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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 9700421" data-attributes="member: 6686357">I don't know if this counts, but there's a lot of rpg settings/premises I liked that got canceled and I've never been able to find suitable replacements from any settings that are still supported/still have fandoms. These seem to fall on genre lines, I think.Universal Scifi rpgs. Not counting GURPS, the only universal scifi rpg I've ever found was Alternity, published by TSR/WotC from 1998 to 2000. (It was seemingly a spiritual successor to the previous Amazing Engine game and some of the material was later adapted to d20 Modern/d20 Future, but I'm not going to go into those separately.) Other scifi games restrict themselves to specific settings and their various idiosyncrasies, like Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and Traveller, but Alternity tried to be setting agnostic and account for other scifi tropes not accounted for by those games. It got sample settings in Star*Drive and Dark•Matter, as well as an edition of Gamma World. To this day, I still haven't found anything that scratches that itch. I did find rules online from Pyramid magazine for <a href="https://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1543" target="_blank">converting Star*Drive to GURPS Traveller</a>, but I'm more interested in where the writers were taking the setting and the fandom discussions. Since it was canceled by WotC decades ago, the fandom is barely existent now.Paranormal, occult and supernatural investigations that are not Cthulhu/cosmic horror/Lovecraftian/whatever. Back in the day there were a number of games in this vein like Chill, Dark•Matter, Tabloid!, Bureau 13, Conspiracy X, Chronicles of Darkness, Hunter: The Vigil, Nephilim, etc. Nowadays the only options are Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, or Laundry Files, none of which I'm interested in. I'm completely burnt out on the Cthulhu genre because it's so oversaturated and homogenous. I want to go back to the days of Roswell grays, Satanic cults, chupacabras, templars, etc. Similarly, I'm also tired of monolithic investigator organizations, especially if they're your generic oversaturated shadowy quasi-government MIBs or generic oversaturated government taskforces, and I would like more variety in terms of what organizations the PCs can be employed by.Psionic espionage and other investigations. I remember back in the day that there were quite a few rpg settings that were either dedicated to psionic espionage or included it as a key component of their settings. Necroscope is probably the biggest I can remember, but I also remember that WotC had an "Agents of Psi" setting in their d20 Modern game and SpyCraft used psionics in their setting too. TSR's Star*Drive setting included psionic espionage as a detail of its setting: every military had a dedicated psi corps (which presumably included espionage) and psychic detectives were routinely employed in forensics. Interstellar scifi settings that aren't generic oversaturated space opera. All the scifi games that I could find rely on <a href="https://spriggans-den.com/2022/07/18/the-default-space-opera-setting/" target="_blank">the same set of generic oversaturated tropes</a> dating back to about the mid-20th century, or are otherwise pastiches of some famous generic oversaturated scifi IP like Alien/Outland, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, etc. I'm completely burnt out on all of these due to them being generic, oversaturated and mismanaged, as attested to by all the mediocre offerings the corpos owning them have given in the decades since their creative peaks. The only scifi ttrpg I am not sick of is TSR's Star*Drive, because 1) it's a kitchen sink where you can play pretty close equivalents to characters from all those other settings combined, and 2) it was canceled after just a dozen books so it never outstayed its welcome like everything else did.Urban fantasy that isn't WoD. During the 90s there was an explosion of urban fantasy games and they didn't feel like clones of each other. We had Nightlife, Nightbane, WitchCraft, Everlasting, Fireborn, Changeling: The Lost, Nephilim (particularly the French editions that were never translated to English), etc. All the games I ever liked or even thought vaguely interesting were canceled and nobody else has made anything similar since. I find this strange because urban fantasy is oversaturated in prose fiction. There should be dozens of urban fantasy games but there aren't. I bought Night Shift because it promised setting-agnostic rules and such (it is extremely difficult to find setting-agnostic games that aren't GURPS), but I found it underwhelming.Universal genre rpgs that aren't GURPS. Some of my favorite games are All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Night's Black Agents. These are universal games without fixed settings, but unlike GURPS they're made to emulate specific genres. AFMBE emulates the zombie apocalypse genre for the most part, with various settings exploring different scenarios like alien zombies, nazi zombies, [historical period] zombies, cyborg zombies used as theme park employees, etc. NBA emulates the conspiracy thriller genre with a vampire twist, with various settings exploring different kinds of vampiric antagonists like genetically engineered viruses, aliens, and the lineage of Dracula. I really like this format because I've grown frustrated with the limitations of games that only support single settings, as this inevitably restricts the creativity of groups and ends up making the fandoms similarly feel stagnant and creatively dead to me. As a kid just getting into rpgs I was cyberbullied by cultists for not playing the "right" way and even roped into cultish behavior myself before I realized that fiction is fiction and canon is crap, so it's something that I really want to avoid encountering again. Otherwise, the lack of common ground for many genres has resulted in them being really fractured. I bought about ten different espionage games in the past year and they all felt like they could be settings for a single universal espionage rpg.I've decided to just write my own stuff because I can't rely on others to do it for me, but wow is it time consuming and emotionally exhausting.</blockquote>

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