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Old 10-14-2015, 10:41 AM   #1
christ0pher
 
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Default Modern LXG

After seeing this League of Extraordinary Gentlepersons art, I'm interested in running a league game.

My question is this: Has anyone done this with much success? What restrictions did you put in place for character selection/creation? Only characters from modern literature? Only movies? TV? Points cost?!?
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Old 10-15-2015, 03:37 PM   #2
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Default Re: Modern LXG

I tried to run a game like this a while ago. It wasn't really successful per se, but it was due to outside factors. The original LXG actually has issues that take place close to the modern day (although the "otherworldliness" of the setting becomes more apparent when the characters are contrasted with a more modern history. Adenoid Hynkel from The Great Dictator replaces Adolph Hitler, for example.)

As far as character creation, most of the LXG characters have their adventures take place after their "canonical" adventures are long over, e.g. Dracula is already vanquished, Quartermain has already had his literary adventures, Hyde is in hiding after the suggestion that Jekyll is going to try to commit suicide at the end of his story. Proposed characers of this sort from that defunct game were an adult Wednesday Addams who had grown up into an eccentric investigator who was occasionally consulted to solve crimes, Miss Marple style due to her eerie gift for understanding murder. Other characters were descendants of literary characters, like Nemo's daughter. We had Penelope Drake, who was the daughter of a spy who had vanished in the 60s after promising her mother he was going to leave the business. (He is of course, John Drake from Dangerman/The Prisoner). Others were ancestors of characters whose stories were set later, e.g. Campion Bond, who appears to be James Bond's ancestor. We didn't have one of these, but one character concept that was considered was a member of the Grayson family, a descendant of the Golden Age Robin Dick Grayson and ancestor of Amanda Grayson, the human mother of Spock.

The suggestions for character creation were pretty loose, point value was anywhere from 250 points up to 500 points, and power modifiers were left wide open, since a player might be playing anything from a bio-exorcist ghost, to a living hologram, to a guy who gets his newspaper a day early or a vampire. A few character ideas were thrown out for being too disruptive or imbalancing. One notion that Zach Morris' time stopping ability was because he was the illegitimate son of the same alien as Evie Garland from Out of This World (with the idea that this alien might have been an Orkan.) This was scrapped because time-stopping is super expensive and spot light hogging.

If I were doing it again, I might pick a smaller group of reference works, just to make world building simpler, something like "all TV shows" would have worked for most of the characters that were encountered. (The British Avengers and FLAG from Knight Rider made appearances) and the few who didn't could have been replaced (like Zampano from House of Leaves). The little bit we played was fun. the look on a player's face when they realize they have crashed KARR into the home of the Tanner's from Full House is not a thing to be missed.
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Old 10-15-2015, 04:04 PM   #3
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Default Re: Modern LXG

Quote:
Originally Posted by christ0pher View Post
After seeing this League of Extraordinary Gentlepersons art, I'm interested in running a league game.

My question is this: Has anyone done this with much success? What restrictions did you put in place for character selection/creation? Only characters from modern literature? Only movies? TV? Points cost?!?
I ran a campaign some years ago that I called Gods and Monsters. It was inspired by League of Extraordinary Gentlement, Planetary, and the Wold Newton corpus, and by Ken Hite's telling me that the genre of all three was pulp. I still have the campaign logs; PM me with an e-mail if you'd like to see them.

My rule was that characters from late nineteenth and early twentieth century popular fiction and cinema were appropriate; and I was prepared to do knockoffs of other characters—for example, I had a Chinese "fantastic five" with powers based on the five elements. One of my taglines for the setting was, "This is a world where Adolf Hitler is real, but his creator, Leni Riefenstahl, never existed."

It wasn't a 100% successful campaign, but it lasted out its two years and gave the players a fair bit of entertainment. The meeting between Peter Pan and Aleister Crowley was especially memorable (Crowley was trying for the Great God Pan, but he picked the wrong island).
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Old 10-15-2015, 04:25 PM   #4
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Default Re: Modern LXG

At first I'd thought to limit it to any movie character in a modern setting where the events of the movie didn't change the course of history too drastically that it would no longer mesh with other movies in the modern setting. Spooky events can be hushed up, new tech suppressed, but dropping alien motherships over major metropolitan areas would be right out.

But after your replies, I'm wondering if it's better to let the players pick any character from fiction that takes place in a modern setting and change the character's back story as needed to fit them into a normalized amalgam of the various settings...
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Old 10-15-2015, 06:15 PM   #5
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Default Re: Modern LXG

Some time ago, someone wanted to do an on-line campaign that used characters from the action adventure cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s.

I wrote up Race Bannon. Someone else did Modesty Blaise. There were other characters such as that. It was GURPS 3e, and the characters were 200-300 points.

The campaign aborted before it really got started, but I think a limitation such as that is quite useful, although the GM really needs the ability to articulate his or her vision for the setting.

For instance, one wouldn't want a party that had (effectively) special operators such as Bannon and Blaise, alongside (for instance) Transformers and Smurfs.

Too much of a mish-mash and, without some controls, the whole thing starts to look like a Gnorfles thread.

However, a party that included Bannon, Blaise, Corto Maltese, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, and Emma Peel could be a lot of fun.
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Old 10-15-2015, 08:32 PM   #6
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Default Re: Modern LXG

Farmer's Wold Newton is a good reference for how to tie together characters and a reference of possible characters.
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Old 10-16-2015, 06:15 AM   #7
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Default Re: Modern LXG

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Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
Farmer's Wold Newton is a good reference for how to tie together characters and a reference of possible characters.
I'd call that the ur-reference myself, especially in terms of breadth of scope. You* may not like the result, but you* definitely have to give props to the work that went in to it.



*generic "you"
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Last edited by Randyman; 10-16-2015 at 06:16 AM. Reason: because English
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Old 10-16-2015, 09:19 AM   #8
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Default Re: Modern LXG

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Originally Posted by Randyman View Post
I'd call that the ur-reference myself, especially in terms of breadth of scope.
I'd tend to agree with you, the Wold Newton family is interesting reading, but I don't think I'll be using the whole "these people are great because they're mutants and they're related" thing.
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Old 10-16-2015, 09:42 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by christ0pher View Post
I'd tend to agree with you, the Wold Newton family is interesting reading, but I don't think I'll be using the whole "these people are great because they're mutants and they're related" thing.
Yeah, the point-source mutation aspect of it is my least favorite part. Given the upswing in human population numbers that was starting around that time, I'd rather call it a statistical convergence that produced a distinctive human type - less variance from the norm than even a subspecies, but a set of characteristics that are nonetheless dominant in their offspring, especially if the Wold Newton heritage is on both sides. While technically still a mutation, it is one of combinatorics rather than environmental point source.
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Old 10-31-2015, 12:50 PM   #10
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Default Re: Modern LXG

Quote:
Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
Some time ago, someone wanted to do an on-line campaign that used characters from the action adventure cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s.

I wrote up Race Bannon. Someone else did Modesty Blaise. There were other characters such as that. It was GURPS 3e, and the characters were 200-300 points.

The campaign aborted before it really got started, but I think a limitation such as that is quite useful, although the GM really needs the ability to articulate his or her vision for the setting.

For instance, one wouldn't want a party that had (effectively) special operators such as Bannon and Blaise, alongside (for instance) Transformers and Smurfs.

Too much of a mish-mash and, without some controls, the whole thing starts to look like a Gnorfles thread.

However, a party that included Bannon, Blaise, Corto Maltese, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, and Emma Peel could be a lot of fun.
There was a Modesty Blaise cartoon series on TV? Really?
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