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Campaign ideas that never got beyond "Toying with the idea" phase
elkatas
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi,
All GMs have dozens of campaign ideas that never got beyond "toying with the idea" phase. Some of them were good, but you couldn't interested players. Some were just plain strange. Some were just outright ridiculous, borderlining sheer stupidity. Here is one (quite recent and stupid) example from my own memos:
Castlevania 70's
Year is 1973. Group of satan worshippers led by notorious occultist Herman Haarman have break into Chicago History Museum, and stolen rib bone from Romania Exhibition. Rib bone that is rumoured to belong Count Dracula. 46-years old vampire hunter Jonathan Morris goes to investigate scene, but he is captured by worshippers who plan to use his blood to resurrect Count Dracula. Now Ben Morris, Jonathan Morris's 18-years old son must rescue his father and put stop to Haarman's plans.
Some ideas that I had about this campaign
* Lots of references to the era. 1973 oil crisis, vietnam war, etc.
* Ben Morris is actually rebellious hippie who suffers LCD addiction
* His friend include all stupid stereotypes from 70's. Guy with big afro who knows kung-fu, awesome disco dude etc.
* As Romania in late 70's is totalitarian communist police state, Morris and his friends must find way cross the border undetected.
* Haarman is his cult have bribed corrupt soviet officer and his mechanized division to help them.
So what is your campaign idea that never got beyond "toying with the idea" phase?
All GMs have dozens of campaign ideas that never got beyond "toying with the idea" phase. Some of them were good, but you couldn't interested players. Some were just plain strange. Some were just outright ridiculous, borderlining sheer stupidity. Here is one (quite recent and stupid) example from my own memos:
Castlevania 70's
Year is 1973. Group of satan worshippers led by notorious occultist Herman Haarman have break into Chicago History Museum, and stolen rib bone from Romania Exhibition. Rib bone that is rumoured to belong Count Dracula. 46-years old vampire hunter Jonathan Morris goes to investigate scene, but he is captured by worshippers who plan to use his blood to resurrect Count Dracula. Now Ben Morris, Jonathan Morris's 18-years old son must rescue his father and put stop to Haarman's plans.
Some ideas that I had about this campaign
* Lots of references to the era. 1973 oil crisis, vietnam war, etc.
* Ben Morris is actually rebellious hippie who suffers LCD addiction
* His friend include all stupid stereotypes from 70's. Guy with big afro who knows kung-fu, awesome disco dude etc.
* As Romania in late 70's is totalitarian communist police state, Morris and his friends must find way cross the border undetected.
* Haarman is his cult have bribed corrupt soviet officer and his mechanized division to help them.
So what is your campaign idea that never got beyond "toying with the idea" phase?
Hypnotically inclined.
elkatas on
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I have nothing to contribute to this thread (as none of my campaign ideas ever made it past the drawing board before my friends stopped gaming), other than to say that the above post is the coolest goddamn idea in the history of ideas.
So yeah, cool. This is the kind of thing where a lot of control over what happens could be left up to the players, instead of needing to railroad them through it.
Awesome android RPGs are made by my friends; check them out.
I had an idea for a DBZ-esque campaign where all the enemies were based off of the Greek Muses.
And my idea for a fighting game Thrash campaign keeps getting restarted and then abandoned over and over throughout the years.
I tried to run a White Wolf game about the Technocracy developing powered armor for the military/police to help push the technology level higher and help weaken Vampires and Mages and the like. Of course, I don't even know if I was doing that right...
Neon Genesis Cthulhu.
Actually, thats a bit misleading. My conception has very little to do with Evangelion, beyond the post-apocalyptic setting (in this case, instead of "2nd Impact", it would probably be "2nd Awakening of the Great Old Ones") and mech design of Eva, which I really like.
Theres actually a new book coming out called "Cthulhutech" which appears frighteningly similar to my dreams, so perhaps it will spurn me forward into finally planning out a campaign.
I offered a brief description of the campaign (with fewer spoilers) as one of several options to my players, and they chose a bog-standard D&D campaign instead, so the idea went back on the shelf.
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/home/detail.php?qsID=1353#
The setting itself looks like something I would have to trim down a bit. A little less cyberpunk, a little more mecha. Still interesting, however.
The cover, which I have mixed feelings about.
They're in your head.
Stealin' your thoughts.
And we're both ripping Eva off.
You simply must see Midnight.
opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Ohhh shiiit.
That looks amazing. And, uh, I was going to to do a cyberpunk-cthulhu, too. Huh.
All the players are introduced one by one, risen by a middling necromancer that is trying to make better undead, ones that don't just get rolled by clerics or someone with a hammer. The players would initially be tasked with defending the necromancer's hideout but he'd get whacked by a mage that teleports in and blows his ass up. So the players are free to do whatever, but as undead. I'd probably set it in faerun because I am unimaginative but there you go. Maybe start them out near uh... Bane's city. I can't think of the name. Zhentarim are from there. Maybe it is Zhentar... So it wouldn't be crazy unusual for townspeople to see creepy shit (like a cloaked group of travels that click when they walk) at night
New Emperor
Year was 1954. Group of japanese businessmen gathered into secret location near Tokyo, to discuss about future of Japan. They came to conclusion that Japan had lost its honor by surrendering, and only way to restore that honor would be to topple current goverment and restore "good old ways". This would mean also that there would be new emperor. After heated discussion about who would be emperor, conspiracy came to conclusion that no-one of its members could meet (impossible) physical and/or mental requirements for new emperor. But the leader would be needed, as conspiracy would otherwise lose its meaning. But what they could do?
One of conspiracy's more progressive members presented extremely radical idea. If conspiracy couldn't find perfect candidate for emperor, they would CREATE one. Result was "Project Dragon", one of world's most advanced cloning programs. By funneling insane amounts of money into project and not caring about ethical problems, conspiracy created its first human clone in 1972. After that, conspiracy started to refine their techniques adding DNA samples from imperial family, japan's greatest minds and so on. Ten years later, in year 1982, the new emperor, Ryu was born. Conspiracy hired some of the Japan's greatest minds to teach Ryu, and it was soon obvious that young boy could learn and adapt things in extremely rapid pace.
However, something went wrong, and in 2004, now 22-years old Ryu escaped from conspiracy's base, murdering three soldiers during his escape. Why he did escape? Where did he go? Is he still alive? All these questions all still unanswered even after three years after Ryu's escape. But the clock is ticking, as Kazuma Uematsu, last surviving member of original conspirators, wants to find Ryu before he dies. He can't trust reigns of conspiracy to anyone else than Ryu himself, as it is obvious that some of new generation are using conspiracy only to their own personal gain...
Distracting them with Technocracy anti-vampire cyborgs designed to counter vampires in the wake of Ravnos's destruction, I was trying to pull their attention away from the demon they accidentally unleashed after fending off hordes of zombie children bound to undeath after a life of torture and molestation. Ultimately, they would have discovered that the demon was a mere third of a larger plan.
Future endeavors would have set them on a ship with the Sons of Ether, battling against weird creatures of the Void, just barely unable to stop some gibbering madness from beyond creation's edge from slipping into reality. In trying to hunt the thing down, they would have come across yet more troubling signs, in that a powerful Wyrm-aligned spirit was being called into the city. Maybe by a pack of Black Spirals or something else that could kill them by looking at them.
Ultimately, the Hermetic master that had been sending them out on all these quests would gather his minions, circle the wagons, and engage in a massive ritual which, due to his recently financed construction efforts, would have drawn on the entirety of the city as a ritual circle. This ritual would have merged the Master with the three supernatural manifestations of evil he had schemed and plotted to conjure forth. Rather than simply combining their power, the ritual drew on the primal energies of their essences: the demon as Evil, the mini-cthulhulhoid as Madness/Destruction, and the Wyrmy spirit as Corruption.
In essence, if the players didn't stop him (which they almost certainly wouldn't, they were just about standard starting characters), he would become a living god that was the incarnation of all that evil and nasty and bad, and he would have probably reduced the world to ash.
Yeah, I really saw that exercise in sadism as going places.
C'est la vie.
Good god, that is fucking awesome.