Exploring New Genres - Share Your Favorite Other Genres

[Christopher R Taylor]

I do have an affection for cops with powers (very low level stuff, maybe 200-250 point characters) as a special squad in Big City.  Tons of cop stories out there, easy to write scenarios for.

 

One genre I would love to see is Napoleonic British Navy.  It has the same drawback as pirate stories: who's the captain?  How do you get players to stay within the military rank system?  But I could definitely see the player characters start out as Midshipmen and go up through the ranks as Lieutenants on a ship.  Its unrealistic and implausible that the "party" would stay on the same ship for very long but you could do a campaign where they were middies, got promoted, then got each moved on to their own ships as Master and Commander, under a commodore.  That could last a fair amount of time, each of them sailing their own sloop or light frigate (as the get promoted to full captain) say, a Mediterranean or Caribbean campaign.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Duke Bushido]

3 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 It has the same drawback as pirate stories: who's the captain?  How do you get players to stay within the military rank system?  

 

 

Yep.

 

Tried pirates twice over the years (I like the romanticized swashbuckling version of pirates; the whole group was into it each time), but both fell apart for pretty much the reasons you suggest.

 

Interestingly, every attempt we made at FASA's old Star Trek RPG fell apart for the same reasons.

 

Looking at it from this angle, perhaps it wasnt just setting and knowledge issues: our T2000 game might have just been destined to fail under the weight of even a pseudo-military structure.  😕

 

 

[Khymeria]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

Interestingly, every attempt we made at FASA's old Star Trek RPG fell apart for the same reasons.

 

 

I ran this back in the day and had each player make a few characters, the Supply Officer and random engineer and such so they could mix things up a bit for personnel and on away missions. They were good roleplayers and in it for story so they chose one player to be Captain and then did a pick rotation a few time’s through. It was fun but also works best on a smaller starship for impact. 

[Lord Liaden]

I had a lot of fun running TSR's old Gamma World game. Technically it's post-apoc, but not the kind of grim scrounging to survive you usually see in the genre. This one featured bizarrely mutated animals and plants, many of them having achieved sapience and tool-making, and organized societies; radically advanced technology, and its products such as robots and androids and cyborgs; wild mutant powers that almost reached comic-book superpowers. Pretty gonzo, and more fun than the genre is normally known for.

 

Speaking of post-apoc, I never tire of recommending Keith Curtis's magnificent The Savage Earth campaign website for HERO 5E. Most of what I said above applies to this world as well, except that the apocalypse was magical, unleashing the potential for life forms organic and inorganic, and literally turning the planet on its side, changing the orientation and climate of familiar land masses to something radically different. If you're familiar with the old Saturday morning Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon, imagine that world greatly expanded, richly detailed, and given historical and cultural coherence. Add in Keith's numerous character sheets for races and monsters, unique magic system, detailed maps, extensive campaign logs, and a lot of beautiful color artwork, and you have a setting for adventure like none other.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I think war settings are an interesting if largely forgotten genre.  So many stories that can be told of a small squad of PCs.  You usually have one higher ranking guy -- usually a non-com, but that can just be an experienced, respected player's character.  All higher ranks should be NPCs.

Edited August 29, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Khymeria]

4 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I think war settings are an interesting if largely forgotten genre.  So many stories that can be told of a small squad of PCs.  You usually have one higher ranking guy -- usually a non-com, but that can just be an experienced, respected player's characters.  All higher ranks should be NPCs.

I played in a Special Ops game where all the PCs were from different branches of the military with elite training, Delta Force, Navy Seal, Force Recon, Parajumper, etc. We were not all the same rank, but we had chain of command and a mission and that was usually enough to keep things in check. I did kill another PC for endangering the mission from my sniper position on the order of my commanding officer once though come to think of it.

[DentArthurDent]

We played Twilight 2000 for several years (well before the year 2000). We ported the rules over to Hero system (probably Danger International). But the background and structure of a military unit made it a new experience. It helped to have one current and one ex-military playing with us.

 

The military structure also worked well with a Star Trek campaign and a pirates campaign. Even cutthroats need someone to coordinate tacking into the wind. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

The military structure also worked well with a Star Trek campaign and a pirates campaign. Even cutthroats need someone to coordinate tacking into the wind. 

 

It takes a certain kind of gamer group to submit to military authority and hierarchy, but if you can do so, it opens up a lot more opportunities for games.  Typically the captain of a pirate ship wasn't the king of the ship, he was just the guy who knew best how to sail and fight her, and when they weren't sailing or fighting usually was just another one of the crew, and that sort of authority more gamers are willing to work with.

Edited August 31, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Cancer]

I'm in the process of hammering together something like a derivative of the Arabian Nights boardgame translated into a role-playing game.  If you've never seen, let alone played it -- and it has been hard to come by -- it sort of tries to put the players on a series of adventures, both mundane and fantastical, in something like the Tales of the 1001 Nights in the Arab world while Baghdad was at its peak, sort of AD 1000 +/- 200.  The players end up wandering around nearly all the Old World, acquiring and losing statuses (which can be good or bad), wealth, and wondrous items, accumulating Story Points and Fame Points.  Once you have enough of those latter two things, and are clear of disqualifying statuses (and getting rid of some of those is nigh-on impossible), you try to get back to Baghdad, overcome a final encounter there, and win.

 

Because I am also strongly interested in maritime history and technology development, and I've been reading a remarkably good book that includes much more about merchant trade in Asia (going between the Near East and China by sea, necessarily including the territory between both) than I had previously known, I'll be setting my players as merchants with a small ship loaded with trade goods setting out from a port in the Persian Gulf and heading out on the northeast monsoon (December through March) down into a port in Indonesia.  They'll stay there for several months, trying to make maximally profitable trades with other merchants from everywhere from Korea through China, southeast Asia, India and Ceylon and all coasts inbetween, plus the immense Indonesian archipelago.  (Also the east coast of Africa is in scope for this.)  Then, once it comes, ride the southwest monsoon (June through September) back to their home port.  The historical context is a bit before 800AD.

 

Now, as usual I've gone off the deep end and researched way too many things, from maritime tech, money (the relative values of gold, silver, and copper varied across the area), trade goods and where they came from and what locales demanded what, climatology in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific north of the Equator, the politics of the era and as much about the legal aspects of commerce as I can find for the realms in this region ... I've been an academic all my life, it's what I do.  So far I've got two 8-page documents for introducing the setting and the game partly hammered out.  I've also researched the calendars, and I'll be keeping both a western solar calendar and an Islamic lunar calendar as correctly as I can; I'm coding that up now so I can barf out blank calendars a decade at a time.  All that said, I will not be restricting myself to real-world events (there will be some low-grade magical stuff of appropriate flavor that the PCs will deal with), and the historical record is hopelessly incomplete in any case, so I am free to make up interesting things that tickle my fancy.

 

Because this was inspired by a boardgame that has very little "crunch" in its mechanics and is much more in the lines of structured, prompted storytelling, and that flavor is something I am looking to retain, I'm going to try this in a "soft" system; right now I'm looking hard at Fate Core since I have it on the top layer of stuff here in my basement.

 

Then I'll run it past the gaming group and see if they'll give me a timeslice to run it.

Edited December 10, 2023 by Cancer

[Rich McGee]

One sub-sub-genre I've yet to see explored in gaming is the "scifi-medical-mystery-first-contact" thing James White wrote about so effectively in his Sector General novels.  There's a few other stories sort of like them - the StarDoc series, and the old Med Ship stories - but White defines it for me, anyway.  The core conceit would be specialized "ambulance ships" responding to distress calls from entirely unfamiliar species and having to not only figure out how the new xenos work when they're healthy, but how to fix whatever's gone wrong to trigger the call for help.  In extreme cases even figuring out which ones are intelligent and which ones are pets or livestock could be an issue (there's an old Poul Anderson short that takes that even further by having the intelligent aliens actively hiding among the zoo animals out of fear).  The rescue ships have fairly small crews of extremely competent individuals (so, perfect PC groups) and often wind up self-quarantining for everyone's safety so no mobs of NPCs getting involved until the PCs manage some degree of success.  Add in communications issues, social conflicts with alien cultures, and some light politics and there's plenty of things to do to keep the concept fresh - but no one seems to have done anything quite like it yet.  There's dedicated RPGs for stuff like being a monster veterinarian or working in a supernatural ER that come kind of close, but nothing quite right that I've seen.

Edited December 23, 2023 by Rich McGee

[Lord Liaden]

Ted White complained that whenever he created an innovative new alien species, it always seemed to end up getting sick and winding up in Sector General Hospital.