assault

Tom Wilkinson dies aged 75. He was the lawyer killed in Michael Clayton and the bad guy in Rush Hour. He was also the crime boss in Batman Begins
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65823240

If you want to see what the BRP system can do, check out Stormbringer and its spinoffs. The earlier versions weren't balanced, but that was intentional. In a word: Elric.
 
For SF, check out Ringworld. Unfortunately it's focused on those specific books, but you could probably run a Known Space game with it. It's a bit more complex than I prefer though.
 
And of course there is Call of Cthulhu. There have been various supplements that could form the basis of an interesting Pulp fantasy game. Clark Ashton Smith? Even Lord Dunsany if you try. C L Moore"s Jirel of Joiry stories would probably work too.
 
To me the main interest of Superworld is its half developed point system. I'd use it as spare parts rather than trying to play it.

The Gaean Reach RPG has a cool setup. Everyone has a reason to want revenge on a particular guy. It's up to the players why in their specific character's case, and it's up to the GM who the guy is. (And obviously "the guy's" gender etc.)
 
It doesn't involve a lot of needless backstory - just a description of the world they are on and place they are in.
 
It still takes a bit of effort getting them in one place and getting them to know each other, but they have a common goal.
 
Shame about the rest of the game.

New one UP before the New Year!
 
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1294.html

A Terrible Thought: what if there were Cthulhu-oid horrors called the Young Ones? Could you deal with the horror of Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike? (Spelling according to Wikipedia.)

On the level of traditional symbology, there is also a superficial resemblance to the Hanged Man, one of the major arcana of the Tarot:
 

 
 
 
Which Bad Things? That book has a lot of them.

The Young Ones are a pretty good fit for Warhammer's Chaos Gods...

Call of Cthulhu is kind of a beast of its own; the simple system works really well for that setting because its less about mechanics (let's face it you're hopeless in combat anyway) than atmosphere and role play.

A concept I used in a campaign (which ended before the nature of the enemy became completely apparent) is the incursion of old evils (evil gods' cults, archdemon slaves, the less human the better) coming in, not because they were always around, but because the old regime/dynasty/whatever as things were coming apart for them cut deals with whatever they could get to listen to get the magical power they needed to try hanging on to temporal power.  Now, despite the deals (too little, too late) that regime was ended forcefully and rendered fully extinct.  But, since the evil powers had had sense enough to require collateral of actual land, landmarks, neighborhoods, etc. when they made the bargains, those bargains remain valid and the evil things are showing up to collect their payment.
 
So the players (and whatever alliances they form/join) have a multi-level task in front of them.  First, they have to recognize that it's not just one big evil bad guy; it's half a dozen or disparate bad guys, each with their own calling cards, themes, modus operandi, preferred l00tz, etc., despite having crudely similar but completely disparate goals in their incursions.  Then comes something of a desperate hunt through the ruins of the Bad Old Days to see if any records of the old regime's deals still exist, and to make clear that the bad stuff happening now is not just evil entities trying to reestablish the old defunct regime, which is an easy conclusion to jump at.  The campaign got into the transition from the first stage to the second, but broke down before getting further.  The next stage never got underway, which was trying to compose a unified countereffort to stave off the not-actually-united evils trying to break into the realm and consume their own parts of it (parts which, from a purely legal view, they did have a legitimate claim to).
 
That multiple-evil-influences let me grab whatever cool-looking bad stuff I happened to read, and slap it into the campaign without worrying about any integration into a coherent plan: it's just another infernal debt collection coming in and there was no coherence to it.  ("If you have no plot, you can't have plot holes.")
 
How could it all be resolved?  Well, I didn't worry about that too much; the evil creditors varied from pretty punky as cosmic evil things go, up to things that (once fully awakened) could eat entire kingdoms.  I was explicitly hoping for creativity among the players in building solutions to the individual problems.
 
 

I'd also contend that percentile skill systems are just plain more intuitive for most folks, especially non- or new-gamers.  They then go on to spoil that a bit with a full range of poly dice for damage and a few other functions, but everyone groks what a 75% chance means where reading the odds on a 3d6 roll is a less universal skill.  That factors in to the ease of summarizing, of course.
It's on the cusp if being actually good even in its current (badly-edited) state, and someone experienced with Hero (or any point-buy supers system) that wanted to put in the work could probably make it shine.  I'd certainly put it ahead of GURPS Supers or the Silver Age Sentinels/Absolute Power BESM-engine games in that regard, which I can also see unrealized potential in.
 
Well, maybe not Absolute Power.  All these years and they somehow made a worse version of SAS.
I think you might mean the Sidekick book, but there's some overlap with the Resource Kit as well.  They're both very slim, and in the store for single-digit prices.
 
I bought the slim BRP book many times over, but only because it was bundled with every boxed RPG Chaosium released for years and I bought pretty much all of them.  Yes, even Ringworld and Elfquest.  Heck, I still have a Madcoil miniature from the EQ figure range that came out for the game. 
 
I really should pick up the new BRP.  I know I like the system, and while I had the "yellow cover" interim version it was lost in a flood years ago so it's not like I'd be duplicating something I have on the shelves.

BRP has one advantage over Hero. The rules can be summarized briefly.

The Worlds of Wonder version had the core rules in 16 pages, plus another 16 each for Magic World, Superworld and Future World. While each of the latter three beg expansion (and Superworld was expanded), having such a concise format is obviously a benefit when it comes to learning how to play it.

At times I've considered using Superworld as the basis for a fully point based version of it.

May wanted to change the Hunted: Adventurer's Guild to Watched: , showing that they keep an eye on the person without involving too much effort on keeping tabs. To me a hunted would mean they send someone after him from town to town; where it could just mean they watch what he does - as long as they pay dues, don't get arrested (too often) and keep their nose clean they don't bother them.
 
All in all I don't see an issue with it all.

In the distant future, assuming humanity gets a distant future, archeologists will simply assume that is a sculpture of a goddess. 

S&S doesn’t absolutely require human fighterism. Elric is squarely S&S and a powerful warlock in his own right. Gray Mouser is a former wizard’s apprentice who still remembers some of his training. It’s more the style of magic that sets S&S apart—ritual and summoning, rather than balls of fire. 
 
Unfortunately that’s where 5e D&D really falls apart for S&S. You could easily run a game of rogues, fighters, and barbarians, but the only magic D&D really supports is high fantasy video game magic. I’m sure it’s not impossible, but it’d be hard enough to inspire me to look at other game systems. 
 

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.

and for you others Happy Summer Solstice!

Dont know if it helps, but generally I start with "thinking about putting something together for Traveller next month.  Interested?"
 
And see where the snowball rolls and how big it gets.
 

back in 1996 I modified the then current setting for Fantasy Hero (2e, 1990), Western Shores. Adding to it again in 2006. I'm now thinking of updating and improving it to 6e Hero System as I may run another campaign using it. This thread is for feedback and ideas on what I've done so far and what folk might like to see (and if anyone actually would like it to be done).

Locations to find this setting:
The Western Shores Campaign (1996, 4e Hero System, note the elite level HTML use) The Western Shores (2006, 5e Hero System, some issues with transitioning wiki markup from the RPG.net site) WS:Index (same as above but hosted on the RPG.net wiki) In it's current state there are some areas with lots of detail not particularly well organised (because that's where the PCs were) and some areas that are not detailed at all.

A good concept is great, but that should not mean your character cannot be effective.   A good concept should not hamstring your character in every way.  Building in an exploitable weakness into a character is fine but making a character that cannot accomplish what he needs to is not.  While players should be able to play the character they want, that character is part of a team and should be able to carry their weight.   If your characters concept is that they are totally incompetent at combat maybe that concept should be used for a DNPC instead of a PC.
 
All too often I see people who focus on concept before efficiency fail to actually achieve the concept.  When you concept is a charismatic swashbuckler that can charm anyone and your skill with swords consists of WF blades and 2 3 point skill levels that is not a swashbuckler.  Having the social skills and talents to talk your way out of trouble is great, but don’t totally neglect combat.
 
Another thing I see is that players focusing on concept often cannot afford everything there concept should have.   This is really common with newer players, or those with limited system mastery.  Often they waste points on something that can be built more efficiently leaving them too few points to purchase the rest of the abilities their concept includes.  Often by rewriting the character more efficiently they can actually get closer to their concept. 
 
Building a good character is an art.  It requires balancing out what you want vs that which is needed by the game. 

For something like Frost Giant's Daughter I don't think I'd change anything mechanically, just spin the narrative description for a more dreamlike hallucinatory feel and make the aftermath leave the players wondering just how real it all was.  Maybe injuries vanish at the end of things, but some element from the dream has come back with them to reality.
 
Similar for emulating the feel of the Moore stories, or some of Smith's eerier work.  Jirel tended to encounter strange environments that could have mechanical effects but much of it could be purely narrative descriptions in game - and perhaps some weird maps.  There's a fair number of puzzler situations (roughly equivalent to traps with inobvious ways to get around them) and deceptive villains (often with conflicting motivations and trying to recruit aid against one another) but those are part and parcel of many fantasy settings.  Think getting the feel right is largely a matter of presentation, not unique mechanics.
 
If you really wanted to emphasize the "this ain't Kansas" aspect of otherworldly adventures, run the mundane stuff with FH as usual, and then when they're in a dreamland/otherworld/pocket dimension inside a sleeping wizard's mind/etc. switch to a different system altogether.  There's tons of low-crunch light RPGs out there that feel less "real" than a simulationist high-crunch engine like Hero, and they'll feel "off" when you switch between the two such extremes - and because they're so low-crunch, the effort required to port your PCs to them and teach the "dream" rules (some of which fit on a single page for the really light ones) is minimal.  Troika's a decent option, as is Into the Odd (both of which are seriously surreal to begin with), and the Powered By the Apocalypse engine has a lot of options to choose from.  When the players get back to "reality" they go back to Hero, of course.  The whole point would be to make the gameplay between real and otherworld feel different.

It's worth reading Catherine Lucille Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories.

Contemporary with Howard, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, (as in, the same issues of Weird Tales), the Jirel stories were mostly about her dealing with supernatural threats. Her actual butt kicking scenes were minimal, or happened before the proper stories began.

So to build her, you would include lots of Ego, OMCV, DMCV and so on. And, yes, she can ride at the head of her soldiers cutting her way through mooks in a perfectly Conan-ish manner.

Despite Margaret Brundage's covers, she wore perfectly functional armour too.

It's worth reading Catherine Lucille Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories.

Contemporary with Howard, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, (as in, the same issues of Weird Tales), the Jirel stories were mostly about her dealing with supernatural threats. Her actual butt kicking scenes were minimal, or happened before the proper stories began.

So to build her, you would include lots of Ego, OMCV, DMCV and so on. And, yes, she can ride at the head of her soldiers cutting her way through mooks in a perfectly Conan-ish manner.

Despite Margaret Brundage's covers, she wore perfectly functional armour too.

I've been bingeing a lot of Swords and Sorcery recently, and keep running into a lot of other worldy/dream/weird sequences. Even Conan isn't immune (see The Frost Giant's Daughter, The Vale of Lost Women, and others I can't be bothered thinking of).
 
The obvious question is: how would you run this in a game?
 
It's quite a different tone from more "realistic" situations, yet it is so commonly present that it begs to be included. I can see a lot of players and GMs not wanting to do it, but for those who do: how would you handle it?

You could consider switching over to having EGO function as BODY for this sequence. OMCV and DMCV could replace OCV and DCV or alternately replace PD and ED for basic defense since it is all in the mind. It also gives a boost to these characteristics which are often under utilized in many campaigns. Just off the top of my head, but I am going to ponder it further.

The way I would handle it would be to treat a dream as a different dimension.   This allows the GM to change the rules for the session without making changes to the actual game.   I could see a dream using more of the Champions rules instead of the more lethal Fantasy Hero rules.  If the normal campaign uses critical hits and hit location switching to a d3 Stun Multiple and no critical hits would make it less dangerous.   On the other hand, if you are going for the nightmare type dream using more lethal rules than normal works too.
 
Basically, it can give the players a break from the normal game and allow them to try something different.