Ideas Are Easy

[crretin]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Or, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenozoic_Tales

....huh.... cool....

[quarkstomper]

I bought GDW's Cadillacs and Dinosaurs RPG years ago and every once in a while get an itch to run something with it. Like many licensed game adaptations, it suffers from a tendency to be geared towards making characters exactly like the ones in the source material rather than making characters who would be interesting to play in the setting. Or maybe I've just never approached it from the right angle yet.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

I bought GDW's Cadillacs and Dinosaurs RPG years ago and every once in a while get an itch to run something with it. Like many licensed game adaptations, it suffers from a tendency to be geared towards making characters exactly like the ones in the source material rather than making characters who would be interesting to play in the setting. Or maybe I've just never approached it from the right angle yet.

Oh, I'd imagine the game designers wanted to appeal to the readers of the comic (and those who viewed the cartoon) as the core market demographic. The way to do that is to allow them to play people such as the protagonists.

It's not a bad approach, really, and from the standpoint of the hobby, it helps draw in people.

That said, I'd probably devote some time to the creation of a more coherent background, but that's just me and I'm an habitual world-builder.

[crretin]

Into the woods: An alternate reality where since the 1900's it has become common place to abandon unwanted children in the woods to the point where in modern day there are whole communities made up of these unwanted children. The players play children who have been just dumped off in the woods.

[ericthered]

The king of a small border kingdom (think authurian england) commissions a sword capable of founding a kingdom and dynasty to be made by a famous and powerful mage in a far off land closer to the center of the world (Think Byzantium, though thematically he may live closer to Jerusalem than constantinople). The players must escort both the payment and suprise.

Real world locations are optional. We can do this fantasy style.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by crretin

Into the woods: An alternate reality where since the 1900's it has become common place to abandon unwanted children in the woods to the point where in modern day there are whole communities made up of these unwanted children. The players play children who have been just dumped off in the woods.

"Hansel? Hansel? What kind of name is Hansel?" - asks the giant talking rabbit.

[RogerBW]

A blog post for Free RPG Day:

Millennium steals the basic idea of Mage: PCs are among the few "proper" mages, and most of society either doesn't believe in them at all or is opposed to them. But rather than the wide-ranging Mage approach to spell-casting, PCs are using Cabalistic techniques, perhaps with Path/Book magic. This will severely restrict what they can do, and this is a campaign where PCs try to stay too small to be noticed rather than charge up against the big bad guys (though in the long term this could change). Following my preference for transformational moments, PCs will be the first mages of their type, or at least something close to first; but the stars are right, and magical stuff is popping up everywhere. (The ancient conspiracy of mages, which these things always seem to need, should see its own power increasing as magical stuff in general becomes easier. Or maybe it isn't, which would also be interesting.)

Ars Scientiæ is a post-collapse game: scholars attempt to rebuild lost knowledge. This blatantly rips off Ars Magica and would run in the same format, with each player generating one scientist and one or more bodyguard types (who are probably several tech levels lower, at least at first). The biologist wants a sample of a giant mutant venus fly-trap? The physicist needs a proper high-power laser from the radiation-blasted ruins of Cambridge? Guess you're escorting him into the rubble, then.

The Turbulent Century was mentioned at greater length in the podcast for April: a fantasy version of 14th-century Europe, with pointless wars and a divided Church and mad nuns. This also has some elements of Ars Magica, in that a serious mage is not a PC but an NPC patron. It starts with dungeon bashing, then moves into the much more dangerous realm of civil society.

Wives and Sweethearts: a small ship of the Royal Navy (in space) visits old and new worlds and tries to keep the peace. Tech assumptions need to be set up to enable a ship's captain to be the ultimate local authority: no FTL communications, and long operations without the need to refuel. (Age of Sail in space, though the attitude to people and tech is closer to John Winton.) Sometimes the problem is alien artefacts, sometimes it's a colonial governor calling for help, sometimes it's personal problems on board. The ship is capable of handily beating off pirates or civilian attacks (it has moderate capabilities in several areas as well as one specific military job at which it's especially good, something like a Type 23 frigate), but will have to run from bigger military vessels. I suspect, as people have said about Star Trek games, that it would make sense for players to have several characters: one department head, one slightly more expendable crewman who goes on landing parties, and perhaps one other miscellaneous character.

[Anders]

Real doll sex toy company seeks to create AI. Now imagine Reign of Steel where the AIs were originally sex toys.

[johndallman]

They have a direct way of making money from AI, and the customers aren't likely to complain publically if dissatisfied.

[crretin]

Wormverse: In one world, a large ship containing the last remains of human society crashes into an interdimensional portal 1/10th, in many other worlds portals start appearing that drag all kinds of creatures to this one ship. Fast forward about 10 years and you get the world of today, all matter of civilizations who rub up against one another in a small enclosed space. Hilarity ensues.