Five games

Here are five campaigns I’d love to run if I had limitless free time and a crew of fearless players:

1. American Barbarica: 1950 AD. I've been wanting to do an OD&D hack for Kenneth Hite’s supremely excellent The Day After Ragnarok since the day I read it. I'd set it in the ruins of Appalachia and fill it with teenage cavemen, Mothmen, reptilian shapeshifters, and Hyperborian Death Machines. I'm thinking a ratio that's 70% R.E. Howard and 30% Fallout sounds right. Stats for Silver John are a given. The main antagonist would be the snake worshiping Grand Army of the New Konfederacy as led by the Exalted Cyclops of West Virginia - none other than future West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd! 

2. Prisoners of the Red Planet: An alternate 19th century in which the victorians decide to do their tomb robbing on Mars rather than in Egypt. A lucrative trade in Martian mummies follows, complete with unwrapping parties. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic draw their plans against us. While you can’t do Mars without acknowledging Burroughs, I’d shy away from straight Barsoom pastiche. In fact, a frontier town on Mars strikes me as a pretty neat place to set a weird western.

3. Evil Creature Double Feature. A small town setting for Call of Cthulhu, based on Bronze Age horror comics. Think ‘Suburban Gothic’. Despite my abiding love for D&D, CoC is probably my favorite game. It was the first game I ever actually ran, rather than just played. Most folks primarily associate the OSR with D&D, but Chaosium’s flagship game has barely changed over the course of it’s six editions. That’s pretty fucking old school. It’s a game that doesn’t get enough attention in the blog scene and I think it deserves more. And I think the bronze age thing would be a lot of fun to work on, and very different from the mythos standard. I’ve been meaning to plow through my Tomb of Dracula omnibuses anyway.

4. Mystery in Space: a horror-themed pulp 50’s space opera set in 'The Vodyanoi System'. Also inspired by  comics, but here we’re talking EC classics like Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and the imaginatively-named combo title, Weird Science-Fantasy. More alien ruins, bug-eyed monsters, space zombies, and beautiful-but-deadly alien princesses than you can shake a raygun at (note: rayguns are largely ineffective against bug-eyed monsters). My aim here would be to juxtapose Gee-Whiz retro-futurism with the stark alien horror of a haunted star system. Expect plenty of splattered brains on the bubble helmets.

Speaking of brain matter, 

5. The Brain Invaders. Okay. This is one of the weirder game concepts I’ve had. I thought is one up during an extended surgical recovery, which may be why I thought mashing up psychic espionage and dungeoncrawling was a good idea. The setting is an ancient, unnamed city, equal parts Interzone and Fantasy Island. No one remembers exactly how they got there, but Malevolent Forces (supernatural or otherwise) prevent them from leaving. Everyone in the city has a secret, and one of those secrets is The Escape Plan. To find it, PCs use a process (magical, psychic, superscientific, or hand-wavy) to delve into the subconscious minds of the Island’s inhabitants.

Which is where then dungeon aspect comes in. Journeying through someone’s mind is -at least in game terms- indistinguishable from dungeoncrawling. There are traps and locked doors and weird puzzles and very strange monsters, and the idea of a magic sword is literally the same as a magic sword. I think HPL’s dream cycle is probably the biggest influence here, so hopefully Realms of Crawling Chaos will include stats for Gugs.

So, there you go. These are the idle thoughts of a gamer in exile. I’m going to do a little one page writeup of each of these to see if any have legs as a world building exercise. If so, the winner(s) will go forward as my 2011 setting project. If any of these strikes you as something you might like to read about, do speak up.