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The Game Idea Graveyard
piL
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Most of us have been there before. You work for two weeks on an idea, throwing it against the wall and writing down anything that makes sense. Then you spend the next week building it into a more cohesive idea, develop the constraints you want to have over the game, figuring out what the players can play and cannot play, trying to guess what the players will want to play, and how to incorporate those ideas into your world. Then you start getting character concepts and sheets from the players, figure out what needs to go where. Who do they know in this town? Which friend of theirs will betray them? How did an elf from the north hinterlands get all the way down here?
Then it's time for the first session. Everybody is excited. People are stoked about how well everything is thought out. Everything that happens seems to have a cohesive meaning or an interesting explanation. You pack it up. Then two people can't make it the week after that. It's four months later and you find your notes. "Huh, whatever happened to that?"
This thread is devoted to the fallen games, or the games that never happened. I've lost track of the campaigns that were played for zero to three sessions and then abandoned. This thread is about what made that game different, either about the setting, the planning, or the mechanics. So come by and leave your tale of the ideas cut down before their prime.
To get things going, I'll start with two of my ideas.
Hell is other people's schedules. This one died two sessions in, thanks to just not getting people together. This was back in 3rd edition days, before 3.5. My friends were tired of dwarves and elves, and clamoured for a non-traditional race game. The challenge of letting people play whatever festered until it bore fruit (playing Planescapre Torment probably didn't hurt either): The game would take place in hell (eschewing traditional DnD cosmology to some extent. There were lawful and chaotic aspects of hell and it was mostly evil, but I didn't want to use the traditional shape of the universe. Instead, this hell was on a large flat disc. The players were stranded and were tasked with recovering their memories which had been strewn about the landscape (which ideally would let them piece together their character's backstory bit by bit until they actually managed to craft a cohesive whole. I had developed a town of miners. They were too full of despair to actually be literal slaves, but food was controlled by the demon who let them work, and so they worked, since the fireblasted landscape outwards was unlikely to feed any escapees. On the bottom half of the disc, the players would fine eventually, was a land of dreams and nightmares that attached the cosmology to itself.
We made characters, played twice, and never got to anything but a simple dungeon crawl in the first town.
History Repeats Itself. This is an idea I never really made the effort to get players for. Mid-apocalyptic Shadowrun. Players would have to generate three characters throughout the course of the game. The first would be a group of traditional Shadowrunners, who would probably do one or two runs related to some magical happenings. As they're working together on this third run, news breaks out about a spreading calammity. Nobody's quite sure what's happening, but the UK is devastated right at Midnight GMT. From that point onwards, creatures are pouring out of the astral planes as midnight travels across the face of the planet. It's a repeat of the events of Earthdawn before the Kaers opened. Meanwhile, the players are mid-run inside of an arcology which shuts its doors. Missiles are launched to try and stop the invaders, but only those locked down in secure facilities survive the magical holocost.
Stage two is 250 years later, and the arcology survivors have separated into a number of factions. The first players would set the stage for this, but there would be a small core of elite corporate followers and the near immortal (cryogenics, medicine, etc) CEO-family that was in the arcology at the time of the event. Some areals would be split from those caught inside, those factions led by the anti-establishment Shadowrunners that had broken in, and probably some racial factions as well. This stage of the game would be the players finding out about the events that took down the world, in addition to securing bloodlines for their third characters.
The third phase would be the wasteland the players find themselves walking out to after the acrology doors open another 150 years later (Looking at about 2470 CE). Here they would battle leftover demons/monsters, help towns, recover and restore lost technology, and so on.
Tell me about your abandoned games!
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Luckily, all of that research on "alternate World War II" didn't go to waste, as I got to re-use it for my Godlike/Wild Talents campaign (which lasted the better part of 2 years).
We met really infrequently so they played about three sessions before I moved to Spain. When I got back to the States 4e came out and I had to re-learn all the rules and never got around to re-vamping the story line.
Zithra Melitch in Star Wars: An Empire's End
Jellica in In the Shadow of Zeus
Technically we didn't kill him. We just didn't save him.
I'll be honest, I forgot what happened at the end, besides him dying.
Zithra Melitch in Star Wars: An Empire's End
Jellica in In the Shadow of Zeus
We just sort of sat there awkwardly with his room-mate before excusing ourselves.
Sort of shitty, but to be honest, I didn't really want to play D&D anyway.
2) Playing Poison'd with my girlfriend and two others. The two ladies present do their very best (terrible) English pirate accents, while the third (I think he was Quartermaster) was gunning for captain. He took a debility at character creation, a mutilated throat, which caused him to scratch out his speech. So there's accents over here, robot voice over there, while the two girls team up to sell the other would-be captain out to the British Navy. We played two games of that, I think, but only two players returned for the second session, and Poison'd with two people just isn't very fun.
3) Trying out Exalted resulted in a player who had a gigantic flying badger. Kind of like Appa, from Avatar: the Last Airbender, if Appa was a badger. We actually spent the entire session making characters before people had to leave, and we just never returned to them.
However! A different group played Exalted and loved it. The ninja fisherman leapt from a dock onto a pirate ship attacking the port town they were visiting, assassinating most of the crew, while the strong-man archer grabbed cannonballs out of the air as they were fired and hurled them back at the boats. The best part was the pirate captain talking trash to the ninja fisherman, saying he'd never make it off the boat alive as two of his henchmen drew in, and the other player asking, "Can I have my guy just fire two arrows right now and pierce the henchmen in the throats? I can totally do that." And then he did, and it was fucking cool.
Went maybe three or four sessions, I think. Everyone liked Exalted, they just didn't have the patience for it past one or two fights.
Ideally it would have been a great game, a bit of space combat combined with maintaining stealthy behavior (wouldn't do to be seen by the bridge bunnies and assumed to be a new Zentradi mech). On board the SDF-1 there was room for non VT pilot characters to attempt to maintain the future VTs without tipping off that you where from the future, stealing ammunition, sneaking repair bits, engineering pieces from the classic VTs to keep the future tech working, feeding our crew etc... all while striving to maintain a low profile so as not to screw up the timeline. It was an interesting basis for a game that could have gone on for a while.
Or until one of the players decided that his LRM loadout included reflex warheads. You can't really hide it when those go off. And they did go off. There was some attempt to pass the destroyed Zent cruisers as accidental drive failures or something that wasn't an advanced fighter from the future, but our blatant disregard for canon killed the GM's hopes for the game.
I had such bold plans. The setting was a vast desert country that got its water with several rivers. The rivers started in the capital and were provided by the only god of the region, Tlaloc.
At the end of one of these rivers was a little settlement called Iram. It started in a city called Bilar where another country invaded with strange summoned creatures made of a black and silver stone. The players got as far as reaching Iram (escorting a Shiek's wife and child. The village was under the rulership one of the Shiek's brothers). Iram is weird as it's an oasis. Elsewhere you have to carefully irrigate and fight the desert but here it's lush and green and full of all kinds of life. And nobody knows. Nobody knows as there is a curse that prevents anybody revealing the true nature of the place.
The Shiek's brother, however, is missing and by the rites of succession, this puts the Shiek's son in power, but he's just a boy, so the party are in control for the time being.
Venturing outside, a fire started by the party (burning some goblins they slaughtered) attracts the attention of what seems to be a dragon (and the party cleric is affected by some strange compulsion which renders him almost useless and has him babbling about "the call to prayer"). Taking shelter in a house, the party discover the basement is full of the strange silver-veined rock conjured by the wizard back in Bilar. The dragon eventually seems to get bored and leave, allowing the players to rush back to the relative safety of the castle with their tails between their legs. With them they took a strange idol they found in the basement. An idol of some unknown deity who bears a striking resemblance to the one and only god of the desert, Tlaloc.
The next morning a large section of the castle's courtyard is blown up and outwards and a pair of new arrivals (a princess and her bodyguard from a land so distance as to be unheard of). Having a brief meeting with the townsfolk and the Shaykhah, the two new arrivals are assimilated into the group and leaving the priest to recover, they set out into the town and into a small forest near the fort. Ignoring a polite note and a trail of strangely discarded jewellery they eventually find a small clearing occupied by some kind of stone stage and a voice. After a rather unsatisfying conversation, the voice departs (the party having focused on getting the owner to reveal itself).
And then it fizzled out.
They never found out about the intelligent crows in the forest (despite speaking to one). Or the invisible replica of Iram floating in the air above it (which was home to a few Illithids). Or about Tlaloc's brother, the god who was buried not far from Iram. It was a shame. I had such plans.
I tried to run In Nomine GURPS twice. My players were willing, but they really didn't give two shits about the game, which is one thing when you're telling somebody to make a DnD character, but is a whole 'nother beast when you try to make a GURPS character. Nothing gets done.
Awesome. I had a friend try to do a similar thing, only instead everyone made Norse characters and tried to kill off the other pantheons, but it fell apart in the womb.
Why every GM that tried to run games about (his favorite anime/tv show/movie) for my group never worked.
That's pretty cool, and I think I'll end up stealing that idea.
Next failed idea: I spent a bunch of time trying to develop a fun sci-fi setting. I came up with five or six different systems, separated by earth by about a hundred light years, but all apart from each other by about ~3 to ~6 light years. There was no faster than light travel, which was one of my favorite parts, so the decision to go somewhere else was a big one.
The story was that ships left Earth during some calamatous event and for the most part, everything worked and colonization took place with several areas isolated from each other. Over the next 600 years, places expanded. There were a few places run by corporations, a few run by feudal societies, and one system, filled with strange artifacts that bestowed some psychic powers, ended up with a tribal society naturally attuned to repairing and maintaining technology (but unable to develop their own), so along with some other psychic powers. Basically, players could bounce between Starsiege: Tribes, Space Feudalism and Space Cyberpunk. Did a lot of planning, thought about a couple of game ideas with players as bounty hunters or mercenaries. Never saw the light of day.