Herland too, staple of feminist theories classes everywhere
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I just remembered the video’s OSP made for the Pope Fights, and that seems as a great backdrop for a historic game, either being just stuck in it, being a mercenary band (or commander of one for a miniatures type of game) involved in these or for a top level Diplomacy style game of Intrigue (or a Fiasco Hack?) this seems like an interesting backdrop.
For those who don’t know them, watch them here:
4/12/2021: Edited to add the newly released pope fights video 
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One kinda game I want to run at some point is a game that lasts over generations. For every third session or so, the players advance to a new generation and make a character of their previous character offspring or related family. That and add a layer of domain play, and you have something like tabletop Crusader Kings.
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Undercover angels infiltrating Hell for some purpose. Obviously being angels they can’t lie, so if someone asks you directly if you’re an undercover angel you have to say yes.
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I love Papal history and how messy it is
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I need to play test my current Crystal Frontier adventures for the next book:
The Tower of Flints - a crumbling lighthouse and shrine to the Imperial Saint of Doomed Sailors. Now a point of conflict and tense cooperation between pirate/smugglers and depraved owl worshipers. Faction based hijnx.
Cold Manse - the ruins of a mansion amidst dead orchards, burnt down 40 years ago by the locals in an orgy of violent revolution but allegedly still filled with the treasures of the horrific family that lorded over them for centuries before. Definitely very haunted.
Both are too low level for my current home game - and anyway I want to run them for folks unfamiliar with the Classic dungeon crawl play style - even if that means running them in OSE. I should maybe do this next week and recruit from here?
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The NSR discord might get you more “hits” than here, but I don’t know that for sure!
The thing I want to run next is a slow-paced, wandering game about a long-term migration, which would be played as a PbP game where IRL time and game time are synced. The setting I’m thinking is very low tech, maybe near-Neolithic, but in the far distant future. Since IRL/game time would be synced seasons would pass as they do in the ‘real’ world, and you could play out a multi-year migration. I think it would take advantage of the slow-moving, but very long term nature of PbP games. It also syncs with my love for highly observational, very quiet games. (posted about this on NSR a little while back)
Time would progress regardless of player posting. Each day, the ref (me), would post something about what was around and the players could engage with it or continue out. The expectation would be that players would post about once a day, but time would keep moving forward regardless, and the expectation would that the migration would continue on unless the players specifically decide to stop.
My hobby life has been largely consumed with finishing up my first proper game/toybox - but hoping to turn my attention to getting this idea off the ground very soon…
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I recently read a roleplaying guide to the 19th century Philippines, so I want to use that. Dunno what game to use though. I’ll think of it more concretely later on, but right now I’m stuck with editing my setting and plans to playtest Mangayaw.
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I love/hate pbp, and love seeing games being made with it’s strenghts and weaknesses in mind!
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I’m reading through the Harry Potter books at the moment (currently on Goblet of Fire) and was struck by the idea of a “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” type game set in Hogwards.
Perhaps you are students constantly missing all the action and having your own kind of things going on, or perhaps you’re house elves, just doing your thing, working in the kitchens etc.
Have you looked at Pariah? It ticks a lot of those boxes, and could, I believe, be adapted pretty easily to tick the others as well.
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@SymbolicCity yes! totally agree - love Pariah, and definitely will draw from it. I’m also hoping to use some material from those excellent hex generators that Alone in the Labyrinth has been posting
@TheBeardedBelgian I hear you re:love/hate for PbP. It’s become my main form of playing rpgs these days - but it’s definitely it own kind of thing. And that’s exactly it, I was thinking about how to take advantage of the very long time frames involved, while integrating/working around the generally slow pace of posting and giving me, as the ref, an excuse to post everyday and continuing having my lonely ref fun (lol), even during a quiet spell on the player front. Plus, I just love the idea of a quiet observational game played along with the changing seasons.
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Oh, another one of my more wacky ideas I want to try sometimes is Fantasy British Bake-Off.
The fun thing is that Fate has already made a sort of ruleset for a similar concept: Uranium Chef!
Basically my take, while it doesn’t need to be baking, but could be cooking in any style, is what if a cooking show was hosted in a magical or sci-fi world. Especially if you turn up the Anime! toggle like in Food Wars! (though I personally like to keep it less sexually charged).
Troika!'s “Blancmange and Thistle” adventure, but as Hotel Staff.
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You might want to take a look at the Legacy rpg from UFO Press and it’s many offshoots if you haven’t already…
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I posted this wishlist of games to another forum.
New To Me Games
- Twilight Throne
- To Tread the Spiral Path
- Stealing the Throne
- This Night on the Rooftop (or another BoB game)
- Babes in the Woods
- Fedora Noir
- External Containment Bureau
- Scene Thieves
- Scum and Villainy
"Hacks" (many of these are full-fledged game ideas)
- Hearts of Wulin in 19th-century Russia
- New iteration of Checkpoint Midnight (my PbtA game of supernatural espionage in Cold War Vienna)
- Labyrinth Lake (Stranger Things meets The Vast of Night, Carved from Brindlewood)
- Vow of the Knight-Aspirants (squires questing through a dark fairy-tale wood, PbtA)
- Walking Shadow Touring Company (Shakespearean actors hunt monsters, PbtA)
Setting Drifts for Magical Multiverse Tour
Magical Multiverse Tour is my mega-series of using different indie systems to run games set on the various planes of Magic: The Gathering
- Something cyberpunk for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
- Agon for Theros
- Hogwarts RPG for Strixhaven
- Apocalypse World Amonkhet
- Cartel for Streets of New Capenna
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I might just do that!
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I’ve been thinking of reskinning/stocking Blancmage & Thistle and run it as a christmas game, with festive character backgrounds. The tricky part is keeping the irreverence of troika when dealing with a story that I myself find important. The main idea is that the characters arrive and take the last room as done in the original game but then after them a couple comes in of which the woman is highly pregnant and there’s no more room in the hotel. Also, this time there’s no feast of the chiliarch, but he does want all his people counted (and hey, since it’s the time of the year, there is a christmas party going on on the roof.)
Some backgrounds I’ve been thinking about: Pregnant virgins, Royal Counters (they are very good at counting, they have many fingers), shepherds looking for a newborn prince, stargazers looking for a newborn prince, the catalan pooping guy, A jolly saint who is also very serious about theology and can throw a puch, something like that.
I think it would be funny reskinning he encounters, having multiple christmass traditions represented. The scandinavian christmass lads, krampus, a stingy accountant, spirits of christmas past, present and future, etc.
I had a new idea pop into my head on the commute home from work. What is Keep on the Borderlands, but all the strangeness is in the Castellan’s head, like some kind of Don Quichote de La Mancha thing! Creatures in the cave? Just dirty miners with strange equipment that makes weird, inhuman noises. Stuff like that.
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