The road yet taken; old timers: what is your White Whale setting?

[RangerWickett]

I recall my first RPG book was the Naturalist's Guide to Talislanta, with the five-headed kaliya dragon on the front. I think I was 9 at the time. I ended up running a 'game' for one of my friends in a summer daycare, where he had a folder and kept notes of all the monsters he killed and magic items he got. We didn't have dice, and I didn't have the rulebook, and it was really just a game of pretend with me using the numbers and flavor to provide some baseline.

I have run Mystery at the Magical Fair (from, I think, the Cyclopedia Talislanta II) maybe 7 times for different friends as an introduction to RPGs or as a filler when we didn't have all the players for a normal session of whatever campaign we're playing, though only once with the actual Talislanta rules.

 

[R_J_K75]

Talislanta. It is my favorite game and setting, and I've played it a couple times, but never a full campaign.

Never heard of the setting before so I checked online and see that all the books are available for free as pdfs.

Talislanta Library – Talislanta

talislanta.com

 

[Jd Smith1]

Never heard of the setting before so I checked online and see that all the books are available for free as pdfs.

Talislanta Library – Talislanta

talislanta.com

Well worth grabbing just for the art.

 

[MNblockhead]

I've been noodling away at a homebrew campaign involving a world where arcane magic is banned and for the most part lost from the world. The entire party would be wizards searching out lost lore. I wanted to make getting each new spell a quest. Make finding components a challenge. It is more difficult to find the right group of players for this.

 

[Tonguez]

I would love to follow the fortunes of the (dis)Honourable East India Company through the 17th and 18th centuries with chracters immersed in the exotic glories of Mughal India, naval battles and piracy between British and Portugese, colonial manoeuvring between British, French and Dutch forces, the mercantire domination across India, Japan, the Chinese Opium Trade and even the Atlantic Slave Trade.

A fascinating period

 

[RangerWickett]

Well worth grabbing just for the art.

 

[pogre]

I always thought a campaign of Duty & Honour would be fun.

However, a Richard Sharpe - style game would be tough to sell to my current group. For the same reasons I probably will never get to run FVLMINATA: Armed with Lightning.

 

[John Dallman]

I've always wanted to play a campaign in a military-focused WW2 setting. Over the years I've studied Behind Enemy Lines, Gear Krieg, Weird War, and Acthung Cthulhu, but never gotten the right combination of campaign ideas to be able to pull it off.

I'm playing in one that has worked pretty well for the last 14 years. There's an introduction to it in issue 2 of The Path of Cunning. It is GURPS 4e, but the campaign ideas would work in Acthung Cthulhu.

So, long-term GMs: what is the setting you've always wanted to run a campaign in, but for which you've never got the right inspiration/group/motivation/system/etc?

Glorantha, playing as Lunars. I nearly got to run it earlier this year, but some of the group got cold feet.

 

[MNblockhead]

I would love to follow the fortunes of the (dis)Honourable East India Company through the 17th and 18th centuries with chracters immersed in the exotic glories of Mughal India, naval battles and piracy between British and Portugese, colonial manoeuvring between British, French and Dutch forces, the mercantire domination across India, Japan, the Chinese Opium Trade and even the Atlantic Slave Trade.

A fascinating period

If you ever run that game by VTT and need a player I'll love to play in that game. Sounds awesome!

 

[Pawndream]

For me it's Star Wars.

I only played WEG's Star Wars RPG, a couple of times, when it first came out, but thought the game was really cool. The setting is fantastic, and like many others, I am a big fan of the Star Wars movies (all of them).

But I don't read extended universe novels, etc. and have always been concerned about my ability to run a Star Wars game, where it's quite likely the other players will know the universe better than me. Then you run into issues associated with running games based on well-known intellectual properties (e.g., Middle Earth), and it's just too much.

So Star Wars remains my Moby Dick, and likely will always be so.