How about an OSR game in the vein of Toy Story, Small Soldiers, The Indian in the Cupboard, the Army Men video games, and the like?

Essentially I am envisioning a game where the player characters are sapient toy soldiers and other similar figures and figurines.

An RPG where you are the miniature, basically. I think an OSR style system could work well for that.

Tarzan or the Wheel of Time.

Quote from: Dumarest;966784Vis-a-vis the rights to Buck Rogers: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/judge-rejects-film-producers-bid-877683

Yeah, I have no interest in trying to use other people's intellectual property and trademarks. The original story Armageddon 2419 A.D. had pretty much nothing in common with the setting in XXVc aside from the main character. There were nine novels if I recall for the RPG, and only three of them had Buck Rogers in them. You could remove Buck Rogers entirely from the XXVc setting and it would work fine.

My main interests in the setting are these. For one, it's set in the Solar System and there is no faster than light travel. Enough time has passed for Venus and Mars to be terraformed, and there are stations, colonies, and settlements as far out as Oberon (orbiting Uranus) so far as I remember. Mercury has moving cities to stay in on the dark side for obvious reasons. Jupiter and Saturn have inhabited moons. The asteroid belt is full of stations and mining operations. Travel never takes more than a day or two in the inner solar system, but it could take you three to six months to get to Pluto. Technology is plausable. Yes they have rockets which landed upright, which was probably laughable until SpaceX started doing it. That really isn't a horrible strategy if you have the fuel capacity to pull it off. Weaponry is creative. You have lasers, but they also come in infrared and ultraviolet varieties as well as masers (coherent microwaves). Rocket rifles exist which fire shell sided missiles, which means self powered with no recoil as opposed to bullets. Some have guidance systems so you can do things like shoot around corners. The technology that appeared in XXVc was an extension of technology from the 20th century, or at least concepts. So philosophically, I'd probably do the same and build on existing technologies and science.

Quote from: Voros;966599Buck Rogers sounds like a great idea. Are the rights still held by the estate? The original comics have to be very old at this point.

As I mentioned, I don't want to use someone else's IP and Trademarks. Dumarest's link shows that the property is not in the Public Domain and I never thought it was in the first place. I could attempt to emulate the genre, thought the question remains as to how true I want to be to it. I like modern technology and the possibly future paths it could take, but I also like retro futuristic complete with ray guns and grav belts. I really do enjoy Pre Golden Age Science Fiction, so building something around retro futuristic technolgy is certainly a possibility.

Quote from: Cave Bear;966591Alternate timeline where the space race never ended, and the USA has had lunar colonies since the nineties.

Okay... That is something I never thought of. I do have a setting that could be compatible with, the aforementioned setting (Post Cyberpunk Urban Fantasy) which could be adapted to such an alternate history. But then again, this is a kind of idea which might benefit from a clean slate. The thing is, I kind of have an idea of how to include powers, though I imagine that could be worked in via Soviet/CIA Cold War experiments in ESP. I really really like the idea of established Lunar colonies.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;966804One of the things that always kept me away from sci-fi RPGing was the lack of an easy motivation for the players. In fantasy, you've got the accumulation of treasure combined with occasional "save the day" type adventures. The PCs as heroes works best here because of the lack of communication and transportation in a medieval setting means that often times the PCs are the only ones around that can help (Star Trek often uses this scheme due to their slow as molasses warp drive). Accumulation of money does works in a sci-fi setting but it is a bit overdone at this point.

That being said, I'd like to see a planetary scifi adventure that has survival as the core theme. Not just as a hook, but central to campaign. The PCs crash land (or get transported) to the Swamps of Venus and have to fight to survive; hunting for food, distilling clean water, recharging their ray guns, etc. Also, rather than a small group of PCs, have an entire crew (20-30 people) that need to be protected. [the nebulous "crew" is also the source of replacement PCs in case of death]. So, sort of a combination between planetary romance, post-apoc survival, with Battlestar Galactica-like leadership decisions. All the while, fighting dinosaurs & primitive sub-humans, rescuing the occasional Venusian, and matching wits with the evil, silver-skinned, Queen of Venus.

I have played a lot of a game called Planet Explorers. It inspired me to write up an outline for such a setting. The premise I came up with subject to revision is that a Slower Than Light Colony ship likely with sleeper capsules went on a mission to a certain world. Something went wrong and travel was cut short in an unexpected system. The ship sustained damage from passing through some sort of belt, which left it vulnerable to cosmic rays and other radioactive hazards forcing the colonists to evacuate. In some cases, automated systems and robots would load sleep capsule onto Life Boats and Life Pods. Some of the colonists may have been awakened for various reasons, allowing them to flee on their own. I imagine no more than a dozen life boats, and maybe quite a few more life pods being scattered along the planet. The players would be the survivors of one of them and they would have goals such as finding other survivors and technology. Some crash sites may be in good shape, others may have salvageable wreckage and others might be a crater. The one thing that I may find daunting about such a setting is that I may have to deal with things such as resource management and crafting. Though I am sure it could be simplified by say making little bounded boxed texts blocks which outline stuff that could be salvaged and/or crafted.

Planetary Romance is a nice genre. I do like the idea of having other survivors especially in the case of PC death. Also, if I did Venus it would be all about the dinosaurs and jungles.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;966804Either that or something based on Power Rangers/Super Sentai. The structure of Super Sentai always seemed to me to match the general flow of an RPG campaign: a group of random (but above average) people join together to fight the bad guy while constantly accumulating new fantastic powers.

Okay, as I mentioned I was thinking of something Gatchaman, which kind of ties in with the setting I was telling Doc Sammy about. Basically people with extraordinary abilities augmented by technology. You have a super-team which answers to some superior be it alien or government body or what have you. One theme I like is them running some sort of secret war, attempting to keep the existence of otherworldly threats secret, though likely ending up in failure when a battle hits a major city.

Quote from: Ulairi;966832Tarzan

Ooh Tarzan!

Quote from: 3rik;967032Ooh Tarzan!

I knew I forgot to reply to something...

Quote from: Ulairi;966832Tarzan or the Wheel of Time.

I have not read either. I know there was a d20 Wheel of Time game though. If I was to pick either to read, Tarzan would certainly be the one I choose.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;966831How about an OSR game in the vein of Toy Story, Small Soldiers, The Indian in the Cupboard, the Army Men video games, and the like?

Essentially I am envisioning a game where the player characters are sapient toy soldiers and other similar figures and figurines.

An RPG where you are the miniature, basically. I think an OSR style system could work well for that.

I'll probably do anime before I do this. Not that I have anything against the genre but I don't know if I can do it justice... Well maybe the small soldiers one could be fun.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I tried to be deliberately vague about the settings I have considered because I like to see other people's ideas. I doubt that everyone is interested in everything that I am interested in, and vice versa. I figure though that some of what people are interested in are things that I am interested in, and in some cases my built in perception filter can make me oblivious to that. So this thread is helping, so feel free to throw things out. I mean, I don't even like hockey and I have notes for a hockey OSR which I did out of principle because I am Canadian. There was likely rum and Blood Bowl involved.

I have one idea which is kind of an alternate take on a Solar System bound game like XXVc. In this case, it is about a billion years in the future give and take because odds are they're not using the Gregorian Calendar. The Sun has expanded to a red giant aptly referred to as Big Red, and has expanded out past the former orbit of Mars. This is not a problem because the Ancients who have yet to be given a name did a little redecorating. Borrowing from Clarke, Jupiter is now a star tentatively known as Jova. Yes I know Jupiter does not have enough mass to maintain a nuclear reaction even if it were somehow ignited. However, the to be named Ancients solved this by siphoning mass from the Sun. 13 or so of the largest planetary/lunar bodies are in orbit around as five planetary bodies (Earth, Venus, Mars, Ganymede and Titan) each with one or two moons. Now I realize that five bodies in the same orbit don't really obey the laws of how Lagrange Points work I'm not sure if I care, for all we know the Ancients took advantage of 12 dimensional spacetime and bent one of the dimensions until the pentagonal orbit worked. Or... I could calculate the mass of Jova, the temperature and color and then figure out where the habitable zone is and do some funky Kepler related math and see if I can pound out five orbits. Or I could have two or three orbits with multiple bodies. I'll probably end up doing it because I'm one of those weird people who does that kind of thing for fun.

The system is something like Earth with Mercury and Pluto as moons, Venus with Callisto and Triton as moons, Mars with Io and Titania as moons, Ganymede with Luna as a moon, and Titan with Europa as a moon. Pretty much all the bodies have been terraformed for millions of years. The setting would certainly be humanocentric but with a billion years there is going to be speciation with or without the aid of genetic manipulation and/or editing. It is certainly possible that there are aliens, though I would like to make my aliens alien. My inspirations here would range from things like the Dancers at the End of Time, Arzach, old 80s cartoons like Blackstar, Thundarr the Barbarian and even Masters of the Universe. The advantage is that I could use it as a kind of end of time kitchen sink and toss everything in. The major drawback is, science is magic. Odds are pretty good that miracle technology exists, and really you would have science fantasy. That is not bad in itself, but I think part of the charm of trying to do science fiction is to try and not just reskin D&D as something sciency, but to go back to the roots of science fiction and build a setting from there.

Doc Sammy - the idea of doing something anime is still possible. I think if I were to do this, including a setting with some sort of sentai like team, then it would have to be on a modern or near future Earth. One setting I have is called Hachi:Blue which is loosely based on a webcomic I did in 2011. I may have mentioned that it was inspired by Haruhi Suzumiya (I have read all the light novels) and the Toaruverse (Index and Railgun), with some possible inpirations by shows like Level E and Ghost in the Shell. The premise involved a world where Angels and Demons use Earth to recruit agents to act as hosts so they can fight their war. Both Angels and Demons are the same alien species, which are dark matter lifeforms comprised of nonbaryonic particles which can only access our world through hosts. The Angels and Demons are factions. Angels influence humanity through religion, indirectly through established religions and directly through the Instrumentality of Immortality, a fictional religion which gathers followers through the promise of being able to bring back the dead, which they deliver. What the Angels don't mention is that they mark religious adherents and those who pass on with repairable damage to their physical forms are inhabited by Angels, which is how they are brought back. In contrast, the so-called Demon faction makes pacts with living beings, and inhabits their bodies in a form of symbiosis. It gets weird because normally the Demon would dominate the form but in some cases the host is very strong willed and may turn the tables.

I describe this setting as Post Cyberpunk Urban Fantasy. Post Cyberpunk inasmuch as yes there are giant mega-corporations, but that doesn't mean they are evil. Yes there are seedy elements to society, but really no more than there is now. Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed would be considered Post Cyberpunk in this sense. Urban Fantasy in that I had weird supernatural stuff. For instance, Youkai, animal spirits or something similar which are kind of like Hengeyokai from D&D, where "henge" is the ability to change shape. In my world they come from Angels and Demons attempting to use animals as hosts, creating a new species. There is also a connection to Faerie folk which would take a long time to explain. In any case, there is also western precedent for the existence of Youkai. Reynard der Fuchs is an example of a western Kitsune.

The city itself is called Mirai, which kind of means Near Future and I went so far as to call it the "Near Future City". For an OSR I have steered away from it mostly because it is too busy and unfocused. Fine if I am running a game, but maybe not so great if I am writing one. I won't even get into the AI named Maitreya who has taken control of Mirai, and takes care of her human citizens because she sees them as children incapable of making their own decisions, and who has single handedly decided to eliminate Angels and Demons because they pose a threat to her people. I also won't mention that she uses time travel technology to manipulate the development of humans in order to cultivate Espers to use in her secret war, not to mention her alliance with the Satori/Otori family who train people to be the sentai team known as Toaru Kagaku Ninja-Tai Otoriman (A Certain Scientific Ninja Team: Otoriman). As you can see, way too much happening and if I were to make it in to an OSR bound setting I would have to streamline it somehow.