Crazy campaigns ideas

[RyanW]

Am I the only one who picked up GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms and thought "Why send four school children through, when you can send a circa-1960 military expedition though?"

I doubt I'll ever use that idea. Maybe I just really liked having an excuse for researching on the era's military hardware.

[trechriron]

My current campaign is;

• Near Future (30 years) TL8
• Top Secret DOD section with special operators
• Contact with ETs via a long travelled space probe
• Gate technology that connects to many worlds (given to Earth from the ETs...)
• ... with an offer to help save humanity from the impending inhabitability of Earth.
• Space Orcs with advanced tech (TL11)
• Spawn of Shoggoth flying fungus crab bat tree creatures OF DOOM (aka Space Dragons as the players have nicknamed them...)
• Science!
• Military!
• Cool TL9 combat vacc suits with HUD, smart weapons, targeting, tac net.
• Cool TL9 ETC weapons that do MEGA amounts of ridiculous damage putting maximum punishment on said Space Orcs and Space Dragons
• Kidnapped Scientists and Logistics Personnel who came back 10 days later walking "au natural" in a fugue state back to base...
• Fear, loathing, and many second thoughts about signing up for this wacky mission.

It's a science fiction + fantasy + horror game. And it screams "yes GURPS can do that."

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Am I the only one who picked up GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms and thought "Why send four school children through, when you can send a circa-1960 military expedition though?"

I doubt I'll ever use that idea. Maybe I just really liked having an excuse for researching on the era's military hardware.

One of the three campaign settings in Portal Realms, Gerontomachia, is designed precisely for that premise.

[Mr_Sandman]

My recent campaign idea, which I haven’t really put together yet, is set in a private school where some of the students are fantastic creatures from myth and folklore. They have to maintain a masquerade as humans, at a time when their hormones and anxieties are pushing them towards their inhuman natures. The focus would be on the social and academic challenges of high school, complicated by intrusions from the hidden world of magic and monsters. The tone I’d like to set is teen age melodrama combined with surreal weirdness: “Big Mouth” meets “Doom Patrol”. I’m not sure I have the players who would get into the melodrama part though, my usual group is more into action-oriented games.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mr_Sandman

My recent campaign idea, which I haven’t really put together yet, is set in a private school where some of the students are fantastic creatures from myth and folklore. They have to maintain a masquerade as humans, at a time when their hormones and anxieties are pushing them towards their inhuman natures. The focus would be on the social and academic challenges of high school, complicated by intrusions from the hidden world of magic and monsters. The tone I’d like to set is teen age melodrama combined with surreal weirdness: “Big Mouth” meets “Doom Patrol”. I’m not sure I have the players who would get into the melodrama part though, my usual group is more into action-oriented games.

I ran a campaign once that included a high school for young superhumans. One of the students for it was a young Norse goddess, Blikke, the goddess of eclipses. So in one scenario I had Loki's three kids show up—Fenris, Jormungandr, and Hela (I didn't think of including Sleipnir, but then Sleipnir was probably older and too busy). They could make interestingly weird characters. Kind of like some of the characters in the current video series Ragnarok, maybe.

[Donny Brook]

Inspired by a passing comment on another thread, I am developing a campaign where the PCs will be non-humanoid utility robots (SM-1 or smaller) stranded on a low-tech world inhabited by alien biological life and a bizarre and cruel totalitarian culture whose holiest site houses the mcguffin that could get them back to civilization.

Originally Posted by RyanW

Am I the only one who picked up GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms and thought "Why send four school children through, when you can send a circa-1960 military expedition though?"

I doubt I'll ever use that idea. Maybe I just really liked having an excuse for researching on the era's military hardware.

That reminds me of:

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/b...-coramonde.htm

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Am I the only one who picked up GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms and thought "Why send four school children through, when you can send a circa-1960 military expedition though?"

Because modern military would roflstomp a usual fantasy world (citation: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Gate).

Now, if you gave the fantasy world some kind of magical TL upgrade, then it's a different story....

[sparcipx]

My campaign ideas are usually fuelled by "crazy". I know I'm not alone in this regard :)

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Am I the only one who picked up GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms and thought "Why send four school children through, when you can send a circa-1960 military expedition though?"

Mary Gentle's fantasy novel Grunts! concludes with the fantasy world deciding to do that itself.

[quarkstomper]

This has probably been mentioned elsewhere, but there is a very good anime series titled GATE, in which a dimensional portal opens up in the middle of downtown Tokyo and an army wearing Roman-style armor and bearing medieval weaponry, and including orcs, beast-men and wyvern-mounted aerial cavalry, comes through and attacks.

The invaders are repulsed, and the Japanese Self-Defense Force sends an expeditionary force through the gate to secure it and to scout out what's on the other side. At least that's the original plan, but as the mission progresses, the protagonists find themselves more and more involved with local politics and power struggles, not to mention a full-sized grown dragon who isn't quite as easy to deal with even with modern fire-power.