Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Vikings Versus Venusians

At one time, like back in 'o4, I swore to Peryton that I was going to write the most rambling, rather pointless RPG setting that I could think of. The title from a weird CoC game that I ran back in the 80s became this project's name which is "Vikings Versus Venusians." It was my take on the Highlander movie the new White Wolf style introspective games coming out back then for that game system but with reincarnation and astrology worked in.

I've even made notes on this. Player-Characters roll to see how many pass lives that they have, and based on a rating, get random flashbacks during the course of any adventure. The Venusians are not actually from Venus, but a dimension where the gateway to that world opens only when the Earth and Venus are at a certain conjunction to on another, so it only appears that the invading aliens are coming from Venus, to the defending Vikings. The Vikings themselves are not often really Vikings, only having a one in ten chance of even being a reincarnated Dane, Swede, Nordansk, et al. on the reincarnation chart, but the defenders of Earth are a secret order that calls themselves the Norse. Neutral characters could berandom psychics that came into contact with the highly psionic Venusians as well as the Old Souls of the Earth's guardians. These neutral PCs could not have a reincarnation but might think that they do because a Venusian, or a demon, or an Atlantean, acting like a previous life of that character. Then there is some astrological charting guidelines that are meant to modify Character rolls during the course of play each season, but these can be randomly generated with a series of dice rolls or calculated by the GM as needed.

And then I stopped. I stopped not because things were getting too wild for a game system-- indeed the complete notes are barely a dozen pages-- but it could all be fit into one scenario. Try as I might, I could not stretch this RPG premise out to a whole game, even a pamphlet sized one. I blame mostly my better control of game session pacing now that "one off" scenarios are what I usually run 75% of any year.

Still I wonder, can I turn this into a game? More than likely it'll just be a Wobble scenario if I ever try to make this silliness presentable.

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