The Whiteboard
Most game masters feel more motivated and creative when people want to play their games, encourage them to work on some specific idea, or look forward to a specific game that they’ve considered running. However, it can be hard to know what potential games somebody might have in their mind; we don’t exactly have a whiteboard on which people keep track of which person is interested in running or playing each different game. Sometimes you don’t realise that a friend might be interested in running some game until he actually announces that he’s doing so!
So this is the stuff that I’m thinking about lately. This is my “whiteboard” of possible games, projects, and interests. People can express an interest in stuff that they like the sound of, give their opinion, ask questions, offer to collaborate, or even just think “None of that sound slike my cup of tea... but what I’m really interested in is...”
I think it would be helpful if more people wrote about what games they’d like to run or look forward to playing. Most people have a blog of some sort, so put your possible games and interests on a whiteboard somewhere!
- Scion: Hero, Demigod, and God
I’ve written about Scion several times, so you may be familiar with it by now. I’m currently running an occasional Hero game, which will scale up to Demigod sooner or later. I figure that it would take most of a year to get a campaign to the God level of play, and I’m not really planning to go that far. I haven’t got a definitive plan, though - I’ll see how we go during summer. I would certainly hope to bring it to an interesting close rather than just stop running it one week in favour of something new.
- Wild Talents-Aberrant
I had planned to run a Wild Talents scenario at Necronomicon this year until the convention was postponed; I’ll probably run it next year instead. Who knows, the second printing of the rules might even be ready by then!
Another option that I’ve kept in mind is the Aberrant setting. I don’t think much of the original Storyteller version of Aberrant, and I’m not really interested in the more recent d20 reprint either - but I think that Wild Talents suits the setting admirably. Aberrant is a setting based on how much society and the planet can change if superhumans existed and actively participated in society. The Wild Talents rules deal with supers interacting with normal people better than Storyteller did, and scales easily right up to thw world-shaking level of ability. Just about any ability can be defined by a custom power, not just the traditional ones. The default rules for Wild Talents are considerably more deadly than most supers games, but that suits Aberrant.
I would want to change the setting a bit - the official Aberrant timeline begins in 1998 (with the first known Nova appearing) and goes into detail up until 2008... but as it was written in the mid to late 90s, it lacks some world events that might be a bit jarring for us now. I’d also want to eliminate the heavy focus on super-powerful celebrity NPCs who seem to do everything important in the setting. Ideally the PCs should be filling these roles, not being midweight spectators to the affairs of Caestus Pax and Divis Mal.
Wild Talents is in the “pretty good chance that I’ll run this” category - whether that’s just as a (post-apocalyptic, Sheri Tepper-inspired) convention game or as a (revised Aberrant) campaign.
- Changeling: the Lost
C:tL is one of the “new World of Darkness” games that White Wolf has released with their new unified ruleset and refocus on tighter themes over metaplot. Changeling is about people who were captured by the inhuman Fae and kept as pets, servants or slaves in Arcadia. They somehow manage to escape back to the mortal world, but have been transformed into magical beings by the ordeal.
There are some comparisons with the old Changeling: the Dreaming, but this game is much less whimsical and not so devoted to Celtic faeries. Changelings are more unified; there is no noble/commoner divide (the True Fae are antagonists, not player characters), and the changeling seasonal courts are based on different approaches to opposing the True Fae rather than the bitter rivals of the old Seelie/Unseelie courts. The enemy of C:tL is an incomprehensible supernatural captor rather than “banality”, so characters are more likely to be threatened by the Greve of Stolen Lovers or the Zookeeper rather than Some Really Boring Mundane People.
I wrote a freeform using some of this setting, so obviously I like it a great deal. I could possibly run this game as a campaign (although I have no current plans). I would be just as happy to be a player in a Changeling game that somebody else runs. Changeling: the Lost is in the “games I’d like to try someday” pile.
- REIGN
I don’t have any current ideas or plans for REIGN. I think it’s a great game, and I’m probably going to borrow bits of it for other games that I run, but for the moment fantasy isn’t really on my mind.
If I write any fantasy games for conventions next year then I’ll probaby use REIGN; and I’d be more than happy to join somebody else’s game. REIGN is in the “games I’d like to try someday” pile.
- Radiance
Radiance is a science fiction thing that I’ve been kicking around oh, for years now. It’s a potential game that I just have fun writing bits and pieces for (or sometimes major revisions; the character rules have undergone two massive rewrites). I enjoy this because the kind of SF that I like doesn’t really exist in published RPGs. I would want to play in or run a social science fiction game, set in the distant future of our galaxy with the varied descendants of humanity (and no pointy-eared aliens), leaning towards the hard SF side of things.
Anyway, I’ve written some more useable material in the last couple of months and I like how it has shaped up. Radiance still suffers from a “kitchen sink” syndrome - there’s lots of Stuff That I Like in there but the central premise or core story (ie, “What do the players do?”) is rather vague. It might work better as a series of convention freeforms than a campaign. Radiance is in the “games I’d like to try someday” pile.
- Grim War
I’ve sent an email to Arc Dream to express my interest in playtesting Grim War, a Wild Talents/REIGN sourcebook by Greg Stolze and Kenneth Hite. It’s been described as a modern-day setting of magic and mutants that features extensive rules for ritual sorcery and REIGN’s “company” rules to play out factional conflicts and alliances. If they decide to use me as a playtester than I’ll put together a small group of people who are interested in playing three or four sessions - not actually a campaign, but a chance to play around with it and see what works, what’s fun and what needs to be cleared up.