Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

In the far future, elves, cat girls, golems, bipedal wolves and more battle with swords and sorcery...except the "sorcery" isn't. Sorcerers are people who are able to communicate with nanotech. Clerics are people who are able to communicate with the uploaded intelligences occupying Deus, a planet-wide computer . Wizards are the people who seek out, study and carefully hoard the surviving scraps of TL 11-13 technology. And the various races that now occupy the world were created as living toys during the decadent last days of humanity.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

So a world with gunpowder and electricity, but not the internal combustion engine.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

He didn't say that. Just that "vehicles" (and he probably means "airplanes") weren't stronger than dragons, not that engines didn't exist at all. Which is easy enough to postulate, since dragons can be arbitrarily tough. Especially in the early war period, the planes weren't all that powerful, either.

There might be an interesting story there. Suppose dragons were more powerful than early warbirds, but less powerful than later ones. As with so many things, technological development in the war threaten to make the traditional dragon-riding knights of the air obsolete. There might be nations with natural dragon resources that have an early advantage, only to be overcome by technological powerhouses. (Something like Japan-US in the Pacific.) Or internal struggles within a nation as to which path to take. Or a quantity-versus-quality choice (analogous to those difficult-to-manufacture Spitfires in the Battle of Britain).

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

They have the internal combustion system, it's just that dragons are really, really powerful, more than any weapon we could make even today, so they pretty much put a saddle with a turret on them and have someone ride them rather than build an airplane.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

If that isn't a typo, it sounds like something that would make interesting changes to economics.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Except that it's so hard finding Eternals to combust. They're not fond of being made into fuel, as you can imagine.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The wyrm dieth not; his fire is not quenched.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

right sorry, that was meant to be internal

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Operation Monster:

This is a monster hunters campaign composed entirely of monstrous PC's. As mundane humans are outclassed by monsters (generally humans should be limited to 200 points or less), the government has assembled a task force of monsters to fight back.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

In other words, Hellboy.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Agents of hades: A very different take on the monster hunting genre where in modern day the greek gods are real but are also just as horrible as they where in ancient myths, the PCs are normal people, taken and granted power by Hades in order to fight the threat that these other gods hold over all humanity.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Is it that close? I guess there's probably lots of room to play with the idea.

flying off the idea that hades is the most responsible of the olympians, I suppose. This idea would involve a lot of custom monster making, I think.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

That and besides some kidnapping attempts, hades is the least despicable of the gods compared to modern day ethics.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The Dome: In a small town out in the middle of nowhere a mysterious dome appears that blocks out any radio and wi fi signals from the outside. With no access to the outside world the societal structure of the town slowly begins to fade and the players are caught in the middle of it all...

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

So kind of like the Stephen King novel/TV series Under the Dome?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

'The poor' are able to over throw the corrupt government (but incapable of replacing it quickly enough) when a pesky media virus addicts the middle and upper classes to foolish tech that is too expensive for 'the poor'.

now PC have to navigate a world where any tech device is likely to enslave them (think maddness check in Cthulhu) all the info of the world at the fingertips but a very strong reason not to use it.

The timeline would be like this with players introduced at any point:

-The virus starts slowly

-"The poor" Organize

-The virus ...goes viral
(does not infect analog devices- also this is nearly impossible to tell)

-"The Poor" successfully start the coup- national media coverage and streaming news enslaves most of the world

-"The poor" have everything they want- to heck with a real government the media-slaves are one step form zombies anyway

-"Other threat" tries to take over the 1st world by low tech

-Armageddon/Apocalypse

-post-Apocalypse analog only future

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

........oh..............

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Admittedly, as far as I've read/seen for that one, it also includes an alien butterfly so...

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I actually stole that idea from a regular show episode... which admittedly might have been a parody of that book your talking about...

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Entirely possible. It's been done several times. The book was published in 2009, but as I recall, it's a fleshed out version of a short story he wrote in the 70s.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

See, for example, the "future" timeline in Dollhouse.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

There is nothing wrong with having an idea that someone else has had before. Really. Your implementation of the idea is likely to be totally different from theirs. Gurps books generally talk about the 'source material', literature and media that the genre and setting draws ideas from and aims to look like.

To say another work is similar to the idea you want to run means that you have a source to draw upon, and that your idea has been successfully implemented before. These are good things.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I know, I wasn't going to worry about it :)


The secret life of the musketeers: In the renasience you have heard about the musketeers, but what you may not have known is that they also had access to technology no one else at the time did, and went on missions that only the crown knew about. Basically steampunk meets secret agents meets pulp

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

It's A Horrible Life The player characters, each fairly normal inhabitants of the modern world are brought together by their mutual discovery that their community has mysteriously changed in that so far as anyone else knows, they were all killed sixteen years ago.

Haunted Stars It's said that "rules change in the Reaches" and so they do. On the edge of the galaxy things get strange as multiple universes bleed together. Colonies and ships disappear, computers become spontaneously sentient, people see strange visions, and the mana level rises to normal or even high. People who go there tend to be fugitives and refugees looking for a hiding place out of the reach of any kind of interstellar civilization. Or as in the case of the PCs, free traders who have been squeezed out of safer markets by the big concerns.

Sky Realm In the future, humanity and the various other races shaped from humanity have taken to floating island cities in order to escape a surface taken over by demons and magical mutations created by very high mana levels down there. Even up where civilization now lives the mana level is still high and the inhabitants use all of the Urban Fantasy tricks to support themselves in a kind of anachronism stew where enchanted replicas of Camaros share roadspace with 19th century carriages and "robots" that are actually golems. Fanciful flying boats and carriages cross the skies with magical animals used as mounts or draft animals.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Relicpunk: A very different take in the pulp genre where everypne knows about all the mystical voodoo that pulp heroes fight on a daily basis and in the midst of world war 2 a new type of weapons race has come to pass, one where the axis and allies fight each other to gain another mystical artifact for their arsenal

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Look at the HBO series, Cast a Deadly Spell, for inspiration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_a_Deadly_Spell

The sequel, Witch Hunt, was less good, but still may provide some useful ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Hunt_(1994_film)

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

meh... not quite.... think more if the Nazis from Indiana jones knew what the Ark of the Covenant did from the beginning and then managed to send in a spy with the box to open it with his eyes shut in the middle of a US embassy which prompted the allies to send out spies to find their own weapons of mass destruction. Not really something that's fantasy and noir mixed together....

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Ran a handful of ideas by my players to see what might fly on a prospectus (so a bit of a prospectus prospectus), and figured I'd share a couple that just didn't have the support they needed among my group, but that I think have promise.

Agents of the Pharaoh - Hatshepsut's agents struggle against the manipulations of her co-regent nephew, conspirators among the bureaucracy and priesthood, and rivals from beyond the frontier.

Zeerust - Teach green-skinned babes about love, give alien monsters a taste of raygun, and fight the spread of Space Communism, all while wallowing in the cliches of classic sci-fi.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Death shall have its dominion In a fairly standard fantasy world, a generally decent kingdom is fighting a protracted war with a thoroughly nasty enemy. This is a problem because all magic is death magic, powered by death and suffering. The good kingdom is having a hard time of it, because moral concerns hamper its use of magic.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Where would you put the PC's?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The PCs are agents of the crown, affiliated with the College of Magic. They may be mages, scholars of magic, soldiers who protect the mages, or various sorts of "fixers" the crown keeps on hand (i.e. "rogues", in FRP terms).

Their first task would be to investigate the disappearance of a major magical researcher, who was working on alternatives to death-mana, specifically pain.

The problem the PCs will run into is that magic and everyone associated with it have a really terrible reputation. Most people with clout will refuse to deal with them, and those who can't avoid it will tend to tell the PCs whatever will get them out the door quickest.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I don't know that I'd want to play in that campaign. Such a dark premise is a hard sell, but could be pretty cool if well-executed.

That said, you might find the books written by C.S. Friedman helpful, especially her current series. That first book is Feast of Souls, and the second is Wings of Wrath.

In those books, magic is powered by draining life-energy. A "witch" is someone who powers magic by slowly draining away her own life force. However, those who receive proper training know how to cast outward for an external source -- essentially, the life-force of some random person to whom a "Magister" mystically connects.

These people slowly waste away, and usually die before age 40 (for a Magister who practices seldom), and death before age 25 is not uncommon.

The key thing is, only the Magisters know they fuel their spells by consuming the souls of innocents. However, because people aren't completely clueless, they somehow associate the "wasting sickness" with Magisters, but have no idea of the reasons or the mechanism involved. They only know that when lots of Magisters are around, the wasting sickness appears more frequently and assume it's a side-effect of the spell-casting.

Moreover, since the Magisters don't know the identity of their sources (and really never want to know...), they don't know how close they are to draining them out, at any particular point. So, if things are about to come off the rails, the first step is to drain down their reservoirs, so as to connect to a fresh, untapped source.

In other words, deliberately kill their current reservoir, so as to tap a new innocent.

Make that a known mechanism, in your setting, and it solidly establishes the reasons for the dismay of the populace.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

A game in which the PC's are going to die is a given. Players can focus on role playing the deaths of the characters. GMs who have difficulty killing PC's can get it out of their system.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

You can use it as the intro to your Wraith: the Oblivion campaign.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Artful Dodgers: The year is 1970, a 1970 with personal computers, smart phones, car GPS and genetically modified foods in the supermarkets because it's a 1970 that has supers and Reed Richards Isn't Useless. The problem is, it's still a 1970 that has a Vietnam War and a draft, and the draft classification of a super doesn't have enough "A"s to fit on the page. And this, children is why you create secret identities as soon as you get superpowers. How else can you dodge the draft?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

In this setting, the PCs could be the team of military recruitment agents sent to enforce the draft on reluctant supers. They monitor newsfeeds and police blotters for evidence of new power manifestations, they're specially equipped for this brand of investigation and for capturing and detaining draft dodgers. But how easy is it to catch a young Superboy and still win the PR battle?

ETA: Isn't this basically the Watchmen setting, with Dr Manhattan instead of Reed Richards?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Be female?

All the boys are in 'Nam, leaving all the supergirls to be the heros and villains on the home front.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The actual inspiration is Marvel's Civil War meets the Incredibles. The essential flaw with the Mutant Registration Law is that it started by violating the Second Amendment and moved on to violate the 13 Amendment. You can't actually condemn a person to lifelong government servitude because they were born with a built-in weapon without a substantial alteration to the American Constitution. But you can constitutionally register people for the draft and should there be an actual war, call them up for a limited term, provided that they fit within certain parameters.

This caused me to think of the last time American citizens were actually being drafted, which is incidentally the same time frame as that in which the Incredibles movie takes place even though because Reed Richards Isn't Useless they have cell phones and stuff.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

"Forget your draft-dodging hippie idea. Let's go be supers fighting the Vietnam war!"

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

If the supers setting is at least a little realistic, the government is going to realize that these mutants are some of their most valuable human resources, and will take measures to cultivate them. They're all getting free rides to Meta-Human Training Institutes.

It's a sweet deal, and nearly everyone takes it. But the catch is that by taking the deal you accept that you are always going to be among the first to be called up when things go wrong in a big way.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Along with other benefits, including stupid amounts of cash and other lifestyle elements.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Heck yeah. People with major powers would be living the lives of major celebrities. And even people with much less oomf would be well off. If you had a power that was at all useful, meaning it was worth training, you'd probably be making doctor-level money.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The government might also encourage the news and entertainment types to make legit supers (ie. government affiliated) celebrities while others are socially unacceptable in some way. Having groupies and such is a major lure for teens and twenty something.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I would expect there to be people who opted out of the system, in a free society where this is possible. (In an authoritarian one, it wouldn't be.) But I kind of suspect that enough of them would be troublemakers that the ones who aren't would keep a really low profile, to avoid being tarred with the same brush.

And the government would keep tabs on them by various means, just because the ones with high power levels could do so much damage if they went rogue.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The Matriarchy, the Heir, and the Trial of the Knife: A medieval-level (post-collapse) riverside settlement in West Africa has a matriarchal system, implemented to ease inheritance even with wartime male deaths. It has stood the test of the environment, scavengers, and hostile tribes to provide a safe walled city and well-watered surroundings for a stable agricultural society. However, a rebel from within the city threatens to destabilize its system.

The Heir: The city's ruler, Antanganoroa, has two recognized children, Ngoranda and Mberosha. Ngoranda appeared to be female to all outward scrutiny upon birth, but within the past few years has exhibited male secondary characteristics, such as increased muscle mass, height, broad shoulders, and a beard. The city's female rulers declared Ngoranda to be Ngoradnarof, a man, and stripped him of his eligibility to inherit his mother's rulership position. Ngoradnarof has led a revolt of the city's menfolk to the surrounding countryside, hoping through non-violent opposition to force the city to accept his own claim to the throne. He has also latched on to a more widespread "male equality" movement among the city's disenfranchised men, but is only half-heartedly committed to this movement personally.

The Trial of the Knife: In the time since the revolt by the disobedient Heir, the female rulers of the city have instituted a relentless regime of a specific gender-based surgical procedure to be performed on all adolescent girls, ostensibly to prevent them from accidentally maturing into men like the Heir. This has become something of a quasi-religious ritual designed to cow and subjugate the women, but also to rally them around the importance of uniting against the Heir. The hapless wielder of the knife is "Dadokta Ants Fadenwe" (Dr. Ernst Fadenauer), a Western-trained physician with modern medical tech. He wants to end the mutilations but he also knows that if he doesn't go through with them, the rulers will take over the process themselves without the benefit of modern medicine, inflicting even greater suffering on the city's female children.

Possible solutions: Killing the Heir or his select advisers can change the timbre and direction of the male revolt, all the moreso because the Heir has a younger sister who can take his place. The Heir is also open to negotiations and is willing to call off the strike, provided that he can enjoy a privileged status on his return. Killing Dadokta Fadenwe in a suitably bloody manner could temporarily suspend the mutilations.

To permanently stop the mutilations, it's necessary to prove their genetic cause: the Heir's father was actually a consanguinous relative to the Queen, so the Heir's intersex condition was due to parental inbreeding across a few generations - this knowledge would embarrass the ruling house but would also eliminate fears of this condition in the general populace. Tracking this information down will require many in-person interviews from the various villages that the Queen's family hails from; this society is largely pre-literate.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Start a post on this forum in this sub forum called what do you have in your pockets?

Each poster finishes with a 24 hour time notation and the next poster states approximately what they have in their pockets at that time.

Useful for looting zombies and other "what did they have in their pockets situations"

Variation what do you have in your pocket by TL modify contents to suit a TL from the above poster.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

For the past year a formerly notorious moneylender and recluse who had been living in self-imposed misery has re-invented himself as a generous and friendly man and even something of a social reformer. But tragically on the anniversary of his Yuletide self-reinvention the man who was now one of the most loved men in the city was struck down. Well at least now he'll be missed. Now the PCs have three mysterious clients who want them to answer one question:

Who Killed Ebenezer Scrooge?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Mrs Crachit, who do you think? She hired an actor as her accomplice.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Word has arrived in Lisbon that a fugitive is to arrive wanted for espionage, sedition, terrorism, and as an accessory to the recent assassination of a German officer. He is said to be accompanied by an attractive women. The PCs are officers in the local police.
As an added complication it turns out that this fugitive carries a visa signed by Charles de Gaulle. Maintaining neutrality between beligerants is hard enough. This visa will involve the local government in someone else's civil war. And whatever the PCs do they know uncomfortably that if a diplomatic mistake, is made the government won't hesitate to explain it as the work of "overenthusiastic officers".

What do they do when Victor Lazlo comes to town?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The PCs have a tough job. A Chinese partisan leader on the other side of the Himalayas needs to be supplied. All of the air routes are prioritized elsewhere and the only choice is a laborious overland trek from India via Nepal. The PCs are a band of Allied troops charged with this mission. It is a dangerous one. Made only worse by the fact that your intelligence liason will never leave off boasting of his cultured refinement and of the glories of the Prince of Wales Own West Yorkshire Regiment.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Depends. Is there such a place as "Rick's Café Américain"? :)

Seriously, this would be a great espionage/intrigue setting, but you'd want to build it out more, and define the relationships between the local constabulary and the NAZI liaison, the Vichy military, the Free French resistance, and the Moroccans.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Not much unless there's a new wrinkle. They can avoid trouble by just not noticing Lazlo. It might get interesting, though if a prominent German is killed in Lisbon while Lazlo is in the vicinity.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I'm sure there is in Casablanca by now. It's to obvious an advertising gimmick. But it wouldn't be the real one. I was talking about Lisbon however. If you remember at the end of the movie Lazlo had gotten his hop to Lisbon from Casablanca. However he will be in a similar difficulty there, and he has to get from there to Allied territory. The Germans of course will want that not to happen.

But there were real places like Rick's in neutral cities that catered to rich refugees who were stuck in town and had nothing to do with their money but party. Or acted as places where the Good Guys and the Bad Guys met and exchanged sporting insults. Or all of that kind of thing. They are mentioned in some of the espionage histories I have. Some of the tradecraft of the movie was off but the basic premise was real.

The poorer refugees didn't have as much fun. And the poorer spies were likely to end up with a knife in the back-from whoever-and dumped in the harbor for the fish. But what the hey.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

There is. Also one in Cape Town, South Africa, for some reason.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The one in Casablanca looks like almost an exact copy from the movie, and the staff willingly gives up a seat at the piano for anybody who wants to play, "As Time Goes By."

(It wouldn't surprise me to learn the house pianists are absolutely sick of that song, by now, and are happy to let the guests play it, so they don't have to.)

I sent the link to the site for the restaurant to a co-worker, a black guy, who said he'd like to take his wife, some day. He also said he'd learn to play that one song, and buy a white dinner jacket with bow-tie, just so he could do it right -- and get pictures.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Elven magical style slash martial art that incorporates elements from the plant college or it's equivalent. Highest level a tree form spell/technique giving an Ent like form for combat or camouflage purposes

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Does the police chief allow gambling?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Of course not! Unless he wins.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I'm sure he would be shocked to find gambling taking place.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The Age of the Superhero started in the 18th century. As a result Europe is filled with super powered nobles and royalty, many of whom have a lot more authority than in real life. Meanwhile the United States Constitution never happened. Instead the not especially United States still operate under the Articles of Confederation as fundamentally autonomous political entities. Weirdly autonomous political entities, what with the one that was influenced by a superheroine to remove the vote from men, the one that had a successful slave rebellion and is dominated by the descendants of the slaves, and the one that is a theocracy. And elsewhere the Machine Empire rules what used to be the empire of Russia, and Europe and the Empire of China watch it with dread.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I don't particularly care for superheroics as an RPG genre (it's not bad, or anything, it's just not my thing), but this is a cool idea.

It's remarkably dystopian, based on the brief sketch, and it would be fun to create characters fighting against the despotic superhero overlords.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

As I conceive it, no more dystopian than the real life early 19th century (outside of the Machine Empire which is all kinds of horrific). Of course that means in general quite undemocratic but it's not like the kingdoms and principalities of Europe are hyper-controlled surveillance states or "state of nature" anarchies. But yeah there is reason for the strong revolutionary sentiment in places like France, Italy and Spain, and it isn't unknown in England

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Yeah, I could imagine myself as a revolutionary, in such a setting (or in 19th Century Europe in OTL, really...), which is what makes it so interesting. Who the character is, and what he or she is supposed to do, just jumps right out, and that's the sign of a good idea for a game.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

It is noticeable that pretty much every era has been called dystopian by some and idyllic by others.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Transhuman Fantasy: Almost all of humanity long since uploaded themselves into a gigantic computer laced into the planetary crust, leaving behind a few Luddites and constructs to repopulate the planet. Now the TL is 4, sans gunpowder, but they have "wizards" who can communicate with the omnipresent nanotechnology thanks to their implants, and "priests" who have had one of the intelligences of the planetary computer take an interest in them and thus can be heard by them,

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

A sci-fi race that was sufficently advanced to have discovered mature robotics and digitized consciousness but not interstellar space travel. Their world has a sterilization event, all life ends. Most of their race is uploaded and can freely download into robot bodies. However they cannot create new consciousness' when they discover other species they are very keen to get hold of some organic material. (Or technology).

For contrast they should have evolved in a high biomass environment. Predators without prey maybe

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Earth has been invaded by strangely humanoid aliens who, despite their advanced technology seem to be lacking any art, fiction, poetry, music, history, mythology, or nonmilitary traditions of their own. In fact they seem to be a little foggy on the whole idea of sex and none of them remember anything that happened to them longer than five years ago. And they all seem to be the same age. And none of them are civilians.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I'd really have to sit down with MAGOne and hash this out, as MonkeyFist and I are big fans of the Supers genre.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

On Earth even the most warlike peoples have art, poetry, music, history, and mythology. Usually largely about war, a habit which has not ceased as is shown by the fact that we are discussing a fiction about war. Fiction as opposed to legend, and history as opposed to court-flattery are more subtle concepts that not all cultures on Earth quite have.

If such aliens invaded, I would conclude they had been brainwashed or genetically pre-programed clones. The thought that they were simply the descendants of abductees raised as slave soldiers occurs. But if they were humans the best way to make good soldiers out of them would in fact be to encourage them to evolve art, poetry, music, and mythology peculiar to them. As they don't know about sex they are probably clones.

Or possibly you will find out that they do have all those things, just that they are peculiar to themselves, and perhaps hidden in secret ritual. For instance perhaps breeding is a reward saved for unusually distinguished soldiers, and therefore all the ones that have done so have retired. Or perhaps the ones that have not been gelded are not docile enough for military discipline while the best strains are saved to increase the herd, much like war horses.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Me and my friends joked about a comedic star trek campaign where we are in a crew of people so incompetent that it was considered safer to just put us on some back end of the galaxy with no life where we can't possibly **** anything up until our service contract ran out. Probably not cannon friendly but it was an amusing premise to me though.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

John Ringo wrote a story in Weber's Honor Harrington setting about this. One of the RMN's less exemplary ships.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

That's actually pretty good. And the Federation must have some nooks like that so it's perfectly canon friendly.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Prince Xav Vorbarra has secured an arms contract which the Betan government of course had absolutely nothing to do with. It is the PCs responsibility to smuggle it past the Cetagandans to the Barrayaran rebels.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Don't forget the need to smuggle in the instructor so that the backwater Barrayarans can learn to use the stuff. Lots of good tense stuff to do off that...

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Only available instructor is a quaddie hermaphrodite.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

That won't work. If that really is the case then you need to smuggle VorPragmatist and a few of his friends out and train them as instructors rather then sending a mutie for the job.

Actually there might be something to that. The Betan Secret Service might want a special ops team and a few bloodthirsty foreign mercs might do well. They can triangulate that so that the Betans get the op they want done, the Barrayaran team gets the training and in turn they can return and train the Barrayaran army. It might be much like the way Genghis Khan received some sophistocation in the Chinese forces.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Some classic openings for a campaign are:

Fantasy: A man comes into a pub offering to sell a map to any interested adventurers.

4 Colour Superhero: A giant robot attacks the city center

Post-Apocalypse: Someone from before the apocalypse wakes up from their coma or state of cryogenic suspension

Private Detective: An attractive distressed client walks into the office

Space Traders: A passenger seeks passage on your vessel. In his luggage there is a maguffin.

Space Mercenary: A small community looks for "seven samurai" to fight off the raiders.

What if you switch them up? What if you started a fantasy campaign, with "A giant automaton attacks the center of the city"? What if a 4 Colour Superhero campaign began with heroes from the past waking up in the present?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

A game set int he world of Mages in world of darkness where there is a Wizard conspiracy in Hollywood to perpetuate unrealistic to real world physics things in movies and tv shows as tropes so that people will believe such things are possible and allow them more leeway with casting magic. The only people that could stop them is a the humble bunch of a small group of experienced science people and engineers to stop them by making non copyrighted mythbuster like tv show to help educate people on how real science works. They have to deal with the rigors of making a popular tvshow, getting as many people as possible to watch it all while trying to survive the hit they have on them by the wizards. This would be part time buisness management and part time urban fantasy.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

You mean there is not?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I'm sorry, I don't follow. I can't tell what part of that quote you are referring to. Could you please clarify that?