The Deadlands kickstarters had me looking back at my Pinnacle Downloads page and my Deadlands folder here and I have a really large amount of material for that game. From maps to one-shot adventures to full-blown campaigns I have a lot of good stuff to work with in the game. That's not counting a step back into the original edition, that's just Reloaded. If they put out as much supplementary material for Good Intentions as they did for Stone and a Hard Place I will be swimming in PDFs. It's a good problem to have.
Good material begs to be played. I have an irregular game of Deadlands with two of the Apprentices when they're available and it's a lot of fun but going back through this stuff makes me wish I had a regular group blasting through this stuff.
Naturally this also had me looking over the Savage Rifts material as well and since the Kickstarter ended there has been a lot of material pushed out for it as well. My players are already asking when we're going to play it. I'm going to try and work in a one-shot or short adventure soon, hopefully this month, and see how it plays. If it goes well I expect it to be fighting for a slot next to Pathfinder and the Superhero game I keep promising myself we will run. Again, it's a good problem to have.
This is not a new problem. At one point years ago I threatened to run the "Tour of RPG's" for a year: We would play a different RPG every month. I would schedule up to 3 sessions each month:
- Intro, Character Creation, and Kickoff
- Meat of the adventure
- Finale, Wrap-up, and Review
There is of course the question of "which ten games?" but that's a fun question, not a bad one. Heck, I could probably run ten different Savage Worlds games and have a pretty good year.:
- Deadlands
- Hell on Earth
- Pirates of the Spanish Main
- 50 Fathoms
- Necessary Evil
- Evernight
- Slipstream
- Star Wars (homebrew)
- Day After Raganrok
- Weird Wars (Probably WW2 but Rome and Vietnam are options too)
That's with just a glance at my folder - there are additional options. I have one-shots for almost all of those which would easily be playable in a night so we could get in 3 small adventures at least, maybe more. I'll take breadth over depth if that's a better choice for my group.
The more I look at this list the more I like the idea. I wonder if I could set a once-a-month session to do this just for a one-off without disrupting our ongoing Pathfinder game? Hmmm, have to see.
My other choices for a once-a-month thing like this would be ICONS or Marvel Heroic - minimal prep and a system that's fairly easy to grasp in play would make this easier. "A Year in the Marvel Universe" or "Atomic City 2017" would make a nice campaign framework or this kind of thing. Genre-jumping with Savage Worlds or going all-superheroes would both make it easier to handle player comings and goings than the usual serial campaign approach.
More to come on this.
That's an interesting idea. I have so many games that I want to play and run, and I know the rest of my group does too. Maybe we could have a two or three session try at each one and then use that as a basis to decide what to play longer term.
ReplyDeleteFor some gamers D&December is their thing. That's what they like, that's what they run and play.
ReplyDeleteFor some it's Superhero games. They may switch from Champions to FASERIP, then jump over to M&M for a spell, but it's always Supersport.
Between 1981 and 1990-something, our things was trying new games. If it came out and was remotely interesting to one of us, someone was likely to but a copy and run it.
I still do this to a lesser extent, though it's less about buying new games as revisiting old ones.
I wholly support a Tour of RPGs.
Please excuse any ridiculous wording. I posted this from my phone. It's autocorrect is both dyslexic and learning impaired.
DeleteThat's part of what I want to see - which games really strike a chord with the group and then find a way to make that a more regular thing than our current ad-hoc approach to everything besides Pathfinder.
ReplyDeleteWe used to rotate games more but another DM and I did that a little too much and it began to annoy our players who were not as eager to swap out. I swore to finish what I started from then on and that still lingers. Combine that with the ridiculous length of Pathfinder APs and it's really locked us in for the last few years. Well, that and complicated "life" schedules.