What is your gaming white whale?

[humble minion]

Talking of Scottish legends that could apply to your game, Sawney Bean is a late C16th legend, but if he and Agnes Douglas (allegedly a witch) had 12+ children, a descendant could easily figure in the game, as could the site of the sea cave near Girvan.

Yeah, old Sawney was definitely going to make an appearance. I figured in a D&D game he could very easily be a ghoul and still be around in the early 19th century, but i also kinda like the idea of him having a network of mortal descendants scattered across the landscape as well. Some wealthy Scottish laird might have a touch of Bean in the ancestry for instance. I've always wanted to run a scene where the PCs conclude some delicate bit of negotiation with a touchy warrior lord and are invited to a feast in celebration as guests of honour, only to be served with a glistening, perfectly glazed roast human on a spit as the table centrepiece, as the entire dining hall falls ominously silent and looks at them eagerly...

This whole idea actually sprung from a post VRGtR desire to rewrite the old Ravenloft Core into something more culturally coherent, with all the generally British-coded domains together. So Paridon as the capital city, Nosos as the rapidly growing industrial wastelands, Mordent as the small town countryside, Lamordia as the expression of the new rationality, etc etc. Forlorn a relic of an old kingdom, on an island in a loch somewhere.

I've got a whole revision of Soth, where he's a kinda semi-Lancelot figure whose affair with not-Guinevere led to him failing to join not-Arthur on the battlefield against not-Mordred, leading to the death of the Arthur and the fall of not-Camelot. Soth had been the greatest knight of the Round Table and his chivalry and piety had impressed an ancient red dragon so much it converted and agreed to serve as his steed, but his fall left the beast embittered and now it stews in eternal contempt for the flaws of man and its own gullibility.

Elves are ex-fey, fey who were so jaded or bored with meaningless forever in the fey realm that they willing gave up eternity for the chance to feel, touch, suffer, love, and die in the mortal world. Goblins are the low-level menial fey who escaped service to the fey lords and managed to stay in the material realm long enough to go native - they NEVER want to go back.

The great war on the Continent, which continually sucks redcoated regiments in and spits them out, began as a long-running dynastic squabble between the long-interbred aasimar royal houses of different nations (the line of succession is HARD to work out when things like resurrection spells, reincarnation, long-term petrification, vampirism, etc etc etc come into play), but French Revolution brought a Napoleon-figure into play who pretty much wants to wipe them all clean and start a new order. England is torn between its loathing of monarchicides and distrust of the louche, decadent aasimar aristocrat refugees who are increasingly fixtures at local garden parties.

 

[Tonguez]

(By the by, my favourite Scottish history anecdote is about the mad preacher who roamed the highlands in the late 1700s, prophesying the coming of a dread beast he called the Great Sheep, which would bring ruin and destruction. Of course, it turned out that this prophecy was entirely accurate, as new breeds of sheep were bred that yielded large amounts of high-quality wool on a scant diet, and landowners all over Scotland enthusiastically expelled their crofter tenants in favour of grazing this new and lucrative strain of stock. Massive displacement, poverty and misery ensued, and the Scottish highlands were largely depopulated and a society destroyed as a result. Beware the sheep!)

the character I played in a ‘Solomon Kane’ inspired game was of Scots origin and had begun life as the son of crofters forced out of Galloway as they had supported the Galloway levellers during the lowland clearances.
Poor and landless they go south, and eventually resettled in Gotheburg, Empire of Sweden, where Tomas meets his great love Catherine before becoming a mercenary (and discovering he was son of the Erl-King)

It was alt history somewhere in the 18th-Century where the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth dominates England and had moved into Ireland before the Seige of Clonmel where a witch coven summons the Faerie Queen Melancthe, causing the lost land of Lyonnes to rise up from the sea opening portals to the Faerie Realm. Fey and giants return to claim Lyonnes, some expanding into Ireland and others heading to other parts of the world. Old Shuck once more terrorizes the Fens and goblins infest the sewers of Manchester. The Puritans ally with the Scottish Witchfinders (paladins) and push south to claim Doggerland and the Low Countries to form a broader Protestant alliance against the fae and the Inquisitors who dominate Southern Europe after the Grand Inquisitor became Pope.

as to OP - its not Regency per se but have you looked at the Solomon Kane rpg?

 

[Mannahnin]

• Ars Magica
• The OAR version of Dark Tower, under either 5E or OSR rulesets

These two for me, though Caverns of Thracia and The Lost City are higher priorities for me to run or play in. I've played two sessions of CoT and desperately want to play more.

A full long-running game of Ars Magica with the passage of years, Covenant management and politics and so forth is one of the real white whales for me. One of my longtime wargaming and D&D buddies apparently had a gaming club in his college years that ran a big open-table Ars Magica campaign like this and he raves about it periodically.

I’m already lucky to be running one of my life dreams… the Directors Cut Enemy Within campaign for @GuyBoy et al.

So I have five left…

I’d love to play in or DM a truly brilliant Underdark Campaign that brought to life all those dreams I had reading the Menzoberranzan boxed set as a 16 year old a quarter century ago. I’m yet to find the campaign that can fulfil that… I missed the boat on night below. Throne of Night ended a failed Kickstarter and Rise of the Drow doesn’t quite do it for me. Out of the Abyss comes probably the closest. Maybe I’ll one day combine all of them.

I’d love to play in or DM a truly amazing Birthright Game… or something conveying it. With all the atmosphere of Cerillia and the politiking and mass combat and castles and monsters etc etc. One day.

Finally I’d love to play in or DM an amazing Dark Sun game, but as of yet the publisher adventures just don’t cut it. I’ve toyed with adaptions many times but I think I need a bit more inspiration from WotC to get me over the line. Definitely a white whale here… more myth than anything else.

These are all excellent choices. Birthright and Enemy Within, in particular, but the other two definitely are things I longed for as a young gamer.

• Having a "generational" campaign that lasts several decades (in-game!) and sees the characters age substantially. I'm planning to implement really long downtime durations from Level 10 onwards (things like you need to spend 1 year in downtime before levelling up) to make this happen organically.

I'll second the recommendation of Pendragon for this; I'm playing in my first campaign of it now and we're about a year and a half of real time and a few decades in game time into it.

I'd also love to play in various (original) World of Darkness games, but I think the zeitgeist of the 1990's would be impossible to recapture and I wouldn't enjoy them the same way I did back in the 1990's.

WoD in the 1990s was big for me and a sizable circle of my gaming friends. During the pandemic one of them tried this, running a Vampire game set in mid-90s Boston, where we were running around going to goth clubs and attending Vampire LARPS at the time. It was good fun for a while, though he sadly lost focus and inspiration while juggling other commitments and it foundered.

Oooh, another white whale of mine: Having a long-running Planescape and/or Mage: The Ascension campaign where all of the players take all the philosophical themes very seriously. As in, I want the game to be essentially a long discussion about metaphysics. But I'm the nerdiest one in my gaming circle (I'm the one doing a PhD in philosophy after all), and I just don't think I'll find enough players to get such a group.

That's so ambitious. Love the concept.

For Pendragon, you could always play The Great Pendragon Campaign! I’ve ordered from DTRPG print-on-demand Rulebook for KAP 5.2e and The GPC. I’m considering trying it solo if I can’t get other players. I’ve wanted to play this for years

This is the one I've been playing for a year and a half online with some guys I met on an OSR Discord server. It's amazing. We're only up into The Anarchy, as we've been going a bit slow, but I don't think any of us are sad about the prospect of playing this for a couple of years more.

To play, a long-running epic VtM game (since we're talking White Wolf...) that follows PCs through different periods in history as they age and change. Something like Giovanni Chronicles.

To run: in an Arabian-themed setting which isn't quite Al-Qadim, a modernised combination of Al-Qadim's Ruined Kingdoms and Assassin Mountain campaigns.

My brother ran that V:tM game for a few friends. It went for years of real-time and took them from Dark Ages to modern day. Absolutely epic game that I've heard tales of for years and have a bit of envy about.

Re: your second one there, I dig the Persian (with a dash of Turkish) setting from The Nightmares Underneath, which is an OSR (or maybe NuSR) game I haven't gotten to play yet but am champing at the bit to.

-Old School Essentials+Dolmenwood

Really excited for this one.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'd also love to play in various (original) World of Darkness games, but I think the zeitgeist of the 1990's would be impossible to recapture and I wouldn't enjoy them the same way I did back in the 1990's.

It was lightning in a bottle, that's for sure. Looking back at the OWoD books, I have an enormous amount of nostalgia for them. But they are admittedly very much products of their time. Maybe a campaign could go back and get close, if everyone bought into the premise.* Put on "Lucretia, My Reflection," a pair of sunglasses whether indoors or at night,** and have at it?

*Arguably many retroclones are about trying to recapture a time and place long lost, not just the mechanics of an RPG.

**I for one ran around wearing sunglasses all the time in the 90s. I tried that once recently for a Halloween costume, and was mystified at how younger me managed to see anything at all.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This.

I'd also love to play in various (original) World of Darkness games, but I think the zeitgeist of the 1990's would be impossible to recapture and I wouldn't enjoy them the same way I did back in the 1990's.

I think you could still do a V:tM or Mage campaign still, but not too sure about the others.

 

[humble minion]

I think you could still do a V:tM or Mage campaign still, but not too sure about the others

Hunter might also work, but speaking for myself I kinda prefer the NWoD take on Hunter (and Changeling, for that matter) anyway. Some of the historical games might also work.

Of course, the less said about Kindred of the East the better. Did NOT age well.

 

[Crusadius]

Put on "Lucretia, My Reflection," a pair of sunglasses whether indoors or at night,** and have at it?

Cough! Hides phone playlist displaying both of these song titles