We all like lots of things. We all have so little time on this blue-green ball.
So this book should be published:
100 weird fantasy one-shot or mini-campaigns in different worlds. With good pictures and rules-variations for each, written so you can start with any Old School system, modify it slightly and run it for a bit--then go back to your endless D&D campaign or your life, whichever of those you currently have.
Each is like 2-4 pages long, with everything you need to get it going, at least for a few sessions
Here's what I have so far*:
-The Field of Cloth and Chaos
It's an old-fashioned Arthurian jousting-and-melee tournament but every knight is a mutant champion of some weird god. Mutation rules, cool armor and weird mount options. Riding vortex zebras in bone-plate. Gambling, intrigue, death.
-You’re Eating Maggots
It's the 30 years war but you're all vampires going to negotiate with this other group of fancier vampires. Paris, Vienna, Budapest. Lace. Rapiers. Subspecies rules. Blood drugs. Actual 30 Years War politics.
-The Kaiju Must Die
Modern-era. One GM, one player plays the kaiju, the other players all play important PCs trying to stop the kaiju: scientist, reporter, general, alien invader, etc. If a non-kaiju dies they're immediately replaced with another person in another position and it keeps going til the kaiju is dead or has destroyed the city. Kaiju generator rules, city map with destruction mechanics.
-Veteran of the Psychic Wars
A vast post-apocalyptic Moebius desert and you are mutants roaming the plains feeding on psychic energy and using martial arts with sticks wearing cool jumpsuits. Scavenging, weird items, psionic rules, telepathic psychedelic sarlacc monsters.
-The PVP Maze Game that Everybody Liked
This is what I used to run at conventions when too many people wanted to play. Basically there's two teams of regular 1st level fantasy PCs and a randomly generated index-card maze between them. It's usually the most fun in the world. Index card templates, items, traps, rules for pvp, simplified chargen.
-Iron Horse
Inexplicably wild-west-themed future with robot horses, cyborg bounty hunters, alien gunsmiths. You must bring in 3 outlaws, each weirder than the last, dead or alive. Lots of gun lore, horse "breed" hairsplitting, minor mutations and prosthetics.
-Short-Lived New Flesh
Mechs but old school so there's Evangelion-esque body horror and sanity mechanics. Everyone is mentally and physically attuned to their mech. Also hit-location and partial damage rules so you are like hitting the other guy over the head with your own severed particle-cannon-beam arm while they try to cut through your armor with a giant sawblade. Awesome mech-building rules.
-Undermanned, Outgunned
You are pirates on a 17th century pirate ship. Things have gone poorly and you are low on supplies, powder, food, freshwater and everything else. Luckily(?) there are 4 ships in the area, including a merchant vessel, a warship, and two rival pirate ships. There's also a small island fortress. To survive you'll need to raid what you need from these sources--the order will matter, so this first then that's easier, etc. Ship combat rules, more detailed ship info than standard, etc.
-Rogue Traitors
This is just like Undermanned, Outgunned but you're space pirates. I will draw cool space pirates.
-Hunt The Black Riders
Ok the black riders in the 160th-17th century were basically like knights in full plate carrying pistols--several pistols because they didn't have 6-shooters then. This is a historical fact. There's a whole cavalry unit of them coming to reinforce the enemy. Your PCs have to stop them. Nice, detailed map of the area and the battle, details on the forces and timetables.
-Defenestrator
It's still the 30 Years War but this time it's player-vs-player. Every player is a different country and has access to 1 of 3 PCs at a time--an assassin, a diplomat, and a spy. You all have separate hidden goals during a peace conference. Fog-of-war rules, some maps, a few scenes ready-to-go with powder-kegs strewn liberally around.
-Cobalt Reach
Heavy metal magazine sci-fantasy. Lasers, blue dragons breathing lightning, jungle mutants, Bakshi. Like this.
-Scheherezade
Arabian Nights style PCs rescue a princess from a spooky palace in the desert. A really nice little enchanted dungeon with magic teleportation pools, long shadows, alabaster columns. Then when you rescue her the roles all change and so does the dungeon--next week a different player is the GM and everything's in a different place.
-Cannibalworld Cannonball
It's a post-apocalyptic car future and you are in a race across the United States. Build a car like you build a PC, and there's tables and maps for procedurally generating your route and what you find along the way from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. If the Dennys staffed by kitchen androids hasn't been sacked by mutant coyotes yet you might find food, and if that last explosion wasn't the pump you might find gas! Also of course all the other drivers know they will win if they kill you and that's not against the rules.
-Leopard Society
Post-apocalyptic subsaharan African plain with motorcycles and wild animals.
-Ultramassive and Unexplained
Tables for generating explorable planets, derelict ships and other big dumb sci-fi objects and the PCs who go see what's up on them. Probably compatible with the other sci-fi PC ideas in the book.
-The Avant Guard
It's World War I and are you on the front lines? No you are not. You are working for the secret service using your subtle but fascinating secret abilities to investigate and disrupt the enemy's use of bizarre new art techniques to undermine freedom worldwide. Paintings that ensnare innocent souls, sculptures that warp space and time, works of theatre none can behold and live! Only the mediums, spoon-benders and psychonauts of the Avant Guard can defeat such perils!
-Red and Pleasant War
One of you is the Red King, another is Countess Elizabeth Bathyscape, your weird vampire armies head to battle tonight. A skirmish wargame with army list rules for all the Red and Pleasant creatures, playable with chess pieces and playing cards.
-Warlords of Carcosa
Like that but Carcosa. Your army will probably includes some robots and some horrible summoned thing. Including a battlemap with strontium lakes and a mobile magnetic storm.
-City-States of the Beast Coast
A wargame with these guys.
-The Stars My Lamentation
Sword-and-Planet swashbuckling with ships of null-gravity oak and solarsilk sails. Same classes, basically, but rules for shipbuilding and airless, low-gravity combat.
-Kill The First Giant
Frazetta barbarians and maybe a sorcerer or two in mythic times have to go and kill the first giant to ever be born. What is its weakness? What exists on primeval earth that can even kill it? What dangers will you meet on the way? Depends what you roll on the charts!
-Once Upon A Time In Hell
A very contained, very stylized Weird West, utterly devoid of any rootin' or tootin'. Like if Cormac McCarthy let Lovecraft write a couple chapters of Blood Meridian after watching Dead Man. Character generation alternating chance and choice producing interestingly varied PCs including home state, Civil War service and rank (if any), specialty, scars, psychic trauma, liquor preference.
-Fuck That Game Mothership, People On That Game Lied About Rape
Ordinary people go to space and what they find is death and horror and the uncanny. But instead of being made by a bunch of people who wrote fan letters for years to the guy who wrote Vornheim then tried to frame him for a felony it's just written by the guy who wrote Vornheim. And drawn by him.
-Mad Mex
You play ad men selling mechs to both sides in a post-apocalyptic Mexican border war. Is your duplicity discovered and you must desperately flee for your life through the dust and fading sun of blood-colored afternoon alleyways? Of course, señor.
-The Worst Of All Possible Worlds
Nazi-occupied Neu York, modern day. Because the Japanese invented mechs. It's a street-level superhero game and you're freedom fighters. Like this. Rules for superhero powers bolted-on to old-school mechanics, nice map of occupied Manhattan, stats for the Weremacht et al.
-Are You Not Entertained?
Gladiator setting. Detailed personal combat rules with a kinda rock-paper-scissors system where you choose block, parry, dodge, feint, strike, etc to make small-scale fights long and interesting.
-Winter in the Abbey
A simple premise: a knight or two, a cleric, some thief, and a few sanity mechanics in a very gritty and very low-magic world are asked by the prior to investigate something. Something has gone awry in the abbey. And it is cold and quiet and uncertain and then it is the most mindbending horror. But let's do it exactly right this time. Exactly right.
-Biomechanecrozone
Dungeongcrawling through an absolute wall-to-wall Gigercube. A catalogue of Gigerthings you find on the blacksilver Gigerwalls, stalactating from the Gigerceilings, reaching up from the Gigerfloors and dripping from the Gigerarches.
-Stingraiders
You are sea-elves with ragged dark eyes. You seek submerged secrets in wrecks and the drowned results of sunken civilizations the deep dodging seademons and sharkmen. All kinds of details to make the politics and complexities of underwater society and geography interesting instead of just like not that interesting like it usually is.
-Operation Hourglass
All the players are multiclass wizard-thieves or wizard-thief-fighters and work together as usual but, despite being able to communicate are all in different eras. They are all spies in different wars at different times working together to prevent some chronomantic catastrophe. One is in World War 2, one is in the Napoleonic Wars one is in the 30 Years War, etc. They need to make sure certain things happen at certain times. Quietly. A very specific scenario with relevant maps, timetables and NPCs.
-I Want My Scalps
It's a few hundred years ago. You are Jews. The pope is a dick. You're going to kill him. Everybody plays a thief/rogue/specialist and you need to make a plan.
-The Time of Jewelled Tusks
You control a small army. Skirmish strategy set in medieval India with Lots. Of. War. Elephants. Also magic--and maybe a tiger or two. From the subcontinent that brought you chess.
-The Future Is Not Yet Written
Ok, so:
1. You take the players' current normal-game PCs.
2. You posit them as 20th-level PCs.
3. You send them on what their Last Quest might theoretically be.
Several suggestions for the apocalyptic foe, stakes, and battleground upon which this Dark-Knight-Returns-esque conflict might take place.
-Frost Raiders of Nephilidia
You are a raiders in insectlike, jewel-eyed, insulated masks investigating the cold half-drowned land of Nephilida, with its various amphibious vampires, from the black-armored knights to the decadent Queen herself. Dare you take the jewel from the demon's eyes? Rules for the special gear of the raiders and the Nephilidian tarot.
-War Magic
Every player rolls a 20th level magic-user, they are each randomly placed in a small but lovingly-detailed kingdom, you have to try to kill each other and the last wizard standing wins.
-PurgePurgePurge
Near-future city, target, sewer system, codes and access nodes, cool motorcycle, optional cybernetic enhancements, floorplan, DNA, AI, betrayal, eldritch wild-card let loose. Trouble, broken glass, neon, darkness.
-Death Before During And After Dishonor
Samurai wargame. Use your house's resources to build your army including yokai summoned with LotFP spells, fight on a little battlefield designed just for this, each player is the general of a chosen section of army. Timetables of the movements of the enemy revealed when its time or when your spies find out.
-The Garden of Forking Paths
A mazelike dungeon. One PC, several players. Control of the PC starts with the first player. Each time the PC decides to go this way instead of that a second identical version of the PC controlled by the next player makes the other choice. This continues until there as many identical PCs as players, all making different choices. They cannot meet or retrace their steps, but they must still work together with their alternate selves to survive and solve the maze.
-Claw of the Annihilator
No-self-control high-dark-fantasy mini-adventure. PCs play max-level dragonriders, archliches, archers with nine-arms and 4 bows, that kind of thing. They challenge the gods on a uniquely-designed alien terrain with a full minigolf course worth of chaotic effects.
-Meaningless Homicidal Loci of Suffering
A player-vs-player where each player gets a PC and a section of the dungeon to control. They decide which monsters are there, which traps where, etc. Their PC can only travel in the other players' parts of the dungeon. Dungeon and options for each section provided, natch.
*I left out a lot of ideas that might fall under "modern horror" because basically they were already within the remit of Demon City.
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