RPG Game Ideas

[myrpgideas]

Mask and Blade

A game about a team of masked vigilantes in a city based on 18th century Venice.

Tricorn hats, great cloaks and carnivale masks. Rapiers and flintlocks.

Swashbuckling and parkour.  Rooftop chases, back alley gang fights, infiltrating aristocratic parties.

Cobblestone streets, red tiled rooves, canals, gondolas, arched bridges lined with hanged criminals.

Masks and secret identities.  Spies, diplomats, merchants, secret police, cultists, slavers, drug addicts, gang informants, vigilantes, serial killers and a rumoured supernatural beast that stalks the streets.  

Justice, loyalty, vengeance, ends justifying means.

Wealth, decadence and privilege just across the canal from poverty and desperation.

Secret cults, seances, faustian bargains and sinister spiritualism.  Sometimes it’s the poor and desperate, sometimes it’s the rich and bored.

A great ship surrounded by canals too small for it to fit down, as though it was anchored here and the city just grew around it.

A raised canal, like a giant aquaduct, lets the nobility take boat trips across the city while literally looking down on the common folk.  They built it to protect themselves after a string of attacks on aristocratic barges.  The attacks were motivated by anger that they spent their money on grand architecture instead of helping the poor and hungry.

The barnabotti, impoverished nobility in extravagant outfits worn thin at the elbows.  They’ll do anything to maintain appearance and standards they can no longer afford.  It’s all they have.

A crime boss who rules this district with violence, intimidation and money.  He’s made so many enemies in the past that it’s the only way to keep him and his family safe.

A vigilante from the slums who sees the best in people: he’s learned that good people can be driven to do terrible things by desperation and need.  A vigilante from a noble family who sees the worst in people: she’s learned that even when people have everything they still do terrible things

A white rose dyed red with blood, left as a calling card.

[myrpgideas]

The Silent Forest

Questions:

What rumours have you heard whispered about the Silent Forest?

Which of you had a sibling disappear near the forest when you were just young?  What do you remember about that day?

The closer you’ve gotten to the forest, the more vividly you dream of voice always coming from behind you.  What is it warning you against?

What is your relationship to the baker who needs your help?

Impressions:

A damp, sleepy village.  Even the houses seem to slump as if they were weary and exhausted.

An old couple tell stories and superstitions about the Forest.  About the power of wolf’s blood, when to walk backwards and about the house the forest swallowed.  One of them is telling the truth, the other is delusional.

A straight line across the horizon where the grassy moors turn suddenly into dense forest.

Eerie silence in the forest.  No birds, no insects, no rustling leaves.  It almost doesn’t feel real.  Every footstep is a conspicuous crash.  It feels weird to talk.

Trees with rough faces carved in to them long ago.  Except that one.  That one looks fresh.

Blood red tree sap that, when eaten, makes you see sound and hear facial expressions.  Or maybe you’re just hallucinating.  You can barely see through your friend’s heavy footsteps.  You hear them exchanging low judgemental glances behind your back.

At night something unseen in the darkness parrots your words back to you in an inhuman voice.

A stream that’s not flowing.  Just a long winding path of still water.

A small animal skull hung from a piece of twine like a totem.  It gently twists to look at the nearest person who’s not really human.  It’s not immediately obvious why it keeps looking at your friend.

The sudden slow sound of creaking wood from all around, like being inside a big old ship.

A person with wrinkly, saggy skin and sunken eyes is desperately digging a hole.  He’s trying to bury a skinless human body.  He urgently shushes anyone who tries to talk to him.

The village of the Silent Ones, groups of thin trees whose trunks twist together to form a tipi before before growing outwards again into the canopy.

[dndideas]

Storm Pirates

The storm came out of no where. Many of the crew had predicted it, imagined signs of ill omen since we left port.  They’d heard the stories too, after all. Mysteriously abandoned ships, angry sea gods, living storms.  More exaggerated with every telling.

First it was a sudden cold wind in our faces then a rumbling thunder.  Clouds ahead of us quickly darkened and merged down into the choppy seas.  Soon is was all around us, enclosing us in it’s darkness.  We barely had time to trim the sails. Lightning leaped and flashed about the ship, roaring winds drove rain and sea spray alike into our faces. Waves crashed against us, pulling men overboard.  I’d never seen a storm so fierce.

And then I saw it.  A dark shape loomed down on us, silhouetted against the clouds by flashes of lightning.  It was a ship.  Odd masts stuck sideways from it’s flanks but otherwise like ours.  It glided slowly down from above like a god from the heavens. It was the very eye of the storm, wind and rain swirled about it but never approached it’s dark bulk. Angry lightning followed it down, struck our masts and crew alike.

Then we too were in the eye and suddenly all was still.  In that moment the sound of boots hitting the deck was almost unreal.  They had slid down ropes from the impossible ship floating above us.  Every one of them tall and lean, covered head to toe in heavy fabrics.  Their shouts were gibberish behind heavy sealed masks.

I drew my sword but it was too late, lightning from above struck the deck before me.  I staggered, blinded by the flash and over the rail I had no idea I’d been backing towards.

I don’t remember much after that, only darkness and cold and the furious seas.  I do remember the storm left as quickly as it came, ascending back up to merge into placid clouds above.  When the air cleared I found our ship adrift, stripped of both cargo and crew. Masts snapped by the storm and lightning. A ghost ship.

[myrpgideas]

Spaces between time

The PCs play as part of a group or organisation that protects the world/country/whatever from disasters/crime/evil by freezing time.  There is a device that, when activated, freezes time with the exception of a small group of people.  Perhaps it’s anyone who was inside a special room at the time it was turned on or who wears a special suit, is injected with a special drug or whatever.

When something bad is about to happen they activate the device to freeze time then go out and rearrange things to stop it happening.  Take a weapon out of someone’s hand, put a cage around the rampaging beast, move people, disable bombs, tie the zombie’s shoelaces together, whatever.  Depends on setting and tone and such.  Then they return to the device and restart time and most people never know how close they came to the city getting blown up or whatever.

Or at least that’s the plan.

Maybe something bad happens to unfrozen people who aren’t back in the special room when the time-freezing device is turned back off.  Maybe they just disappear or get accelerated to such a degree that they decay away on the spot.

The idea behind the special room is that if they have to be at a particular place when time is started and stopped they can’t just have somebody in the field having time started and stopped on a whim.

While time is stopped nobody and nothing moves unless an unfrozen person moves them.  Perhaps there are limiting factors, such as momentum.  If you take a person out of a moving vehicle then they will still have that forwards movement when time is unfrozen which may have unpleasant consequences.  This kind of thing might add a kind of problem solving element to the frozen time missions.

The twist:

At some point (after a “by the books” mission if you can find a way to make that interesting) the group start encountering other people or things that aren’t frozen.  

Maybe it’s another organisation who have some way of avoiding the time freeze.  They could be actively working against the PCs or they could be pursuing their own world-manipulating plans.  Perhaps they’re staging threats that encourage the PCs to freeze time to deal with them then using the frozen time to sneak in to places, assassinate people, switch important documents etc.  Or perhaps they have their own time freezing device that interacts strangely with the PC’s device.

Or maybe it turns out to be mysterious creatures from another world who live in the frozen time.  Shadowy shapes, strange aliens, Lovecraftian monsters or bizarre animals that eat frozen people so they seem to just disappear into thin air when time is unfrozen.

The result is that the PCs end up chasing/being chased by/fighting/spying on other people or things while time is frozen, surrounded by motionless people and wonky physics.  Maybe if they cause too much damage or change people will start to notice things that seem to just suddenly happen.  This could lead to the PCs being hunted by well-meaning government agencies, conspiracy theorists or would-be heroes who can’t be allowed to let anyone know the time-freezing device exists.

I could see this working as either a creepy investigation game or a crazy action game.

[dndideas]

Brainbots

Random concept: victorian or early 1900s. Scientists develop a procedure to remove people’s brains and insert them into machines.  This is intended for people who have suffered grievous bodily injuries, particularly soldiers.

Think a brain in a jar on spindly spider legs, some the size of people, some big heavily armed war machines. Brain jars on balloons like tiny zeppelins with dangling insect legs to grab things.  Retro mad science meets Matrix robots aesthetic. Little bit War of the Worlds.

The problem is everybody who undergoes this procedure turns against humanity.  Nobody knows why. They seem to retain their memories and everything but universally side together to try to forcibly extract everybody else’s brains and put them into more robots. Some people think it’s the sinister effect of the new-fangled “radio” or wireless telegraph wired to their brains.

Now there’s a full-on war of humans vs brainbots as the bots slowly spread, extracting the brains of whole cities of people and putting them into all manner of creepy robot for no obvious reason.

Needs a better term than “brainbot”.

[myrpgideas]

The Kingdom of Heaven

“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.“

An apocalyptic game about the return of Jesus.  The dead return to life, as promised, increasing the world’s population tenfold in one day.  Sudden massive overcrowding with people who don’t speak modern languages or understand modern technology.  Huge shortages of food, water, space, housing, policing and medical care.

Many start preaching to not bother solving these problems since the rapture is probably coming along soon anyway.

[myrpgideas]

The Light Ages

A kind of post-apocalyptic setting where for reasons lost to legend the world is smothered covered by a low, thick layer of clouds that blocked the sun, causing crops and eventually civilisation to fail.

Now what’s left of humanity is clustered into mountaintops and plateaus above the cloud layer.  Dark ages style society of independent mountain towns and monasteries linked by airships.

The church has evolved into sun worship, believing the lands below were cut off from the divine light as punishment for their sins.  Steer clear of the darkness in your soul, shine the light of God on it.  Hold faith and do as God commands or he will take the light from us too.

Electrical power is a luxury and comes exclusively from increasingly ancient solar panels from Before.  The solar panels are seen as holy relics that channel the power of God.  Destruction of one is the worst kind of sacrilege.

Rumours of endless, verdant sunlit lands drive the adventurous and the desperate to board airships and travel beyond the horizon in search of wealth or freedom.

Places with appropriate access send scavenging parties down into the eternal dark of Hell below the clouds.  Many don’t return and those that do are often changed by what they experienced.  Rumour has it that many come back with their souls so corrupted that they are driven mad and whisked away by the church upon their return so they can spend their lives healing their souls in a remote monestary.

Scarcity of land for living and growing food, of technology, of education, of freedom from the social, political and religious structures of the crowded towns since there’s nowhere else to go.

Impressions:

A viking zeppelin with an eagle-headed prow floats inexorably toward it’s next target, a snow-covered monastery that entirely covers it’s rocky peak.  The bright blue sky above, the thick dark clouds below.  Aboard it thirty warriors in leather jackets and war paint prepare their axes and brightly coloured shields.

A sleepy village clings to a dark mountainside, dotted with the dim specks of candles.  At it’s heart a tall church glows brightly with electrical light, from the statues at the door to the glossy solar-panelled turrets.  A beacon in the darkness, a symbol of the Light of God and of the wealth disparity between the church and it’s flock.

A rusty gondola descends down a rocky ridge into the clouded darkness below.  It’s passengers, wrapped in heavy layers of cloth and fur, make the sign of the sun over their hearts.  Whether driven by money or redemption they descend in to Hell (via a ski lodge) to scavenge for materials and holy relics.

[dndideas]

Eternal Vigilance

Fantasy worlds are full of tomb raiding adventurers fighting off the undead who have risen to guard their tomb’s treasures.

In this game the PCs are those undead.  They were heroes of the past who defeated/trapped some great evil and on their deaths were interred in a tomb with it to continue their vigil in the after life.

The game starts hundreds of years later with the PCs awakening in their sarcophagi to the sounds of the tomb being plundered, bursting forth in anger and confusion to kill the interlopers.

Maybe the people raiding the tomb are a cult worshiping the great evil, which they manage to awaken/free before the PCs can stop them.  The undead heroes must now venture out into an unfamiliar and unfriendly world to once again stop their nemesis before it can continue it’s evil plans.

[dndideas]

Light in the Darkness

The world is almost entirely covered in darkness, thick black clouds blocking all light from reaching the surface. This darkness is home to all manner of night-dwelling monsters and sinister forces.

The exception is the Light Lands (working title), a large circular area of land bathed in a great beam of golden sunlight through an unmoving gap in the clouds. This oasis of light is the single home of good and civilisation in the world, the sunlight keeping most of the creatures at bay and allowing crops to grow.

This idea would work best in a human-dominated game.  Things like dark vision or traditionally subterranean races like Dwarves would probably undermine the effect.

Keep reading

[dndideas]

Indiana Jones and the Hand of Vecna

Images for a 1930s based fantasy setting:

Gnomes in oily overalls tending to a sleek steam train.

An orcish professor with bushy sideburns and a tweed jacket is asked for his papers by elvish soldiers with rifles and jackboots.

Elven “art nouveau fascist” as an aesthetic.  Curly stylised trees in bold red-white-and-black.

A dwarven zeppelin pulling in to a giant art deco zeppelin dock carved into the side a of snow-capped mountain.  Dwarves queue up in their finest furs for the trip while a team of conjuration engineers do routine safety inspections on the warded balloons that keep the air elementals contained.

A half-elf P.I. huddling into her trenchcoat as the tiefling mob boss tells her “the devil always keeps his promises” from the other end of a tommy gun.