Right, so I'm planning to run some kind of game via Skype and probably MapTool. Weekends definitely make the most sense, and I'm leaning towards Saturday afternoons/evenings (Chicago time, anyway). The game? Spirit of the Century, because it's a damned great game, easy to learn, and should be very playable via Skype. Best of all, the rules are available for free....But there's a lot of different stuff we can do with SotC. Its default pulp mode is loads of fun, but people have hacked it for space opera, martial arts, and various flavors of fantasy (low magic stuff, generally). I think it could do a hell of a cool horror or post-apocalypse game, too.
So here's where I ask my prospective players just what they want to play. (And I'm doing it in public because I don't have everybody's email address.) What are you guys interested in, genre-wise? What you be interested in in doing or being in the game? I'm kind of digging the idea of some sword and sorcery (or sword and planet!) stuff, or maybe a shady-adventurers-and-smugglers-in-a-spaceship thing in the vein of Firefly. Or crazy, cartoonish post-apocalypse like Thundarr the Barbarian, maybe. Something kind of simple is probably best, at least to start with. On the other hand, SotC makes social conflicts just as interesting and complicated as physical ones, so something involving a lot of debate, persuasion, and interrogation would totally work.
I'm open to some format gimmicks, too. SotC has some cool stuff for running organizations (gangs, companies, armies, countries, whatever), so if you want to be the leaders of some kind of group or community, that's no problem. Also, if you want to play multiple characters in a troupe-style thing, that's cool, too.
Hell, this is getting long. Okay, interested parties, just comment here and let me know what you're interested in doing. Also, what you think of playing on Saturday afternoons/evenings (time zone issues, blah blah)?
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14 comments:
zombies zombies zombies.
Part of me hungers for brains..err, to play a game with zombies in it. I'll play other things of course, but that's my vote.
"Traditional" pulp, 30s or 40s. With, preferably, Nazi mystics and other such nonsense.
Saturdays are just fine for me.
Damn- it all sounds good to me. A 40s style pulp adventure is cool because I could be a newsboy adventurer.
Or how about Thundaar versus the Zombies in the depression? No?
Geez, I'm no help.
Oh man, I'm really open for anything. I like the traditional pulp idea, I like zombies, I like grungy smuggler sci-fi.
How feasible is a sort of western theme? I've always wanted to play a western game, but never wanted to learn Deadlands. :V
Oh man, 30s/40s pulp with zombies and Nazis would be the easiest thing in the world with SotC. But, what's more, I actually do see kind of an in for a western angle.
See, last SotC game I ran was a pulp-heroes-vs.-Nazi-mystics thing, and my buddy Gerry played this gunfighter dude (who, by the way, hates Nazis SO MUCH that he will shoot them in the face after they surrender). He might be interested in playing that character again, and then maybe I'd set the game in the wild-ish parts of the Depression-era West. (Where will the Nazis come in? Hell, who knows. But you can work Nazis in anything. Zombies, even moreso.)
Oh, man, this could SO WORK.
I recently stumbled across Spirit of the Far Future (Traveller SoTC port), and I love Zombies. Saturdays might be tough for me, depends on the session length. Perhaps we should consider taking advantage of the large group, and the pickup play mechanic, and have everyone who's interested make characters.
Yeah, that kind of flexibility is something I'm considering. If we could actually manage to play each session to a point where cast rotation makes sense, that'd be really great.
Noir noir noir noir noir I like Sul's idea. I am free at that time usually and lucky enough to be in the same time zone, but there will be times I won't be able to get on for whatever reason. I like the idea of a rotating/flexible cast of characters.
Clearly, the answer is a mystical noir western theme with zombie nazis.
Zombies and Nazis are cool, but are kind of played out... I'm not opposed to them, but I'd still like to see that sort of inventive unique weirdness that Matt seems to like putting into his RPG settings. Like maybe if we went with a western sort of theme, maybe the zombies are created by some sort of bizarre artifact unearthed by gold prospectors back in the 1800s and the zombies are all old timey prospectors. And maybe the Nazis are after that artifact. I don't know. Matt come up with something weird!
I have no doubts about Matt's ability to make even zombies and Nazi mystics seem fresh and interesting and bizarre.
Seriously.
But given my latest obsessions, it'd be nice to knock the heads off some SS bootboys, to let off steam.
I second Gerry's comment.
Before I start thinking about what type of character to play - how weird can we get? A Lobster Johnson/Hellboy style could work in this time period.
Characters I may think about playing-(I am getting way ahead here seeing as the theme is yet to exist).
Gatorboy- a backwoods bayou kid who fights with a bowie knife and a slingshot.
Thomas Augustine- A Chickasaw from OK. Not sure about his personality/abilities yet- but definitely not a 'Mystic Indian' and NOT a 'Proud Warrior'. Based on scant knowledge I have of my great-great-grandfather (really all I have is a name and a tribe- the rest I will have to make up).
Bigfoot He would be some sort of a bigfoot.
Durendal A proto-superhero. Roland Feuri was a US soldier in WWI. During the Second Battle of Marne (1918) a piece of shrapnel blown loose from a building was embedded in his chest.
Close to his heart and impossible to move without killing him the sliver of metal causes him constant pain. In spite of this he has proven to be nearly impervious to all other forms of damage. Poison and magic harm him as any other man, but his flesh and bone seem to be unbreakable.
The US army immediately utilized him as a living weapon, but he has since gone rogue.
Roland has no powers other than invulnerability-his strength is no greater than an other physically fit man and he has aged normally (assuming the game takes place in the thirties he is in his late 30s-early 40s).
To deal with the pain he has become addicted to morphine which he takes orally (as needles cannot penetrate his skin).
He has taken the codename 'Durendal' after the legendary unbreakable sword. There has been some speculation that the shrapnel in his chest is a fragment of said sword, but there is little or no evidence to back this up.
Ummm...I have other ideas, too.
--edited to fix serious typos--
Oh, yeah, there's definitely stuff that can be done to make zombies and Nazis a different. And the possibility of a western backdrop definitely brings some ideas to mind.
MJP, basically all those ideas should totally workable. Really crazy superhuman stuff doesn't work well with this system, but stuff in the realm of enhanced human capabilities is okay.
Anyway, I'll post a big thing about SotC characters soon. Also, everybody should probably go and download Skype and MapTool when they can. Mostly, we'll probably just be using MapTool for dicerolls (and, if necessary, text chat), but it's pretty cool. And free, of course.
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