Tragic Glass (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tragic_glass) wrote,@ 2003-08-28 18:01:00 |
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ADVENTURE!
Blame Arref for getting me started on this today. I was going to post settings/plots for the BABYLON 5 RPG, but...
Five of my weird ideas for ADVENTURE! games.
Metropolis
This setting takes inspiration from both the Fritz Lang classic and the anime. Inspiration comes also from Alan Moore's Tom Strong, Promethea, and Top Ten. Visual inspiration comes from all of the above sources as well as episodes of the Batman Animated Series and the original designs for the 1989 Batman movie. Add a dash of the short story "The Gernsback Continuum" in here as well.
The time is the present. The setting is a city that I will refer to as Metropolis in homage both to the classic Fritz Lang film and the stomping grounds of a famous Kryptonian. The city is huge and labyrinthine. Great towers reach into the heavens while power plants and industrial centers reach deep into the earth. Roads weave through buildings. Cable cars carrying both passengers and freight traverse the city on spider web of cables running throughout the great towers. Dirigibles, both passenger, and smaller police units, fill the skies.
Computers are rare. Atomic research is a fringe science. There is an art deco feel to the place. Call the look retro-future if you like.
WW2 never happened. The League of Nations still exists. Its peacekeeping forces find themselves deployed around the world to keep the fragile peace.
The characters are your standard pulp lot. Scientists and explorers. veterans of the last League war. Those who have traveled abroad and learned great secrets other men were not meant to know.
The adversaries to are the standard stuff of pulps. Evil businessmen exploiting the workers far below them. Insane scientists conducting forbidden experiments. Those who have long schemed to make their country great again. The world is a powder keg. Adventure can be found anywhere for those brave enough to seek it.
Stalwarts and Steam
An Adventure! series set in an alternate Victorian/Edwardian time. A time in which most of the great inventions/events described by Verne and Wells and Doyle occurred. Travel from England to India is expedited by passenger artillery. Her majesty has recently unveiled new shock troops-brutish animal-like soldiers created by Dr. Moreau. Brave and heroic PCs seek to protect the British Empire from a seemingly endless number of nefarious foes.
The Fantastic
The time is the Roaring Twenties. The world is celebrating the end of the Great War. One brilliant scientist is determined that he will take mankind from the gutter to the stars. He and a group of his closest and most loyal friends blast off into space aboard his amazing rocketship. when they return to earth, they are forever changed. They become the earth's foremost science heroes and protect it from incursions from lost worlds, mad scientists, insane foreign despots, and alien menaces.
Yes, it's The Fantastic Four gone pulp. It's a good fit, I think. I know I'd like to see a pulp FF deal with Ming the Merciless.
The Great Game: Pellucidar
Imagine what would have happened if the world powers of the Victorian era had discovered the existence of Pellucidar. Each nation would scramble to mount expeditions and the Great Game would have a new playing field-one with dinosaurs. PCs are heroic explorers and loyal agents of the Crown (or whatever government appeals to you) finding adventure in the Hollow Earth. They contend not only with foreign agents and spies, but with natives and dinosaurs as well. The Great Game just got a little more dangerous.
WW2
In the last days of the Nineteenth Century, the earth was invaded by hostile creatures from the darkest reaches of the heavens. Their great war machines leveled cities. Their heat rays and black smoke killed millions. Their red weed choked the very rivers. Then, just as suddenly, they fell.
But their war machines were left behind. As mankind recovered, the surviving scientists took apart the great machines while the doctors dissected the alien horrors. They adapted the technologies to their own uses. They rebuilt the cities. And they made plans. For they knew that one day the enemy would return. .This time they would be ready.
It's decades later. The enemy has not yet returned. Its time to take the fight to them and show them we are the true masters of the solar system.
Heroic PCs battle alien agents on earth or lead the attack on the red planet.
WW2 is, of course, War of the Worlds 2. I've threatened to run a variation of this game forever. The recent proximity of Mars got me thinking about it again.
Blame Arref for getting me started on this today. I was going to post settings/plots for the BABYLON 5 RPG, but...
Five of my weird ideas for ADVENTURE! games.
Metropolis
This setting takes inspiration from both the Fritz Lang classic and the anime. Inspiration comes also from Alan Moore's Tom Strong, Promethea, and Top Ten. Visual inspiration comes from all of the above sources as well as episodes of the Batman Animated Series and the original designs for the 1989 Batman movie. Add a dash of the short story "The Gernsback Continuum" in here as well.
The time is the present. The setting is a city that I will refer to as Metropolis in homage both to the classic Fritz Lang film and the stomping grounds of a famous Kryptonian. The city is huge and labyrinthine. Great towers reach into the heavens while power plants and industrial centers reach deep into the earth. Roads weave through buildings. Cable cars carrying both passengers and freight traverse the city on spider web of cables running throughout the great towers. Dirigibles, both passenger, and smaller police units, fill the skies.
Computers are rare. Atomic research is a fringe science. There is an art deco feel to the place. Call the look retro-future if you like.
WW2 never happened. The League of Nations still exists. Its peacekeeping forces find themselves deployed around the world to keep the fragile peace.
The characters are your standard pulp lot. Scientists and explorers. veterans of the last League war. Those who have traveled abroad and learned great secrets other men were not meant to know.
The adversaries to are the standard stuff of pulps. Evil businessmen exploiting the workers far below them. Insane scientists conducting forbidden experiments. Those who have long schemed to make their country great again. The world is a powder keg. Adventure can be found anywhere for those brave enough to seek it.
Stalwarts and Steam
An Adventure! series set in an alternate Victorian/Edwardian time. A time in which most of the great inventions/events described by Verne and Wells and Doyle occurred. Travel from England to India is expedited by passenger artillery. Her majesty has recently unveiled new shock troops-brutish animal-like soldiers created by Dr. Moreau. Brave and heroic PCs seek to protect the British Empire from a seemingly endless number of nefarious foes.
The Fantastic
The time is the Roaring Twenties. The world is celebrating the end of the Great War. One brilliant scientist is determined that he will take mankind from the gutter to the stars. He and a group of his closest and most loyal friends blast off into space aboard his amazing rocketship. when they return to earth, they are forever changed. They become the earth's foremost science heroes and protect it from incursions from lost worlds, mad scientists, insane foreign despots, and alien menaces.
Yes, it's The Fantastic Four gone pulp. It's a good fit, I think. I know I'd like to see a pulp FF deal with Ming the Merciless.
The Great Game: Pellucidar
Imagine what would have happened if the world powers of the Victorian era had discovered the existence of Pellucidar. Each nation would scramble to mount expeditions and the Great Game would have a new playing field-one with dinosaurs. PCs are heroic explorers and loyal agents of the Crown (or whatever government appeals to you) finding adventure in the Hollow Earth. They contend not only with foreign agents and spies, but with natives and dinosaurs as well. The Great Game just got a little more dangerous.
WW2
In the last days of the Nineteenth Century, the earth was invaded by hostile creatures from the darkest reaches of the heavens. Their great war machines leveled cities. Their heat rays and black smoke killed millions. Their red weed choked the very rivers. Then, just as suddenly, they fell.
But their war machines were left behind. As mankind recovered, the surviving scientists took apart the great machines while the doctors dissected the alien horrors. They adapted the technologies to their own uses. They rebuilt the cities. And they made plans. For they knew that one day the enemy would return. .This time they would be ready.
It's decades later. The enemy has not yet returned. Its time to take the fight to them and show them we are the true masters of the solar system.
Heroic PCs battle alien agents on earth or lead the attack on the red planet.
WW2 is, of course, War of the Worlds 2. I've threatened to run a variation of this game forever. The recent proximity of Mars got me thinking about it again.
