Soooooooooooo....
I've been looking for games to play for like, three weeks. World of Darkness is tough for me to get into at the best of times, but none of the current offerings have managed to seize my imagination. There are no really good superhero games (all the current games seem pretty... restrictive, to me) and the only Shadowrun or Swords & Sorcery games in town are Denver and Tenebrae respectively, both of which have crazy issues.
Straight up, I don't know if I've got the time to get something off the ground fast, but I figure if I can't find something I'd like to play, the best option is to do what I do in real life - make it. Before I even start looking at shit like 'how do you get a dice rolling system going?' and 'how do I make sure backups exist?' Step one seems like it'd be 'decide what you wanna do'.
I fear World of Darkness because it comes with so much baggage and I don't know (or like) the themes well enough, so I'm going to take that off the table.
I've been on a huge Savage Worlds kick lately, which has the advantage of being very easy to understand, very cheap, and very flexible, so I'm leaning towards that as a system choice. With that in mind, I'm thinking of the following options to provide something that isn't anime-based or urban fantasy (as those genres seem to have plenty of support).
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Deadlands - Has the advantage of being a published setting and I've got all the Deadlands: Reloaded stuff. A new video game is coming out at some point in the near future and that'll hopefully spur some interest too (did you see what I did there? Hah). Deadlands is 'fantasy western' so you can have your scary 'horror' elements in there, but it is also about gunslinging and being a bad hombre. Could be interesting, but I fear it is pretty niche.
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Original Fantasy - Swords & Sorcery with magic and adventuring as a key focus. I've always liked the idea of playing around with a Guilds-type structure, where people can form up adventuring companies and go questing for gold, loot and glory. I don't know any published fantasy settings well enough to want to try and convert them over, but this has the advantage of being generic enough anyone ought to be able to get the general gist... with the potential pitfall that a lot of people might not want to bother learning about the (oh so rich and deep) lore of whatever setting I cobble together.
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Oriental Adventures! Basically the same as the above but set in a more Samurai/Ninja/Weird Japanese Monster setting than a classical western fantasy one. This is mostly because I think samurai adventures are bloody cool, but I'm not sure I'd want to mash them all together into one big pot. I am seriously burned out on 'multiverse' style games and (personally) think it is better to try and keep themes mostly separate.
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Superheroes? Basically the same idea as the fantasy one but... for superheroes. I have the notes for a game I was going to run in the aftermath of a Crisis on Infinite Worlds style event where, basically, the good guys lost and heroes from a bunch of worlds were shoved into the one remaining Earth with amnesia, and are now remembering who they were. This has the advantage of my ... having a bunch of shit written for this already, but I'd have to convert it all over to Savage Worlds and there's already a few superhero games around, even if they aren't to my tastes.
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Space Opera - I could easily get into some sort of space opera thing as an alternative to the fantasy idea. Again, love the idea of ships and crews running around trying to scratch out a living as weird aliens and political machinations boil in the background. Some sort of Babylon-5-esque setup would probably be my choice here... but again, this'd require a lot of work and people might be turned off to the idea of learning all about a new sci-fi world just for the opportunity to play.
I'm thinking that if I go for one of the original ideas, I make it VERY OBVIOUS in BIG FLASHING LETTERS that I am open to integrating more original content into the world (but it would have to be original - nothing makes me facepalm harder these days than seeing Daleks and Klingons turn up in the same setting).
The hope would be that these kinds of action-focused 'Go Be Protagonist'-esque settings would help take some of the pressure off me as potential Headstaff, because in any case I would want people to focus on the adventure more than politicking amongst each other, and thus the potential for drama bombs would be ... less. Not nothing, but less.
What do you guys think? Do you have preferences for the above? Is there a genre you think is crying out for representation? Is there something painfully obvious I'm missing? Is Savage Worlds gonna mean that it is literally just me, sat alone, on my own, on my server, pouting for eternity? Most of my old MU*ing contacts have drifted off into the ether so... any advice y'all can offer would be greatly appreciated!