Thursday, January 27, 2011

What I Want To Run

The past two posts have eluded to a very special post I've been wanting to put up and this is it. The idea for this came to me in a rare moment of quiet clarity while I was walking a dog through the hauntingly beautiful snow that came down in the early hours in New York City on Wednesday.

What do I want to run?

Let's say that player input or interest wasn't a factor. That is, assume for this excercise that your group of players would be overjoyed to play whatever you come up with. Its all you, the GM.

What would you run? What is your dream campaign or even, to pull it back closer to the doable, what do you really want to run next more than anything else if all the parts fell into place. You have the time, the system, the players, etc.


For me, it's actually Hunter Planet.




I want to run a Science Fiction, Space Opera Action/Adventure game with a touch of Comedy thrown in. The Player Characters are all Aliens who've come to Earth ('Dirt') on a Safari Vacation. Some are photographers, some are hunters out to shoot and mount trophie kills of the indigenious life (i.e. Us) and others might be campers, writers, artists or even a married couple on their honeymoon.

That's when it all goes to Roswell in a handbasket.

Whenever I think of this idea for a campaign, and I have had it pop into my head many, many times over the years, I see it as a reverse Men In Black, a Redneck Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Predator Sitcom all mixed together. I think this game would be, pun irresistable, out of this world.

Will it ever get run? I don't know. I hope so. I really, really want to run this.

I don't want to GM anything as badly as I want to GM this.

What about you? What do you want to run?

AD
Barking Alien




9 comments:

  1. 'a reverse Men In Black, a Redneck Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Predator Sitcom all mixed together':
    Has someone been drinking the Awesome Sauce, 'cuz that sounds really kewl! Also: for a sec, I thought I read Redneck Rampage in there...

    I've been fortunate enough to run all my most wanted campaigns so far(my groups have rocked!). But.... I'd say I'd want to throw together Street Fighter PC heroes, Call of Cthulu monster races, and the brutal, gritty reality of Aftermath, tinged with some Earth-X Nazis for NO REASON AT ALL, forced to survive on a satellite in slow orbital decay above say, Mars, maybe(?), into a blender and see what comes out. I'll use Dream Park(the all-time Champion Genre-Blender!), or SF's (O)WOD, or BRP. Choices, Choices! Can I beat RIFTS at its own game is what I seem to be saying. *sigh* Now to convince someone to play this!

    Good luck with your concoction and your PA game.(Which ideally will be using D6, yes?)

    Great post, I hope inspires more people!

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  2. In a fashion I realize that this post is an incomplete thought. I wrote what I want to run but is what I am going to run the same thing? If not why not?

    I'm glad you guys think its a cool idea. I think its a cool idea to the point of near obsessing. I actually want to contact the original creator(s) of Hunter Planet and discuss bringing it back out. Believe it or not after three years of trying consistantly I still can't get a copy of the game! I've only ever read a friend's copy about 15 years ago.

    @Velaran - 'Convincing someone to play this' is the key component here my friend. More on that later.

    @JJ - Thanks for the Yes! vote man. You're in Utica eh? Ever get down to the Big Apple? :)

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  3. Big fan of your proposal. I think it would be an awesome game.

    As for myself, my ULTIMATE CAMPAIGN changes from week to week. Right now, I think it's back to a kind of techno-magical Gamma World. Kind of like Encounter Critical but not nearly as silly. If you had asked me last week, I would have described some kind of retro-SF raygun & rockets game (more Gurps Tales of the Solar patrol then the Moon Soldiers Must Die! that I ran at NC Game Day).

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  4. Well I've tried to run my Super-Sleepers campaign for years now - the concept is that everyone wakes up in a room with no memories of who they are but there is some gear stashed around the room. As the characters stir, a video starts to play where some masked man laughs at them and talks smack to them like they've all known each other for years and he's just won something. The group then has to find their way out of a very secure building patrolled by robots. They eventually figure out that they are the members of a super-team that was defeated somehow and woke up in this facility. The bigger reveal is that they are a) clones of the original heroes and are part of an ultimate failsafe program activated when the heroes died and b) their arch-nemesis discovered the program years before it was ever used and wiped out the memory backups, c)when they get to the surface they find the world has been destroyed and d) they are in Australia

    This was a wild idea I had one night after reading Stronghold (the Champions super prison) M&M, and an Aftermath module way too close together. It's a post-apocalyptic mystery supers campaign so it covers a lot of ground. Once they get out the heroes can do whatever they want - try to recover their memories, take over part (or all) of Australia, try to figure out what went wrong and go back through time to stop it (negating their entire existence in the process) or whatever else they come up with. I had outlines written out for each of those.

    Let's just say that one of them involves this line:
    "What do you mean you couldn't stop them? You've got a perfectly good Luna-class Battleglobe in orbit right now! the thing is filthy but that stuff will shake right off if you'd just go power it up!"

    It was going to be pretty wild. I'd love to run it with a group in the right frame of mind.

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  5. Yep! I sure do! Will be "down south" in March for my Bday celebrations. I have been trying to make it down to a Redbox NYC game, but the stars haven't been right (yet). Would love to get down and play a Redneck Predator!

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  6. @Risus Monkey - I've gotta say that the whole Rayguns and Rockets sub-genre of Sci-Fi is one I've never really gotten to play or run and would love to.

    I am also interested in the Steampunk variant more closely associated with Moon Soldiers Must Die! and the very inspirational art of Greg Broadmore. I've been following your blog very closely waiting for an actual play report. Don't keep us in suspense!

    @Blacksteel - That is a pretty freaking awesome concept man. I would love to see how a game like that panned out.

    @JJ - Keep in touch. I sometimes run at the Complete Strategist or another location not far from there. I wish you had come to RECESS. It was off da hook! Heheh. I can talk street.

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  7. I've always wanted to run and/or play in two settings:

    1. Heroic Bronze Age Greece based on the Odyssey and the other legends about that time. (A substitute would be a very low magic Roman campaign kind of like David Drake's Vettius stories.)

    2. A gritty, low powered superhero campaign with a dollop of moral ambiguity thrown in and mixed vigorously. There may be supers with much greater powers but they would be NPCs.

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  8. I've been following your blog very closely waiting for an actual play report. Don't keep us in suspense!

    Full AP is here: http://www.risusmonkey.com/2011/01/moon-soldiers-must-dies-ap-part-deux.html

    Professor Pope captured a particularly cool moment here: http://professorpope.blogspot.com/2011/01/penningtons-pleasantries.html

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