"On The Other Claw...."

I was perusing some text files I wrote up at the end of last year, sketching out the initial outlines for a game setting, and got inspired again. I wanna run a game in this setting -- preferably a round-robin type game with rotating GMs, because, frankly, I'd have a blast playing in it myself.

This would be a Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition game set in an alternate DC Universe -- one where the major characters are introduced in the years they debuted in our world, and then age normally from there, interacting, marrying, having families and legacies.

It would steal heavily from "Elseworlds", especially Generations, The Golden Age, and The New Frontier.

I've put together tentative timelines for the Superman and Batman legacies, and I have ideas for the Marvel Family that I haven't typed up yet, but after that, I just... petered out. There are major legacies I need to timeline, and hten I need to go back, figure out how they intertwine, and revise accordingly.

So, I need a GEEKTANK! A thinktank of geeks to brainstorm ideas based on this premise -- largely just for the fun of it.

I may set up an LJ community for it -- if I could find some kind of Q&D Wiki, that would be ideal, since we could all brainstorm on timelines.

I know I've got fanfic writers and comics fans in my flist who could come up with good stuff here. Who wants in?

It has come to my attention that many D&D players spend a great deal of time, energy and effort complaining about core concepts in the system: Alignment, Class, Level, the Magic System, incompatibility between optional rules sets, and even things that exist at the setting level rather than the mechanical level, such as the perponderance of monsters that make no damned sense. Rather than just discarding or modifying those aspects of the game to tailor it more to their preferences, they instead apply torturous rationalizations to make sense of inherently arbitrary, irrational rules.

If the objections and rationalizations were isolated, one could justify simply "gaming around them"; however, at some point or another, the same people have brought every core concept of the game into question -- and yet, far too often, the questioners resist both the idea of actively changing the rules (which the OGL/d20 revolution has made more feasible than ever) or finding another system less heavily burdened with the ill-conceived baggage of '70s Miniatures Wargaming (which the OGL/d20 revolution has not yet managed to make impossible).

Granted, this has always been The Nature of the Beast. however, since the introduction of Third Edition and the "d20 Revolution", it often seems as though the players of that system simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of other game systems in any but the most offhand and academic manner ("Yeah, but nobody plays that").

Many D&D players also have a tendency to approach any discussion of game design in terms of whether or not it would work in D&D. Frequently, one person will bring up some aspect of mythology or folklore -- folk magics, for example, or the role of consecrated ritual tools in magickal practice -- and note that few existing game systems incorporate these ideas in their mechanics. Far too often, a D&D player will dismiss the question by saying something that boils down to "There's really no way to explain that in D&D terms."

This tendency to shoehorn every circumstance into an arbitrary and inappropriate frame of reference while at the same time discounting the validity of other frames of reference strikes me as being unwholesomely... Republican.

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EDIT: I do apologize for this popping up again in everyone's Friends list. Semagic did something weird and reposted it, over-writing the time stamp on the original.

If you're looking for a Government Organization to use as the basis for a modern-day Monster-Hunting/Weird Science/Exotic Phenomena RPG, have your PCs work for The Center For Disease Control. They've cropped up as the "go-to guys" in several recent movies of that nature, and it makes sense: weird pheonmena that threaten large segments of the population, requiring specialists to control and contain; a well-established infrastructure for such tasks; and, for the ever-popular "secret war against the supernatural" genre, a convenient cover story that will keep most people as far from an "infected" area as possible. After all, vampirism, zombie outbreaks, or alien parasites can be treated as an infectious disease in many ways. A sewer full of flesh-eating mutant cockroaches is a disease-vector problem.

A post that the_gneech made early this morning brought this to mind, and I thought I'd expand upon and share the thoughts in my earlier comment.

( Some thoughts on the applied use of clichés and tropes: )

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Today's Project: ( B.J. Snark's Best Battleboard Ever!* )

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A year or so ago, jordangreywolf and I pondered the necromantic implications of LifeGems: industrial diamonds made from the cremated remains of a human being as an "eternal memorial".

This is one of the most disturbing, morbid, freaky, and strangely cool concepts I have ever encountered. When I first stumbled across this company, my brain immediately came up with half a dozen Modern Fantasy/Modern Horror/High Fantasy/Sci Fi plot lines.

All things considered, you could visit the web site of a company that makes tombstones, and it would be *morbid*. There's just no avoiding it. But that's MERELY morbid. There's no Steal Your Soul resonance in there. No thoughts of Really Disturbing Ways to make Psychic Power Crystals. No thoughts of, gee, if they can make over a hundred LifeGems from one person, but you can only afford to buy one or two, how do you know that the rest aren't being channeled into some Infernal Device?

Since I often refer to good "adventure seeds" as "gems", this is especially appropriate. Consider this a Jewelry Store version of the Night Gallery, where frozen fragments of nightmare take on a tangible form...

( Submitted for Your Approval... )

Feel free to contribute your own Creepy Ideas.

Just days after my reminisence about Gamma World, someone sends me this:

SWORD & SORCERY STUDIOS TO PUBLISH "GAMMA WORLD®" CAMPAIGN SETTING FOR D20 MODERN

After spending a few minutes out front locking eyes with one of the local felines, I recalled a Classic Geek Moment:

From Gamma World, c. 1983 or so...

The party included a mutant panther played by "Doc", and Hood-Spreading-To-Catch-The-Dawn, a mutant cobra played by Your Obedient Serpent. At some point, the party found themselves in disagreement, leaving Doc and Hood glaring at each other, and our respective players RPing it by staring each other down at the table.

Doc: "Not many people can stare down a cat."

Moi: "Snakes... don't... have... eyelids."

I miss Brother Hood. Fun character.