Joe's GM Wish List

Hello.

This is a collection of write-ups on a handful of the sorts of games I'd love to run, given the opportunity. I have probably pointed you toward this page, in hopes of figuring out what it is that I'd like to run next. So, without further ado:

End of Days

A Scion Chronicle
These are the end times, the End of Days.

It began with a small rumble, a disturbance that no one noticed in the frantic information glut of the early 2010s. In the middle of political outrages, class conflict between the haves and the have-nots, fears over misogyny, racism and homophobia, concerns over First World freedoms, the latest memes to crawl across the information networks of the world and the thousand-thousand shrieking voices vying for attention at the end of 2012, it happened. The prison shattered.

At first the reports were dismissed as attention-seeking pranks. No serious journalist credited them, and even if they did, the shareholders in the media conglomerates weren't about to risk their credibility and good name reporting nonsense. Giants in the Alps, fiery serpents in the hearts of newly-active volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, great thunderbirds swooping through the hearts of storms that rumbled across the Midwest.

By the time the reports garnered any kind of actual attention on a world-wide scale, it was too late. The governments of the world were the first to take them seriously, of course. As it turned out, the world's governments had known of the strange men and women throughout history who occasionally came to their attention. Indeed, they were complicit in helping these occasional heroes with the blood of gods to hide their existence from the rest of mankind.

For at least three mortal generations, the warnings had been there. Since World War II, possibly since the igniting of the first atom bomb. The gods were paying attention once more, sending their herald to awaken the divine blood in their children, to take up celestial arms and fight the minions of the Titans while the gods themselves engaged the Titans themselves in the realms beyond the ken of mortals. Such battles were waged in secret, covert wars between godkin and titanspawn, with mortal intelligence agencies and corporations doing their best to keep everything hidden, so as not to shatter the very understanding the world had of itself.

Perhaps they should have bent more of their efforts at winning that war than hiding it.

No one knows which Titan broke loose first. With the strange deathknell of the year, marked in the Mayan calendar so many centuries before, the prisons were at their weakest. The world descended into terrible madness. A sun erupted over the sands of Egypt, turning the sand for miles around an ancient necropolis to glass. Ships all throughout the Caribbean were lost in a strange mist that rose up, spewing the dead from the waters. The smouldering ground of Centralia, Pennsylvania cracked and split in an inferno that birthed tall terrible towers of black basalt, which rose high into the air, a deadly cathedral to that which burned.

Tunnels and mines the world over spewed darkness itself into the world around them, clutching at all that was living and pulling it into the suffocating darkness below. A great hurricane blew into the Gulf of Mexico, and grew, and grew, and grew, until it encompassed the whole of that body of water, throwing smaller hurricanes onto the lands around it like a child scattering flower petals around it.

Across the world, horrors awoke, and mankind died by the cityful.

It has been five years since the End of Days, and mankind is a hunted, harried thing. Most humans dwell in tucked-away places, having learned that fighting the spawn of the Titans brings only escalating deaths. Thus, men flee and hide. Occasionally, the heralds still appear, to give men hope. These demigods are not the aloof, hidden secret masters that once fought the secret god-wars before the End. Now they are bright and shining champions, and humans rally around them in desperation.

You are one such hero, gifted with the blood of the gods. People rally around you, seeking your help, begging for your protection, for you are one of the few in the world who can defend them from the death that awaits them in this Titan-haunted wasteland that was once man’s world.

The Fiercest Lords

A Song of Ice & Fire Roleplaying Chronicle
Of all the tyrants the world affords, our own affections are the fiercest lords.
The lords of the Houses of Westeros live enviable lives. With great castles as their seats, ancient alliances to call upon, armies of killing men to obey them, knights to protect them and maesters to serve them, who has it so fine? At least, that's what the smallfolk think. In truth, the lives of Westeros' lords are often brutal and short, lived in sacrifice balanced between doing what one wants and what is best for one's House. Alliances between lords - whether recent or generations-old - can be the only means by which lords survive. And, as some have noted before: In the game of thrones, you win or you die.

This chronicle will be played in the "Game of Thrones" style of SIFRP gameplay. That is, each player will generate a minor House, which will determine how many player characters they will create (one per 10 points of Influence in their House). The players in the troupe will all be neighbors and allies, their characters spouses, wards, sworn knights or others associated with one anothers' Houses. This will explicitly be a troupe-style game, in which players will shift between their characters, based on the logic of the scenes presented; it is also explicitly a game that will require out-of-game communication to handle secrets, plots and other such things.

Players should be familiar with the Westeros setting. The group will choose which of the following Realms the game will be based out of: The North, the Riverlands, the Iron Islands, the Vale of Arryn, the Westerlands, the Stormlands & Crownlands, the Reach, Dorne.