There are so many stories I want to tell. There are so many adventures I want to have. In about a month I will have a bit more free time to prepare and run campaigns, and hopefully a few more positive changes in my life will open up my schedule to have two games a week; One game for me to run and one game for me to play in.
The question isn’t if I am going to run a game but which game to run. Here is a list of those games and my visions for them.
Rise of the Runelords: Anniversary Edition
I have the hardcover and PDF of this already, and I have read through it a couple times. There are so many cool things going on in this campaign that I can’t help but want to run it. There is also a huge amount of supporting material for the game, such as pewter minis for all the major characters, and a few of the supporting cast, plastic minis for nearly every encounter, Herolab files for every encounter, official and fan made maps for every encounter, artwork, handouts, soundscapes, and so on. This would be the campaign where I would attempt to pull out all the stops, and go beyond what I have done before. It would be fun to see if I could pull it off.
I would try to keep my rulesmithing down to a minimum but the campaign would work great with a modified hero point system and my Patronage system from the Mystical Market’s line Flying Pincushion is publishing. I also would limit the number of open sources for player character options, possibly limiting them to only a few books. To compensate the character building session would have some system to introduce cool and unique character background traits or options.
I might also want to rework some of the NPCs to use the Occult and Horror rules, as the AP is much older than those books (Horror isn’t even out yet) but fits perfectly with both genres.
Cloudhaven
I don’t have much of a story arc for this campaign but I do have an idea of how I would run it. This game came from a thought experiment where I asked the question: What if dragons were the dominant creature in society and not humans? I also wanted a reason why airships would be a common from of transportation. Drop Dead Studios already has an excellent starting point for this campaign so I might just get their stuff and build on it.
One thing that I may do with this to make the world building easier would be use Pathfinder modules and Pathfinder Society scenarios. I could take the PFS rules and make them into an adventuring guild, which may make things easier in the long run. I could also have the players involved in direct world building through certain parts of the game. This would be doing things like asking them to create new nations, religions, and even background NPCs, or having them come up with some neat flavor for already established stuff.
Mech Game
I don’t really have much of an idea for this beyond mechs. There are a few systems that could work, and I even have a couple home brew system ideas, but if I am honest about this I want to play more than I want to run. I have an idea for a sniper mech that strikes at long distance, and I have had this character in my head since high school. If I ran it the game would be on a mostly desert planet, but not the sandy dunes of Tattoine. This is more of the rocky and life filled deserts of the American Southwest. It would look and feel like Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada, with some Colorado mountains thrown in for good measure. The planet would be an old military testing planet, the inhabitants shipped there as prisoners to scavenge the scrap metal of rusty test sites and work clean up in the dangerous bombing fields. The military still runs a few bases, but for the most part they leave the population to fight amongst themselves. Think Mad Max meets Mech Warrior.
As for the rule set, I am thinking of going with Fantasy Flight’s current Star Wars RPG. They honestly need to rerelease the rules as a setting neutral system, as it is by far the best sci-fi/modern system I have played in a very long time. It isn’t complicated, it is super modable, and it just runs so smoothly for every type of encounter. It wouldn’t be hard to adjust the vehicle system to allow for mechs, and Edge of Empire already has nearly everything else the game would need.
An alternative would be finishing up my non-transitive system. This would require more work but I would be borrowing elements of other games to lighten some of that load.
Why not another system? I am not keen on trying to learn the Mech Warrior systems, as they look a bit complicated. The Heavy Gear system looks alright but once again I am not sure I want to put time into learning it, and the books are not as friendly to first time players as I would like.
Non-Pathfinder Games
I want to experience other systems, and the best way for me to do that is by being a player. I think having a few short campaigns in D&D 5th edition, Fate, and Savage Worlds would give me good exposure. There are also many, many smaller systems that I want to play around in.
I’m excited and looking forward to getting some more time in at the game table. I’ll have to post some updates here as things come together.
Elements Nine 