Missed Settings
-
I’m surprised, and have been for years now, that the Shadowhunters series isn’t a super popular world setting. It seems to have all the popular tropes… Vampires, Werewolves, Angels, Demons, Warlocks, Humans, and Hunters… It’s big on action and adventure, it’s full of epic dramas. It can be based out of literally ANY large and popular city. It always seemed to me like it would make a popular and easy setting, but I’ve never seen it done.
-
@Jenn Yeah! There also was this big influx of games that were centered around YA fiction back in the day, which I feel like would have been shortly before the time that the Shadowhunters TV series came out. There was that The 100 MUSH, then someone did a Percy Jackson game a little while after the movies came out, it does seem like a missed opportunity with Shadowhunters. The whole Mortal Instruments universe has largely been missed altogether, really.
I also want to cosign the Fading Suns reference above, I would play that so hard I would be at an alpha build of the game and suffer through it to be able to play a Charioteer.
One thing that’s kind of a headscratcher, IMO, is the lack of a proper run at a Warhammer Fantasy or 40k setting. Age of Sigmar is also now pretty fleshed out to the point that you could have a solid fantasy experience with that.
And fantasy games in general, actually! And particularly for me, I think fantasy without the reliance on the L&L pastiche. D&D and Pathfinder were mentioned and, yeah, it’s kind of odd that there haven’t been a bunch of Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Golarian, etc. games. I seem to recall there was that one Dragonlance game back in the early 00s set in the Age of Mortals, and there was… Treywinter? Was that the name of it? It was a D&D 3e MUSH that was running around the same time.
-
@Raistlin said in Missed Settings:
either Pirates era
The pirates we think of when we say pirates (“The Flying Gang”) were a very specific and brief period (about 1716 until quite specifically 1726) and very few people know this or understand what was going on.
(I am running this tabletop with CoC d20. But on a MU, the little history lessons are not so welcome.)
There’s also the whole “we’re on a boat!” problem. Which is a mild pain playing tabletop when one player can’t make a session and you’re wondering what the heck their character is doing, since they couldn’t leave, but is a constant challenge on a MU. At least, in a period setting where ships are just not very big.
-
In the vein of Fallen London, Sunless Skies. It’s literally Fallen London IN SPAAACE! Empress Victoria got tired of being in the Neath. She also decided to build her own Clockwork Sun. Its light isn’t…right. Also, it hates us and is going insane. Spoilers: https://thefifthcity.fandom.com/wiki/The_Clockwork_Sun
Continuing down that avenue, Cultist Simulator! Let’s murder each other to gain immortality!
-
I sat and thought about it for a sec, and wondered “why has no one made a Magic The Gathering MUSH?”
-
@Hobbie said in Missed Settings:
“why has no one made a Magic The Gathering MUSH?”
My guess at an answer is: Because everyone on the game would throw a fit if they didn’t have a Planewalker Spark.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
-
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
- Zombie Apocalypse (This seems like a no-brainer, pun intended.)
I’ve always wanted to run a zombie game but feel people would get bored of it quickly.
-
@catzilla I think you’d have to really really focus on the community building aspect of “this world has died, we must rebuild it” and less on the actual zombies. All of my favorite zombie media is just really interesting human drama and analogues to real world societal stuff punctuated by extreme gore.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
-
@MisterBoring The first step would be finding or making tweezers so we can all have our generally attractive PBs.
-
I am surprised there hasn’t been a primitive fantasy setting, a tribal culture trying to survive amongst the fantasy monsters and the ruins of previous civilizations. Though this would probably need to be more RPI-ish because it’s begging for coded survival mechanics, like hunting, fishing, cooking, weapon crafting, clothing making, etc.
-
Along the lines of zombie apocalypse, Fallout.
-
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
@catzilla I think you’d have to really really focus on the community building aspect of “this world has died, we must rebuild it” and less on the actual zombies. All of my favorite zombie media is just really interesting human drama and analogues to real world societal stuff punctuated by extreme gore.
Yeah. And then you get to the problem. Because zombies are stupid and humans are clever. (How many seasons of
"The Squawking Head’‘The Walking Dead’ did we get before we saw somebody, anybody, make a zombie-attracting noise-maker pit-trap? It was kinda maddening.) So pretty soon the zombie MUSH would be ‘making up new recipes for dandelion greens in our walled village’ MU unless GMs make zombies a lot more formidable or add new adversaries all the time, or make PC plans fail because reasons-we-made-up-on-the-fly and no dice-roll or clever idea will make your plans ever work. -
Ghosts.
Just that. It’s a haunted town or something and some PCs are ghosts and some are not, and the ghosts do annoying ghost things and the living people are annoyed or frightened, or confused because they think somebody is not a ghost when they are, or vice versa.
-
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Just that. It’s a haunted town or something and some PCs are ghosts and some are not, and the ghosts do annoying ghost things and the living people are annoyed or frightened, or confused because they think somebody is not a ghost when they are, or vice versa.
Strangely this is the exact plot of the last tabletop Wraith game I ever played in. It’s really really easy to ignore the Wraith metaplot and it basically becomes this.
-
@MisterBoring I tried to play a ghost on a few Buffy games.
But this is back on my mind because I just started reading The September House, (Carissa Orlando) and it’s amusing – the living protagonist is constantly being disturbed in various ways by the undetermined but large number of ghosts in her house, but she refuses to leave because it’s a really beautiful house and she loves it enough that it’s worth tolerating the bleeding walls, especially since when the blood goes away it doesn’t damage the wallpaper. It’s cracking me up and I can imagine expanding it to a remote-ish village where everybody works at some high-paying and desirable tech firm, or at a local shop or service, the firm has renovated the houses for the workers, and it’s a choice between staying because it’s your dream job with great pay, free housing and great local services, or leaving because every night a ghostly headless plumber shows up to fix the leaking pipes in the kitchen.
-
@somasatori said in Missed Settings:
Numenera
I loosely looked at this because it’s simple dice, powers just descriptors and all. It is a neat setting, you can build up dungeons and maps as people expand out from a central city (and newcomers arrive to). Each ruin can also be re-explored by people with new powers, so if someone who Employs Magnetism has gone through Ruin 4b, but was not accompanied by someone who Possesses a Shard of the Sun… maybe there is a passage that can only be opened with SunBeams or whatever. Also fast travel unlocks and vehicle artifacts and stuff. I didn’t get super far, but the brainstorming is there, I will help add to the mix if other people want to do the thing. There aren’t really rules for player conflict, so that might pose issues. Things can be figured out later.
@Solstice said in Missed Settings:
I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.
Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?
It would so be my jam, right about now.
My only problem is I want all the other Cosmere Investiture systems published immediately, to minimize the need for HRs, but I guess we could deal with fan-made material until things get published.
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
Exalted (I’m not the biggest fan of Exalted, but still, where are the Exalted MUs?
It exists, and Volund has made the code open source, so it’s possible!
@Raistlin said in Missed Settings:
Star Trek
We have that brainstorm in that other thread, Deep Space 69 for the pun but also ‘oh no, Romulus Star going to blow up, there is another Class (???) star that previously looked like it was going to blow up, but didn’t, we must study it to learn how to save Romulus’… DS69 being set near unexplored space but also fighty area? More thinking can go in to this.
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
LARP RULES WOD
Not just large group of players, but events in real time. I’m on record pushing this… not just WoD LARP, but any LARP rules.
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
All of my favorite zombie media is just really interesting human drama and analogues to real world societal stuff punctuated by extreme gore.
That’s because this is the proper way to do Zombie Drama, and exactly why Romero has said Shaun of the Dead is his favorite Zombie film.
@Ominous said in Missed Settings:
I am surprised there hasn’t been a primitive fantasy setting, a tribal culture trying to survive amongst the fantasy monsters and the ruins of previous civilizations. Though this would probably need to be more RPI-ish because it’s begging for coded survival mechanics, like hunting, fishing, cooking, weapon crafting, clothing making, etc.
Would play.
As for what’s on my list… I know L5R has had MUs, but I still want it. The brainstorming continues, but Mummy on CoH (I don’t have a problem, honest) has done a fair bit of distracting.
Something else that has been distracting and would also make for a neat MUSH setting? BATTLETECH(/Mechwarrior Destiny). I haven’t worked out how to make it happen, because the travel times are a big problem. Maybe if it’s all in Solaris or another Gladiatorial system. Either that, or people part of different mercenary companies. Or a single company doing a campaign. But yeah, big stompy robutts.
-
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
@Hobbie said in Missed Settings:
“why has no one made a Magic The Gathering MUSH?”
My guess at an answer is: Because everyone on the game would throw a fit if they didn’t have a Planewalker Spark.
You could go two ways with that.
- Every player character is a Planeswalker.
- No player character is a Planeswalker, just use the Omenpaths like everyone else.
We can tack my personal loathing of FCs on to #1 and say that “only player characters are Planeswalkers” so NPCs remain as such, aside from the occasional GMPC for plots and the like. Or, you go with #2, and Planeswalkers are these exceedingly rare Unknowable Things that are something like final boss territory. Whilst I prefer #2, for the sake of actually getting players, #1 is better. People like being super speshul.
Then there’s the system. Do you create something new based on abilities within the setting that’s more RP-oriented and using coloured/colourless/no mana? Or, do you go full ham and transpose the actual MtG card game in? My ego right now demands I fully code the card game and I’m having to argue with it that it’s too much work right now lol.
-
@Solstice said in Missed Settings:
I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.
Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?
It would so be my jam, right about now.
I have more than once seriously considered trying to make a RosharMU*, no lie, but I get extreme imposter syndrome from it.
(Plus wtb all the deets on Voidbinding and the Unmade, pst.)
-
Wheel of Time. Fourth Age (post books). L&L
-
I helped run a Zombie game awhile back because it really was a dream setting of mine. The reality was the constant threat of ZOMBIES EAT U combined with a lack of meaningful systems for resource gathering kinda made the whole thing get old rather quickly? Like, either you are fighting zombies, or you’re running from zombies, or you’re talking about how scared you are because you just fought / are going to fight zombies, and it’s just a rinse & repeat.
That’s the issue with a lot of themes, IMO. The setting seems cool, but there’s just nothing to do.
My missed setting? Cowboys.
It’s never going to happen.
