setting to setting. I used to pitch game prospectuses to my group here more frequently but only ended up sad for the potential games I never got to play.
Oooooh, Ars Magica. There's a classic whale right there. One I've never seriously considered hunting, but i love the stories of those who have....
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