The Miscellanium

The PCs are gentleman (and lady) assassins in a steampunkified mid-19th century Europe. As the great powers maneuver in the Great Game and revolutionary ideas spread among the oppressed working classes, the PCs are hired to kill the German Confederation’s Iron Chancellor (so named because he is kept alive in a massive iron cybernetic case, of course). Intrigues will be plotted! Romances will flower in the least likely places! Loyal friends will turn out to be craven traitors! Karl Marx will tell bad jokes!

System: If someone has not yet created a light and humorous steampunk system it will be necessary to create one.

The Smuggler Game: The PCs are small time moonshiners operating in rural North Carolina during the early years of prohibition. They have a pretty good operation and make a decent amount of money. One day, a well-dressed man with a foreign last name approaches them with a business offer. He can provide them with the funds and support to take their operation big time and make loads of money, all they need to do is agree to his terms…

System: I like the mechanics of CoC, and it’s designed for the time period, so I might use that…

The Légion Étrangère Game.

The PCs are members of the French Foreign Legion (with the necessary dark pasts, world-weary sarcasm, and fake names) stationed to a dusty desert outpost in North Africa sometime in the late 19th century. Their regular routine of desert patrols, exchanging shots with Bedouin, drinking brandy, and telling stories about the girls they left behind is broken when the commander of their outpost is murdered. An investigator (an officer of the regular army, not of la Légion) is sent in to solve the crime and he selects the PCs as his investigators (not because of any particular skill or character trait, he’ll probably pick them by lots). They will uncover plots, schemes, dark secrets, and all that good stuff.

System: I’ll need to think on this.

The PCs board the Orient Express in Istanbul in July 1914, the last train before the outbreak of the Great War, a train packed with patriots, spies, and at least one murderer. The PCs must navigate a maze of sealed envelopes and coded missives to survive the trip and carry out the secret instructions of their respective spymasters. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is a letter on the train that could prevent the outbreak of war and save Europe from self-destruction.

System: 1920s CoC - without the Mythos stuff

The world-spanning, grand conspiracy CoC game.

1921. An eminent scholar of archeology vanishes in China, having entrusted a coded manuscript to the PCs. Strange ruins are uncovered in Sweden and people from local villages disappear in the night.

1922. The CEO of a prominent banking firm is torn apart by invisible forces on a New York sidewalk. An acquaintance of the PCs is driven mad by horrible nightmares. A ship runs around in California will all the crew dismembered and their limbs and organs neatly stacked and labeled in an unknown language.

1923. The PCs begin to suspect that the above events are connected, but go insane before they can figure out how.

Yup, this would be the classic evil brotherhood of darkness carrying out world-spanning evil CoC game. A string of strange events begins to reveal a pattern, leading the PCs to have to risk their lives and sanity to save the world.

System: CoC

The Fantasy Ming Dynasty Secret Police Game.

The PCs are members of the Jinyi Wei, the Ming Emperor’s Brocade-Clad Guard, an elite group of agents dispersed throughout the empire to keep watch on the local governors and magistrates, uphold the proper Confucian order, and punish injustice wherever they may find it. They are granted near unlimited legal authority (although not always the tools or respect needed to turn that directly into results) and – barring the presence of a superior or a member of the Imperial Household – the absolute last word on matters of morality. Their actions, however, are constrained by a logic of efficiency and minimum disorder, and PCs who use unnecessary force or produce unnecessary disorder will quickly find the judgements of their superiors strict and harsh.

The campaign will be episodic, with PCs riding into a new town, city, or village every episode, detecting the presence of injustice and/or conspiracy and resolving it (experienced Jinyi Wei claim to be able to smell social disorder in the air). This injustice could range from the performance of unregistered marriages, to village family problems, to a group of governors plotting treason, to black sorcery and demon conjuring (in this strict Confucian worldview, the first two lead surprisingly quickly to the latter two).

System: Those of you who are deeply steeped in RPG-world will recognize that this is a resetting of Dogs in the Vineyard, which is quite a well written system, if a little too religious for me (I suppose it reveals something about me that I remove the moral authority of religion and replace it with the moral authority of an authoritarian state…). This game would use much of the system from Dogs, but with a few changes for setting.

Another James Bond game: At the height of the Cold War, the PCs are called into M’s office. It seems that the KGB has recently gone to great lengths (multiple agents, poison, explosives, and a sniper, huge sums of money) to murder a waiter at a classy London hotel restaurant and MI6 has no clue why. M, understandably, finds this deeply unsettling and wants the PCs to go figure out what’s going on.

System: James Bond RPG

I’ve been busy lately with reading for class. Alas, nuclear targeting doesn’t provide good RPG material…

Anyway.

The Men of Honor Game: The PCs are members of a small but proud Sicilian (or fantasy world take on Sicily) family sometime around the year 1900, just as the mafia is becoming a (or the) major force in Sicilian politics and society. The PCs must defend their family’s honor and turf by uncovering and out-scheming conspiracies formed against them by other families. An added element to the intrigue might be some amount of resource management, as the PCs develop investments and manage the assets of their family over the course of the game.

“The Good, The Bad, The Weird” Game: As I paid tribute to Japanese and Hong Kong cinema with #25 and #26, it would be unfair to leave out the South Korean film industry. First of all, if you haven’t seen this movie, go check it out. It’s hardly great cinema, but it’s a good take on the Western formula and quite a bit of fun.

Anyway, the PCs are gunslingers in the frontier lands of Manchuria in the 1930s. They get word of a hidden Qing Dynasty treasure cache, and set off to find their fortunes. Of course, various factions – including but not limited to the Japanese Army, local bandits, Qing restorationists, and Communist guerillas – have similar ideas and goals.

System-wise, I’d be looking for something like the heroic gunplay system I want for the Hong Kong game. If anyone knows a good system for classic movie-style Westerns, let me know (not including the quite clever but thematically inappropriate Dogs in the Vineyard). At one point I made a not entirely serious stab at such a system myself, but didn’t produce much of value (there were three skills: Shootin’, Drinkin’, and Womanizin’).

The PCs are professional duelists in a swashbuckling take on 15th-16th century Italy, called in to settle the honorable disputes and trials by combat of nobles unable or unwilling to fight for themselves. Close to the corrupt heart of court life and scandal, they see the darker side of the ruling elite on a daily basis. The situation becomes more complicated as they begin to suspect that one courtier is using them to systematically eliminate his rivals, among whom are NPCs that the PCs are friendly with.

Here, for flavor, I give you a Medieval oath sworn by combatants before fighting a trial by combat:

Hear this, ye justices, that I have this day neither eat, drank, nor have upon me, neither bone, stone, ne grass; nor any enchantment, sorcery, or witchcraft, whereby the law of God may be abased, or the law of the Devil exalted. So help me God and his saints.

Potential System: 7th Sea