Not In Kansas Anymore, Revisited.

[athelind]

In a private post, a friend of mine mentioned an old post in Pyat's LiveJournal about the classic fantasy trope of someone from a familiar world getting transported to a new and exotic realm, and how seldom paper-and-pencil RPGs took advantage of this, despite the advantages it has from a GM's standpoint.

Here's a variation of the theme that didn't come up in the original thread:

Nothing says the PCs all have to come from the same place or time.

This can be a boon for groups with a wide range of preferred genres. Has Clem always wanted to play a Gunslinger, but never been able to convince a group to play an Old West game? Drop him into your Lost World with the Renaissance Man, the Pulp Era Brawler, the Cold War Fighter Ace, and the Special Effects Guy With A Gift For Improvised Tech. Have aliens abduct them. Send them to the time of the dinosaurs, or to some far-flung future wasteland.

Or, heck, to the carefully-crafted Non-Standard Fantasy World that your D&D players never appreciated before.

It's also a boon for the rare player who likes to sit down and devise elaborate backgrounds for his PCs, and play Someone (or Something) Exotic. The NIKA scenario gives them an opportunity to come up with all manner of baroque customs, traditions, familial rank and relations, and what have you, without having to force the GM to work all that backstory into the game proper.

(Never rely on an entire group to do that, however; Snark's Fourth Law was originally formulated after a my short-lived GURPS Space game folded. I came up with a setting with a wide variety of human colony worlds, and said, "Hey, you don't just get to write up your characters; you get to create their entire culture." Only two players out of half a dozen made the effort.)

Comments

[hedgegoth.livejournal.com]

Dump 'em in Cynosure.
Make sure to leave the cranky looking old mercenary alone.

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

Actually, I like to do this. It's the people I play with who have issues.

"You can't play one of those as a Glitterboy Pilot!"

"Why not?"

"Because! He's from a low-tech fantasy setting!"

"Yeah, and? This is fuckin' Rifts."

"You can't!"

And so on.

I wanted to do this in Exalted once as well, but the GM wouldn't let me. I totally don't get this, since stuff like divine guiding the course of the world is the bread and butter of this setting. Who says that the Unconquered Sun wouldn't yank someone from outside the world to fix it? Nothing. If he can instill the essence of a demi-god into someone, I am fairly certain he can yoink a modern person into his strange world.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

Both Torg and Rifts had this idea. Torg dealt with power problems by having the various 'realms' (Fantasy, Cyberpunk, etc) have magic or tech work differently. Rifts dealt with the issue by, uh, having the most powerful characters utterly dominate the proceedings. I mean, you could have a hippie mystic or something but he'd be dead in the first combat that occurred.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Hence the example characters I provided.

Torg and Rifts were mildly amusing, in much the same way that watching someone slipping on a banana peel can be mildly amusing -- you're glad it's not happening to YOU. My weatherbeaten drifeter in a duster was pretty much useless in Rifts. I think they bollixed -- in different ways -- at trying to make the Everything Setting. I think that settings expressly built around the idea that different game genres have "crossed over" are trying to cram too much together. The only times I've seen the idea of the Nexus City really work was in GRIMJACK, the comic that Hedgegoth mentions above.

(Honestly, I don't know why they tried so hard. There's a well-established genre which encompasses everything: the superhero comic.)

Note that I'm not talking about How To Make A Published Setting; this is all about the home-brewed campaign. That's something you can fine-tune and juggle to your heart's content.

Oy, Rifts....

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that the source book writers for Rifts seemed to be in competition with each other, and felt the need to out do each other with every new book. I can see it now:

Designer 1: Glitter Boys and dragons not manly enough, well, heck, I'll make a whole kingdom of Vampires!

Designer 2: Bah! I'll resurrect Atlantis, make it an interdimensional trade center with super science and super magic all together!

Designer 3: Pish Posh! King Arthur is back! With knights! And an evil Merlin the match for your interdimensional trade master!

Designer 4: Who cares about pithy King Arthur! I've got the Four Horsement of the Apocolypse roaming Africa!

Designer Whocares: I got it! Let's make the players Demigods!

And so on.... :P

How many geopolitical superpowers can one world hold? Where do they find all the nuclear material for all the power armor and giant robots? Why hasn't Earth gone into a third or fourth Nuclear Winter with all the nuclear ordinance that gets tossed around?

I wanted to like Rifts, but my suspension of disbelief check kept failing....

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I've had two points that might fall in under this. First off was a one night gaming session that I got in years ago, the basic premise was that a small orb fell on the table in front of us (the actually players) and that it transported us to another less advanced world where we only had what we really had with us (one of the players had a prop pistol with him asked if he could use it as a real pistol, but no it was only a prop pistol), all and all it was a fun and interesting session.

The other was the possibility of using a combination of D&D d20 and d20 modern to kludge together a campaign based on Eric Flint's 1632 book series.

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

Sorry about that, my LJ connection reset and kept my username from showing.

[paka.livejournal.com]

'Course the milder alternative to that is, keep a pretty vague worldview ("You can be from anywhere on Oerth" rather than "If you want to be a wood elf in Middle-Earth you are by definion _________"); talk to the players; and work out as much of how you can still get them playing exactly what they want.

The biggest concern I figure is; having characters be at a similar tech level (and magic or ability scores counts as tech for this discussion). After that any GM preference winds up being thematic (for instance, you want everyone in your WtA group to be Garou rather than being this travelling menagerie of were-aardwolves and were-koalas with a single werewolf).