Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Yep, thats the intent. And a big part of the game is the race for these equations. Infinity has better expertise at parachronics, but the Imperium has a larger scientific base. Oh, and the readings infinity needs are in imperium space.

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Lost and Found: The characters are members of a very special detective agency that specializes in tracking down mysteriously disappeared people and things. Whether your child has stumbled into a gateway to Narnia or Wonderland, or your spouse been abducted by vampires or turned into an animal by witches, or your priceless artifact or convicted serial killer has disappeared past your elaborate security system, L&F will use a mixture of expert detective work, advanced technology and outright sorcery to track them down and return them or least their bodies. Unless y'know, they're free adults and don't actually want to come back.

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For some purposes, eleven thousand planets is more then enough security. If the IISS has it's own black ops dimensional corps set up it can be hidden on any planet with plenty of redundancy available.

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Terra exists in Traveler yes. But it isn't at all in Imperial space. Instead it's owned by a bunch of racist paranoids. Nor is the Traveler setting likely to be at all enticing to either Centrum or Infinity in canon. It's a superscience setting with psi powers, far too large for Centrum to absorb or even effectively spy on and too divergent to be relevant to the secret war, far too threatening, occupied and advanced to be a good market for trade or colonization. Even disregarding the ways in which it violates the restrictions on the Infinity setting, the two sides have no reason to go there and a list of reasons to put a big red sticker on it. The Cabal or Reich might have a reason to go there. Not Infinity. At least not the official Infinity.

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It is the first, well technically the second, Constitutional Convention. The PCs are here in some function, as part of the delegation of a given state. While the negotiations are going on some kind of Evil Conspiracy is designed, perhaps more then one. Possibly both the French and the English wish to know what is going on just for starters. And of course all of the states will want to get as big an advantage as possible and some will be inclined to rather-untoward-methods.

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Reminds me of the board game Credo, in which the players represent factions at the Council of Nicea, and are attempting through various means to gain support for their differing views and get their doctrines ensconced as part of official Christian doctrine (thus making their opponents heretics). That, too, could be done as an RPG.

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The Wrong Mission: The players are given a mission that makes sense, but their characters have utterly the wrong skill-set. They are expert sailors who are told to assault a mountain stronghold. They are Navy SEALs who have to help their employer's daughter get into the Ivy League. They are forensic accountants who have to beat a street-gang.

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Bleed them of their money and make sure they don't know about it. Or make it look like their boss has been tippling the account of the Columbian cartels.

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Murder at the Horse Fair:

Such a thing has not been seen before! Not in anyone's life time at least.

All of the Rom Travellers had been anticipating a happy few days of feasting, flirting, and bargaining over good horseflesh when a murder is found. A Kris(court of elders)must be called to investigate. The PCs must find the murderer while keeping the affair away from the prying eyes of Gadje cops who would bring shame on all(of course if the murderer is found then obviously he will be outcast and no affair of theirs and the Gadje can do what they will).

This requires a bit of research on the GMs part but can make a rewarding detective story.

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Tell your players two things:

1. This is a science fiction game in which you will be playing in a Reboot/Tron style virtual reality in which you do mind-numbingly boring jobs as programs shuffling data for your oppressive cybernetic overlord. There's a resistance, but most of the population thinks the computer they live in will crash if they cause too much trouble. Malcontents are put into video games where they are condemned to die again and again at the hands of the malevolent "Players" until they break and are either returned to their blissfully boring cubicles, or disappear.

2. It is possible to escape and discover the physical world.

What you don't tell them: They aren't programs. This is more like the Matrix, and they are living human beings who had their memories suppressed when they were frozen and plugged into the planetary computer network to add their brain's processing power to the whole after they were rendered obsolete by automation. The real world belongs to the wealthy, the machines, resurgent wildlife and hunted scavengers who live in the cracks and corners.

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They call it the Jesus Plague. You fall ill rapidly and hover near death for three days but then you recover just as rapidly and are fine.

For even more fun, have the worst part of the illness resemble actual death: cold skin, apparent rigor mortis, and very reduced pulse and breathing.

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So...what's the game use?

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It's a red herring in a paranormal-investigation game. The heroes get reports of dead men walking around. It turns out there's a natural cause, but the players have to understand the problem first.

The real challenge will be either a) persuading medical authorities that the people who seem to die of the plague aren't really dead (so they won't inadvertently be killed by being put in body bags or something similar) or b) persuading the superstitious locals that the revivals aren't supernatural (so they won't be killed in exorcism ceremonies.)

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Have it start amongst one of the religious groups that abhors embalming, and holds the funeral on day four. (I know both such groups exist, but I don't know if they overlap. I suspect at least one does.)

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If I remember Orthodox Jews regard mutilating the dead with distaste but consider forensic examination a life or death matter.

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They object to routine autopsy, but allow it if supervised by a rabbi and all samples are interred with the body. They're one of the groups that wants the body in the ground as soon as possible. So, in that aspect, they make a poor choice.

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Every single person in a small town wakes up to discover that they can't remember who they are. (Players design all their characters as Partial Amnesiacs. The GM then decides what role in the town they were made for based on their design.) They must investigate their homes and the town for clues as to who they were and what their relationships were, why their town wide malady happened, and why communications with the outside world seems to have been disabled.

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The PCs are a group of ghosts of people who left something important undone before dying. As ghosts they can only just barely effect changes in the material world. They also know they don't have all that long before they pass completely from the world.

I'm not quite sure how to make an adventure like this work. Obviously, the challenge for the players would be to make a lot of a little, accomplishing their goals in a world they can only just barely influence. But what subtle influence would be the best choice?

Perhaps only their former pets can see them. One might be able to make some things happen through a large obedient dog.

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The day Ragnorak came late: For what ever reason it took more time than it should've to get the Viking apocalypse started, but in the year 3000 it finally came in a cyberpunk future.

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The Acadamy: The players play mad scientists in a secret school for for mad scientists. Pretty much harry potter if you scooped out all the magic and replaced it with mad science

Blood and Ink: The result of taking a noir storyline and dropping it into the middle of a wushu style fantasy, where corruption hides behind a false sense of honour and in the end all men must pay there dues...

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So, Transylvania Polygnostic University, then?

http://girlgenius.wikia.com/wiki/Tra...tic_University

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well yeah, but without all the magical stuff and set in more of a modern day setting

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Considering how heavily a GURPS implementation would lean on Social Engineering: Back to School and Powers: The Weird, I'd be tempted to call it Stoddardia.

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One Million: In a far future galaxy where human interstellar civilization spread out over the galaxy, terraformed the heck out of it and then declined and vanished, leaving uplifted animals, discarded robots, and a few lost genetically divergent colonies, a small group of interstellar prospectors discover a derelict and possibly a few surviving crew members from a time before humanity reached its peak. Now they've been given a rare opportunity to try to figure out where, after a million years of galactic motion, the lost homeworld of the First Race is.

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Bored suburban teens have a new game: how many of the neighbors' pools can you take a plunge in after midnight in one hour? 50 is an excellent score and of course you aren't supposed to ask first.

The cops really hate this one, because the home owners with pools understandably want it stopped, but cracking down hard risks a backlash from some pretty darn influential parents within the community.

Maybe the PCs are youngish undercover cops looking to infiltrate the movement.

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Some prankster has been leaving bottles of whiskey and do-it-yourself Molotov cocktail kits around the city on Halloween. This can't end well.

Just the thing for our heroes, rookie detectives in the Big City PD.

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Magus: Magus is a world where Christianity never caught on but magic did in a big way, becoming the basis of a 3+5 tech level. Despite this, it is weirdly similar to Homeline in many ways. But now a anti-magic terrorist group known as the Stoics is using TL 7 and 8 tools in the United States of Avalon that local defenses and law enforcement have no idea how to detect or stop. As Infinity Agents your job is to determine what the source is for their technology and shut it down, extract or kill any Stoics who know The Secret, and do it without letting local authorities know what the source of the technology is, letting locals see as little of your own technology as possible.

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The Round Table: A superhero game set in medieval Europe, basically part the avengers cinematic franchise and part the legend of king Arthur

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Traveller: There is a high level intelligence leak. The PCs are Imperial counterintelligence officers.

The catch? The ruler of a member world is believed to be a courier link to Zho space. It is the PCs job to infiltrate it and gain information. With the secret service of a whole planet after you.

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Traveller: Variant of above. A notorious terrorist has escaped from an Imperial prison. The PCs are assigned to track him from world to world before he makes it to the border. Any sort of adventures are possible along the way including local security reversing the pursuing/pursued position.

There is no NECESSARY limitation as to how the hostile exfil is to be accomplished when the fugitive is located. He has already been convicted under Imperial Law so seeking a warrant isn't EXACTLY needed. Your chief limitation is Don't Embarrass The Imperium. If in fact you do embarrass the Imperium you might find yourself needing another job-or worse.

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Victoria: A game set in a Victorian England type land, where magic both exists and twists those who use it into beasts, known as hags, Humanity has learned how to use this magic safely by instead of drawing magic into themselves to craft spells, but rather pulling the magic into objects to craft impossible machines, but not all is well with this change as mysterious fey like creatures try to infiltrate the great city of Victoria, men who can jump higher than any building and vomit sparks upon all those who stand in their way, and deranged strangers made of rickety parts and jury rigged engines to drag prostitutes into the night and suck the blood from their veins... the players play members of the Night Watch, an organization intent on beating back these monsters of the night and reclaim their city.

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(Inspired by the Manchineel tree, which is very poisonous.)

Everyone who sees a Grayleaf tree drops dead within seconds. The effect reaches beyond human beings to all known sighted animal life. Each Grayleaf tree sits at the center of a specialized ecology of blind animals, many of which occur nowhere else. It is a vigorous plant and grows taller than most other trees. Depending on siting, the blind zone around a tree may reach as much as ten miles out. Their means of reproduction is unknown, as all known examples are mature trees.

No one actually knows what Grayleaf looks like. All reports are from scholars who have examined specimens by touch. The Mad Emperor did commission several paintings of Grayleaf, created by artists who saw a Grayleaf tree, died, and were then magically resurrected. The paintings vary considerably, as might be expected since each of them is based on a single look.

The largest collection of Grayleaf trees in a single location is the Line of Peace, which stretches 50 miles across the breadth of the peninsula known as King Philip's Finger, among other terms. The trees are planted in a straight line from shore to shore at roughly half-mile distances. Assuming the original arrangement was regular, there may have been 100 trees, of which 61 remain. No one knows who planted the line or for what purpose, but it was already present when Bannon's Chronicle was written, 350 years ago.

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Hellworld: The players play a family of theme park goers after the nuclear apocalypse and most of the world outside had become unlivable as a result. Pretty much mad max but in a theme park

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The greatest war in history to date is winding down and the Corsican Ogre looks to be soon caged. But His Majesties Foreign Ministry is not free from worries. Czar Alexander is behaving as overbearingly as, well, a Czar, and there is fear that he is likely to overtip the balance of power and start another war almost before this one is fairly ended. In the meantime the American war is dragging on, and if continued likely will drag on as long as the first American war with similarly unfortunate results.

The PCs are diplomatic couriers assigned to carry a message to the British negotiators to shut the American war down as quickly as possible to allow assets to be shifted back to Europe. No one can find out: if the Americans get a hold of the message they will bargain harder. If the Russians get a hold of it they might or might not send it to the Americans to get them to bargain harder depending on whether they are thinking more about finishing the war or collecting the spoil. As for Boney, well he has no reason to love any of his neighbors. The Prussians are practically a Russian puppet. The Austrians probably would like more British assets in Europe to back them up but they are well known for their slippery disposition. Few would openly attack a diplomatic courier, but a "random" mugging might be arranged and almost every power has a few random muggers in it's pay.

PS. While the incident is made up I have sometimes had a suspicion that the British mission to negotiate with America did indeed have secret orders to hurry up for the reasons given. The records would almost certainly be declassified now but are probably buried under a heap of paper somewhere.

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"The Land And The King Are One". So what happens when the king becomes undead?

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Neon City: 1920's America was hard enough, but ever since that strange comet in the sky came about people all over the world have started gaining superpowers. It's Watchmen vs Heroes in Chinatown in a world of rising chaos.

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Fundare: In this generational game, the characters are initially members of a doomsday cult of sorts led by a mystic prophet predicting the end of the Roman Empire who are banished to the far end of the Empire, under the shadow of Hadrian's wall, where they find themselves reincarnating again and again on a mission to first unite Britain, then guide it, making it the kernel of a new empire even bigger than the first.

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One Man Chess

Ever played chess against yourself? How do you pretend you don't know what you're about to do?

In this Supers campaign, PCs make two characters each- one for a superhero team and one for the supervillain team. Sessions alternate between the 2 teams, with the supervillains planning a heist or evil scheme, then the heroes reacting to the crisis and thwarting it.

I actually have no idea if this'd work, but it'd be interesting to try.

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I have heard of something similar being done in an In Nomine game.

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Wizardpunk: In a setting of industrial magic, the characters live in a city of tens of millions among the desperately poor caught between the aristocratic rival wizard towers who have largely replaced common labour with golems, undead and conjurations. Some are people with the Gift hiding from the towers. Nobody knows what happens to commoners who are taken away to be "adopted" by the Towers...but nobody's ever seen them again. Some are non-mages who have had runes of enchantment carved into their bodies, reshaped by biosorcerers, or given animated clockwork parts, because they were experimental subjects, or served in the military, or were just dwellers on the street looking for an edge against rival criminals. But now they work together, maybe as thieves, maybe as mercenaries, maybe as revolutionaries...

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Biofab: Speaking of which, there are several reasons why Transhuman Space has never quite been my jam. One of them is that, objectively speaking, there is no job an organic intelligence can do that an AI (or ghost which is really just an AI programmed by other means) can't do better. This makes it seem pointless to be an organic, while at the same the way of AIs seems too alien for me to want to play one. But what about a transhumanist setting where AI research hasn't made those bit breakthroughs? Instead the big advancements have been in the biological and biocybernetic sciences. There are a few "sapient computers" but that's because they have a natural or artificial biological brain at their core. Living people still have a place in space travel...

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World War I with giant robots. So much for trenches.

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Or you get really big trenches.

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They'll have to be in quite different places. The water table was close to the surface over much of the WWI Western Front, which gave lots of trouble for human-sized trenches. Submersible giant robots aren't very WWI.

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There's even existing artwork.

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+Magic=War Machine/Iron Kingdoms

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Reminds me of Dune.

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They have computers. The computers just haven't crossed over into being people.

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I like this one a lot, I would second a lot of what you were saying about AI.

The other thing is that this has a hell of a lot of scope for possible settings this could be anything from strict hard SF to (new) Space Opera according to taste.

Maybe one to float on the GURPS board as a 'build a shared setting' project?

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I'm not gonna lie... a dieselpunk mecha game sounds awesome...

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We'd need a mechanism for making choices. Most the projects I've seen are either a guided dictatorship, a voting mechanism, or the question game. If you don't have a way of making things canonical people go all over the place.

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Next one I was thinking of doing was straight-up cyberpunk, but I might be a bit busy for a little to get too involved. Of course, another poster could go ahead with a biopunk project.

Don't think I've seen any guided dictatorships- got a thread you're thinking of?

The voting ones, I have to admit, were a bit tedious. They took forever to settle each decision and reading pages of voting scores wasn't much fun. They also took a lot of effort from the coordinator, so they couldn't move much without him. Having said that, the urban fantasy one got some good ideas before it fizzled out.

The question game works fairly well, though sometimes it's a case of people asking questions you might not be interested in. This can help the creativity, but it ends up a bit patchy as a world building exercise.

Ideally, the output would be a setting wiki, but I'm not sure of the best way of guiding content for it. How does the Orion's Arm setting handle that, I wonder?

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Myriad incomplete ones. Guided dictatorship is when someone says "I have a setting, I need ideas in this area." Then all the forumites start posting ideas, and the OP takes one or more as "cannon". Its a brain storm of sort. The full structure usually isn't used, I admit. Here is an example:

Weird War 1

The trick with those is you once again need an administrator type figure. Its probably not as bad as the voting method, but its still puts a lot of effort on one.

Orion's arm I think is a guided dictatorship (or oligarchy) with a very light hand, a lot of work up front to set guidlines, and a large enough universe that the chance of collision is low. It might also have a wiki-type setup, which functions similarly.

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The other model I've seen is what happened (a while ago now) with the space opera and fantasy settings in my sig. Basically a theme is suggested, then people discuss strategy on the forum while posting content straight to a wiki, reporting back to the forum with "I've added a new city on the west coast" and so on. These were probably about as productive as the question games, but would also benefit with some shepherding.

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This would be the reason I didn't just go ahead and do it.

Having taken part in a few collaborative settings and being somewhat disappointed in how they developed, guided dictatorship doesn't strike me as particularly collaborative (even though it is a model I have used), question games tend to be somewhat unfocused and peter out quite quickly. Voting is probably either the best or the worst option it let's you have a certain amount of direction while still being collaborative but it takes a lot of work and can be daunting to ocasional posters particularly if they miss the early parts of the process.

You have done a fair bit of this, which model do you feel worked best?

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I don't mind the question game model. I think it's important to realise that it's just a creative writing outlet and not a serious attempt to generate a usable setting. I've only once seen anyone say they'd actually use one of these settings in a game, and that was tshiggins about the recent steampunk effort, for a stop-off on a world/timeline-hopping adventure, so I don't know if he'd need that much depth from the setting anyway.

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That would be another problem for me, I get involved in these projects is to collect new ideas preferably to try and find a draught setting to build upon.

I am very tempted to try running one of these, probably using the voting model all I need now is to work up a decent plan.

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A model that might be worth stealing and abusing is that of Microscope. I've only used it once; we ended up largely departing from the "this is now player X's turn" model, but it seems like a potentially viable way of resolving conflicts.

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I think the best work came out of the submission threads in the voting projects. Which is unfortunately, an edge case. I've actually used the VUASO world in play, so by some standards that's the most successful, but I'm also not sure how well that hangs together.

The observation that the question game is a creative writing exercise is a pretty good one: in generates a seed, not a finished world. It also is good at unusual twists.

Guided dictatorship's main flaw is it often loses momentum as people loose interest in someone else's project. But it can get some real interest, as long as people feel that their input is being actually used, and as long as the problems to be solved are interesting.

I might favor a combination of the voting and dictatorship to create a shorter turn-around time, plus make multiple 'curators'.

The wiki idea is interesting, but I've never done much with it.

Microscope is very good at creating history, but terrible at creating setting. The two overlap to some degree, but you don't usually mess around with what is possible much: you start with a genre and work from there.

For some setting generation it might be worthwhile, but I don't think it would work well for the project that spawned this tangent. At least until the ground rules are in place.

Though you know, we do have half a genre selected...

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I think this discussion is interesting but a bit beyond the purview of this thread. New thread is over here.

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To get us back on ideas for games:

The good old fashioned were-wolf plot, where someone in the village is turning into a were-wolf. making it contagious is optional. Of course, the old ways have been made illegal, and the one person who might know how to deal with this has been arrested and is on trial in town...

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Speaking of that, I watched a docu where some correspondent or other actually went to Romania and found villagers who had dug up a corpse and did something to it(it wasn't the stake through the heart thing but I can't remember) to make sure it didn't come back. Of course vampires aren't the same as werewolves but it is interesting that you can find strange places if you look hard enough.

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Magic is reliable. Magic is safe.

When the first caveman controled a fire elemental for the first time, a revolution took place for the feeble human animal.

Over time, Magic would mark all the human existence. All the civilizations have been born by that elite that provides magical to it.

But... That meteor happened. That cursed cataclism. And it changed it all.

Magic has always been a dangerous thing, and only a few luck ones were so blessed with its biggest secrets.

So, there has always been a natural order... Those able to use a little Magic, those able to use A LOT of it, and those able to use god-like Magic.

And those without. The common citizens. The powerless.

But, after the cataclism, some people started having a weird kind of a fever... Some kind of disease of the mind that no medice men were able to cure or identify.

Those common people, those dirty peasants, started having weird toughts, thinking on manual tools never tought before.

No mage could understand those creations. Wheel? Mills? What the hell is that?

At first, those were just amuzing curiosities.

But after a while, it became deadly serious.


Thunderous staffs that spilled thunders of death, flying metal birds, metal turtles that spilled fire rain, metal golems, intelligent mirrors

Those traitorous peasants called those nightmarish things of weird names as "fireweapons" or "Beam weapons", "airplanes", "tanks", "robots", "artificial inteligence", whatever that may mean.

Those infected with this disease call themselves "inventors", sometimes "gadgteers", all call their power or unique kind of Magic as "technology".

Whatever that phenomena may be, it is clearly dangerous for the social order, so, technologiy is punishble by death. Some of those traitors are even speaking about rebellion against the sacred priesthood of the magetocracy...

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The Lovecraftian Post-Holocaust: So finally the stars were right and the Great Old Ones came out to play. Mind you H.P. Lovecraft didn't give humanity quite enough credit. As it turns out nuclear weapons really were powerful enough to give even the Great Old Ones pause. They might not be able to kill the GOO but...apparently they did at least drive them away. But our triumph was costly. Over 90% of humanity...gone. Our civilization destroyed. Nonhumans and semi-humans emerge from the shadows to challenge us even as cults rise to worship the Old Ones in anticipation of their return and feral barbarians rampage to destroy what scraps of settled humanity try to rebuild.

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The Bureau of SURPRISE! The characters are toons being used as agents intervening in the lives of actual flesh and blood people to...ah...help them.

I said ideas were easy. I didn't say they were all good.

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A fusion of DC and Marvel where characters are introduced at their original start points and aged as seems reasonable. The player characters are all legacies, offspring of the official characters.

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Transhuman Space Gone Horribly Wrong: 1% of the population live in a paradisical "post-scarcity" eternal life in which their AI slaves give them everything they want. The player characters on the other hand are on the outside, part of a criminal conspiracy to steal goodies from the Elect while avoiding security forces, and fending off worse criminals.

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Or Reign of Steel type robots and extermination.

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Bill Stoddard ran a campaign along these lines. Anybody who wants to pursue this should probably send him a personal message.

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Probably the climax if the campaign lasts long enough.

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A Legion of Superheroes-inspired setting where various races are each based on a marvel super, so you have a Hulk Planet, a Thing Planet, a Magneto planet, an Invisible planet...

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Strange Ways: The characters are moderately criminal employees of the one of the richest, oldest men in the world. They act as investigators and spies gathering information about targets as diverse as cloning experiments, pharmaceutical R&D, haunted houses, alchemy, mind-computer interface, fungus in remote caves, organ transplants gone horribly wrong, mythical serial killers, Ponce de Leon and government super-cyborgs, and the holy grail all in pursuit of some unclear objective of their employer (to them. He actually wants to live forever and is chasing after anything that might buy him more time or offer him hope of life after death)

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Cliffhangers: The real life Lazlo Almazy was a noted commando and Egyptologist and came from a Hungarian family with a tradition of exploring, it's own castle, and a treasury of occult artifacts.

So supposing one of the Almasy's was a vampire?

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You are in a starship somewhere in Jump Space. Suddenly your maintenance microbots start to mutiny and are tearing the ship apart slowly. What do you do?

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You are mice. There is an unattended block of cheese on the counter. There is a cat sleeping on the chair.

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Encourage someone else to move first. Then while the cat is busy grab the cheese and run.

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The microbot idea is awesome.

--------------------------------
The Great War has ended, and it is time to negotiate the new world order. All the most important people in the world are in the great city, and they don't disagree on who gets what.

You are not the great heads. You are spies. Discreet, nosy, underhanded, and skilled. The information you uncover or conceal will change the destiny of the world...If this situation doesn't blow up in your face!

Inspired by the treaty of Versilles after world war I, but could be used in most any setting.

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I like the Congress of Vienna for that but that would work too. Like you said it's a great setting. And thank's for the compliment.

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The early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.

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Two ideas for some weird alien-on-alien action:

An alien species that has haploid genetics, and sexually reproduces to create a sessile and non-sentient "potted plant" creature. The "potted plant" then buds off a new generation of the haploid phase.

An alien species that are genetically genderless, but upon reaching maturity they undergo a meiosis event that produces a gendered haploid appendage. The children of a monogamous couple will be clones of one another, but genetically distinct from both parents.