Invader by Judas Priest<\/a> stuck in my head for the past week. The imagery at the beginning makes me want to drop a UFO in a cornfield in front of the PCs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
That’s a big red flag in my book.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t like mixing sci-fi and fantasy.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t even like mixing sci-fact in my fantasy.\u00c2\u00a0 It takes the mystery out of things and hurts the genre.<\/p>\n
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But since we’re just brainstorming here, let’s go with it and see what happens.<\/p>\n
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Ok.\u00c2\u00a0 UFO.\u00c2\u00a0 Cornfield.\u00c2\u00a0 PCs.\u00c2\u00a0 Description here will matter a lot.\u00c2\u00a0 Words like flying saucer won’t make a ton of sense in this context.\u00c2\u00a0 The players will know what they mean and read into it before the players do.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d describe a streak of fire, the smell of ozone, and a crash landing.\u00c2\u00a0 Or something.\u00c2\u00a0 I really want this to be subtle, but a UFO crash landing is pretty much the opposite.<\/p>\n
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I’m guessing the players will attack whatever is in the UFO.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what they do.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m going to punsih that behavior.\u00c2\u00a0 This UFO is a messenger with a warning.\u00c2\u00a0 The warning is something along the lines of “they’re coming,” implying a much bigger threat.<\/p>\n
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Okay, sidenote time.\u00c2\u00a0 Players signing up for a D&D game probably want a fantasy dungeon crawler.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe courtly intrigue.\u00c2\u00a0 Starting them out with sci-fi is a bait and switch.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not really sure how to get around that.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think it’s fair to lie about the premise of the game.\u00c2\u00a0 I might send out the previous paragraph as an intro email.\u00c2\u00a0 I might run it as a one shot with premade characters and then let the players make their real characters.\u00c2\u00a0 Not sure.\u00c2\u00a0 Also not relevant until I get some real, live players.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What’s the bigger threat?\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s go big.\u00c2\u00a0 Invading force from another solar system.\u00c2\u00a0 So big that when they show up the first order of business is to eat the sun.<\/p>\n
Whoa.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Okay maybe that was too big.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s go with it anyway.\u00c2\u00a0 Constraints are a great source of creativity and imposing something this big on the world is a huge constraint.<\/p>\n
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I like the image of the sun disappearing in the middle of the day.\u00c2\u00a0 But it lacks suspense.\u00c2\u00a0 I want some tension.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, let’s have this happen right in the middle of the night when one of the PCs is on watch.\u00c2\u00a0 When the sun goes out, so does its reflection on the moon.\u00c2\u00a0 The moon going dark seems ominous, but not quite so catostrophic to me.\u00c2\u00a0 I imagine the player who is on guard will wake the others, but there won’t be a whole hell of a lot they can do.\u00c2\u00a0 I figure they’ll wait till day.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re going to be waiting a while…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So the sun’s gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Invasion is imminent.\u00c2\u00a0 But I don’t see any reason why the invaders would show up right away.\u00c2\u00a0 For now I’m more worried about what’s happening on a global scale.<\/p>\n
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1. Long term this seems like the sort of game where the end game is to unite all the races agaisnt a common enemy.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s screw with that.\u00c2\u00a0 The orc population of the world is going to do the opposite.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ll have had some prophecy about when the moon goes dark, it’s their time to rule the world.\u00c2\u00a0 The orcish tribes will unite against the other humanoids.\u00c2\u00a0 Inconvenient.<\/p>\n
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2. The undead must be addressed.\u00c2\u00a0 With no sun, vampires have no weakness.\u00c2\u00a0 I see them getting cocky and trying to run amok.\u00c2\u00a0 I also see them going a bit nutty without the moon.\u00c2\u00a0 Vampires are always tied to the moon in some spiritual sense.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think they’d admit it, but they wouldn’t be functioning properly.<\/p>\n
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3. On that note, Lycanthropes might still function.\u00c2\u00a0 The moon is still present, it just doesn’t show up.\u00c2\u00a0 I figure that means it they could wolf it up every 29 days or so.\u00c2\u00a0 Or you could also say a full dose of moonlight is what makes them shift, so lycanthropy is subdued.\u00c2\u00a0 That sounds lovely at first, but it might also mean that the lycanthropes want things to stay the way they are and work against anyone trying to return the sun.<\/p>\n
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I’m comfortable working with either option.\u00c2\u00a0 I might do some research to see if there’s any definitive mythology.\u00c2\u00a0 Or I might leave it up in the air and go with whatever best serves the plot.<\/p>\n
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4. Crop shortages.\u00c2\u00a0 This might take a while to come up.\u00c2\u00a0 Even though the players can summon their own food, I figure most of the world lives off farming.\u00c2\u00a0 This’ll lead to widespread panic (which is also likely exacerbated by untimely seasonal affectation disorder) and a screwy economy.\u00c2\u00a0 (I was considering making the UFO mithral or adamantine or something cool.\u00c2\u00a0 If the economy is ruined, this wealth isn’t as much of a problem.)\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t really know where this is going long term.\u00c2\u00a0 Short term it seems like a good distraction and a cause for people do go against each other when that’s the exact opposite of what they should do.<\/p>\n
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5. Magic.\u00c2\u00a0 Sun gods will suffer.\u00c2\u00a0 If a PC wants to be a cleric of Pelor, they’re gonna have a bad time.\u00c2\u00a0 I might kill off the god, I might just remove that aspect from the god’s portfolio.\u00c2\u00a0 I might also target moon gods too.<\/p>\n
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That should be enough global shenanigans for now.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s go back to the aliens.<\/p>\n
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Sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic.\u00c2\u00a0 This means the aliens should be capable of things the players don’t understand.\u00c2\u00a0 But I think the opposite applies as well in that the players should have access to magic that the aliens don’t understand.\u00c2\u00a0 In a world that has magic, I think it’s reasonable that the aliens would have magic too.\u00c2\u00a0 But I don’t think that’s as interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 I like the asymmetry of magic vs tech better than PC magic vs alien magic.\u00c2\u00a0 I also this it’d be interesting for the PCs to figure out why they have magic and the aliens don’t.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think there’s enough here for a game.\u00c2\u00a0 No, not in this post, but in the idea.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been writing for two hours and it just keeps coming.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a good sign that the game has potential.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What I like to do at this point is think about an end for the game.\u00c2\u00a0 When I wrote sketch comedy in college, one of the interesing pieces of advice I kept was that once you have a premise sorted out, the next thing to write is the ending.\u00c2\u00a0 If you can’t come up with a good ending at this point, with nothing committed to the middle, you’re probably not going to come up with an ending and so the idea should be scrapped.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Keep in mind that this isn’t a fixed ending.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just a possible ending.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So I like the magic vs tech idea.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve always been of the opinion that magic screws with physics and anyone who tries to combine the two finds out that magic does not behave in a consistent manner.\u00c2\u00a0 Since the aliens rely on technology for pretty much everything, I like the idea of magic disrupting it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Let’s go back to the sun being eaten.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually “eating” it seems a bit vulgar, but I still like the idea.\u00c2\u00a0 What if what I meant by this was that the sun was somehow tapped of its energy by the aliens?\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve seen at least two<\/del> three sci-fi stories wherein the sun is surrounded by solar panels, capturing all of its energy instead of just the stuff that makes it to earth.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe this is the first thing the aliens did.\u00c2\u00a0 Take the sun and use its energy to fuel their campaign, and eventually their life once they take the plaent.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s actually kind of civilized.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
That’s a lot of energy though.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re probably not burning it all at once.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s probably being stored in some sort of battery or capacitor or something.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is where magic comes in.\u00c2\u00a0 With enough research I’d let a mage find a way to release all that.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe even channel it somewhere.\u00c2\u00a0 At the very least, they could sabotage the aliens by draining their energy.\u00c2\u00a0 Best case, send it somewhere useful.\u00c2\u00a0 (Either way I really like the image of the player doing this being burned to a crisp in the process.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If we go with the idea about the sun gods being shut down, I might use that power to disrupt the solar sphere, restoring the sun.\u00c2\u00a0 That should restore the sun gods power.\u00c2\u00a0 Could that be enough to tip the balance in favor of the PCs?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whoa, two posts in the same day!\u00c2\u00a0 What?!\u00c2\u00a0 Well,\u00c2\u00a0 I just posted about wanting to brainstorm game ideas.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s a game idea.\u00c2\u00a0 It shouldn’t be too big of a stretch of the imagination that I had an idea to brainstorm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brainstorming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}