12-16-2013, 10:56 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Udine, Italy
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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You can have a Winter War with supernatural elements. And that quickly makes it a less-than-historical game... OK, b)'s still there. |
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12-16-2013, 06:58 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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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. |
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12-16-2013, 07:13 PM | #33 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison Last edited by jason taylor; 12-16-2013 at 07:16 PM. |
12-17-2013, 08:05 AM | #34 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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Podcast: Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice Gaming stuff here: Tekeli-li! Blog; Webcomic Laager and Limehouse Buy things by me on Warehouse 23 |
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12-17-2013, 09:52 AM | #35 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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12-17-2013, 09:56 AM | #36 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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.
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12-18-2013, 05:11 PM | #37 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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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.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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12-19-2013, 06:15 AM | #38 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: Strange campaign themes
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.)
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Podcast: Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice Gaming stuff here: Tekeli-li! Blog; Webcomic Laager and Limehouse Buy things by me on Warehouse 23 |
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campaign ideas, weirdness |
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