Dichotomy Studio -- Campaign Seeds

These campaign seeds are either campaigns I'd like to run, or settings I'd like to run a campaign in. The more detailed ones are those which I've actually presented to a group as an option, or simply had the time to tinker with over the years.

Each seed has a note as to whether it's a campaign or a setting.

Age of Apocralypse (Campaign)

Terry Pratchett's Discworld is under the thumb of superpowered mutants, against whom the PCs must raise a succesful resistance while holding off the Things From the Dungeon Dimensions and avoiding Mr. Dibbler's meat pies.

The Colony Wars (Setting)

BattleTech meets Blue Planet, with a touch of psionics to liven things up, as space colonies try to win freedom from the old Earth powers.

Fruit of the Tree (Campaign)

Genre & Style: Secret history; ancient magical conspiracy from the inside.
Tone & Themes: Moral grayness, magical (both dark and bright). The quest for secret power, the cost of knowledge, the choice between good and evil.
PC Power levels: Between 250 and 300 character points.
System: GURPS

Odin bought knowledge from Mimir's well with his eye; he crucified himself on the tree Yggdrasil for magical power. Adam and Eve chose knowledge instead immortality with the guidance (or temptation) of the Serpent. Prometheus damned himself by stealing fire from the gods for humanity. Knowledge - power - freedom - none are without cost.

As Cabalists, the PCs are initiates -- and powerful ones, at that -- into the most pervasive magical organization the world has ever known: The Cabal. Born in ancient Egypt, it extends its thaumaturgical might around the world. Its members are united in a fraternal brotherhood of monsters and magi. It is telling that the principles of the Cabal are to Know, to Dare, and to Keep Silent. None would name the Cabal as good. Most would call it evil -- its members don't care. Many resist its might, but few if any are saints themselves: from the ancient Pavane des Vampires to the Catholic Church's Fraternitas Sancti Leonis to the sinister ex-Soviet GKMR. The PCs themselves may have committed atrocities in the name of knowledge, power, or secrecy. They have seen the realms of Yetzirah, Briah, and Assiah, and the great Pearl-Bright Ocean. They have met dragons and god, goblins and trolls. They can bargain with demons and gaze at angels. And all this is done through the secret might of the Cabal: The magical power of Thrice-Great Hermes.

In such a society, heroes are rare beyond belief. Yet what the Cabal opposes is the utter destruction of reality by the qlippoth, the abandoned remnants of a previous Creation. In such a struggle, heroes are bound to arise. Are the PCs such heroes, or will they be remembered as villains?

Back in game-speak: the player characters will have quite a bit of occult power at their disposal, whether from what they are (vampire, werewolf, etc.) or from the magic they know.

In this campaign, player initiative is paramount!

The players will drive the campaign as much or more than the GM. Antagonists will range from mortal authorities to other Cabalists to old Nazi war criminals to -- well, there's a lot out there. The point is that the players will have the freedom to decide what they want to do, but they will have to live (or not...) with the consequences. All this freedom, of course, leads to one inescapable choice: What do you do with it?

This campaign is based around the GURPS Cabal setting by Steve Jackson Games, as refined by Kenneth Hite.

Forest Perilous (Campaign)

A group of strangers is suddenly thrown together, vampirized, and find that they must combat an ancient occult conspiracy that crosses the boundaries of myriad worlds -- but so can they.

Men In Black Capes (Campaign)

High Concept: A Technomancer-esque campaign in a world where supers exist publicly. In GURPS books: Mage: The Ascension + Black Ops + Supers.

Player characters would work for the Agency (or the Technocracy, or whatever) and suppress "reality deviants," including the nastier kind of supers, while keeping the normals (including most supers) in the dark about the really horrible things tha lie outside of reality. (Cthulu, anyone?) This would probably work well in a heavily modified combination of GURPS International Super Teams and Mage: The Ascension. Avatars have been worked into the dominant paradigm as metahumans. I'd seriously modify Mage -- change a lot of the factions, alter the way magick works -- and I'd want to include some other cool stuff. Say magick (or magic) is the power of the human soul (embodied in belief), psychic power is an extension of the mind, and technology an extension of science and rational thought. Ergo, the Traditions are those groups that emphasize the soul over the mind, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.

The MDNA Affairs (Campaign)

As agents of a US federal agency at the turn of the 21st century, the PCs must deal with outbreaks of deadly psionic mutants while keeping the general public unaware of the threat in their midst. (Based not a little on Parasite Eve.)

Necropunk (Setting)

Characters are undead (probably reanimated corpses) in a cyberpunk setting. They've been deliberately reanimated -- and this is normal. Reanimated corpses are used for grunt work, dangerous stuff, supersoldiers, etc. They are probably second- or third-class citizens, with very few rights. Characters struggle against the uncaring corporations, paranoid (or not) society, and, of course, dark supernatural forces. Might work well as a very bizarre Cthulupunk campaign. (Gotta fit Frydies of Give Me the Brain in there somehow.) Perhaps the souls of the undead are held by the corporations, forcing them to work for pathetic wages (but also making them nigh-invulnerable).

The Rails of Mars (Campaign)

Genre & Style: Steampunk exploration and colonization.
Tone & Themes: Bold technological adventure and "the Earthman's burden;" strange new worlds, colonialism & imperialism.
System: GURPS
PC Power levels: Between 100 and 125 points.

Ten years ago, England landed on Mars. The Hyper-Ethereal project was a success! Now it's 1893, and the race to dominate the Red Planet is well under way. Germany and Austria-Hungary are the threat to the Anglophone world with the efficency of their scientific machine. America, on the other hand, has a purely commercial presence on Mars, with a few companies of U.S. Cavalry to fend off the potentially hostile natives. Meanwhile, the British Empire has the most successful colony -- but the colony must expand to survive.

The player characters are all associated with the colonization effort, overseeing the building of a Martian railway to haul valuable resources from outlying mines to the main spaceport and to connect the scattered colonies. They also have to contend with Germanic spies, aggressive American industrialists, and the mysterious natives who speak of ancient, vast, and uncaring intellects who watch over the new world.

This setting isn't fully developed yet, but the above gives the basics. As earthlings on Mars, the player characters must deal with rival earthlings, strange Martians, the incredible difficulties of building an infrastructure on a foreign world, and the exploration of ancient ruins.

The Tar'Avi Wars! (Setting)

Across the far reaches of space, war washes the stars with blood as the swords of the evil Tar'avi Empire sweep towards the green homeworld of all humanity -- Earth. The only things standing between the Free Terran League and crushing slavery are the brave soldiers and sorcerers of the Fleet with their mana-powered ships and mecha.

Ever since the return of magic in the twenty-first century, the journey to the stars has been possible. Magical rifts in space completely obviate the need for faster-than-light travel, mana siphoned off the great ley lines that run from star to star across the deeps of space provides more than enough energy to power mighty war machines and the combination of technological know how and mystic power creates fantastic devices and effects.

It's a good thing, too, since humanity is not alone in the universe. Aside from the Fair Folk, who briefly visited the earth many centuries ago and left legends that later became fairy stories, there is the Tar'avi - a species of insectoid tyrants that are bent on conquering the galaxy for their own inscrutable means. Their client species - including the brutal and cunning Sotis and the shapechanging Meer - compete with each other and with free species for the rare and precious habitable worlds. Earth and her colonies are next on the Tar'avi menu, and all hope seems lost. But an ancient Fair Folk prophecy claims that from this seemingly insignificant planet will spring the death of the Tar'avi empire.

Be a manamech pilot, driving your fifty-foot tall suit of armor through alien cityscapes, striking down Tar'avi battle drones with your flaming sword and Vulcan Mk. V Autocannon!

Be a Sorcerer First-class, coordinating a magical assault on the Hive Mind of a Tar'avi homeworld!

Conduct delicate diplomatic relations with the Fair Folk as a diplomat of the League while attempting to navigate the labyrinthine politics and social customs of the Land Of Summer!

Combat shapechanging Meer spies and assassins as a Home Guard esper on the colonies - or on Earth itself!

Stand on the bridge of a Merlin-class battlecruiser and send your frigates and fighters into battle against the ships and creatures of a Tar'avi invasion fleet!

Tigers Of The Mountain (Campaign)

The player characters, students of the Old Master in a monastery located between two mutually hostile lords, must balance opposing forces to preserve the monastery, both physically and spiritually. (The setting is similar to (or is) the Warring Kingdoms period in China, feudal Japan, or possible the setting of Exalted.)

The World Is Ending And Nobody Knows! (Campaign)

Inspired by the below-mentioned Suppressed Transmission.

Essential Concept: The world, or rather, society, is going to collapse in the near future (from weeks to years). However, this is not common knowledge. The cause of the collapse may be a "nova" event as Hite has suggested, or it may be a slow slide into anarchy or barbarism. The question for the players, then, is either "You know about this; what do you do?" or "Do you find out about this?"

Major players can include the government, organized crime, academia, average Joes, extremist groups (survivalists, eco-terrorists, radical cults), secret societies (the Illuminati, anyone?), the underclass, etc.

Themes can include stopping the change, accelerating or supporting the change, capitalizing on the change, or surviving the change.

Other themes (like, actual themes): kindness to strangers, survival at all costs, fighting against the inevitable, How to Turn A Buck On A Disaster, etc.

So what causes this? Well, there are the usual suspects for a "nova," esp. as illuminated by Kenneth Hite in his Suppressed Transmission Going Nova: Big Newness In Your Campaign: The conspiracies stand revealed, the occult powers take over the world, the fundamental reality of the world changes somehow. Or there are the old standbys of the movies: a comet is going to strike earth, a plague is about to be released, killing 90% of the population (and turning the rest into zombies?), alien invasion, nuclear war, massive climate change, or even just plain old civilization collapsing into barbarism. Plus, there are some that roleplaying games tend to admire, such as the awakening of magic in the world (for a magical world, the magic disappears), everyone suddenly gets psionic powers. In short, the cause can be anything, and whatever it is, it will make a significant difference in your campaign. A game where the dead rise to eat the brains of the living will have a completely different flavor from one where magic returns or from the chaos when all the conspiracies are revealed.

Inversions

This is a special category of campaign seed. These are campaign or setting ideas I've had where the normal assumptions of an established setting or genre are turned on their heads.

For the Good of the Empire

After a thousand years of corruption and decay, the cancer of the Old Republic has been swept away. Under the fair and just leadership of Emperor Palpatine, the galaxy is experiencing a renaissance. Not everyone is happy with the New Order, however. Aristocrats jealous of their ancient priveliges, demagogues willing to sacrifice the masses for personal power, and republican fanatics still cling to the old ways and attempt to topple the government, wrapping the galaxy in the fires of Rebellion.

Yes, it's Star Wars -- but in this worldview, George Lucas' movies were Rebel propaganda, Alderaan was a hotbed of rebellion and terrorism, and the heroes of the Alliance are depraved or misguided zealots in service to a dying oligarchy rejected by the people of the galaxy. Player characters might be heroic Imperial officers, keeping law and order in the chaos of the Rim; acolytes of the Sith, reviving the old religion under the guidance of Lord Vader; traders taking advantage of new markets opened by the Empire's scouts; or even misguided rebels.

National Socialist Elves

The civilized lands of humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings have suffered under the assaults and ravages of the "evil" races for centuries. Over the past five hundred years or so, a general peace has been reached, with the evil races in question beginning to integrate into the civilized world with their own nations, settlements, etc. As the campaign begins, or shortly before, the chief elven and human kingdoms (and probably dwarven, with the other small folk as minorities) are experiencing a backlash against the ignoble races. A notable leader, probably the king, seizes on this backlash and uses it to consolidate his power (he really believes in it, though). The backlash and new politics follow these tenets:

• The Noble races must be preserved to fulfill their destiny of a new and better world.
• The Ignoble races are, and always will be, a malevolent and eternal foe to the Noble races.
• Therefore, to preserve good and wipe out evil, the Ignoble races must be conquered, contained, and eventually exterminated.
• As a corollary, half-breeds and Fallen Nobles are an abomination, as they pollute the Noble races with Ignoble blood.

This is, of course, a close parallel with Nazi Germany & so on. I'll probably want to toss in an SS-analogue (The King's Own, or something) and suchlike.