PC's From Earth!

[Jürgen Hubert]

Yrth, the setting of GURPS Fantasy, is a fantasy world with plenty of links to Earth - all humans who live there are either from Earth, or are descendants of those who came from Earth.

You see, a long time ago, a group of elves wanted to get rid of all the orcs on their world. They cast a mighty spell, and got their "orc-bane"... sort of. The so-called "Banestorm" was created when something went terribly wrong during the casting - a storm that trancends the barriers between the dimensions and snatches people from other worlds - including Earth.

That was 1050 AD. Now it is 1992 AD (the last edition of GURPS Fantasy is ten years old), and the human kingdoms are still stuck at a medieval technology base. Though now and then people from our world still come here - I think Jim Morrison is mentioned somewhere...

 

[2WS-Steve]

As Tsadkiel pointed out, I'm kinda fond of the PC's from Earth idea

I've run these sorts of campaigns a lot; personally I like it when the PC's get to go back to modern day Earth occasionally and kick some butt. Of course they're also pretty nervous because on Earth way too many people have grenades and machineguns.

If you like the idea of PC's from Earth one technique that can make for a fun game is to run a few scenarios in d20 Modern, Spycraft, or Wierd Wars then have them transfer over in some magic freak accident. This helps you build up the Earth background a bit more so the players feel like they have a history when they end up in the fantasy world. Depending on how you like your physics you might even let them keep their guns; they'll really value their ammunition.

If you ever read the old Warlord comic published by DC that had a pretty similar feel.

 

[Savage Wombat]

My current group of players actually are playing characters from the real world.

See, they're all gamers and former college buddies, who showed up at KukulCON in Mexico City. Then they all died - they don't know why yet, but they'll get a hint next week - and woke up in the Aztec Underworld. Now they're questing to outwith the sinister forces of Huitzilopochtli, and make it to Mictlan in the hopes of regaining their lives.

The original PCs include:

A lawyer with a passion for paintball
A Republican party crony collecting illegal campaign funds
A scholar of Meso-American history
An accountant who commits burglaries as a hobby
A chemical engineer
A survivalist and part-time drug dealer
A doctor of medicine
A lumberjack and truck-driver

I had a lot of fun making up their starting equipment lists - such as the character whose entire list consisted of "silk boxer shorts with stripes, and flip-flops" and the player who wanted to know exactly what was in her purse, so we created a "random purse generation system" by going up to a complete stranger in the club, and asking her to list her purse contents for us. Worked great - but we don't know why the doctor had a rock-climbing clip on her key chain.

 

[SteelDraco]

Heh. Thanks, SW. I learned things about the other PCs. ((I'm the one playing the survivalist drug-dealer in the above post. Fortunately, my starting equipment list was fairly useful - I actually got pants, for one thing, unlike several other members of the group. And a weapon, in fact - I'm the only person who started with a weapon.))

I've done this for one campaign, though it wasn't D&D. It was a GURPS supers game. I had all of the players write themselves up as characters, then described that they were all meeting up at my house for the start of the new game. Only I never showed up. After some amusing arguing, they found a note that told them, essentially, that they were all mutants and could expect the government to hunt them. That was when they noticed the white van sitting across the street.

It was quite amusing to run a fight between my friends and some government agents, using my house as the scene. Though the campaign ended up not working out, I attribute that to my inexperience with supers games. We had quite bit of fun for about a month and a half.

 

[Aryoche]

Just thought I'd chime in here....

There's a series of novels called Guardians of the Flame, by Joel Rosenberg (sp?) that covers this exact scenario. A group of college kids playing a FRPG wind up transported to their game world by their GM, who in turn is a great and powerful wizard who is stuck in -our- world... it's an entertaining read.

 

[Humanophile]

I actually prefer it the other way around. One of the campaigns I've always wanted to run is an "It's Earth, milennia after we bung things up past all recognition, and things settle into a D&D'ish worldview". I know it's been done to death before, but I like the idea, and now all I need are players and projection maps.

My problem with "earthlings sent to another world" is that it either gets overly cheesy, or else someone invariably looks up how to make gunpowder and attempts to leverage that into a "how to make modern firearms" benefit. (Interestingly enough, no player has yet brought back advances in agriculture, medicine, construction, sanitation, engineering, or anything of that sort. Only ways to make things go boom.)

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I actually prefer it the other way around. One of the campaigns I've always wanted to run is an "It's Earth, milennia after we bung things up past all recognition, and things settle into a D&D'ish worldview". I know it's been done to death before, but I like the idea, and now all I need are players and projection maps.

Actually, you don't need to go that far into the future check out the Reign of Fire setting if you have Pyramid access!

Short description: There is (or was) a Cabal, a group of wizards who held a near-monopoly on magic on modern-day Earth. They kept it secret to maintain that monopoly.

One of the Grand Masters of this Cabal had a problem: He was even less than half the man he used to me. You see, his body was destroyed in an "accident", and after that he only survived as a magically preserved head. Naturally, this is a state of affairs he does not like, and he uses his considerable resources (financial and otherwise) to search for a way to get a new body.

Finally, his researchers find a ritual that might just do the trick. And it only needs several thousands of gallons of genuine dragon's blood.

Unfortunately, the last dragon on Earth died in 1531.

But this Grand Master is a resourceful guy - he decides to simply create new dragons through a combination of powerful magic and modern technology and genetic engineering. The first dragon hatches out of a Tiamat-Class fusion reactor in Manila in 2031. Many others follow around the world. The researchers believe them to be none-too-bright and easily controlled.

They are wrong. Dead wrong.

First, the dragons unleashed horrible plagues that decimated most of humanity. After that, they unleashed hordes of werecreatures, zombies, vampires, wraiths, elementals, liches, spirits, trolls, and uncounted lesser dragons un an unsuspecting humanity until they had conquered the Earth and killed most human beings. The Final War was over, and the dragons had won.

The 18 surviving Great Dragon divided the world into an equal number of zones. Each pursues its own agenda, which range from ecological restoration to space exploration, and these agendas are increasingly coming into conflict with each other. Meanwhile, the shell-shocked survivors are trying to come to terms with the new realities of the world and organize a resistance...

This could easily be run with D&D - just throw in modern equipment from Spycraft or d20 Modern, and you are set!

(To read the full article, you need Pyramid access - but at only $15 a year for weekly articles and reviews, this is a steal! The Suppressed Transmission series alone is worth the price of admission... and when you do subscribe, remember to give your referral bonus to "jhubert". )

 

[SteelDraco]

This sounds like the GURPS setting Reign of Steel. From the name, I'm guessing that that worldbook (which is, IMO, among the best GURPS worldbooks) was used extensively in the development of Reign of Fire. Story is very similar to what Jurgen just described, save that it's about AIs instead of dragons.

Jurgen, is that the case?

(Mmm... Reign of Steel. I soo want to run that some time. I had a bunch of fun ideas about doing an Arthurian game, where the Zone London AI discovered Arthur's cave in England, and that's what it was 'thinking' about.)

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

This sounds like the GURPS setting Reign of Steel. From the name, I'm guessing that that worldbook (which is, IMO, among the best GURPS worldbooks) was used extensively in the development of Reign of Fire. Story is very similar to what Jurgen just described, save that it's about AIs instead of dragons.

Jurgen, is that the case?

Yup. In fact, Reign of Fire was presented as a crossover between GURPS Reign of Steel and GURPS Cabal, a game revolving around a vast magical conspiracy which IMO is Bloody Brilliant (as well as it should be - after all, Ken "Suppressed Transmission" Hite wrote it). It uses the basic geography, poltics, and timeline from Reign of Steel, and the magical weirdness from Cabal - but the article is pretty much "complete" and could actually be run without either of these two books...

(Mmm... Reign of Steel. I soo want to run that some time. I had a bunch of fun ideas about doing an Arthurian game, where the Zone London AI discovered Arthur's cave in England, and that's what it was 'thinking' about.)

As much as I liked Reign of Steel, I like Reign of Fire even more. After all, in Reign of Steel your opponents will be mostly subunit robots. In Reign of Fire, on the otherhand, your opponents could be anything you can steal from other fantasy settings... Free-willed enemies are cooler enemies, in my book. Plus, more magic in a setting is always a good thing in my view...

 

[SteelDraco]

Continuing the ever-interesting THREAD HIJACK!

I would actually use some supernatural stuff were I to do a Reign of Steel game. However, it would mostly be the domain of the humans. The PCs would play the part of reincarnated versions of Arthur's knights, trying to figure out why they're suddenly getting flashes of ancient Britain. A few would likely develop supernatural abilities. From the side of the AIs, Brisbane would have some supernatural abilities, as the 'mad scientist' AI, and London would be experimenting with stuff, as it discovered magic via Arthur's cave.

This Reign of Fire thing does sound interesting, though. Sort of a Rifts-esque take on the same idea.