Just like the title says.

Are you running a contemporary or modern-day setting RPG campaign ?

 Have you in the past?

Oh and modern-day with a touch of Sci-Fi or fantasy monsters is okay or counts.
Tell me ...US about it.

How about Sci-Fi or near-future to Futuristic setting RPG campaigns?

Are you running one ?

Are you a player in one?

Have you run one in the past?

Go and ahead and babble about that.

Have you had any really good ideas for the above types of campaigns - that you haven't used yet....but have really wanted to ?


- Ed C.

Mankind has reached the stars only to find Earth. Birds flying through distant skies, fish swimming unknown seas, and dinosaurs ruling unexplored continents. On a hundred worlds are found the children of the Earth; an Earth of sixty-five million years ago.

Man has outgrown his cradle and now wonders who and what scattered the seeds of the Earth throughout the stars. He are forging a new life among the stars but old fears and conflicts still threaten.

The year is 2403 and this is their story.

I've wanted to run a big, goofy, operatic John Carter of Mars type campaign for years, but no one will go for it.

I'm starting a Starblazer Adventures game in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure yet what direction it's going to take, as it's very sandboxy, but the setting revolves primarily around an oppressive religious organization and the race of posthumans they want to wipe out.

The player characters are:

• A dotty noble / scientist who's into making gadgets
• Your standard gambler / smuggler
• Starfighter jock / martial arts guy
• Marine framed and exiled for firing on civilians
• Archaeologist with symbiotes that increase her influence through pheromones
• A "living computer" who's part of the ship and interacts mostly through holograms and remote control of robots.

It cribs pretty liberally from Firefly, Flash Gordon, various pulp sci-fi novels and what little I know of Dark Heresy (i.e. I saw the cover and thought it looked cool, I haven't read it). It steals almost nothing from Star Trek. One of my players begged me not to have a technobabble-heavy game with strict military structures, so that's all getting tossed.

Most of what I run are SF and modern. Asking me to talk about them all is just  opening up a can of worms. Big, fat, juicy worms.

-clash

In recent times (say a couple of years) I ran one comedy near future game in whcih the party were news reporters. There wasn't any fighting,  the premise was they had a bunch of leads on different possible stories, the catch being that there wasa time limit (in game not real time) to get the full stories with enough corroboration.  

I also ran a scenario in which the players were private investigators on a Total Recall style Mars.

While developing Diaspora we were doing this constantly -- three years, weekly meeting. Since then we've been playing with new projects and two are modern or sf; one is post-apocalyptic and one is modern derived from the comic series, 100 Bullets.

The Diaspora games were all heavily informed by Traveller and ran along similar lines -- starship owners, scraping by, conducting research, discovering terrible truths and conspiracies, dealing with same. Ex-wives in pirate ships, solar-system destroying catastrophes from mis-use of half-understood technologies, and hard choices about who to save in the short time that there's still an atmosphere in that ruptured space station.

The modern game (Hollowpoint is the game; not done yet) is a team of super-competent and violent individuals dealing with the business of their employers, betrayals, double-double-crosses, getting shot, and fleeing for a simpler life. Some great scenes with a new character arriving (replacing a dead character) to get the investigation on track, berating the existing characters for fucking up so bad as to get a man killed.

Post-apocalyptic stuff was using my Deluge system-less setting kit and revolved around a small group of survivalists and loners trying to cross Vancouver after a hundred years of heavy rain -- skiffing across submerged industrial parks and diving for forgotten treasure in a Canadian Tire.

Mankind has left the cradle of Earth due to a stellar cataclysm and several generations after the first resettlement discover remains of an ancient civilisation and glean hints towards a feasible FTL method.

After several more generations, FTL is achieved and the second great expansion of mankind occurs. Spreading humans and heavily gene-modded people/other species over a big sector of space.

The game starts in the Decario System, an interface between the rich and powerful Kadenin Confederation and the unruled, criminal gangs and fiercely independent regimes/nations of the Lundian Traverse.

The players will be on the planet Mellus, farming planet for the nearby pleasure planet of Amedies. As the game starts the planet will be under attack of unknown origins with ground troops enroute via old fashioned drop pods without gravatics.

-- Forgot to add, going to use Alternity, because I have it and I like it and Alternityrpg.net has some great resources for it.

For me, My two "big ideas" science Fiction-wise that I haven't run yet are
1) Marco Polo In Space...and

2) Martian Colonists in a Rebellion against Earth.

Hell, someone else on here took my Marco Pllo idea and already ran it. Someday I might get to if I find the right group and situation.


On the backburner : I'd like to run a game someday where the player characters are all variations on cyborgs or androids in disguise and they're on the run from authorities or trying to stay underground and hidden because of prejudice in the setting against "mostly mechanicals".


- Ed C.

I'm currently running Stormrift, my soon-to-be-released alien invasion of earth RPG. Right now the players are Resistance fighters in Norfolk where the naval base is one of the last major US military strongholds. One of the characters was seriously injured in a fight with a gang but the base commander (who doesn't approve of the resistance) refused them access to the refugee hospital. So the characters raided the hospital for supplies and are now on the run from a punitive force. Funny how even with the threat of alien conquest humans still find time to fight each other.

I've run 1980s Miami of course, and plenty of WWII games (both straight up and with a touch of the occult). I've run several zombie apocalypse type games to varying degrees of success.  I'd really like to run a Mafia campaign as opposed to the one shots we usually play. Crime Network looks like the best game ive found for this so far (expect a review soon). In all, the only game I run these days that isn't set in some form of the modern world is Star Wars WEG.

Pete

I've got too many ideas, too much enthusiasm and not nearly enough gaming time.

Starblazer Adventures. Using the Mindjammer setting. Or maybe the Septimus setting. Or maybe a pulp retro-SF Solar System with shades of planetary romance (jungles in Venus, ruins in Mars etc.). Or maybe a hard-SF STL-only Traveller-esque Solar System trading and politics game, with shades of Cowboy Bebop and Eclipse Phase. Or better yet, sit down with the old group and try some collaborative setting creation. Damn, I get a dozen new ideas every time I look at this book.

Eclipse Phase. A standard Firewall campaign. Actually I can't say I'm teeming with ideas for this, other than the obvious ones; I just like the thought of seeing my players playing anarchist octopi and robo-smugglers.

Ninjas & Superspies. I'm getting a real bad N&SS itch I'd like to scratch. I love almost everything about this game. The complete absence of a setting would be unthinkable today, but did wonders for my imnagination back in the day (PCs were the agents of a brand-new EU joint intelligence agency 20 minutes in the future). I might not use the Palladium system (see the Rifts thread), but if I convert, I'll totally recycle everything from my old game, inclusing mystic martial arts powers and cybernetic implants.

SF and modern genres have been underrepresented at my gaming table -- hell, my players consider Shadowrun an acceptable cyberpunk game :eek: -- and I'm firmly intent on breaking the fantasy/horror duopoly.

Not that there's anything wrong with our current fantasy and horror games.

I am running a modern Mafia game using our Crime Network system. It is set in Boston, and the basic storyline involves the players rising through the ranks. Complications include encroaching Irish gangs, and a potential war with a neighboring family. I've been having a lot of fun with newspaper handouts and radio broadcasts. One of the NPCs in the game is a talk radio guy, who uses his program to attack the mob. Sometimes when they get involved in a big scene, it ends up being the subject of the next radio show.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;380349I am running a modern Mafia game using our Crime Network system. It is set in Boston, and the basic storyline involves the players rising through the ranks. Complications include encroaching Irish gangs, and a potential war with a neighboring family. I've been having a lot of fun with newspaper handouts and radio broadcasts. One of the NPCs in the game is a talk radio guy, who uses his program to attack the mob. Sometimes when they get involved in a big scene, it ends up being the subject of the next radio show.

"You're on the air, Guido from Revere!"
"I'd like to prevaricate that there ain't none-such thing as the Mafia. It's all wicked insultin' Hollywood hyperbola, designated t' slanduh hahd-workin' Italians livin' in the Boston Metronomical Area"
"And you are suggesting... what? That this show is inventing these occurances?"
"Nah, just suggestin' that the last talk radio guy what kept discussin' about suchlike ended up wicked drunk and takin' a walk off Fan Piah in Febyu.. Feb.. the wintah! What a retahd!"
"Thanks, Guido! And now a message from Giant Glass: We all know what a pain it is to drive around with bullet holes in your windshield, especially when it's snowing. Last time it happened to me, I took a tip from an anonymous source and went to Giant Glass - call 'em at 1-800-54-GIANT. They were fast, professional, and had a lot of practice. Now my car looks like new again except for the rust spots!"

-clash

I have run, as I've mentioned in the past, a Twilight:2000 game.  For the most part it was pretty stock.  Characters motivated primarily by survival in a struggle to either establish themselves or find a way home.  Nothing out of the ordinary.

I'd like to give The Morrow Project a try but it's an even more depressing scenario.

Back in the day I ran an long running campaign set in the 1980s (mobile/cell phones the size of bricks with limited coverage, disco, coke, casual sex, women with big hair and short dresses, sholder pads, etc.)

The PCs were members of a secret investigation unit of the European Space Agency who were battling a stealthy alien menace. Essentially it was the X Files with no supernatural content - just aliens - set in Paris but ranging over Europe. Oh, and the ESA was penetrated by alien dupes and colaborators. The campaign ended when they finally captured a Grey and got the ESA member governments to fund an alien fighting agency bigger than 5 people in one room.

It was one of my players' favourite campaigns. Now I'm tinkering with the idea of trying to merge what they liked about this 1980s game with what they love about our current 1930s international cops pulp game - 'Blue Star'.

The result will be a game set "10 minutes into the future" with a fledgling Europol investigation unit, based in Amsterdam, tackling international criminal gangs operating in the EU. I'm thinking of adapting Atomic Highway of all things - for a fast moving, gritty but action-movie feel.

And my wife plans to play the daughter of her character from the 1980s game!

I'm currently running a Ghostbusters game in GURPS (it's our "teach ourselves gurps" game) that's a sequel/reboot of a Ghostbusters game I ran for a year in d20 modern. We're having a good time of it. The rookie of the team recently earned his nametag a few sessions ago when he successfully wrangled a ghost that was giving everyone trouble (last time I give anything a 13 dodge for a while) into a trap while standing on a fishing boat at the RV and outdoor sport show.

I'm slowly putting together a game that combines elements from the group's favorite sci-fi series. I'm planning on running that one next year.