Strange campaign themes

[Michele]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

If you could somehow convince players to play a:
a)historical game
b)military game
c)game without supernatural elements.

Any of those three seem to be dealbreakers in these here parts.

Well, he did not say c).
You can have a Winter War with supernatural elements. And that quickly makes it a less-than-historical game... OK, b)'s still there.

[William]

Originally Posted by mehrkat

There are continued waves of power and they get a pretty nice chuck of points to tweak the powers every so often and a few points here and there.

Puts me in mind of two variations of the bildungsroman:

1.) Power waves make powersets unpredictable. Your powers always have a pretty reliable theme -- fire, brick, speed, whatever -- but how strong they are and the kind of tricks you can pull might vary drastically over the course of weeks. It's fortunate that this holds for superpowered villains as well as heros.

You might buy a "base" set of traits and a "library" of powerups that range from the 200-point slugger level to the 1000-point walking force of nature level, and never know what you and the plot will be dealing with next week. Heck, the GM might roll it randomly at the start of a session. Villainous plots would likely be building up circumstances that would allow them to pull something off during the next power wave. You can build up either, but "base" traits have to be human-normal or otherwise justifiable when powers are in ebb.

2.) An inversion: powers are slowly vanishing. There was a climactic battle against the entity that had been manipulating human evolution and supplying cosmic energy to superpowers. Humanity had the choice of fealty and dependence for its superpowers, or relying on its own science and technology. For the most part, it chose the latter, since the entity was clearly not a very nice one. The entity has pulled up stakes and gone off to push some other planet's monkeys up the ladder, joined perhaps by a few lickspittles who couldn't imagine life without their gifts. Within (a generation, a year, whatever), Earth will be almost normal again. Anything with the (Super) power modifier will drop in point value as sessions progress, taking limitations or disappearing, and by the end of the campaign all of it will be gone.

As powers fade, supervillains and nation-states dependent on them are furiously jockeying for position in the new world order, trying to make one last score, or create and preserve what powerbase they can. Heroes are doing their best to contain the chaos and make a life for themselves and their loved ones after the super is gone.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Michele

Well, he did not say c).
You can have a Winter War with supernatural elements. And that quickly makes it a less-than-historical game... OK, b)'s still there.

Actually it makes a Historical Fantasy. Which genre is come to think of it easier to believe then historical detective fiction(how the heck do I know whether or not there really were fairies in Medieval Scotland. However I know reasonably well that there weren't many clan bards solving murders with impeccable logic). And if you can make Baba Yaga cast a curse on the Red Army, or the Firebird come to the rescue of Finland, or Simo Haya find the Sampo and get magic aim with his rifle with no one but the PCs knowing, that would explain a lot.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Actually it makes a Historical Fantasy. Which genre is come to think of it easier to believe then historical detective fiction(how the heck do I know whether or not there really were fairies in Medieval Scotland. However I know reasonably well that there weren't many clan bards solving murders with impeccable logic). And if you can make Baba Yaga cast a curse on the Red Army, or the Firebird come to the rescue of Finland, or Simo Haya find the Sampo and get magic aim with his rifle with no one but the PCs knowing, that would explain a lot.

In Irresponsible and Right in early 1940, Russian elementalists were working weather magic to make the winter colder. Why colder? Our heroes killed them before finding out.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Russian elementalists were working weather magic to make the winter colder. Why colder?

We think we know - to make the off-road going easier in snow.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

If you could somehow convince players to play a:
a)historical game
b)military game
c)game without supernatural elements.

Any of those three seem to be dealbreakers in these here parts.

How about a game where you're irregular volunteers, not actually part of an army, but the army gives you supplies anyway? If a bunch of people who know how to ski and shoot turn up and want to hunt Russians by themselves on the front line, the Finns would probably support them - unless they started shooting the wrong people.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

In Irresponsible and Right in early 1940, Russian elementalists were working weather magic to make the winter colder. Why colder? Our heroes killed them before finding out.

Actually the Finns were praying for an early spring. Some soldiers could get through a Finnish winter. None could get through a Finnish swamp fed with molten snow. That is after all why it was called FENland.

But for some reason I have a hard time thinking of magicians working for the Red Army at that time, Communism by definition, being against magic. Unless that's what they wanted us to think but that's another story.

Now in 1941, nationalism could make the old Czarist battle mages that the Whites had kept hidden come out and fight wizard duels against the Aryan-occultist trained Fascist battle mages in defense of the Motherland. Maybe they could convince Grandfather Frost that the real threat to his realm came from the invaders, and not from the Communists who would not bother him because they wanted to pretend he didn't exist.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

But for some reason I have a hard time thinking of magicians working for the Red Army at that time, Communism by definition, being against magic. Unless that's what they wanted us to think but that's another story.

These particular elementalists, organised under the GRU, appear to have been crypto-Whites. As opposed to the NKVD operators who had no truck with this "inborn gift for magic" nonsense -- Lysenko would not approve! -- and instead used odd machines constructed at the A.G.Stoletov Electrical Institute. As it turned out, those machines were based on materials retrieved from the Tunguska site, and that could all have gone quite badly had the PCs not sabotaged the NKVD's plan to run them networked at full power for the defence of Stalingrad. (Nikita Khrushchev was collateral damage.)