Posts made by Runescryer

@Thenomain said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Runescryer said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Space 1889: Classic Steampunk adventure before Steampunk was even a thing.

You can bypass the "steampunk" label and add so much depth to it by calling it what it is: Verne.

Its tag-line is even more descriptive: "Everything Jules Verne should have written. Everything H. G. Wells could have written. Everything A. Conan Doyle thought of, but never published because it was too fantastic." Bam! You are there!

edit: Or for Fantasy Victorian, Castle Falkenstien (preferred for originality) or Victorianna (aka Shadowrun 1889).

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My issue with the "steampunk" label is that it doesn't describe setting or theme or time-period. It describes technology, and only just. It describes fashion more than it describes anything else. It's like a bunch of 90s kids started running around in ripped jeans writing stories about being poor and unhappy and saying that makes the story "grunge".

Yes I'm just so used to explaining it as 'steampunk'. But Verne, Wells, Edison, and Tesla, all mashed up with lumeniferous Ether Theroy. I used to play a Texas oilman modeled after Quincy from 'Dracula' back when the game game out.

A couple of other RPGs that I left off on accident...

Underground: Recycling a scaled down version of the Mayfair Exponential Game System (DC Heroes), you've got genetically modified soldiers with superpowers and accompanying mental health issues ranging from Berserk Killing Rage to Multiple-Personality Disorder, recently completed their tours of duty with a Private Military Conflict company that enhanced them and set loose back into society. It's the perfect mash up of dystopian futurism (you have to get a Free Speech Permit, but you also have the right to bomb a post office as free speech), over the top 90's comic book violence (guns go up to the 75mm range and the works of Frank Miller, Geoff Darrow, and Peter Chung are heavy influences), and social commentary ranging from the treatment of veterans to manufactured ghettoization to unrestrained free market corporatism. One of the neater bits is the ability for a character group to spend Karma/XP on actually improving social conditions, ranging from a neighborhood to nation wide, depending on how they go about accomplishing the change in RP. For example, increasing a neighborhood's quality of life could involve something as simple as a plotline about protecting a local Free Health Clinic from gang extortion or boosting a shipment of meds for the clinic, while changing it on a national level could involve something like breaking into the broadcast transmission of the Super Bowl and showing evidence of how money that's supposed to be used for healthcare gets diverted to CEO payouts instead. Of course, it cost more group XP to improve things on a national scale than on a local scale, and when you improve one social aspect, another decreases. So, maybe you end up getting better healthcare for your neighborhood, but take home pay decreases because of an increase in local taxes to pay for it.

Space 1889: Classic Steampunk adventure before Steampunk was even a thing. Victorian adventures on Etherships throughout the Solar System; ties in heavily with the 'John Carter' style of Planetary Romance Sci-Fi. European Colonialism abounds, with the British on Mars, the Germans on Venus, and everyone hating the Belgians.

Trinity Universe: The best meta-plot ever created by White Wolf, IMO. The Storyteller System adapted to Sci-Fi, Superheroes, and Pulp well with only a few bits of kludge. I'd love to see a game that covers the whole timeline, with sub-games for each era, but I realize that the intricacy of the meta-plot might mot make that possible. Challenging to pull off, but I think that the RP rewards would be well worth it when a Trinity Era character sees the ultimate culmination and effects of a TP that happened in the Adventure! Era.

Colony: Great series on USA. Like the classic V, but turned up and without stock characters. Collaborators and Resistance characters are both well fleshed out and I like that the main characters have to make hard choices that sometimes go against their moral codes or even betray their alliances to protect the family. Set it in one of the other major cities on Earth; how would the scenario be different in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, or Cairo...lots of different storytelling possibilities here.

And yes, CthulhuTech would be awesome as a MU, Sands

Hmmm...

Avatar: The Last Airbender/Legend of Kora: Fantastic, rich setting with martial arts and elemental magic. I have no idea why this hasn't been done more as a game

Wild Cards: A different take on superheroes; maybe it will get more love if GRRM actually does a TV series

The Man In The High Castle: Alternate history, espionage, and resistance

Tekumel: It's a good book series and one of the original RPG settings. Rich in history and detail, clan politics; a great non-Western fantasy series. I think that it's the level of history and societal detail in the books that prevents it from being used as a game, sadly.

RPG's
Top Secret SI: There should be more straight up espionage games, and Top Secret SI (the second edition) had a fantastic set up with clearly good guys (The Orion Initiative) and bad guys (WEB), instead of murky realpolitik. There's a new edition of the game coming out soon by the original creator, Merle Rasmussen.

Eclipse Phase: One of the best sci-fi settings, game or otherwise, in years. Doing this game could combine various player's cravings for an 'Expanse' game and a 'Cyberpunk' game in one.

Blue Rose: A nifty fantasy RPG from Green Ronin; the first edition used their True 20 system, the new second edition uses their AGE system. A romantic fantasy game where the emphasis is on relationships and working as part of a group to protect society, this is pretty much the 'Chronicles of Valdamar' game that fantasy readers have been asking for, but Mercedes Lackey has been quashing. Plus, you can play an intelligent, psychic animal. The setting might be a little too accepting of gay and trans characters for the tastes of some hardcore gamers, though (the main kingdom has full equality and acceptance of gay/lesbian persons, and second edition adds ideas like using magic to shape new bodies for transsexuals to complete their transformations. Also, Intolerant Monotheistic Theocratic Frenemy Country on the border that's only not a full enemy because of Evil Necromantic Nation of Evilness to the North). Still, it's a good break from the traditional 'murder hobo' adventuring of the majority of fantasy games, and the emphasis on social relationships fits in nicely with what the majority of MU*s are or turn into, IMO.

Scion: Wish this game would have gotten more love from the MU* community. I played Monsters and Moshpits while it was around, and Scion remains one of my all-time favorite games. Hoping 2nd Edition turns out well, but feeling nervous after Onyx Path pushed out Exalted 3rd...

7th Sea: Again, another fantastic RPG that never seemed to get love from the MU community. Swashbuckling, magic, deep conspiracies...this game was a blast. Sadly, I'm not too thrilled with 2nd edition, but the setting is still great.

Renegade Legion: Outshined by it's big brothers at FASA, Shadowrun and Battletech, Renegade Legion had a great premise: high space opera focusing on a group of resistance fighters against an overwhelming and evil galactic government. If it sounds familiar, it's because Renegade Legion grew out of the game design that FASA pitched for a Star Wars RPG license that ultimately went to West End Games. However, changes were made, like the Evil Galactic Empire rising from the ashes of Earth and being modeled on a fascist interpretation of the Roman Empire. It was fun, had lots of emphasis on epic combat, and had a great deal of setting depth and lore.

TORG: Speaking of West End...Torg was just an awesome expression of 10 gallons of weirdness in a 5 gallon hat. America converted into Dinosaur Land. The British Isles converted to a fairy tale kingdom with an epic story of Light versus Dark. The South Asian island chains turned into horror-scapes with Victorian Colonial 'White Man's Burden'. A French papacy mixed with cyberpunk where people experience God and Heaven by jacking in...The setting was amazing and the system was enjoyable. The card mechanics shouldn't be too hard to duplicate. If you ever wanted your Japanese Techno-future corporate ninja to have adventures alongside a fantasy paladin, a werewolf, and The Shadow, this is the game for you.

@Arkandel He's been doing side work for pretty much everyone (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Dynamite, Image) while writing more Astro City in that time period. 'The Dark Ages' story arc (Astro City in the 70's) ran between 2005 - 2010. 2013, Vertigo started up Astro City Vol. 3. Kurt was answering letters on his own website about Astro City in June last year.

That's all a quick search revealed.

@Arkandel

I think Kurt is mostly taking a break and doing the convention circuit for a while. Garth is pretty much focusing on the Preacher TV series as an EP.

@Paris

I'm happy with Mukluk, myself. But, I think that BlowTorch offers activity notification like you're looking for.

Once upon a time, I also used AndroMud, but I can't remember if they offer activity notification.

I'm not familiar with the Savage Worlds system and can't code. But Superhero world-building and Classical Mythology? Those I have a solid grip on. Hit me up if you'd like some help in the lore/esoterica departments.

@ThatGuyThere No, it's still crap. But it's crap that panders to the very loud segment of comics fans complaining about 'diversity' and whose tastes have become more jaded and voyeuristic over the past several decades. It's a schlock-shock event storyline like all Marvel's (and 99% of DC's) have been for years now. Sound and fury signifying nothing because the status quo will be restored soon enough. And then the sales start dropping and the edge gets pushed further out to appease the diminishing reading base and make up for the sales lost from the majority of long-time fans (like me) who have stopped buying because we've gotten tired of the heroes fighting each other for the 3,572nd time in the history of the Marvel Universe, or being written as arrogant a-holes that think they know better than everyone else and everything would just work out fine if everyone acknowledged their superiority and followed along with their proposals, which is why they have to enact things in secret for the betterment of everyone.

In the mean time, I just dropped a few hundred dollars the past couple weeks getting into DC's Rebrith storylines and titles, because they actually have good writing that's letting the heroes be iconic heroes again, rather than the mess New 52 ended up as and Marvel currently is. DC's getting back to character fundamentals, realizing that it doesn't have to be 100% character deconstruction; every title, every month.

@bladesurfer The 2.0 version that was released by WEG/Yeti a few years ago was okay. Not great, but okay. I have it, but there wasn't enough of an impression as to rules or advancement of the metaplot to stick in my brain or make me want to play it much.

@TimmyZ Yeah, the name of the system was always mentioned in passing in news files, but never really had any link or directions to documentation. And that's a failing on the Staff of the games, not Faraday.

@golgoth Heck, let's do TORG or one of the MasterBook (the successor to TORG & Shatterzone) games like Bloodshadows or Necroscope. I've got a full set of both TORG and MasterBook cards to use as a reference for coding in.

@faraday Okay. I've been in like 3 or 4 FS3 games before, and I can't remember any of them spitting out the numbers before. Thanks.

My two cents worth...

I don't have a problem with FS3, per se. I think Faraday came up with a decent, simple game engine that has lots of different genre applications where skills are emphasized.

That being said, I think that it falls into a common trap for many simple generic systems in that it does basic stuff really well, but falls apart once you start moving away from the basic stuff. Once you start moving beyond skills into more supernatural elements (be it magic, psionics, or superpowers), the system starts getting kludgy. For pure skill and attribute driven games, it's certainly fine.

Another (minor) quibble that I have with FS3 is that I'm not entirely sure how successes and levels of success are generated. Like, I understand how attributes and skills work together in systems like WoD, Shadowrun, and 7th Sea. With FS3, it's 'do a roll and the engine spits out a result'. It's not like other games where you see numerical results like 'Runescryer rolled Computer, getting x,y,z for a 'Good' result'. When I can't see the numbers and how things interact, it makes it harder for me to get into the system as a player.

Runaways.

http://tvweb.com/runaways-leaked-trailer-hulu-series/

The idea of having separate cities isn't a terrible one, and doesn't necessarily have to block player agency. Many metropolitan areas have several cities linked that each have their own 'feel' to them. For example, the San Francisco Bay Area (I know this isn't the 'official' WoD set-up, but it's how I viewed it in my TT campaigns)....

San Francisco: Major city in the area, center of financial and political power. Major Camarilla presence, light presence of Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers, scattered Mages and possibly Changelings

Oakland: Industrial, rough and tumble. Sabbat stronghold, scattered woods & hills for Garou and/or changelings

Hayward/East Bay: Light residential (comparatively), lots of hills and forests and parks, Garou territory

San Jose/South Bay: Center of technological and biotech innovation: Technocracy turf with Tradition Mage cells

Berkeley: Changelings

West Bay/Pennensula: Scattered small cities along with lots of coastal wilderness. More Garou and other shifters.

You have a couple cities/'neighborhoods', all linked. Each one has a specific concentration of sphere, with the possibility of a few scattered members of other spheres.Each one has it's own feel, style, theme, but there's also a certain potential for limited interaction between spheres.

Just my 2 cents here.

'Capes and Stars' (or 'Stars and Capes'; I don't think they've ever figured out the name) uses the Aberrant game system, but a setting loosely based of the 'Wearing the Cape' e-book series. It's much more focused on the idea of superheroes becoming media sensations & icons than heroic ideals or organizational power plays.

@ZombieGenesis I think that's true of any Superhero game, and a lot of RPG's in general. Simplicity does not in itself make a system easier to use for some players. For me, systems like FATE or Cypher just feel a bit wonky and loose for superhero games because of the sheer, nearly-unlimited potential for what you can encounter or create in the genre. Or maybe I've just had bad initial experiences that soured me on them; either or. HERO/Champions and M&M feel more 'right' to me by having more defined scales and direct comparisons and measurements (5pts in HERO is 1d6 of effect. Each point in DC Heroes is twice as powerful as the previous point. Etc.)

Superhero games in particular walk a very fine line between simplicity and complexity. If you get right down to it, both HERO and M&M are fairly simple systems rules-wise; roll, add or subtract modifiers, compare result to a target number to determine success or failure. Simple. The complexity comes in building characters and powers. If you look at a game like, say, D&D (any edition), character advancement and powers, spells or otherwise, are already pre-created for you, so there's no real need for a 'tool box' to allow you to create your own powers or abilities. Making minor changes (swapping out Fire effect for Cold on Burning Hands to create a spell that shoots shards of ice instead of flames, for example) may have negligible effects on the system. Creating new paths of advancement or classes can lead to problematic imbalances in power scale (remember how broken the Gladiator class in Dark Sun was? I'm a Fighter that can use any weapon without penalty, even that brand new homebrewed weapon the DM just created! Who cares if I'm a slave; that's just about the default state for everyone here. And who cares about armor? It's 50 Bazillion degrees out and the whole planet is a desert!). Marvel FASERIP is the one system that managed to balance that walk beautifully, but all the powers are pre-built, leading to the (admittedly rare for FASERIP) occasional situation of 'What if I want to be able to do X?' where X isn't covered already by the system.

Superhero systems that get a 'complex' rap are usually systems like HERO and M&M where the bulk of the book is a customization toolkit that tells you how to create powers, skills, abilities, etc. And, several times, they don't do very good jobs at explaining how to create what you're thinking of (HERO actually does a decent job of this, with examples for just about every power in the core book). To be fair, both HERO and M&M also put out splatbooks (UNTIL Superpowers Database/Ultimate Series & Powers Database Series, respectively) that contain numerous examples of how to recreate powers and things you see in the comics with the game system. But, these aren't in the core rules. In my experience, a lot of people look at the size of the rulebook, especially MU players used to freeform, and their eyes glaze over thinking that the entire book has to be known in order to play the game.

Doing systems like HERO or M&M on mush is more difficult because character creation takes a lot of interaction between player and Staff. And Staff also have to see potential issues and feel free to say 'No' (M&M Afflictions, anyone?). It's much easier to be one on one and fine tune concepts in a tabletop environment.

One thing I would love to see for any mush that uses a TT RPG system is a 'Training Room'; an OOC area where players can go and test out the rules and action commands. I think having a set of 'target dummies' that you can practice your +attack or +cast on for an hour or so off grid or when RP is not available would help familiarize players with the game commands and system much quicker. Also, if it's done like the Power Centers in Champions Online (the MMO), players can test new powers/abilities out and examine the effectiveness firsthand, then decide if they want to do fine tuning or scrap the new power/ability entirely before committing advancement to it, it would help cut down on the +requests for 'I want to readjust my power, it's not working out for me'.

In the end, toolbox systems are what I prefer for superhero games, but a lot of times they're implemented poorly in the design of a mush. There's not enough emphasis on actually planning out your character, for both creation and advancement, and that's an important key to HERO or M&M. Mainly, from what I've seen for TT ports to mush, it's either 1) all FC's that are pre-statted, or 2) 'Okay, the concept blurb for your OC looks good, in to CharGen you go! toss the system newbie into the shark-infested deep end of the pool and wanders off to do Staff stuff'

Looks like the author of the 'Wearing The Cape' e-book series put out a FATE Core sourcebook for his superhero universe. It's up on Drive-Thru RPG. Not a big fan of mixing Superheroes into FATE, but that just could be becasue I'm not really familiar with the intricacies of the system, such as they are.

Not so much a full system, but part of one...

The last Campaign Setting for AD&D 2nd Edition was 'Birthright'. For those not familiar with the setting, it was Arthurian mythos with some extra cultures thrown in, plus a smidge of Highlander (your character could have the blood of a God in them and gain more power by killing other Blooded characters by stabbing them through the heart with the setting's equivalent of Mithril).

Part of the big focus of the Campaign was the whole Arthurian idea of 'The Land and The Lord Are One'; by having a Blooded character, you could be tied to the land in various nifty ways (Wizards got awesome Battle Magic that they had to use ley lines/sources to draw upon in rituals in order to cast). Each of the Kingdoms/Nations in the campaign world were divided up into smaller areas called Realms. Each Realm had numerous Domains, representing different kinds of power bases in the Realm: Law, Faith, Trade, and Magic, IIRC. Your Blooded character could develop ties to any of these domains to start a power base. For example, a Blooded Thief character could start out with 1 of a Realm's Law Domain to represent bribed judges and guards, a Blooded Priest could start with 1 of a Realm's Faith Domain to represent the Temple and lay folk they influence, and the Blooded Wizard goes for the Realm's Magic Domain, of course.

During the course of the campaign, there's a reasonably simple mechanism to simulate running Domains, including trying to grow your own power base, take Domains away from NPC's, espionage, direct warfare, etc. It added a really great, simple political acquisition & conflict mechanism to the standard AD&D game that could be tailored to a specific group's campaign goals, whether it was 'reclaim a character's ancestral holdings that were stolen a generation ago' or 'install a PC (or NPC) as the new Emperor'.

I'd love to see this tried or replicated with a fantasy game to focus on the socio-political maneuvering that can happen in game. Hell, I'd love for there to be a Birthright game in general. The Birthright online community has an 'Unofficial' 3.0/3.5 conversion pdf, and are working on 5e, or may be done with it.

I agree that there's certain levels of egregiousness when it comes to the actions and poses of other players. The past tense thing...annoying, but not really worth getting upset about, IMO. Themebreaking...again it depends on the level and the experiences you have with the player. If someone's seriously breaking theme and responds to a gentle reminder with 'WhatEVA! I do what I want!', yeah, that's an issue there.

You do have to know which battles to fight, though. If there are other people in the scene that are cool with it or don't seem to want to point it out, it may not be worth choosing that particular hill to die on. For example: the worst bit of themebreaking I ever encountered was on one of the LUGTrek games that sprouted up a few years back; I think it was Anomaly, but don't quote me. There was a costume party social event, and my mind nearly broke when a Vulcan character, who was one of the main characters there at the time, showed up dressed as...The Joker. Including acting like The Joker: crazy laugh, random bits of Chaotic Stupid randomness, the whole shtick. I asked In Character who he was supposed to be, my way of politely going 'WTF?', and he did this explanation, In Character, about researching old Earth entertainment and coming across the character, then deciding to try playing him as a sort of personal 'experiment'. Every other character/player in the scene seemed cool with it, so I played along a bit more, backed out of the scene, and slowly began to disentangle myself from the game over the next couple weeks. It just wasn't worth it, for my sanity, to be 'VULCANS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!' And considering this was happening on one of those 'Fill out your Duty Reports' Trek games to create an 'Authentic' Starfleet feel, that was just too much lorebreaking double-standards for me to want to deal with.