Well, my group really isn’t wild about any of my ideas so we are going to play ICONS for a couple of one shots. I still plan to write up stuff based on the previous ideas that I will share with my fellow Tavern denizens at some point. I thinking of doing Ravenloft or a Gothic pitch next, all this talk of gypsies has stirred that around in the old noodle. It’s not sci-fi at all and this group wants classic fantasy subgenres… (ie, Tolkein, S&S, pirates, classic greek mythology, norse, nobody seems to mind my lovecraft adds)
Any war stories/ideas/comments?
Just that Lovecraftian is the most awesome add-on to any of the RPGs I’ve played. It goes well with anything from SF to Comedy Fantasy, and at the moment our Lovecraftian Numenera campaign is blasting away with all barrels.
Numenera sounds like fun
NOOOOOOO! Not Numenera. Just play some Conan-esque Sword and Sorcery with Lovecraft tossed in.
Christopher Stone-Bush, was just endorsing Lovecraftian as an addition that adds spice to anything.
The RPG equivalent of a strap-on dildo dipped in Vindaloo sauce, if you will.
Whoa. That is a big “no thank you” Michael Barry. Yeesh.
LOL. Ouch. 🙂
Gosh, Numenera seems to get more than its share of haters. It’s an interesting system! I just don’t like the setting. :\
Interesting, hadn’t encountered the Numenera haters before, but I can understand it.
A friend was pushing Numenera on me but I resisted for about 6 months — the SF-fantasy pastiche thing was pretty repellent to me as a hard-SF guy. Even decades ago I had a violent reaction to Shadowrun’s utterly incontinent elves-with-guns-fight-cyberjocks-with-magic mashup style.
I GM for older teenagers, mostly, and Gen Y don’t give a shit about that kind of consistency. Hell, they’re surgically attached to their mobile phones, which might as well work by magical elf-earpoint vibrations. They look at me as some kind of eldritch master when I tell them their phones won’t get reception…in a concrete basement.
I can’t spare a great deal of time for preparation (technically unpaid overtime), and admired the work and imagination that has gone into the Numenera setting. That is one hell of a lot of love lavished on a game (plus half a million dollars of Kickstarter money…)
However the system itself runs very smoothly, particularly for the GM. As does Dungeon World, another favourite of mine.
So I’ll take that as a no to Numenera, Christopher Stone-Bush, but a definite maybe for the dildo.
I’ve horribly derailed this topic, but the weird science fantasy vibe Numenera has is cool. It’s the mechanics and the hype about the system being so revolutionary that turns me off. I feel that other systems do a better job of what it attempted to do. If I want to play weird fantasy, I’d use anything but Numenera.
If you’ve only ever played D&D then yes. Numenera will seem very narrative. But I will admit that it could be a good transition game from people who’ve only played D&D to start branching out to other, more narrative systems.
Well whatever Monte Cook’s virtues its going to be Penny Dreadful meets Conan meets Lovecraft and has a hobbit lovechild cause that’s me. And for that it’s DW all the way baby. I would like to find a good SF system…
a good SF system? Uhn, like Apocalypse World? 🙂
I’m thinking more spaceships than Mad Max, but perphas I should think again. Do people like Monster Hunters?
You mean Monster of the Week Mark Tygart?
Yes. Sorry.
I’m a big fan of Monster of the Week and, just like many PbtA games, there is very little setting. You could totally play MotW in a scifi setting with no change to the mechanics. Just cosmetic changes.
Christopher Stone-Bush Michael Barry To get back to the Numenera derailment for a moment… What I liked about that thing was definitely the mechanics; and Setting aside, if I had to run a game with little to no prep, I think Numenera is an excellent 2nd choice. 🙂
Also, I haven’t played every system out there by a long stretch, but using the PC’s attribute points as a resource that can be lost or spent, and scrapping HP in the process? Well, it struck me as innovative.
Sure, the whole thing is mechanically rooted in “difficulty assessment,” which is philosophically quite different from a game like DW… But that slow grinding down of the PCs and their abilities, combined with the push-your-luck aspect of burning precious attribute points to surmount a difficult obstacle… Well, suffice it to say some people really enjoyed the resource-management aspect of running their characters. More so than just keeping one eye on their HP meter, per D&D et al.
So… yeah. What was my point? I dunno. 🙂 I guess that “innovative” is relative. I’d be interested in checking out other systems that do these things better… although it’s starting to feel like my groups will never let me play anything but 5e ever again anyway… [weeps]
I think you can do some interesting things with genre mashups. Weird fiction was sort of what existed before fictional genres became more subdivided, so it has elements of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, and Lovecraft and R.E. Howard are firmly in that camp. S&S has a lot of overlap with Weird stuff.
You could play out some SF-ish themes with a Gothic setting, actually, since there’s a connection between the genres. A number of SF stories are about humans using technology in foolish ways or experimenting with things they should know better than to fool around with. One of the themes of Gothic stories seems to be about the monstrousness of humanity, made literal. I think you can take those two ideas as examples of how there’s overlap (arguably SF is descended from Gothic fiction, which was an antecedent to Weird fiction).
I think I’ve done a poor job of pitching my group, they are just having a good time with classic DW adventures and feel like we’re just getting a handle on this system. I think I can add other genre elements slowly that crossover well and everybody will be happy.