Showing posts with label stray malingering campaign ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stray malingering campaign ideas. Show all posts

Wednesday, 12 February 2020

The Fling

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there's those campaigns where everyone is fired up to try a new system or setting or someone wants to be the DUNGEON MASTER

but for whatever reason , 2-4 sessions later it just sorta ends.

But What If when we did such undertakings we framed it as limited run, to have something to finish with rather than just moving on?  Both an ending to aim for and an ending to happen if you just stop playing

Please consider the following and note I've included a possible angle to turn each into an ongoing campaign:
(fuck knows why I've listed them in a table)

1. A elritch alien warship, pride of a degenerate alien empire, has been struck by a vast void beast mid void-warp, and crashed back into real space, now warped and crippled, the alien crew dying and maddened from the ruptured void shields, and is now in a decaying orbit towards a blackhole.
You and your fellow players have broken free of your containment  and search desperately for escape among the cruel amusements , maddened guards, and fiendish security systems
You are: captives used as the payload on psychic cannons, genetically engineered geisha, P.O.W, malfunctioning robots, pragmatic alien serfs
The Aim: Get to an escape pod with enough supplies to make the characters future lives comfortable
The Default: You all are crushed beyond all understandings of the term crushed
The Over-achiever: You get the ship going and start your own LEXX-life

2.
Murder Mystery Mansion Time Machine::
 A smug despot of a time-lord has thrown a dinner party for his peers , and further more as a delightful touch , he plucked "guests" from out time and space to join their esteemed ranks.
But he turns out MURDERED and now his mansion/time mansion is freaking out. BUT THE MURDER IS NOT YET DONE. The Mansion itself it not without its dangers, escaped terrors, bizarre traps et cetera  et cetera

You Are: Elites of an advanced and apathetic society, fellows plucked from time for their wit or lack of it
The Aim: To not get murdered, to get back to their own time, to discover Murderer
The Default: forced to live in wrong time line and wonder WHO WAS THE MAKER OF MURDER?
The Over-achiever: The murder is solved , the mansion mastered and now the fabric of space and time is yours to saunter forth upon

3.
A HAMLET, A DOOM, AN OCEANIC CONTEMPT WOKE!
A mysterious mist has surrounded a village, everyone but you is got a fish plague and increasing waves of fishy monsters are coming for you
You Are: Simple practical folk , travelers, tourists, fly-by-night grifters
The Aim: To get out
The Default: you got dead or barely got out and are crazed beggar with 'Oribble tale
The Over-achiever: the secret of the Curse is uncovered plus riches too. But is it but one pebble fore-towing a occult landslide?

4.
DEATH RACE:
you are all convicts given a car and some weapons and sent across the Cursed Earth to try and win years off your sentence , battle other HARDENED KILL CRAZED CRIMINALS and the MUTANT HORRORS and CANNIBAL YUPPIE GANGS of the Cursed Earth, all before the drone eyes of a jaded and cruel LIVE AUDIENCE
You Are: Convicted criminals from a variety of backgrounds with a range of skillsets
The Aim: To make it to the finish or remove your bomb collars and commit to life in the cursed earth
The Default: assumed MIA and eaten or back in the slammer
The Over-Achiever: rebel and build a bandit kingdom and lay siege to a mega-city

5.Babes in the woods:
Lost in the faery woods! Will you make it home? Will you find what you seekth here?
You Are: Lost children, questing knights, talking animals
The Aim: make it out
The Default: Lost forever, as animals, fey servants , or living wood
The Over-Achiever : Riches! An Elf Bride! The Favour of the Seelie Court! Human Form! Further intrigues and quests? Maybe!

6.
Post-Adventurer Fun-House Dungeon:
They've come , solved or brutalized puzzle and trap, slain many, found the cackling undead wizard and took from him his undead continence and his tome of big man spells. But what now for those of rooms not visited as his spells twist and die and the less bold crawl in for the scraps left behind?
Factions are unbalanced and guardians amok!
You Are:  Monsters, Undead, Abandoned Henchmen, Former Servants, Escaped Captives, representatives of underworld tribes or dungeon factions
The Aim: To get out without being immediately hunted down due to the dungeons nearest to civilization.  To have a means of survival.
The Default: you get adventured or are still there preying on treasure seekers
The Over-Achiever : you are now the lord of this sinister peak, you have ravaged the nearby out-crop of civilization forcing it back away from the free wilderness, you have got out with a means of power and agency . OR SUCH LIKE



IN ADDITION:

A fling-campaign like any of these could have a table and/or conditions to determine the fates of characters if the campaign just ends.
So for Deathrace if the character has a bomb collar at the end of the session sequence , they are assumed back in slammer, if they are sans-collar there's a table to determine their fate, if they have earned the respect of cannibal gang then they assumed a member .
You could get involved as you like here with tables and sub-tables. I'm sure the above example is already suggestive of more elaboration.


THANK YOU FOR YUR TIME


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Monday, 24 April 2017

WHY IS IT THERE? WHY??? CAN'T WE MOVE?

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I mean the Sewer Beneath the City or the Ruined Ward is a classic. Though the Ruined Ward needs more love. Big old chunk of the city all wrecked and full of woe and they just put a fence around it and try and stop people from nicking things. Good times.

Here's some other ideas for the dungeon being some fucking dumb :

1: THE ATTICS AND ROOFS : like those medieval towns where they kept building up until the buildings leaned into each other and then insane birds started building nests ontop and flying ships kept crashing into the pile and now up is bad and another civilization might of even been started up there? 

2. BIG FALLEN OVER WARMACHINES like giant monuments and colossal colossi. They are place around the city , fallen on the city, and buried under the city. They are full of treasure because the crews manning them were like every army ever and loved to loot.

3. DREAMLAND : if you are awake when the city sleeps , it's an alternate city with bad shit everywhere. and LEWD PEARLS OF THE NIGHT

4. CRAWLSPACES: Dungeon is condition like Rising Damp or black mold , but one that makes impossible amounts of space underneath your house or skirting board. Technically the treasure you drag out of there is a fruiting body that spreads spores but no-one has wised up to that yet.

5.  METROTUNNELS: Like big ass underground railways that used to connect citys and overland travel is not an option so everyone is really keen on someone making the trip and clearing them out but you know molochs and shit.

6. THE SKY + MOON : really it's just a big ladder away

7.  MANGROVES + SWAMPS: though it's basically a forest right around a city that's awful to log and has shipwrecks in it.

8. SHIPWRECKTOWN: So many shipwrecks they've formed a solid structure around the little island y'all call home. Variants include it's in space and they are spaceships. 

9. LORD MAYOR MUD: The old city gotten entombed in mud and the new one is just a couple of 100 people sweeping out some tower rooms at the top. The deep river below is emptying out the very bottom levels and things are getting in below too. So it looks like a hourglass if the top bit was some small boxes and the bottom was a wide bottomed triangle

10. THE CITY IS ON A BIG DISC AND THERE'S REVERSE CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE: both citys keep having groups sneak into the other and steal and fight shit. Both citys are mostly wrecked from this. Good one.

11. BIG TREE: it's a big tree , everyone lives up high in the upper branches go down and it's bugs and rot and rotten gods. Pretty sure this is where Chewbacca came from?

12. GOD : he dead and rotting in the middle of town. He's got stuff in him though.
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Monday, 30 September 2013

how to run a pokemon campaign

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 EXTRACTS FROM BELOW:
"
like look at pokemon. It's what an alien would draw animals like if it wanted to make animal shaped lures for people. Compare fishing lures to actual bait fish. Similar smoothing and simplifying "
"
Basically there is only one Pokemon, and its trying to get into this world, and it shapes its protrusions in all this myriad of form to get people to base their entire lives and society around it, and more and more of it can enter this world
"
"
 play as  some kind of protean being outside of space and time and you insert yourself in this world as the things known as pokemon. But each aspect of you has to have a certain amount of autonomy or it destabilizes. 
You also need human trainers . The interactions of which help congeal reality around your aspects.

So you start off being only able to manifest a couple of basic pokemon and can get a fairly loser trainer , but as you can gain in strength you manifest more bizarre or trainer appealing forms, lose your old trainers, and there is always the choice between keeping an old aspect or starting again with something new and more potent, or more appealing to richer trainers. Because you also gain in strength by competing with other Intrusions.

It would be kind of meta with like how a player has a bunch of different characters but they are all "aspects" of you intruding in this fantasy world, but now you are explicitly stated to be this. So the player is actually playing a player character player with player character player characters.


mechanically it would be like you earn exp but can spend it on leveling up, purchasing new characters, unlocking new characters.
Trainers would be like equipment, with prerequisites. Like if you want a "beach babe trainer" you would need be a X level water pokemon that is cute or something.
"

CONVERSATIONS RECENT:

Patrick Stuart
Im sorry but humanoid pokeon are fucking bullshit. total fucking bullshit

Patrick Stuart

Scrap, in the Pokeworld is the true 'Pocket Monster' man iteself?

Scrap Princess
+Patrick Stuart come on there is a certain appeal in them acting human in only one particular way and then animalistic in every other way. Like Dr Moreau but they don't even try, they do one thing like a person (box, sing, mime), and then shameless revert to animal behavior for the rest


Scrap Princess
No humans are the only animal not yet replaced by pokemon (which of course are extrusions from an external entity)

Patrick Stuart
Your two replies infer something horrible don't they? How sure are you that humans have not yet been replaced? Becasue, looking at characters in the pokeverse THEY ALL ONLY DO ONE THING AGAIN AND AGAIN

Wil McKinnee
Like defecation.

Wil McKinnee
But I mean that in a Bataille kinda way, as the sole expressive force. Like a Guayaki Tribesman's midnight song.

Scrap Princess
+Patrick Stuart maybe all the poke battling is the entities trying to determine if they have replaced everyone yet

Scrap Princess
The entities suspect that they have already won long long ago and that there was only one entity but it's been so long that the various extrusions believe themselves autonomous even as they themselves  observe the puppet selves they control turn on their strings
EARLIER CONVERSATION (EXTRACT FEATURES)


Patrick Stuart
I just read Ghastleys entry in the online pokedex and its fuckng terrifying, example paragraph "Gastly first appeared in The Ghost of Maiden's Peak. This Gastly had the ability to talk and shape-shift. He kept posing himself as the spirit of the woman which legend said turned to stone after many years of waiting for her love to return to her. As the ghost of the maiden, Gastly kept on toying with the minds of young men."



Richard G
Gastly can slip into any place it wants. However, Gastly's body will dwindle away when exposed to a strong wind but it can probably regenerate itself later. A Gastly is capable of toppling an Indian Elephant within two seconds by enveloping it in poisonous gas.
That last note is the kind of totally bonkers thing my kids make up. The obsession with scale and timing is a very specific feature of being about 10 years old and/or a 19th century naturalist or political philosopher.

You know George Hutcheon's "origin of Pokemon species" articles, right?
http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species:_Bronzor_and_Bronzong









Scrap Princess
Dusknoir has an antenna to receive radio waves from the spirit world and will take a spirit in its pilant body to guide it home



Patrick Stuart
+Scrap Princess Yep. There is one that is actually a sarcophagus and one that is a living candelabra a well.

Scrap, what the fuck is going on with Voltorb? Does anyone ever come close to explaning that? It's lie having a D&D monster where the entry in the monster manual is itself the monster.



Scrap Princess"
ancient legends once told Cofagrigus could eat nearby humans and turn their lifeless bodies into mummies. It also has the ability to form two pairs of arms. Its real face is covered up by parts that slide out of the way when it is active."



Scrap Princess
+Patrick Stuart no , just a "new pokemon just happen. Some of the happen so they look like stuff. This is pleasing to the pokemon because reasons"

Basically there is only one Pokemon, and its trying to get into this world, and it shapes its protrusions in all this myriad of form to get people to base their entire lives and society around it, and more and more of it can enter this world



Scrap Princess
like look at pokemon. Its what an alien would draw animals like if it wanted to make animal shaped lures for people. Compare fishing lures to actual bait fish. Similar smoothing and simplifying 






Richard G
yesyesyes. when are we playing dyspokemon?






Arnold K.
Every Cubone ever WEARS HIS MOTHER'S SKULL ON HIS HEAD.  Wrap  your head around that.

Also, Yamask is the soul of a dead human.  It retains memories of its previous life.  If you put it on  your face, you get possessed by it.

Neither of those are Dark, but they are pretty dark.



Arnold K.
Also, aside from spending his afterlife being forced to fight children's pets, Yamask can also breed and lay eggs.



Arnold K.
Also, lest I be unhelpful: Umbreon is the cutest dark pokemon (according to peer-reviewed journals).



Arnold K.
+Patrick Stuart Voltorb shares a lot of DNA with mimics.  When you find stuff on the ground of dungeons, it's always inside a pokeball.  In the Power Plant (Pokemon Red/Blue), some of the items on the ground were actually relatively badass voltorbs that attacked you.

They re-used this idea in Pokemon B/W, with another gotcha pokemon: foongus, the most asinine creature in the game.



Patrick Stuart
+Arnold K. There are dungeons in pokemon, and things in the dungeons and they are inside pokeballs? How?? Why??



Arnold K.
Dungeons are either (a) pinatas full of angry hornets with a rare pokemon at the bottom, or (b) just in your way.  Despite having cellphones and digital watches, their transportation system is so shitty that completing your pokemon journey (going from one major city to another) requires you to go through meteorite-impacted caverns.  You can't even get a boat to some places.  You gotta swim though flooded sea caves and fight hundreds of zubats to get places.

And pokeballs. . . you can put anything in pokeballs.  Pair of socks, the soul of the king of pokelantis, etc.  Primitive pokeballs were made from weaponized fruit (?) called apricorns, and big pokemon had to be captured in appropriately sized pokeballs.

Also, giving some credence to +Scrap Princess 's conspiracy theory: it looks like pokemon have been replacing the default animals.  Normal birds were shown in early episodes, but no longer.  Normal fish were shown in museums, but only to demonstrate what ancient pokemon used to eat.  



Scrap Princess
+Patrick Stuart well pokemon can hold items. SO maybe the pokemon had the item and then it escaped and left the item behind. Or items are pokemon spores



Scrap Princess
The ocean is about 70 to 80% tentacool, and darkness, darkness is made out of fucking zubats.



Arnold K.
Meowth, that's right.  You can't swing a zubat in some caves without hitting a zubat.



Arnold K.
And the ground was paved with geodudes.



Scrap Princess
like the first time you see "repel" in a shop its like "man that's stupid, why would I turn down exp?" but by the time you are trying to get through the marine caves its like "YOU SHOP DRONE! HOW MUCH SUPER REPEL ? I WILL HAVE ALL OF IT HERE IS FISTS FULL OF MONEY DO YOU HAVE THIS IN A TANKER ? ONLY 99? 99?!?!? WHAT THE FUCK I WILL BUY TANKER SELL ME A TANKER SELL ME A FUCKING CROP DUSTER OF IT FUUUUUCK"






Patrick Stuart
Everything is animate and intelligent, like evil shinto



Scrap Princess
there is prob a totally crap " mysterious orientals" essay about how the lingering influence of Shinto informed the creation of the pokemon franchise







Patrick Stuart
The pokeball is an end-point for human technology. Because pokemon can do anything, control of them is the only meaningful control.



Scrap Princess

A dark day in the histroy of war was when specially breed zubats were released in the enemy cave networks. Their move list: "sing" "confuse ray" "stun spore" "self destruct"



Arnold K.
And they all have Arena Trap, so you can't run away.

And there's a man outside the cave selling lawn mower hats.



Arnold K.
Maybe pokemon are devolving us.  Turning us into some sort of simpering, childish society where we cannot work or think on our own.  Where ten-year-olds are the pinnacles of achievement and the adults just flounce around putting their pokemon in beauty contests and shit.

Meanwhile the pokemon are all breeding with each other, traveling through the internet, talking with the dead, messing with the weather, and exhuming our graveyards to raise armies of yamasks.



Richard G
thank you so much for this thread. I love it.

And really, when are we running this?






Richard G

That could certainly work - POW v POW battles to get the creatures into the pokeballs.

I'm going to give some thought to writing a system just for this..... (tho no results quickly, I suspect)



Patrick Stuart
For some reason the most frightening thing on the yamazk Bulbapedia page (out of a lot of frightening things) was this;-

"They serve Cofagrigus. They were lonely and tried to make more friends, but now they are happy because many Pokémon have come to play."

Now they are happy.



Richard G
at first they are noisy and resist but their wills soon subside.
...now I can't remember which Cthulhu module that's from.









Richard G
gotta catch you all is a great tagline
It's an S John Ross game... I wonder... it might actually be good.



Arnold K.
Never played it, but I've read all of it.  It's a clever mangling of the mythos and the 'mons.  The system is really simplistic and gamist.  It looks like it could be fun, though, but only if enjoyed the abyss at the center of that particular Venn diagram.



Richard G
what's going on here I think is different in intent - Ross seems to have gone "hey Pokemon are cute and a little creepy - let's dial up the dissonance by importing Cthulhu," whereas I think the agreement here is that Pokemon is plenty creepy enough already.
...it's free, though. Worth a look...



Scrap Princess
+Richard G yeah I was going to say that, like  the mythos is a step back from the strangeness of the pokemon. Like "evil scaly squid demons" are pretty played out and chibi'ng them is not doing anything new.

The only angle I can think of to make a pokemon rpg interesting for me is if you player some kind of protean being outside of space and time and you insert yourself in this world as the things known as pokemon. But each aspect of you has to have a certain amount of autonomy or it destabilizes. You also need human trainers . The interactions of which help congeal reality around your aspects.

So you start off being only able to manfeist a couple of basic pokemon and can get a fairly loser trainer , but as you can gain in strength you manfiest more bizarre or trainer appealing forms, lose your old trainers, and there is always the choice between keeping an old aspect or starting again with something new and more potent, or more appealing to richer trainers. Because you also gain in strength by competing with other Intrusions.

It would be kind of meta with like how a player has a bunch of different characters but they are all "aspects" of you intruding in this fantasy world, but now you are explicitly stated to be this. So the player is actually playing a player character player with player character player characters.

...



...

mechanically it would be like you earn exp but can spend it on leveling up, purchasing new characters, unlocking new characters.
Trainers would be like equipment, with prerequisites. Like if you want a "beach babe trainer" you would need be a X level water pokemon that is cute or something.
 



Richard G
that sounds amazing! My own idea - to set it all during the 17th century and you play Balinese or Ryukyu islanders who are forced to make devil's pacts with the pokemon to drive off the Europeans - seems relatively pedestrian. 



Richard G
playing a protean being that needs humans reminds me of a video game proposal I wrote once for Little Lost Shoggoth, where you play a shoggoth with a simple mission (get to Carlsbad Caverns to restart the world engine) and you have to get the humans to help you, but if they see you they go mad and if they find out you exist it's torches and pitchforks, so the game is about sneaking around them, reading their work papers when they're not there, using recordings to play over the phone to make stuff happen, and hiding in unlikely places aboard ships and trains to get transported to where you need to go. I thought about maybe if you ate someone you could get their skills for a short time. 



Arnold K.
I like Scrap's idea.  Other ideas:

You could play it straight, as a group of the few lone souls that know the truth.  Every day you machine gun down a dozen trainers send a few more pokemon back to the nameless void.  But the pokemon lap the blood off the ground and core the memories of all involved.  You never make it on the evening news.  You need to make it to Los Alamos in order to detonate the nukes there.  You've got a scientist that thinks he's found a way to destroy the whole planet and everyone on it.

It's a grim goal, but it's better than the alternative.  You've all seen what the pokemon are planning.  You all know what they intend for humanity.

And so you strive to end the world, in order to save the souls of the living.  They'll never thank you for it, of course.  They don't even know why you fight, or how you fight.  They call you "Team Rocket" on the evening news, presumably after the nuclear stockpiles you are seeking.  But people are told that you "steal pokemon".  And when they learn differently, the pokemon make them forget it.  Yeah, a lot of you wear black sweaters, but they sure as fuck don't have a big red letter R on them.

It doesn't matter.  Everyone sees the letter R anyway.  Just like how they don't see the shotguns and the scroll cases.  And you kill pokemon, yes, but you kill people, too.  They die never understanding anything about the world they live in.  The death of livestock.  Which is perhaps an appropriate comparison.

Okay.  Simpler prose.  Focus.  Shit.

But there is no security or network or anything.  No one knows how to do anything except fight pokemon, watch pokemon on TV, talk about pokemon on the streets, and go to pokemon beauty contests.  All you have to do is take off your black sweater and you are incognito and no one recognizes you.

Not even the pokemon recognize you.  Sure, some of them do, but most are them are just appendages of something greater.  All humans look the same to them.



Arnold K.
The old cities are there of course, but no one goes there.  It's like no one can see those places.  Instead of using the old highways, the people take roundabout routes, going through mountains and swimming across oceans.

There are roads connecting the major cities, but they're invisible to the common folk.  Maybe it's too much illusion to maintain.  Certainly the old cities are wrecks.  Scarred in a dozen ways by the pokemon's arrival.

And so you go into the shells of the old cities for supplies and weapons.  Things are just sitting on the shelf.  The stuff in cans is still edible.  The apocalypse wasn't that long ago.

Team Rocket owes a great deal of its survival to the creature called Meowth.  It's a traitor to its kind.  A rogue drone.  It's assistance was neither asked for not understood, but it is gratefully accepted.

All pokemon can speak, of course.  It's just that the words are usually the last thing their trainer ever hears.




Arnold K.
+Scrap Princess I'm just going to vomit ideas out.  Excuse me.

It'd be hard to roleplay an alien intelligence.  What does an alien intelligence do for fun?  It needs a human element.

Maybe you need a human trainer to be your face to the world.  Maybe your power is linked to how many people think you're awesome, but no one remembers a sandshrew, and so you've got to attach yourself to some chump and ride him to glory.

You can just form new pokemon and appear in front of your trainer.  In fact, pretty much all the wild pokemon that appear in front of your trainer are just aspects of you.

But when you fight another trainer, you actually are fighting another entity.  The thundershocks are just for show, the real battle takes place on a whole different plane.  And so you rise and fall with your trainer.  If your trainer dies or whatever, it's a pain to reattach yourself to a new one.

There's other stuff you can do to get more XP, too.  Devouring souls, eating fingernails.  But pokemon battles are a big one.  So your job is to steer your idiot trainer around so you can fight entities of about your power level (to get XP) while avoiding ones who are more powerful than you.

And you don't just manifest as pokemon, either.  You can also control electronics and mess with people's brains.  When you catch word that Team Rocket is going to drop sarin gas on Pewter City, you need to play some stuff on TV about a spearow swarm on Route 24.  Get Ash excited enough to jump on his bike really quick-like.  And you need to get rid of Brock, too.  He's starting to suspect too much.  Killing him would be harder than engineering a situation where he runs of chasing the local nurse, so you do that.

And thus, vast, transdimensional intelligences are forced to find their a date for a 10-year-old kid for the dance aboard the S.S. Anne.

The identical pokecenter nurses?  Your creatures entirely.  Like finger puppets on top of a tentacle.  If a human ever cracked open that pokeheal machine, they'd see the yawning abysms of infinity stretching out around them, instantly snuffing their fragile, three-dimensional brains.








Arnold K.
I support anything that leads to more madness.  Might I suggest that it contains pokemon #d151 when it is found?



Richard G

Nice. I was thinking Ditto but this is more elegant (and claims primacy!)
END SIGNAL
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