Random ideas you never saw through

[John Q. Mayhem]

A Star Wars world with the force and all, but before space travel. Either pseudo-medieval, with Jedi as wizards and swordsmen, or Wild West.

Pokemon, except people use Pokemon the way real people would-as the weapons of mass destruction they are! Post-apocalyptic madness; the heroes are some of the few good-guy Pokemon masters. I'm thinking The Magnificent Seven with Pokemon instead of six-guns. It'd be brutal and vicious.

Medieval Pokemon. They're just being discovered, so Charizards are dragons hoarding gold, Alakazams might be wise old hermits, Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan wandering warriors, and so on. A few "wizards" have learned to hypnotize and train them, but for the most part they're just monsters.

Arthur and his knights return to save England from a zombie apocalypse. Then, all the other sleeping king legends wake up, sending the world into a new age of magic and the memories of technology start to fade.

A rock band wandering across a post-apocalyptic steampunk world. Steam-powered electric guitars, steel-toed boots, axes that really are.

 

[Lord Ipplepop]

I started working on a system whereby mages could cast spells of a level higher than they were normally allowed to (nothing too huge, max of 2-3 levels higher) by having them pay constitution points. The higher the spell, the more constitution taken from them, with the resulting Raistlin-type effects.
I couldn't come up with one that worked without using spell points, so I figured I would let it go for then.

 

[RangerWickett]

- a time-travel campaign where the PCs have some control over what time they go to, that doesn't immediately become broken beyond repair

What I was going to do involved the metaphysics of my setting. The planes are all planets that orbit in the same 'system' as the material plane, and there are other systems out there that represent other settings. In my setting, the plane of Space was a gas giant like Saturn, and the plane of Time was the ring around it. When the ring gets broken, it fractures the timeline so that different eras are discreet.

You can travel anywhere in each era's timeline, but if you create too many paradoxes in that timeline, the whole era shatters and disintegrates. However, this doesn't affect any other timelines. And the PCs exist sort of outside all timelines, and are sort of temporally girded so they cannot affect their present selves by changing their past selves.

As an example, we'll say the 19th century and the 20th century are two separate eras, and they're not connected. If you travel to the 19th century and fight in the Civil War, then take John Wilkes Booth back to before the war to kill Lincoln so the south doesn't secede, you create a major paradox, and the timeline starts to fracture. You can try to fix it by traveling again, and say that along the way you kill an earlier version of yourself. That murder will affect the era, but not you. Either way,the timeline of the 20th century won't be affected. Even if you completely destroy the 19th century, the 20th century era is separate, and it 'remembers' the 19th century the way it's supposed to be.

I know, it's weird.

I never came up with a good idea as to what the PCs would be doing during their travels. I also never figured out how to limit how often the PCs can travel. And I realize that time travel ain't nearly as cool if you're not familiar with the era you're going to. It's hard enough to get players familiar with one setting, let alone a new one every time they jump.

Ah well. I suppose I'll just have to stick to my 'WW2-era Nazi destroyer vs. the Pirates of the Caribbean' idea.

 

[amethal]

What are some ideas for your campaign, your character, or your rules you came up with but never managed to really flesh out or use?

What do you mean, never? I'm sure I'll get round to them someday.

Just a few of my many projects :-

Updating my 2nd edition adventure series, in which all the PCs were Gnomes, to 3rd edition. (Not much point updating it to 4th edition, clearly )

Finishing my "Four Realms" True20 setting - kind of celtic warriors face off against the invasion of the body snatchers.

Finishing my "Rokugan in Space" True20 setting

Updating and running the three 2.5 edition "Sea Devils" adventures

Re-writing my 3rd edition homebrew so its OGL compliant and posting it somewhere for all the world to laugh at it

Completing my 3rd edition directors cut (i.e. only including the bits I like - if its not in the setting material you can't use it, but I still can for bad guys) points of light, after the apocalypse setting which is definitely not going to be OGL compliant but hopefully by that time WotC will be so far advanced on 6th edition they won't care.

Reviewing The Indomitable Fire Forest and Shelter from the Storm.

Spoiler

I liked them

Finding a group willing to play Star Wars Saga edition and running through the free campaign WotC are bringing out in installments on their website.

Running Shackled City Adventure Path, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, Rise of the Rune Lords, Red Hand of Doom and Necropolis.

Writing my great fantasy novel. Chances are that will never happen, because the problem is the hero is a dark elf (actually a half dark elf) who happens to be good. The thing is, I came up with that idea around 1984 and I heard a rumour that someone else may have published something superficially similar in the meantime.

 

[Nikroecyst]

One of my past ideas revolved around Alice: Throught the Looking Glass, and What She Found There. Using some of the original works like the pig and pepper and the wasp and the wig.

Another more detailed campaign I had set up was an inspiration from Dante's Inferno, the Divine Comedy. I was running a Vampire: The Masquerade Campaign, in which the end of the campaign one of the major heroes was killed, his soul stolen by the major villian. Years later I planned a DnD game in which the heroes (who were now being threatened by the very same villian) had heard the legend of these Vampire heroes form another world and found out that the hero who had his soul stolen could help them defeat the very same villian that had plagued both groups. So they set forth traveling into hell, through the various levels, each one by one, searching for the lost hero. They would encounter antagonists such as Cerebrus, The River Styx, Charon, ect.

 

[MadMaxim]

Running Shackled City Adventure Path, though none of my players are too keen on playing in Greyhawk and I don't feel like re-tooling all the gods and placing the whole thing somewhere in the Realms. It just seems to be made for being played in Greyhawk, but hopefully I'll "convert" them some day since we have no intention of switching to 4E

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Arthur and his knights return to save England from a zombie apocalypse. Then, all the other sleeping king legends wake up, sending the world into a new age of magic and the memories of technology start to fade.

Weird I've been bouncing around a similar idea for a movie with some friends. Basically there was an agreement that the supernatural forces would leave the world alone except for the most trivial ones after the last cataclysm. But a certain powerful individual into the occult got the idea to breach the barriers and use the forces of the abyss for conquest. Only they've played him for a dupe and come pouring forth in an apocalyptic flood that causes all the legends and myths to return and combat them before they destroy the world.

I've used scenes from it as one-shots on occasion, PC identities noted first.
Example: Police and Firefighters in NYC battling the legions of Hell with the Statue of Liberty come alive to fight giant cthonic entities in the streets as ghostly WW1 doughboys join the fray against D&D demons and devils.
Example: Royal Marines retaking London as part of an army involving Arthur and his knights, bronze age charioteers, Wellingtons redcoats, Saxons, Normans, Robinhood's Band, and an animated Sherwood Forest led by suddenly re-empowered druids.
Example: German commandos defending the Rhine against hordes of demons alongside revenants of WW2 soldiers of both sides, Frederick the Great's army as spectres, and the risen spirits of Rome's 3 missing legions.
Example: Celestial Rocs(intelligent) combating Abyssal Dragons in the sky over DC along with fighter pilots as the fallen in Arlington rise to fight and retake Washington.

 

[amethal]

Running Shackled City Adventure Path, though none of my players are too keen on playing in Greyhawk and I don't feel like re-tooling all the gods and placing the whole thing somewhere in the Realms. It just seems to be made for being played in Greyhawk, but hopefully I'll "convert" them some day since we have no intention of switching to 4E

If you check out Jolly Doc's Shackled City story hour, he ran it in the Realms.

You could steal all his conversions (or just enjoy a really good story hour!)

 

[I'm A Banana]

- a time-travel campaign where the PCs have some control over what time they go to, that doesn't immediately become broken beyond repair

I'm a fan of Chrono Trigger's "End of Time" concept.

The idea is that you travel between eras through portals. But there is one era that exists outside of everything, and this is the era that those portals exist in: "The End of Time." This is a safehouse and a base of sorts that you can choose eras to visit that you have opened up by going through the portals.

Now, the players have a place outside of time to go. They can interact with the timelines all they want, but they are officially 'outside of time.' They don't exist in any real timeline, and the events that they force to transpire has no effect on them. They're sort of dead to the world, though they interact with it normally enough.

 

[sckeener]

I have one campaign world that I tinker with off and on...

It is a world at the edge of the multiverse. In fact it is out of phase with the rest of the multiverse and tends to collect things that come through the meta-physical toilet (black holes/rips in time&space/etc.) The world has collected cast offs from the center of the multiverse. Bits of planes crash as meteorites yearly. The landscape has pockets of planes...

in the midsts of this I have a roman-ish empire trying to keep order in such a chaotic landscape.

When Ptolus came out I was (am) tempted to toss in into my world as is....I keep going back and forth if I want anyone able to leave this plane....Ptolus also works because I thought this plane would make a good prison...admittedly I planned on a Black Company-ish burial mounds - prisons.

There were several planes that periodically would come into phase with the world and allow people to travel to them....however when the planes start to unaligned, travelers from my refuse plane would start to disintegrate unless they could get back. I had a graveyard plane and a faerie plane. (I'm interested to see what WotC does with their Shadowfell and faerie planes since they seem to be what I already had written about...)

Since the place is an out of phase concept I planed on using lots of lovecraft....