You really don't like Narnia huh?
Actually I've never read the books. I know the story, of course, I think I've seen some movies and plays. Maybe I have read them too, or listened to them on tape, if I did I was young. Don't really know if I'd like them, but I suspect I wouldn't, for various reasons.
I'm certain that C.S. Lewis was no idiot, though, and they're probably good books in some cosmic sense.
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the setting is Mechanus. the entire party must play modrons starting at the bottom of the hierarchy. (monodrone) You are assigned simple tasks like sweeping a square of floor or taking out thrash. slow experience track.
I'm certain that C.S. Lewis was no idiot, though, and they're probably good books in some cosmic sense.To be fair you can probably make any famous book sound stupid by describing it the right way. At least the fantasy fiction ones.
I've seen that as a joke a few times where they purposefully give games movies etc. bad descriptions.
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the setting is Mechanus. the entire party must play modrons starting at the bottom of the hierarchy. (monodrone) You are assigned simple tasks like sweeping a square of floor or taking out thrash. slow experience track.
I'd sooner play magic talking ponies on an eternal quest to prove how awesome having friends is.
"BOYS, BOYS... do I have to keep you after school.and are your book reports ready?"said the thing behind the desk in the front of the room with the industrial strength application of cosmetics that was just barely hiding the fact that she was the great Cthulhu's older, older sister and prom date. You have just entered Miss Thorn's English class in the Middle School Universe. " set up straight... Children, children, settle down now... You will obey me. Obey me. Obey.
DM:"Okay, so the air's 70°F, but the ground is 222°F. You know what will happen if you get tripped or fall unconscious..."
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Sorry, in this game setting the only thing the players hear from characters like this, adults, or other authority figures is,
Wah-wah wa-wamp. Wa-wan, wah-wa-wamp!"
Also, Perform (Dance) is not in class for anyone.
Good grief!
"You find a cache of 10,000 gp--"
"--woo-hoo!""By which I mean 'g-dd--- peanuts'. 10,000 g-dd--- peanuts."
"AUGH!"
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Dark Sun.
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Synesthesiopolis. All GM descriptions must be delivered synesthestetically.
"The room before you smells blue. A creature shaped like the sound of your mother's voice rises from a pile of heartbeats and brays paisley and oregano."
I'd sooner play magic talking ponies on an eternal quest to prove how awesome having friends is.
You know, I'd never really thought about it. Having friends would be awesome!
Dot.
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the setting is Mechanus. the entire party must play modrons starting at the bottom of the hierarchy. (monodrone) You are assigned simple tasks like sweeping a square of floor or taking out thrash. slow experience track.
Don't worry! Random bomb-toting adventurers (with ranks in profession (plumber)) will show up and help!! And eventually, you can get some tea!
Takes place on Earth ten centuries after an asteroid impact. The Cataclysm, was an asteroid about half the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs. It is made up of radioactive and manna {magic}. It came down in the center of the Australia Archipelago which is still too radioactive to travel to. The asteroid punched through the lithosphere into the mantle. This mixed radioactive material and manna thru-out the magma, which uniformly dispersed new material thru the mantle. As lava poured out of the volcanos contaminated even further taxed the ecosphere. The fallout is finally clearing out and the ice is receding. What life that survived was deformed in awful and foul ways, some remain visibly unchanged.
The Long Sleep is over the AI Darwin is ready. Humans are coming out of hibernation and are waking up to reclaim a world changed from the one they knew. Their proxies the Lore Wardens of Desolation suffered though Winterfall while the pure-strains slept. The Wardens were adapting to both radiation and manna. Often blurring the lines between science and magic taking what ever edge they can to survive.
Technomages: are the masters of science and magic crisscrossing them in new ways. They are a reclusive lot, deciding that silence is the answer to any questions.
Calamity Druids: are the the the hands the Wardens. They are the searchers, gardeners, and protectors of the straind biosphere.
Beast races: are the intelligent animal races that have risen since [i]Cataclysm. The Ark Is a coalition of races that have banded together for defense?
Riffraff: Roadcrews of mongrels and mutants that group together in the Sparse Zones fighting for the scrapes of a long dead civilization.
Snoozers: Pure-strain humans that are coming out of 1,000 yrs of hibernation and their AI-Darwin: a super computer they hold as their god. They have many caches of weapons, vehicles, food, medicine. tool, and other hibernation units hidden around.the earth.
The Brotherhood of Inevitability: known as the Doomslyers their sole goal is the end all life on earth.
Played in a very good Narnia one-off RQ game using existing characters. (3 sessions)
Since RQ at the time did not really encourage the nihilistic, too-cool-to-care characters, the game turned out out pretty well. I will tell you that if that lion called my character Daughter of Lilith one more time...
Any world that completely marginalizes the players/characters is a fail. Frankly though, as you all know, the setting is far less important to making a bad game than the people playing it are. Frankly, if you are one of the crowd that considers terrible anything that interferes with their narrow scope of play, well, any setting beyond that scope is bad.
We will not go into settings that might challenge those basic assumptions that we refuse to question...
"BOYS, BOYS... do I have to keep you after school.and are your book reports ready?"said the thing behind the desk in the front of the room with the industrial strength application of cosmetics that was just barely hiding the fact that she was the great Cthulhu's older, older sister and prom date. You have just entered Miss Thorn's English class in the Middle School Universe. " set up straight... Children, children, settle down now... You will obey me. Obey me. Obey.Sorry, in this game setting the only thing the players hear from characters like this, adults, or other authority figures is,
Wah-wah wa-wamp. Wa-wan, wah-wa-wamp!"
Also, Perform (Dance) is not in class for anyone.
Good grief!
This was a joke. it was meant to be clunky and unbearably tedious just like middle school was.
I think I would spend a sunny day with Cthullu rather than with you.let me think about it. I'll get back to you.
"BOYS, BOYS... do I have to keep you after school.and are your book reports ready?"said the thing behind the desk in the front of the room with the industrial strength application of cosmetics that was just barely hiding the fact that she was the great Cthulhu's older, older sister and prom date. You have just entered Miss Thorn's English class in the Middle School Universe. " set up straight... Children, children, settle down now... You will obey me. Obey me. Obey.Sorry, in this game setting the only thing the players hear from characters like this, adults, or other authority figures is,
Wah-wah wa-wamp. Wa-wan, wah-wa-wamp!"
Also, Perform (Dance) is not in class for anyone.
Good grief!This was a joke. it was meant to be clunky and unbearably tedious just like middle school was.
I think I would spend a sunny day with Cthulhu rather than with you.let me think about it. I'll get back to you.
Pizza Lord's response was in Charlie Brown/Peanuts humor. ;)
Regarding no sunny days with Great Cthulhu ... well, do you really want to get an unexpurgated view in full daylight ... He probably conjures up storms and whatnot so he doesn't have to see his own visage in the surface of the ocean... *grin*
You are right Mad Comrade I did n't pick up on the Peanuts reference, thanks.
and setting on a beach and looking at Cthullu's ass block out the sun is pretty bad.
Can anyone think of a good name for our setting? I'm honestly at this point thinking that everything is so out of place that we should just pick a bunch of random nouns and that'll about do it.
Yeah, that novel series only really works - and just barely at that - when you don't think about it too much. Any examination and the setting basically falls apart.
Plus, I remember it being very boring compared to other youth-oriented fantasy novels I read at that age.
Anyway...
...
Yeah, I can't think of anything worse than the already mentioned Kender World. **shudders**
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"Ok, so today you're all level 1 phone support technicians..."
--Temp Agency, the RPG
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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Ok, so long ago the Ancient Ones had the standard advanced technological and magical civilization, which of course has long since collapsed. One of their Great Projects was to build an equatorial train, powered by magic and solar energy, that could circumnavigate the world in exactly one day. Now, it is thousands of years later and the PCs are the descendants of passengers on the train the day the ancient civilization fell. No one can leave the train because it goes hundreds of mph, it's always noon (the train moves exactly fast enough to counter the planet's rotation) and no one knows how to stop it. Fantastic ruins and incredible monsters zoom by the windows too quickly to interact with.
DM: "Alright everyone. This game setting moves away from all the tropes of dystopian futures. Why do they always have to be dystopian?"
It's a utopian future. Everything's worked out and... probably will keep doing so for the foreseeable future. There's a lot of harp music, gentle breezes, and flowing white garments. Fields of flowers, indeed.
No... there's no hidden danger. There are no subterranean, cannibalistic degenerate mutants. Humanity's worked it all out.
There is also no creativity. Everyone is bored and cannot entertain themselves. Certain brave souls venture into the past to find lost ideas, like the Cleaves or Ponyfinder. If you are a time traveler, I'll post you the links.:)
If you actually read the Narnia books you would have npcs reading bibles, trying to predict the future, and figuring out which biblical character everyone is.
If you actually read the Narnia books you would have npcs reading bibles, trying to predict the future, and figuring out which biblical character everyone is.
Reread the series recently, now, if, as a GM, your NPCs are trying to metagame the campaign through biblical references, your problems may run deeper than your choice of milieu. Now if your Players are doing it, it is merely cheesy/tacky and faux-clever.
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Ebberon
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What about a setting where everyone is a murderhobo?
the setting is Mechanus. the entire party must play modrons starting at the bottom of the hierarchy. (monodrone) You are assigned simple tasks like sweeping a square of floor or taking out thrash. slow experience track.I'd sooner play magic talking ponies on an eternal quest to prove how awesome having friends is.
does that mean I win?
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Everyone must track encumbrance and make sure everything is historically accurate, especially the racism and sexism. You get to play gestalt characters, but there are only 3 classes to choose from, none with magic. All the monsters are magic. You have to make sure your characters have all the proper documentation and paperwork to go adventuring. There are several dozen categories of currency, and the exchange rates must be accurately converted. You must roleplay and haggle each and every shopping experience. No one speaks Common, so you need to hire interpreters.
Ok yeah that is pretty rough ^^ I had a GM waste an entire session once on trying to sell out unwanted loot. We stopped playing that game shortly there after.
I quit that group. To be honest, there were like 6 or 7 allowed classes. It was based on the Lone Wolf RPG. And we got to speak Common.
But I was so afraid the DM would kill my Halfling ranger/fighter's riding dog if I left him tied up outside the Bureau of Acracy, I couldn't get the paperwork I needed to go adventuring.
The other PCs were a fighter//rogue, a fighter//scout, and a rogue//scout.
Ok, so long ago the Ancient Ones had the standard advanced technological and magical civilization, which of course has long since collapsed. One of their Great Projects was to build an equatorial train, powered by magic and solar energy, that could circumnavigate the world in exactly one day. Now, it is thousands of years later and the PCs are the descendants of passengers on the train the day the ancient civilization fell. No one can leave the train because it goes hundreds of mph, it's always noon (the train moves exactly fast enough to counter the planet's rotation) and no one knows how to stop it. Fantastic ruins and incredible monsters zoom by the windows too quickly to interact with.
Have you ever been on a long-distance Amtrak train?(*) Can you imagine how bad the bathrooms would be after 1000 years without stopping?
(*)Not at all trying to imply that Amtrak trains go anywhere near equatorial speed, or even fast enough to be considered high-speed rail, or even fast enough to be considered anything but a bad joke by the rest of the technologically advanced world . . . .
Wow you actually played in that game? I would of just bashed my head into a wall it would of been less painful.
I sat in on a game once that took 3 hours to do one round of combat. the DM had a pirate boat battle thing and they were boarded so he rolled for every NPC. Every single one. also apparently if you died in this campaign you had to make a new character at level 1. so they had a 12 level mage and a 1st level barbarian in the same group and aparenlty the barb was on his like 4th char because the dm kept throwing 12th lvl mage cr things at them and it would one shot the barb.
^The infamous early 1980s Georgia Tech killer DM (AD&D 1st Edition) did that if you died too . . . Glad I never played in his group . . . .
Why have I not heard of this person Google to the rescue!
Yeah they asked me after if I wanted to join. It took a lot of effort to not bust out laughing.
Edit: google failed me.
^I'm not at liberty to post a name, but this one.
Interesting. I've had one like that. not quite as severe. It seems the old guys who play 1st edition seem to run that way. Very cheap shotty and deadly.
I remember one game where I (ranger) saw a kitten with a hurt paw in the wilderness. I picked it up to treat it. apparently its claws were had paralytic poison. Then its buddie cats all come in and naw one you while you can't move.
He tried it again at a much later game. I (giant) threw a boulder at it as soon as I saw it. Flattening the little beast.
He called them kill kittys.
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When I DM, I always keep the PCs the same level. Even if you miss a session or 3. No need to punish players for having lives. Or dealing with family deaths.
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In the first AP I ran (Dragonlance, 3.5 rules) players who missed sessions didn't get experience.
In this case they didn't do it because of serious motives, but because I had a player who liked to come rather eventually and another one who tended to skip any session where things got too serious because of a serious fear of failure.
Anyway, that only made those players lose interest and come less often each time. So I decided never to do that again.
Now I have a philosophy of rewarding good practices from my players instead of punishing bad ones and encouraging instead of forbidding. I think it works much better.
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Can anyone think of a good name for our setting? I'm honestly at this point thinking that everything is so out of place that we should just pick a bunch of random nouns and that'll about do it.Sorry, but I need to say it: Narnia is actually a pretty great setting.'Narnia?' 'N'aar knee uh?' What a weird name... that doesn't make any sense. I think we should stick to giving it a bunch of random noun names...
Lessee... 'The Lamppost, the Kids, and the Altar...'
or... 'The Closet, the Queen, and the Talking Bears?' No... that's sounds like an entirely different game setting.
What you got against talking bears? we can throw down with just our bear hands but you won't like it. it will be grizzly.
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RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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A dark fantasy setting where Evil has won (even cutting off all access to any kind of Good afterlife) and you're not allowed to defeat it, only fight futilely to "hold back the darkness another day".
I have just described an actual, existing, published, popular setting. And no, sorry, there is a way to win: it's called "Not Playing".
I think I've tried to run that setting - managed to TPK two different groups within the first two session each time. It is really harsh on players used to more standard heroic fantasy.
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A dark fantasy setting where Evil has won (even cutting off all access to any kind of Good afterlife) and you're not allowed to defeat it, only fight futilely to "hold back the darkness another day".
Or as I liked to call it: "Middle School."
