Worlds to go back to

I haven’t been too productive of late, despite telling myself that once again I’d kick into gear following the New Year. It would be nice to say that this post will be the start of a new trend, but I’ve told myself that before, and I still quickly get sidetracked by something or other. I can hopefully make myself semi-productive for a while and maybe pull something together from all my draft posts (oh so many draft posts).

So, worlds I miss and want to go back to. Not ones I think about all the time, ones I work on more often. Mostly these are played experiences, ones I felt were never complete or I wish I could flesh out some more.

 

Legend of the Five Rings

So, I’ve managed a few times to put something together for this, as my incomplete play report from a few years ago might attest.

I did manage to round off a few plots that I had for my favourite character there. He was married off, above his station, into a new clan, which made sense from a story point-of-view but still felt at least one adventure too soon.

Always waiting in the wings was a backup character I made, a Centipede clan bushi who, after years of Phoenix clan training to master the art of attuning to the Void, had accidentally attuned himself to the Sun. He never had a chance to break out and do anything, and I doubt he ever will.

It would be cool to go back though. I always had great ideas for a Dragon shugenja, or to play a Scorpion how I felt he should be played, rather than how they inevitably were. With the new rules on the horizon, maybe I’ll get to try something out.

 

Dresden Files

The last time I played, my cryomancer had finally escaped his Doom as a Rulebreaker for naively reading a book on Outsiders, only to end up with a completely new Doom – never accept the help of the Genius Locum of a Leyline in order to trap a Necromancer inside an infinitely repeating second, no matter how good your intentions.

I had some ideas for pulling together a new game set in Las Vegas, with various clued in mobsters and the Lady Luck making several appearances, but I never got it off the ground. And with the Paranet Papers coming out with their own spin on Vegas, I was a little put off the idea.

More recently, I came up with a couple of ideas for other locations (Dublin with lots of Fae and Werewolf stuff going on, Hong Kong with Elemental Courts and probably Vampires and triads). I haven’t made any notes or anything on them yet.

 

The Goblin King

The Goblin King was a magic-powered supervillain in a game of Mutants and Masterminds. He was equal parts campy Batman villain and silly Venture Bros. villain, modelled in part on the Monarch.

But the game dried up just as I was starting to get the development going. Infiltrating the UN in order to have a conversation with the General Secretary, I had just let slip that the entire time we’d been playing, I’d been purposefully hamming up the ridiculous aspects of the character in order to avoid conflicts between Earth and the Goblin Dimension (which had been all but destroyed in a war under the previous, non-Human Goblin King).

I’m not sure how many other players picked up on the fact I’d been underplaying my abilities or motives, but I was enjoying it. I have a draft post sat around trying to rebuild the character in a few different superhero rules sets, but I’m not very happy with it.

One day, I might bring him back.

 

FATEPunk

My A-Z of the setting as I had it imagined was written almost a year ago. It was heavily borrowed/stolen from a cyberpunk game I’d played in for months during 2011, which I enjoyed so much I attempted a not-so-subtle copy of it (that’s my story and I’m sticking with it).

I managed to run a game around 2014 or 2015 using some hastily cobbled together rules for cybernetics in FATE. One session in and I realised that the story I wanted to tell wasn’t the story the players were interested in, and I called it quits.

If I went back to it, I would probably move away from the Pacific-rooted story, maybe exploring the areas around the rival space elevators as I’d written them. That would drop the game into either Africa or South/Central America which would have a very different feel from the Black Lagoon/Marvel’s Madripoor, or maybe wouldn’t. I don’t know.

The big villain of course would still have to be globalism and global trade conglomerates, and so on. Nativism / Globalism, Cultural appropriation / Globalism or Cultural destruction / Globalism would all work in those settings, but I don’t have nearly as many ideas of how to pull it off.

More to ponder then.

 

Sands of Fate

My elemental Arabian Nights fantasy game was fun for the few sessions I played with it, but I was so focused at the time on the rules and how to make them work that I don’t know if my setting was as good. It certainly had a few parallels with the Old Crown, which I’d been working on at the time.

I’d like to try again, maybe sit down with it and work out some of the kinks, but I’m not in the place for it right now. I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt and it’s certainly brought some of the ideas back to the fore of my mind.

 

 

And that’s all for now. Maybe I’ll actually manage to write something else up soon too!