User:BenofZongo
My Games:
BWWWWAAAHHHHHHHH!!!! GAMES!:
The House of Usher (no! No violate the copyright! Bad Ben!)
For one shots, etc. once the rules are actually released and found to be adequately "good": Unhallowed Metropolis [1]
BWWWWAAAHHHHHHHH!!!! NEW GAMES!:
2.)High Fantasy: I know that Jason hates this genre, but I wonder if it could be done right. The answer “probably not”...but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in giving it a shot. I do not know details of how I would try to pull this off, but the bottom line would be: it's all fair game: dwarves, elves, mages, priests, clerics, rangers, Dragons, gryphons, undead, etc. Obviously, dramatic tension in this world would have to come from somewhere else than surprise. I have this sneaking suspicion that this could make for a fun setting though.EDIT: my current working idea for this genre is a world war kind of situation. stay tuned for wtf I mean by that.
New thoughts: This game would be run as another take on the "roaming ship/firefly" type of game. In the game world as I have started constructing it, the open sea is essentially monopolized by one group, who let no one else leave coastal waters. Similar to Antares darkeye and the wormhole, the group has a navigator and a ship capable of at least partially circumventing this monopoly. This gives them a considerable edge in trading/carrying information/etc. Also, the game, in the spirit of the game Jason used to play in, would have players making members of the crew: but since the crew would be 30+ in total, each player would be allowed to make, at the beginning of the game, likely one high powered (3rd tier, in WHFRP), two mid tier (completed 1st tier, or possibly partway through 2nd tier), and one low tier (beginning character) character, with the option of spontaneously making new members of the crew as situation demanded, until the full complement was reached. Obviously, the higher the level of the character, the more "baggage" the character would have: more enemies, more rivalries, more debts unpaid, more obvious in a crowd, etc. Also, the ship being a joint enterprise, all monetary rewards would be evenly split among the entire crew (thus abrogating the danger of letting low level characters suddenly jump up to ridiculous gear). Finally, another mechanic I think I would try is that all earned xp would go into a "pool": the players could then jointly decide which members of the crew they would like to spend xp on. Limits on how much xp a given character could receive per session would be based on their tier (low level characters could get at most 1-200 xp a session, the maximum increasing based on the power of the character). Thus, the group could just be egalitarian, or in certain circumstances (such as when faced by a certain type of job they want to take requiring X skill base), they could communally dump 500+ xp a session into one crew member to get them "up to speed". Also, i think certain types of gear would have "specialist weapon group" requirements, and possibly minimum stat requirements.
3.)I've alluded to this before, but I've been working on a system which basically mirrors the “world of darkness” of white wolf. The major difference with my system is that there are no hard distinctions between mages, werewolves, and vampires, etc: all supernatural creatures just manifest their abilities and their “hunger” as it were, in different forms (read “night watch”, the book, not the movie). This game world would likely be fairly combat-poor, and the plot would be largely character-background driven, with lots of politicking and intrigue-y stuff.
4.) Bring back the Iliadic Game, albeit with different characters. The game would still be set in the Greek Dark Ages, circa 1000 BC. The world is in chaos after the fall of the last great heroes at Troy, and chaos and darkness is beginning to envelop the civilizations of the world. There are still some who have the favor of the Gods, albeit much less favor than the heroes of old: such are the characters, defined by a "path" which both restricts how they must act to appease their patron deity and which gives them strength when attempting acts in the name of their god. I think that if I ran a new version of this game, it would be set in the island nation (a nation composed of several large and small islands) of Atlantis
5.) Another idea I've had recently, which is still in the earliest stages of conception, is a setting in which two parallel fairy-tale worlds, one being the "tragic" fairy tale world and the other being the "happy" fairy tale world, merge, leaving a disoriented new world which has elements of both. Currently what I'm working with on this idea is that there would be different levels of heroes and villains from both worlds, which would sort of function as "classes": how you build your character would be based on this. That's as far as I've gotten.
6.) I'm starting to really want to run a game set in the WH40K universe. this is something that has come up time and time again, and it always ends up getting shot down or disappearing (both Matt and I, I know for a fact, have thought about creating games in this setting before). This game would use one of two systems, either SMitV (cause I really liked how it ran when dieter and I played it) but more likely straight up, nearly unmodified Cyberpunk. The players would collectively choose which faction they wanted to represent: Eldar, Squats, Imperial Guard, Space Marines, Chaos...that would probably be it (I don't know enough of the dark eldar or tau mythos, orks would be too loony, and tyranids and necrons would make for retarded gameplay...anyone I forgot?). They might also get a little bit of say in terms of subgroup (ie, chapter/craftworld, etc). As far as what kind of group they were, it would be totally GM determined. This game would be high combat (reminiscent of the cyberpunk game I ran) with mission style game play in which the group gets objectives that they have to achieve. Large combats (the group would be at the head of some sort of small battlegroup of 10-50 soldiers) would be resolved using tabletop warhammer, with slight modifications. Players would get to make their own characters, but after my Gemini experience, the bar would be set much higher in terms of what I would and would not allow, so put some effort into making a group-functional character (we all know each others' play styles, so that's something worth taking into account...)
My Current Characters:
My past characters:
