Author Topic: Advice needed: GURPS campaign, X-Files in 1947  (Read 2995 times)

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pfooti

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Advice needed: GURPS campaign, X-Files in 1947
« on: May 17, 2008, 12:56:56 AM »
I'm working out some ideas to make a new GURPS campaign. I'm pretty sure I'll get to run it with my tabletop group starting in about 6 months. I'd love some advice, because I'm starting out flying in a totally new direction. Rather than treading well-worn trails (High Fantasy, Cyberpunk), I'm trying to make something marginally new.

The nutshell is: it's a gameworld with semi-frequent occult and weird occurrences. These occurrences are all very recent, as a result of Germany and Japan's use of the occult in the (parallel history) World War II, and the eventual "fallout" from the manhattan project analogue (it was a big magic bomb rather than an atomic one). The PCs start up about 6 months after the war is over, as a group of people put together by the Government (military? civil? intelligence?) to investigate and contain paranormal events. Something like X-Files, or MiB, but set in the late 1940s.

I've got a whole lot more figured out and written down, but I don't want to bore you, and it's mostly window-dressing and backstory. What I need is frontstory - what happens after the curtain goes up.

I've already gotten some good ideas looking here: the Creepy Events thread is a great idea, I'll be stealing probably all of those, but those are largely very cool things to put into a flow rather than adventure seeds.

What I'm hoping to get from this thread is help developing a set of adventure seeds. I figure I need to come up with a set of Episodes and develop an underlying Arc that ties some of those Episodes together (reoccurring villain, sinister conspiracy). I'm not asking for whole adventures (but if you happen to know of any good articles / modules published that I could rip off, by all means point me in the right direction), but I'd love to hear some seeds.

I'm really excited about the setting. It makes for easy fun in a lot of ways (Nazis make great villains, and the Sinister Conspiracy could very easily be the 4th Reich, for example), and it seems like I could steal from a lot of different places. Hellboy, for example, starts in the right place, but the only graphic novel I have (Seed of Destruction) moves to the Present pretty quickly. But there's plenty to go on, even stealing from Indiana Jones and/or The Mummy and stuff like that.

So... any advice or ideas at all are totally welcome.


Tazendra

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Re: Advice needed: GURPS campaign, X-Files in 1947
« Reply #1 on: May 17, 2008, 01:11:07 AM »
How about incorporating something about the Cold War. All the world's major powers are competing to learn as much as they can about the occult, in a sort of magical arms race.

pfooti

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Re: Advice needed: GURPS campaign, X-Files in 1947
« Reply #2 on: May 17, 2008, 01:41:21 AM »
That's a good idea for a developing arc - the rise of communism, the cold war, mccarthyism. Good grist for heady RP in there, I'd say.

Plus which, spies and secret agents. That's a whole extra dimension: James Bond, Wizard.

Josh

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Re: Advice needed: GURPS campaign, X-Files in 1947
« Reply #3 on: May 17, 2008, 04:14:19 AM »
The big thing to consider is "who are the PCs and what do they do?"

What are the adventures that they will go on?  Investigation?  Action?  Political?  What are you and your players interested in?

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DaveTheMagicWeasel

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Re: Advice needed: GURPS campaign, X-Files in 1947
« Reply #4 on: May 18, 2008, 08:24:36 PM »
Did you ever watch Dark Skies?  There was only one series, but it was all about Project Majestic in the 50s and 60s, could be good for some inspiration, and the Ganglain aliens would be great for conspiracies.