It's a shame... (Idea du jour)

...that the Lester Dent estate probably wouldn’t let it (he died in 1959, but there are mentions of the estate in 2015, so I presume it’s a going concern), but golly, “Lester Dent Pulp RPG” would be a fine name for what it says on the tin.

Idea du jour: Elves

fantasy

What if the elves we see are obsessed with nature because they are urban. I mean seriously urban. They're long-lived and population pressures long ago forced them to use up their world. What we see are campers and hikers and even eco-terrorists.

Elves in Faery actually look more like punk rockers and salarymen.

This is why elves are all, “We will not help,” and against industrialization: they’re trying to preserve our world. The elves we see are the upper class, the ones who can afford to take a sojourn of a few centuries in our world.

So when your characters take a trip to Faery, they might get the technological/magical help they need, but they're traveling to the ultimate urbanized area, full of industrialization and concrete and mazes.

Weird Idea O’ The Day

So driving all day does things to the brain.

I present this concept:

James Bond: The Musical

Numbers include:

• Most Famous Secret Agent (sung by Moneypenny and the chorus)
• Lethal Sidekick Even Stephen
• I'm Limestone Scaramanga (But You Can Call Me Spectre)
• Suggestive Name, I'll Turn You (On)
• I Expect You To Die
• Base Ain't So Secret On Fire

I haven't figured out what Felix's role in all of this, though.

Titles of Books I Will Never Write

A Princess Bride of Mars

The Found and the Furry

The Maltese Beagle

A Sea Otter And The Philosopher's Stone

The Fall of the Weapon Shops of Usher

Today's odd idea...fantasy, this time, though I could put a superhero spin on it.

Something fantasy-ish

In reaction to some other post, it occurred to me that turning the hereditary ruler into some short-lived mammal like a mouse or mole would not actually kill him/her but would leave them very likely to be killed, thereby skirting a possible geas against killing the rule.

But at that point I suddenly flashed forward to the part where the heros have found the ruler and transformed them back but too late: the ruler expires of old age, despite the fact that it has only been a few months! So the ruler dies without issue.

Or maybe not...

Suppose that the ruler went ahead and did traditional vole/mouse/hummingbird/whatever things, and bred. This sets the stage for the kind of silliness that can only happen in a fantasy milieu, which is the war of succession between the usurping Duke or whatever, and a family of field mice that the heroes can prove are descended from the ruler.

You have some NPC off trying to turn them into humans, you have a vet of sorts trying to figure out who is the oldest, you have people who quite rightly say, “I'm not going to be ruled by a mouse!” and off we go.

Weird idea o’ the day

Any

It's tough to come up with a vampire-Renfield relationship that doesn't devolve into Arte Johnson scuttling around for George Hamilton's Dracula, but one that occurred to me this morning (thanks to the Facebook group Comics Out Of Context) is Batman and Alfred.

(I might have read it before but I don't remember it, and I'm more concerned about portraying it in a roleplaying game anyway.)

Anyway, the servant who is quite competent (unlike early Alfred, but his modern incarnation), and who is doing it not because of some spell or mind-control or because he hopes to be gifted with eternal life, but rather because he owes the vampire, and worked for him before the change, and continues to work for him after.

That might work in the context of a mob family, too, where the capo becomes vampirized.

What an off-beat Icons scenario: Gang war, but one side is headed by Octofather and the other by the vampire capo. ...I might scribble some notes down on that...

Today's bizarre setting fragment

I was reading something and the author opined that the only thing that humans are good at is killing each other, and that's not gonna change.

At which point the "Well, actually" part of my brain kicked in and I thought, "Genetic engineering could fix that."

And then I thought, "But you'd have to get the world governments together to do it."

At which point I realized something: Every government would hold back a tiny subset of the “killer” humans so they could have them in reserve. Y'know. If they were needed...

So you'd be playing the bloodthirsty monsters, who (in a point that might be on the nose) are you and me.

At which point my brain flipped it sideways and realized that pacifism was a disease released on the world: a pandemic of peace, as it were, and you play one of the people with natural immunity.

Kind of adds a new meaning to “Go forth and kill no more.”

Idea du corporate

Any Superhero

Someone mentioned doing a list of random encounters for superheroes. This is one step up.

I wonder if there'd be any interest in a book (say, 25) sets of one- or two-page adventures?

While each adventure would have all of the essentials (setting, antagonist, etc) some of the adventures would share locations or antagonists, so that any one adventure only needs to specify a place or a character. Some of the locations would be so generic that you wouldn't provide a map, too.

There'd have to be an assumed universe or sub-universe. Let's say something on the level of a DC or Marvel universe. For sub-universes, you could do different books, but essentially you're looking at:

• Street-level or neighbourhood: Your Daredevil or X-Men young heroes kind of thing.
• Basic city level: your Spider-Man or Batman level things.
• World protectors: your Avengers or Justice League.
• Cosmic: your space stuff, typically your Guardians of the Galaxy or Legion of Super Heroes.

Don't take those levels terribly seriously: in the comics, you can find world-beaters defending a neighbourhood and your city guys stumbling on a threat to the cosmos.

Other lines of comics are really their own little sub-genre, too: I think the Claremont X-Men were really in their own little world. Solo (one player character) is different than team.

There'd be some planning to make sure that various bad guys or locations get re-used. As a first iteration, where you don't know if the product will sell, you probably want to do eight of the first three sub-genres. So you do eight little adventures involving the neighbourhood or the small town (because it might be nice to have a spin-off setting that's a little different, and that says “small town” to me).

It occurs to me that these are one step up from the adventure seeds that happen in a number of setting books. It's more than a seed but less than a full adventure.

Setting and campaign idea

Icons

A whole campaign or set of stories occurred to me in the course of defending bad guy of the week campaigns, where there is no overarching evil bad guy...by giving me an overarching evil bad guy.

For now, let's call it Intro City. Better names are possible, but I'm scrambling to get this down before I forget (and before I have to rake the lawn). Intro City is a small city with a university and the main employer is the tech sector. The second-highest employer is probably the university itself. For some reason, I think Ithaca, New York, but that might be totally false because I know very little about Ithaca except that there's a university there.

Two heroes in mind that tie into this setting: Generic Hero and Bubblegumshoe. We'll start with Bubblegumshoe first.

She's at the university, though she's fifteen. Smart. Thinks of herself primarily as a detective because she was heavily influenced by Nancy Drew books of the 1930s (not the revised versions since then). Why did she have access to them? Her dad is high up in the city and her mom in the university. From a supers persepective, she's probably a gadgeteer of some kind. Less Adam Strange and more Tom Swift (also perferred the 1930s version of Stratemeyer Syndicate books).

Intro City has a superhero, the self-deprecatingly named Generic Hero. He's handsome, he's a flying brick, he's secretly six months old. He's a test tube child, produced by secret labs of...oh, we don't want to call them CADMUS but that's clearly the inspiration. Call it Myrmidon, Inc, a company that is transforming illegal clones into super-powered individuals. The process is not without its problems...

Now, I don't want to recapitulate the Superboy/Young Justice storyline, so we're not going to make Generic Hero a clone of somebody. (We'll call him Jason something or other, just to give us a bit more of a tie-in to Cadmus and the dragon's teeth.) No, he's his own person, but he has escaped from the secret labs of Myrmidon...or has he?

That will be one of his Qualities: that he doesn't actually know if he's doing things of his own free will or that he's been programmed to do them.

Our first adventure starts with Generic Hero already accepted by the citizens of Intro City; maybe at this point he's still working for Myrmidon, and it's his association with Bubblegumshoe (she's not particularly girly in civilian life, so she has gone all out on the pink bubblegum themes as a superhero, to divert attention) that makes him split from the organization. Maybe the first couple of adventures are him being sent out to recapture the latest mistake, and because there are superheroes, the citizens of the city take it in stride.

Bubblegumshoe's dad is actually working hard to secure benefits and bonuses for Myrmidon, because they're a major employer in town. "Do you know how many people would be out of work if they pulled up stakes?" Her mom is helping Myrmidon in another way, because they give people a place to work after graduation.

And eventually you can get into Generic Hero's liberation, and a big showdown where they have to deal with Myrmidon in a more definitive way.

So that gives you an arc that grows out of the concepts of the first adventure, and an excuse for a number of initial bad guys.

• Look, they've got to have some kind of mental-implanting thing to put the fake memories in. Let's say it's a machine—and it's essentially a telepathy/mind control machine. What if one of the techs has gotten in too deep in gambling? Convincing a bunch of bank tellers or bookies to transfer him money might seem like a way out, until Bubblegumshoe figures out what's being done and tries to stop it, with Generic Hero's help.
• At some point, they must have tried giving an adult superpowers. Did it work? Did it work but appear to fail because the powers don't actually show up until the next generation of cell replication? So someone cut loose from experimental programs at Myrmidon — maybe a student who volunteered for the “experiment” as a way of getting cash — starts to develop powers. Maybe they're good powers, maybe they're not...maybe the powers do out of control, or they have a tendency to flame out...but it's been months, so there's no obvious connection to Myrmidon.
• The current subject was in the creche with Jason; maybe they have a relationship. But the problem is that the power mimicry ability that showed up actually mimics the ability to give powers from the equipment. It's not really good to have an artificial life form that can give powers wandering around. Of course they locked her up, but something has gone wrong, and she's free....and everyone she touches gets powers briefly.

Just some ideas.

Product idea

Icons

You should never produce a product without some idea of the market. However, I don't know if there's a market, so I'll just describe it here.

Most online gaming modules are done lovely PDF documents, with layout and page design and all of that. Expensive but fun to do. I can't do them well, but I can appreciate the work that goes into choosing the page layout, the background image, the font, the size, whether there are columns, the artwork, and all of that.

I can appreciate it, but I can't do it. Not that good.

So I'm willing to lean into the fact that I buy far more gaming supplements than I can actually play. I mine them for ideas.

With that in mind, a series of adventures and campaign modules for superhero games done as ebooks. They're in ePub format, they're searchable, they reformat when you change size, you can alter the text, and you can link them out the wazoo. Most phones have an ePub reader (or a .mobi reader) of some kind.

Yeah, there are still maps but they come in a sketch format so you can see where the important things are, and the rest is up to you. Because, dude, it's going to be on your phone. It's something you'll read when you have spare minutes.

And, yes, you could totally run a game off one of these if you wanted. Structurally, they'd steal a lot from the Ars Ludi discussions with a “Here's a summary, here's the basic setup, here's each scene complete with the interesting schticks you could do.”

And there's still artwork: the cover has to be nice, and there are still portraits of individuals, usually head and a bit of torso.

There'd be room for some kind of story in the back if you wanted.

Plus there should also be accommodation if you want to run it solitaire.

And, having said that, now I'll do some desultory market research.

An odd idea

Any

There's an eruv bounding about four square miles of Manhattan. If I understand correctly (and I might not; apologies if I don't), it's a thin wire that symbolically separates "public" from "private" for Orthodox Jews, so that they can behave more or less normally on the Sabbath. That means that they can do things that would normally be considered work...like carrying things.

But it's not just Manhattan...other cities have eruvim. Cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and more.

New York has rules, such as the maximum thickness of the wire is a quarter-inch, and it must be at least fifteen feet above the ground.

It's inspected by rabbis every Thursday night, presumably so they have daylight Friday to fix it, if necessary. And Manhattan's costs about $100,000 a year to maintain.

Do they ever get broken in superhero fights? Especially fights on a Friday night? Are there Orthodox Jewish superheroes who protect the eruv because keeping all those people inside on the Sabbath has economic consequences? Do tech whiz superheroes invent stronger materials to compose the eruv? If it costs too much for the eruv to be replaced, do they quit?

Thoughts on a Wednesday afternoon. I have no answers, but you could probably make a scenario out of bad consequences.

Idea du jour: Family Business

Icons

Idea du jour

Because we're all locked up, I suspect there are more one-on-one campaigns happening. This popped into my head.

The premise is that the player is playing one of the three heroes in the city. (Well, the player plays all three — one for each tier of play — but usually not concurrently.)

My current thinking is a family or pseudo-family; we're either talking three generations (or you can finesse it to two), or three siblings, something like that, one for each tier of play: Premier, Champion and Backup. For example:

• The eldest is the Premier hero. Although technically seventy years old, some doubletalk has kept this hero young, whether it was being frozen for fifty-five years, alien antagathic treatments, mutant metabolism, or a magic spell.
• The middle character is the Backup hero. He or she is rebelling against the absent parent and deliberately chose to do work at the local level instead of on the national or global stage.
• The Champion hero is the child of the Backup hero, or the grown-up sidekick. This character is ready to step out on the big stage, now.

The GM creates a supervillain for each one, but I'd produce it commercially with that setup in mind. Some of the universe creation stuff is already there (the villainous organization SKULL; the Association for Parareal Technology; the Sisters of the Sigilant; and so on) so the GM doesn't have to come up with it.

Provide character hooks galore, and the player characters are intertwined: Grandad just came out of suspended animation, Mom's taken over her husband's hero role because she thinks he's dead and has re-married, Junior is angry at Mom for betraying Dad's memory and ignoring Grandad, who seems cool, and is struggling with some romantic interest.

Provide half a dozen adventures and villains lightly sketched out, and provide twice as many seed.

Three campaign models immediately suggest themselves to me:

• You can play as the presented family or sub in your own characters for them
• Play as superhero rivals to them
• Play as their arch-foes and do a Romeo and Juliet thing

Chortling

In a superhero story I am in the process of writing, who do you call when you need an infestation of vampires, werewolves, or zombies?

Do you call the Vatican? What if they're Jewish vampires? Do you call the FBI? What if they’re operating outside of the US?

Nah, you call the Center for Disease Control.

The CDC has a division dedicated to eliminating zombies, werewolves, and vampires. They’re just contagions of a different kind.

And mention is made of the “meme division” but apparently those boys are weird.

Flashing the CDC badge just makes me happy. And they’re chronically underfunded, so they have an excuse to ask random strangers to help. “Here, you hold her chest while I place the syringe…”

“Don’t you have to use an ash stake?”

“Not for a type 2b; an air embolism in the chest will do it. There you go. This fella here is a transformed super type, all scientific instead of mystical. Low chance of an outbreak with him.”

“And you killed him?”

“Nah. The embolism just puts him into an agitated state where his heart decays as fast as it regenerates. Keep him weak as a kitten until we get him to the Center.”

“RAAAAH!”

“Whoop. 7d instead of a 2b. Run!”