The game.

Recently I've been thinking about trying to find a kind of default roleplaying game that would have a kind of ongoing campaign that you could always return to. For many roleplayers I guess this is the norm, but for me and the group of friends I usually play with it's not. Granted, we've always had a few cornerstone games that we've always returned to like Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. But we rarely stick with one game or one campaign for more than six months or a year max.

The problem is not that we get tired of our current game, but rather that some new game turns up or an idea for a different setting pops into our heads. When everyone was going to school and had lots of spare time this wasn't much of a problem - we tried out different games and different settings - but nowadays with how busy people are it feels like we'd benefit from actually trying to focus on one game and try to get the most out of that instead of always play one-offs. Not that there wouldn't be room for excursions into other settings now and then.

Like I said one of the staples of our gaming history has been WHFRP. We started with 1st edition where we actually had a good thing going, playing regularly and working through The Enemy Within. We continued with 2nd ed. but didn't play as much or as often. Now with 3rd edition coming out in a few months I'm thinking that it might actually be the main game for our group. We all love the setting and know it very well, and it's easy for me as the GM to just run with it and play without any pre-planned adventures (although since there's so many great fan made creations out there we'd never run out of stuff).


On top of that, the 3rd edition looks really, really interesting and I think this new way of handling the "game interface" would work really well with our group. We've been playing a lot of board games over the past few years (much more than rpgs actually, simply because it's so much easier to set up and play for a few hours with no preparation needed) and I think having more tactile reminders of your character and his/her abilities, in the vein of a boardgame, would help the players in our group to get more involved and pro-active in the game. Not that they've been lazy slouches up until now, but it's just something that I believe will work very well with how our group works. The dice mechanic is the same way and it's probably the one thing I'm most excited to try out in the new edition. The dice more than anything else I think will help the players contribute to the storytelling in a new way. I'm hoping that they will actually be able to take over some of the work that I as a GM usually do; in this case interpreting the dice. Anyway, suffice to say at the moment I'm thinking that WHFRP might be the default game for our group in the future.

But... there are so many other games I'd love to run (or play if someone in my group would ever take over the Gm yoke). At heart I'm much more into sci-fi than fantasy so most of my ideas revolve around different sci-fi settings. Off the top of my head in no particular order...

• To run a kind of Fireflyesque campaign in either Jovian Chronicles (hard sci-fi) or Coriolis (much softer).*

• A low-key, muddy Heavy Gear campaign.

• An old school space opera adventure in WEG's old Star Wars rpg.

• Day to day survival in a post-outbreak world in All Flesh Must Be Eaten, ala The Walking Dead.

• To play Deciphers Lord of the Rings rpg. It's now more or less dead, and the core book needed this huge errata, but the feeling in the books is right on the money and I'd love to explore Mirkwood, the ruins of Angmar or, dare I say, Khazad-Dûm!

• Using The Trail of Cthulhu to run some old classic CoC campaign like Horror on the Orient Express or Masks of Nyarlathotep.

• And of course, there's Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader...
  

Lots of idea and not enough time. So if WHFRP (does anyone else read it phonetically? Whuf-rup?) would be our main default game what would be the best way to explore these other ideas? As one-offs? As parallel campaigns? As intermission when the main campaign is winding down? Hmm...

Well, that's all of my ramblings for today I guess. I'm sure more will follow.


*Yes, I know there is a Serenity rpg and I actually own it. But the JC setting is just fantastic and I think it'd be interesting to put a Serenity-style crew in a much more harder edged setting.