So, Firefly is basically the post-civil war era in space.  "O brother where art thou" is a re-telling of the Odyssey in the great depression.  There was a certain popular anime series that was a retelling of MacBeth with mecha.

What kind of stuff like this would be cool to do as RPG settings?

The US Civil war is a kind of obvious choice; a lot of my Traveller campaign was based on the Civil War as inspiration.
I could see one doing a mecha game setting version of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet (what is it about shakespeare that it might translate very well into mecha stories?).

I could see the basic storyline of Henry V working as inspiration for many a D&D fantasy world.
Or a Sci-fi version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

What else could be done or have you done?

RPGpundit

I've been working on basically playing ancient Greek myth with cavemen.

!i!

George Martin's Song of Fire and Ice started as a fantasy version of the War of the Roses, even the names were obviously "inspired" (instead of Lancaster/York you got Lannister/Stark).

The problem with lots of pre-fabricated fantasy worlds is that they tend to focus on humans vs non-humans too much. If they have to human nations, one is often very "evil" by definition.

This makes it very hard to integrate historic happenstances into the plot. Back in the days, half of Europe's nobility was related to each other, which caused a lot of wars and strife. Replacing one party with orcs or demons is simplifying the facts too much, reducing it to the usual black-and-white border war. In addition, the usual polytheistic believes of most game worlds don't play well with stuff like the Crusades or the Reformation.

I've always wanted to run a mecha campaign based on the King Arthur stories.

IIRC, there was a sci-fi Arthur supplement for the Amazing Engine series, called...

 "Once and Future King", duh.

One of my favorite anime series is Reign: The Conqueror, which is at it's core the story of Alexander the Great, but tossed into a bizarre ass sci-fi/fantasy lens.  There's not really enough setting there though, to actually make a game of I think, and there's the masive problem of the main character rather defining the entire course of the world, to the extent of actually destroying it in the end.  

Ran was a retelling of King Lear set in feudal Japan, and that was a really good movie.

I have a copy of Once and Future King for Amazing Engine. Far future setting with the Knights of the Round Table jousting on mechanical flying horses. It's strange.

Agree about Ran. One of the best stagings of King Lear ever produced.

Quote from: J ArcaneRan was a retelling of King Lear set in feudal Japan, and that was a really good movie.

Kurosawa did Shakespeare a couple of times, in fact.  Throne of Blood was a very good telling of Macbeth. The Bad Sleep Well was a loose version of Hamlet set in post-WWII Japan.

!i!

The list of what Shadowrun HASN'T ripped off, parodied, borrowed, etc. over it's 17 years of metaplot is likely shorter than what it has.

Ive done Seven Samurai as a game set-up for Legends of the Samurai d20, Henry IV for D&D.

I also contend that there's WAY more than a little WWII inspiration in LOTR. Of course Tolkien always denied it, and his worshippers take him at his word, but I still see it in there.

Chuck