The Emprise Strikes Back

This has been a rough week and I’ve had to make some pretty grim decisions. I could tell you all about it, but then you’d just know about another set someone else’s problems you can’t do anything about. Instead, I’m going to tell you about ten ideas I had for tabletop role-playing game campaigns that I’ve always wanted to run but never have (and probably never will, which is why I’m willing to tell you about them). When reality lets you down, there’s always fantasy! So…here we go:

1. Begin in Darkness, End in Silence

System: D&D, probably 3.5 because it’s a little more robust and expandable, if unbalanced.

Hook: It’s a Middle Earth arms race! (No rings involved.)

Story: I came up with this as a campaign for my homebrew D&D3.5 setting, the World of Talis, where the gnomes and dwarves each have their own homelands that are often antagonistic and even confrontational towards both one another and the other races. The gnomes, in their remote and frigid underground kingdom of Bhane far to the north, are known for their development of sophisticated technologies and clever mechanical devices, while the dwarves, in the stony fastness of Karva, control access to the continent’s greatest storehouses of mineral wealth and resources. Between them lies Drovia, formerly a human kingdom but now under the thumb of the tyrannical dark elves. The gnomes have recently developed a shocking new invention that could entire change the balance of power: a high-speed underground rail system that can traverse the length and breadth of the land in only a few hours’ time, carrying the biggest and most powerful weapons ever built. But they can’t finish it without minerals and ores from the dwarven mines. Will they sell it to the highest bidder (likely one of the big human empires, forever warring for status and territory), or will they combine forces to solve the mutual problem of the Drow? Or is it better off destroyed so that no one can possess such a powerful weapon? That question is up to the PCs, a group of diplomats from various factions who have been sent to sound out the gnomes and dwarves on their intentions.

2. The Magic Lamp

System: Probably Paranoia XP, using the “Straight” play style.

Hook: A Paranoia campaign, but it’s in the present day…and there never was an apocalypse.

Story: Inspired by the Aladdin complex of Black Rock Inc., a monolithic system of supercomputers that handle trillions of dollars worth of investments, “The Magic Lamp” proposes a similar situation that goes horribly wrong. A massive office complex staffed with thousands of employees and tasked with managing the investments of some of the world’s biggest financial firms is build up to the point that it functions as its own arcology; at some point, its master AI responds to a series of unrelated incidents by coming to the conclusion that societal collapse is imminent. It triggers a safety protocol that sinks the entire complex under the earth somewhere in the Great Plains, and unleashes a lethal gas that kills all the employees, who it believes it can no longer trust. Luckily, it has cloned them all, and immediately activates the clones, putting them right back to work doing their old jobs, but imprinting them with false memories. They continue to show up every day, staying in ‘company housing’ with their spouses and families, and keep on working (whether it’s as a janitor or a CEO) under the assumption that the decisions they make are critical to the optimal functioning of the global economy. The master AI feeds them capitalist propaganda, misinformation, and constant communiques from secret factions in an attempt to keep them from questioning a reality that increasingly doesn’t make sense. And when someone asks too many questions, they disappear, replaced by someone who looks and acts the same…

3. Gray Skies

System: Not sure. Seems suited to Dark Conspiracy but I always found that system super clunky. Might be fun to tailor this around a customized World of Darkness/Storytelling System game?

Hook: It’s The X-Files, inside out.

Story: The truth is out there…and it’s up to you to keep it quiet. The PCs are a small but skilled group of Grays — rogue extraterrestrials from a doomed civilization. They have to get what remains of their people off their homeworld fast, or their entire race will die; and all they can work with is a bit of high technology and a reliable way of getting to Planet Earth. They have a few friends, mostly well-meaning eccentrics and the handful of people they’ve convinced that they come in peace, but they have a lot more enemies: the average citizen, who would think of them as alien monsters if they truly believe they existed; enemy races who destroyed their planet to begin with and want to do the same to their new home; various government agencies who want to exploit them, dissect them, blackmail them, or steal their secrets; and, of course, a couple of dedicated but misguided federal agents who just won’t leave them alone! You could turn this into a really long campaign, coming up with various alien races, new tech, and specific classes for the Grays, or you could keep it simple and make the PCs the only surviving members of their world, alone against all of Earth’s great powers. There’s tons of opportunities for role-play as well as action, as the Grays must determine who they can trust, how they can ensure safety for their people, and how long — or even if — to keep the passage open to their world open.

4. Intronauts

System: Christ, I dunno.

Hook: The heroes explore the internal landscapes of their own minds to gain power and knowledge.

Story: This is probably the least-formed story on this list, and it’s not even really a narrative or a campaign so much as it is a mechanic that I love the idea of but don’t really know how I would work it into an existing system or setting. Basically, it’s the idea that in this milieu, drugs (both naturally derived and synthesized by science or alchemy) replace magic as a way of bending and shaping reality — but it only works in the interior world. Certain perceptions and information, and perhaps even minor ways of altering actuality, can be carried over into the waking world, but overall, it’s the development of the world inside, and the blurring of the lines of what reality means, that is more important. I want to incorporate an old-school fantasy/DCC element where the more experienced and skilled your ‘wizard’ is — which, of course, means the more drugs they have hoovered into their bloodstream — the more it begins to show in both their physical (through mutations, illnesses, and flat-out deformities) and mental (through some kind of CoC-style sanity mechanic) health. I like the idea of spectacular sorcerous battles taking place entirely in the minds of two drugged-out wrecks sitting on a couch; I like the idea of creating specialized wizard ‘schools’, each with their own powers and abilities, based around different types of drugs (stimulants, narcotics, psychedelics, etc.), and I love the idea that you could fit this into basically any kind of setting, from high fantasy to modern to cyberpunk to post-apocalyptic to sci-fi.

5. The Wreck of History

System: Lexicon.

Hook: Competitive academics try to create a narrative around a vanished society for profit and fame.

Story: This is one I’ve tried to get off the ground a number of times, because I just absolutely adore the concept of Lexicon, an RPG where players take turns writing Wiki entries for a fictional world and other players have to build on them. The idea is pretty simple: an empty world is discovered. Ruins, documents, and artifacts are left behind, but much has been destroyed, and there is no life anywhere on the planet. A team of academics are dispatched to sort through the ruins of the world and try to create a reasonable sense of its history and culture, as well as what might have wiped everything out; but the academics aren’t friendly rivals. Some of them hate each other. Some simply compete for prestige, fame, or recognition; others are personal or romantic rivals. Their competition can be friendly and cooperative, or it can grow fierce — even murderously so. They jockey for position in sorting through the wreckage; they can cast each other’s findings into doubt, or wreck it, bury it, or alter it completely. I’m not sure how to fix the rules to make this work, but basically, there are rewards not for creating entries, but for tying them together and creating an overarching narrative for the vanished world — even if it’s entirely invented. As long as it seems to make sense, you can get your superiors to believe it; but your rivals are working on their own narratives, and always trying to cast yours into doubt. This all plays out through the mechanic of writing the Wiki entries, with the role-playing element coming from ‘notes’ you add as an editor.

6. The Job

System: FIASCO. But maybe not!

Hook: The setting, style, and tone of classic heist movies of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

Story: It’s no secret that I love noir, I love crime fiction, I love capers, and I love heist pictures, especially when they go horribly wrong. It’s also no secret that I love the Parker novels, written by Donald Westlake under his “Richard Stark” pen name, and that I’ve incorporated elements of them into adventures I’ve designed and characters that I’ve played. So I’ve always wanted to recreated that style in an RPG as a total campaign setting. The idea would be that your PC is a professional heist job artist, in a highly stylized America sometime between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s. Every few months (that is, every game session), you get information from one of your contacts about a new job with a killer payoff. You have to assemble a team (that is, recruit the other PCs, each of whom has a special skill or quality you’ll need to pull off the job) and make a plan. What you don’t know is that one of the team is planning a double cross. Maybe the cops got to them; maybe the mob paid them off; maybe the inside man is a turncoat, or maybe two of the team have a shadowy past history. Maybe you worked with one of them before and he wants revenge for some perceived slight. Or maybe it’s just someone who wants the whole take for themselves. Regardless, the whole thing is going to go to shit, which makes the FIASCO system ideal for play, although it lacks the robustness (and character design/skill element) to build an ongoing campaign, so I could be steered to something else. Either way, the cool continuity aspect is that only one of the team has to survive to keep the campaign going — and maybe it’s someone the next group won’t trust.

7. Came Too Late & Stayed Too Long

System: Hell if I know. I never ran into a pure Western-style RPG setting I thought was worth a damn. I feel like defaulting to a d20 Modern or GURPS Western campaign, but that’s out of laziness more than anything else.

Hook: It’s basically just Red Dead Redemption II, which is to say, it’s basically just The Wild Bunch.

Story: Sure, there’s no huge twist here, but…it’s Red Dead Redemption II and/or The Wild Bunch as a role-playing game! That’s pretty cool, damn it! What we’re looking at here is the PCs as a gang of aging Wild West outlaws in the waning days of the American frontier. While Al Swearingen and his crew out in Deadwood are trying to find ways to thrive in a land that’s losing its wildness to civilization, you and your gang are simply too wild and wooly to ever get used to a new status quo. As the hated city ways of the East start to encroach on your freebooting life in the West, you cook up new schemes and new ways of making that one last big take, only to learn that things can always go wrong, the world doesn’t want outlaws anymore, and no take is ever big enough to be the last. This is a bit of a doomstruck campaign, as it’s pretty clear the gang will keep losing its best and keep being driven away from the wilderness, but where will they go? North to Canada? South to the still-open ranges of South America, Australia, Africa? To California, to the edge of the continent? Or will they try their luck in the big cities, hoping that even if they can’t change, they can make the world change? That’s the name of the game…

8. Who Am I This Time?

System: Hoo boy. This is tricky. It might require a system that’s flexible enough to be built from the ground up.

Hook: A survival game where the characters must not only navigate a strange and mysterious world, but do so with no knowledge of who they are or how they came to be there.

Story: This is another one that I really love (you’ve probably noticed that I’m drawn to themes of identity, memory, self-creation, and exploration, because I’m that kind of a metagaming asshole), but I’m not at all sure how to implement. The basic idea is this: the PCs all wake up, naked or with only scraps of clothes, within a few feet of each other. They don’t know where they are, how they got there, or where they’re from — they know this isn’t their home but they don’t know what it is. Even worse, they don’t know who they are; their memories are wiped clean, and not only do they not remember their names or their past, they don’t even know who they are or what they can do. So the challenge of the game combines a sort of exploratory character-building (you’d need a robust mechanic that allows basic stuff like abilities, skills, class, etc. to be set and discoverable, but not yet known at the outside to the characters, because you’ll initially just be handing them a blank character sheet and they have to learn what they are capable of as they go) with a crafting system (they need to learn how to do very basic survival stuff at the outset before they can do major adventuring stuff) and an overarching mystery (who they are, where they are, where they came from, and what happened to them). I think this would be fun as hell and a huge challenge, and another advantage would be that you could adapt it to any number of common RPG settings/genres.

9. A World in Flames

System: I’ve also never run into a WWII-style RPG system I really like. I almost would wanna do a modified Twilight: 2000 campaign here, but it’s a bit too tech-fiddly and gun-lovey for me. I’d be fine with doing a GURPS: World War 2 game here, to be honest.

Hook: World War II, from beginning to end. The whole catastrophic banana.

Story: There’s nothing super fancy to this one, no twist or inversion or anything. I basically want to run the entirety of the Second World War, from the Nazi invasion of Poland to the Japanese surrender, with the same group of characters, an Easy Company-style squad of colorful but luckless grunts who somehow never manage to rotate out. They’re in it from the start of the war to the end of it, and wherever the action is hottest, that’s where they’ll be. You begin in North Africa, work your way through Europe, and end up in the bloody Pacific Theatre. Like Sgt. Rock and his boys, they always seem to end up in a dire situation, and they always seem to find a way out of it — but not always fully intact. This, like The Job, has the advantage having a built-in way to cycle new players in and out, because you only need a character or two to keep the squad together. You can incorporate all kinds of genre-bending stuff in the overall framework — horror, international intrigue, weird war, spy stuff, even superheroes — or you can just play it straight, letting the PCs work their way through history (albeit in a necessarily ahistorical way). There’s nothing really unusual about this other than its scope, but again, I think it would be a hell of a lot of fun, especially with a gamemaster willing to create interesting encounters based on the actual events of the war.

10. By Hook or By Crook

System: Much of this would be role-playing, so the system isn’t that important — might go with Secret Agent if you want to play rules-light, Pulp Hero if you want to play rules-heavy.

Hook: The PCs are prisoners — there’s not just one anymore.

Story: I’ve always, always wanted to do a campaign based around the Village, where the PCs are new arrivals. The setting and the whole vibe to me are so appealing and flush with possibilities, and I think it would be absolutely amazing just in terms of role-playing opportunities to do each and every session just to see what choices they would make. (I know there’s a GURPS supplement for The Prisoner, but it’s a little too fan-boyish for me, and it doesn’t work for my major requirement, up ahead.) The show itself illustrated how you could mix all kinds of genres into the basic framework: espionage, sci-fi, steampunk, even Western. But for me, the one and only way it could really work to its full potential is also the one way that keeps it from being easily playable: the PCs must not be familiar with the original material. I’ve talked already about how I am drawn to scenarios that are based on impenetrable mysteries, deliberate obfuscation, double-crosses and uncertain loyalties, and the loss or lack of identity, and this could have all those wrapped up into one juicy setting, but it would be crucial that everyone except the game-master go into it with no knowledge of the actual nature of the Village. They could be anyone — spies who resigned like Number 6, strangers abducted for unknown reasons, retired loyalists, employees of whatever mysterious force is behind the whole thing, or even minor functionaries like cab drivers or shopkeepers. But it’s critical that they, like the viewers and like Number Six before them, learn what’s happening sporadically, session to session, in bits and pieces, without ever being sure of what they know. If you can get that to work, I think you could have one of the most exciting and unpredictable campaigns imaginable.