Simlasa

I'm picturing some meta-game campaign system that charts the gains/losses in support for the various gods... and distributes power accordingly... "Zeus used to show up all blood and thunder... and throw lightning bolts... but now that everyone has switched to Zoroastrianism you only see him once in a while... his toga is dirty and all he does is try to grope the farmer's geese."

That would be interesting in a game setting... having the one or more 'official' religions that no one really believed anymore but everyone gave lipservice too... offset against another one that had a growing cult of true-believers. For most of the fantasy games I've played in the religions were pretty much equally powerful and equally correct... meaning all the gods could grant spells/powers... or even show up in person from time to time... I think the thing about creatures being real/not real... is part of the mystery that's enchanting about playing in lower tech settings... not naming the creature that is seen but merely describing it and letting the players/characters come to all the wrong assumptions... either mistaking a vagrant for bigfoot or believing the sphinx at the gate is only a statue... oops!

I was never much into mainstream superhero comics... but I've been a fan of plenty of superhero characters... like The Shadow and Doc Savage and the Green Hornet... I've had a campaign idea for a while about a city with a collapsed infrastructure (based on parts of Detroit I've been to) that is full of pulp era vigilantes jockeying for power. Some have 'powerz' but none of them are close to the ridiculous extremes of Superman/Thor/Green Lantern... they team up into loose gangs... good vs. evil is relative to outlook... kind of a gangland setting with powers tossed in. Regarding the powers the superhero comics seemed to have cinematic logic that altered the character's powers depending on the need of the story... in ways that wouldn't transfer in solidly quantifiable ways to any game system. But I've been really interested in 'grittier' storylines and systems like Godlike and Wild Talents and some of the 'pulp' systems. Taking real world physics into account somewhat and making the heroes a lot more three dimensional as well... they can kill or be killed... can dwell in the gray areas.

It always bugged me a bit that most all fantasy games I've seen carry the assumption that every folkloric/mythological creature in the character's culture has a 'real' objective existence in-game... and that most all the characters believed in them too. I can't recall reading/playing an adventure where the characters go on a 'snark hunt'...

It seems that nowadays we have creatures of folklore, that some people really believe exist... monsters... like bigfoot and aliens and chupacabras... and we also have creatures that no one actually believes in and are pure symbol/entertainment... stuff like Speedy Alka Seltzer and Big Bird. Were ancient cultures the same? Was a sphinx something the average Egyptian would expect to find cavorting along a river somewhere? ... or was it recognized as merely a meaningful symbol? Would the powers of the day... the church, royalty, whoever might be inclined... dream up some beast that symbolized their status and would common people see the image of the thing and understand it was not meant to be 'real'? Perhaps ancient peoples did not have our sharp border between what is real and what isn't... maybe symbols could take on a life of their own. Still, it's always seemed a bit presumptuous to me to assume that just because some ancient man drew a picture of a creature that meant he really believed it existed...

GORE makes me go 'grrrrrr...'

My main gripes with MRQ are less than rational... having more to do with Mongoose, how they do things and the kind of company they seem to want to be.

Again... UA's 'madness meter' breaks down shock in categories... You have: Unnatural... the shoggoth Self... you're own self-image vs. reality Violence... self explanatory Isolation... reaction to being cut off from community Helplessness... the feeling you get when facing off against Cthulhu or the DMV. Every threat to your sanity, in each category, has a rating that you roll against... If you fail to many times you go nuts... if you succeed several times then your rating in that category goes up and those sorts of things stop bothering you. You don't even have to roll against stuff you are sufficiently hardened against. There are lots of things in UA that I don't like but the Madness Meter is really pretty great.

UA's 'madness meter' covers that sort of thing really well... you either start to go nuts in the face of the horrible, or you start to get 'hardened' and slowly lose your humanity. I misinterpreted the original post though... as I thought it was wanting a replacement for sanity in COC... rather than looking for a fear mechanic for non-horror settings. Though combat/war usually is a kind of horror of it's own... just ask Colonel Kurtz.

I don't mind the COC sanity rules but we've have sometimes gone with the 'madness meter' from Unknown Armies... there's a lot of stuff in UA's rules I don't care for, but there are some really useful ideas as well.

I'd be more 'offput' if it went the other way... someone tells me we are playing Call Of Cthulhu but it turns out all the wierd stuff going on is just the greedy manipulations of old man Caruthers... Back to the Mystery Van kids!

Sounds a bit like Citys In Flight... Also, there was is/was that animated show on... Cartoon Netword/Nickelodeon/Something... I can't remember the name... where the Earth has been reduced to floating chunks... with huge skyships prowling around and fighting each other. No elves or dwarves but the 'physics' of the setting are purely fantasy... In a way it reminds me a bit of the old High Colonies game... though there were not aliens in High Colonies and it was probably 'harder' sf.

OOH! Cthulhu Adventus does look intriguing from what little bit I can see on that page... it's not readily apparent how the Mythos works in but the 1984/Stargate combo is very appealing to me.

I'm fine with there not being any spaceship info in the basic book... if someones going to do it I'd like it fairly detailed and well thought out... which would probably take up more space than most magic rules I've seen.

I'd go for a China sourcebook big time... especially if it included the sorts of fantasy elements seen in films like Chinese Ghost Story, Green Snake, Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, The Bride With White Hair... etc. Or books/stories like The Dream Of The Red Chamber and Journey To The West... and various Chinese fairy tales... I've got the GURPS China sourcebook but since it tries to cover all of Chinese history there isn't much detail about any one period or genre of story.

Yay for metric! That's one thing that always bugged me about GURPS... it just seemed wrong that it wasn't using metric measurements. I like Worlds Beyond a lot... but haven't really tried out the spaceship rules. When that sort of thing has come up in our games we've always used Full Thrust with very satisfactory results.

Hah! I'd never thought of using Cthulhu By Gaslight for this... but it's so damn obvious! And I love the Space 1889 setting... great stuff.

Your Alastair Reynolds/Future*World mix sounds quite the interesting idea (to me)... I'd think those were pretty divergent flavors to have in the same bowl...

I can see why those characteristics might play better into the secondarys... but why not divide the sum by 2... to keep the result similar to the numbers we already have and avoid having to reconfigure the rest of the system (weapon damgaes, power use costs, etc.) to suit? At least for HP, MP, PP, FT... it seems like averaging the combined stats gives a number still within the normal range... just better representing the character. Or am I (more than likely) missing something obvious?

That's a EXCELLENT idea! As long as it left out the bog-standard orks and dwarves in favor of their more folkloric relatives... and kept the magic/witchcraft to the same levels... it would really work for me. It's got a lot of the elements that had me wanting to do a Napoleonic version of the same... namely that collision between the old world and the new... the fading of kingdoms into countries, the weakening of nobility, the introduction of new technologies and ideas. It has enough of the trappings of standard fantasy settings while also having all sorts of interesting departures. Just this morning I was reading a bunch of old fairy tales and this seems to approximate the setting for many of them... a background of distant wars, knights with (and even a princess) with guns... If someone published such thing I'd surely buy it, if only for the setting information.

I'm not so much for the anthropomorphics in that sorta setting... though I loved me some Albedo. We did have a lot of 'beastmen' though... dogmen, antmen, ratmen... Our Gamma World setup was a lot of Boy And His Dog and Richard Corben's Mutant World... the nature of the apocalypse was kinda vague too... there had been a nuclear war but other stuff happened too... kinda prefigured Rifts in a lotta ways... I know one guy gave me a book on ley lines and geomantic forces that eventually found it's way into the game. Later on the aliens showed up...

Ooooh... yesssss... I'd like that... I'm hoping the Deadlands book lends itself to some good post apocalypse gaming... but something chock-full of weirdness like Gamma World would be welcome too. The first game I ever GMed was AD&D... for one session... but Gamma World was the first long term campaign I ever pulled off and it was tons of demented fun.

I like gloom, but I'd think you could lighten it greatly just by ignoring all reference to Chaos... Back in the day... when I first got a read of the old Realms Of Chaos books... they actually depressed me... made me kind of nauseous... I had to put them down for a spell. Nowadays I just think they are hilarious fun...

Sounds like an intriguing idea to me... makes me want to try it out!

Neither do I really, since it means I'm free to ignore them.