Several months ago I started working on a campaign setting, Africa Incognita, for use with d20 Modern/Past - it was inspired by Source of the Nile, the old Discovery/Avalon Hill boardgame. The characters would be explorers probing the heart of the mythic Dark Continent of H. Rider Haggard, C.J. Cutliffe Hyne, Joseph Conrad, P.C. Wren, and Rudyard Kipling. Frustrated with the Modern magic systems and impatient to get the game started, I scrapped writing it up as d20 Modern/Past and instead prepared to run the campaign using Mutants and Masterminds instead. Our tabletop group plans on playing our first Africa Incognita adventure sometime in the next month or so, when we reach a good point to take a break from our regular Modern game.
I still wanted to put something together for d20 Past, however, so I decided to try a more historical game, without the fantasy trappings, and started working on what I'm tentatively calling The Great Game, inspired by the clash of empires, Russian and British, in Central Asia in the 19th century. So far I've devoted most of my time studying the historical "Great Game" (the Russians refered to it as the "Tournament of Shadows") as well as re-reading Kipling's Kim and Talbot Mundy's King - of the Khyber Rifles and Caves of Terror, novels set in and around the period.
As far as the game system goes, I honestly don't expect d20 Past to provide me with everything I need to play the game I want, so I'm finishing the fifteen or so AdCs that I started working on originally for Africa Incognita for use with The Great Game. As of right now I plan to use material from Sidewinder: Recoiled as well - a couple of AdCs and some of the skills and feats will translate very well to this campaign-setting. As a result the system likely will be a blend of d20 Modern/Past, S:R, and a batch of homebrew.
I'm not familiar with d20 Adventure, so I couldn't tell you if that would be useful or not. I imagine Grim Tales would work well with this genre, too.
My goal is to have the first Great Game adventure ready by March - I picture a Russian spy sneaking into the palace of the Khan of Khiva, a British royal engineer exploring the snowy Pamirs, Baluchi tribesmen preying on caravans in the Bolan Pass, Turcoman slavers selling their human wares in the bazaar of Bokhara, Indian sepoys holding a lonely outpost on the Afghan frontier, Persian merchants gathered in the caravanserai of Tashkent...
