The RPG Anthology

[RobertMason]

Among my many other projects is the RPG Anthology, which would contain about 15 rules-lite RPG games, each twenty pages or less (including both crunch and fluff). Even assuming that each game would be played once (and I'd think that you could at least play any of them a couple of times, unless you were tremendously easily bored by New Things), it'd still be a lot of bang for your buck (and a lot of these you could probably get ten or twenty sessions out of, or even an entire campaign, not to mention what you can do after modifying them further).

I'll update this a few times a week, but here are quick three-to-four sentence outlines for the games which I'm currently considering:

Gonzo Characters are agents of a time police agency or something similar, tasked with going back in time and stopping time criminals. There is no GM, and instead antagonists and troubles are designed through random rolls of the dice, and the simple desire to have Something Awesome happen. This can result in, say, an ex-hitman from a species of intelligent cockroaches which evolved millions of years after the extinction of mankind, a cybernetic agent of Mossad, and a Ferrari which has been infected by an AI virus, being sent back in time to the Roaring Twenties in order to stop a schizophrenic chimpanzee from giving a perpetual energy device to Wizard-Hitler.*

Unnamed; henceforth referred to as "Rats RPG" Characters are rats, and have to deal with the day-to-day lives of being, well, rats, and trying to get food while avoiding death at the hands of Things Bigger Than Them. They have their own culture, and other animals have their own cultures hinted at (although skewed through the rats' eyes; feline culture is perceived as very bloodthirsty and cruel, because that's all which the rats see), and have a system of magic which involves summoning up ever-hungry gods and convincing those gods to do what they ask, and to not eat them. It's highly dangerous, and there are times when you might just want to take your chances with the cat, rather than convince a god to kill the cat.

Vampires... IN SPACE!! Space Opera setting, with horrific atmosphere. The characters are agents of an organization which deals with vampires, which can take an infinite variety of forms and classes, and whose only unifying link is that they are predatory beings which can infect others with their condition. The players are actually going up against the GM, who has a certain amount of points with which to set up opposition. Sessions are split between investigation and then dealing with the vampire itself, and players get an advantage by increasing the terror of their characters.

Tall Tales Set in the wild west, the characters are Mythic Heroes who must participate in apparently impossible exploits in order to strengthen Story, which in turn empowers them further in a manner appropriate to what stories they have inspired with the act. As time goes on, the only really appropriate challenges come from other Mythic Heroes, while those who are generally ignored by Story can use Determination to break the way that the legends are supposed to go, and oppose even the greatest of Mythic Heroes, but in the process risk becoming that very thing which they stand against. Story itself is an entity as much as it is a force and a process, and what it has in mind is anyone's guess, as Mythic Heroes across the land strengthen it more and more, and it changes the scope of reality ever further.

Nascent Gods Suddenly, the characters have the power to alter reality, but unfortunately do not start out with fine control (it's ridiculously simple to affect "all living things" but nearly impossible to affect only one person) and restraint (until you learn how to keep yourself under control, there's a risk of any stray thought at all suddenly triggering your abilities). The game starts out with the trouble apparently arising solely from these two concerns, but they'll learn sooner or later that their reality warping is attracting the attention of horrors which call themselves angels, claim to be servants of a recently-deceased god, explain that it is their duty to kill the characters so that their power can be reclaimed, and prove to not only be invulnerable to the powers of the characters but can in some cases "unravel" what they have done.

Unnamed; henceforth referred to as "Petpunk" Inspired by WE3, the characters are cybernetically-enhanced animals whose hardware is made up of various modifiers (such as damage modifier, area of effect, capacity, attribute enhancement, and so on) which are then explained with player-determined fluff (and since a flamethrower can just as easily be a strange ray gun, or a blast of fiery breath, this works for a pocket-monster styled game as well). There'll be many different species to choose from, ranging from rats to cats to birds to dogs.

Solitas The characters are incarnations of minor, weak things which no longer have much power in the world (elephants are going extinct and chivalrous warfare no longer receives much attention, to give two examples) and which are struggling to obtain "ley," which grants them that power. Ley naturally coalesces in certain places, but is also soaked up at a certain rate by humans and stored in their portions of The Dreaming, which is made up from the collective subconscious. Powers are not dependent on what one is an incarnation of, and running out of ley not only means one's own death but also the destruction of what one represents, yet if one can also bring one's concept back to dominance in the world if only the dangers inherent in obtaining so much ley can be survived.

Playing Gods The characters are god-like beings who acquire energy each turn with which they can shape the world, populate it, guide their creations, and ultimately either destroy their rivals or come to some sort of accord. It works very well as an endless sort of game, although those who want to make it competitive can do so as easily as doing what is necessary to eliminate the other gods (which requires an assault on them through one's own creations, as the gods cannot themselves harm each other).

Breaking Point Currently with no real fluff yet, the game will have several different sanity meters, each one for a different broad manner of mental instability. By willing taking upon oneself instability points, one can gain short-term benefits, and once a certain amount of instability is reached, permanent damage is dealt to the character, giving a moderate benefit but also major psychological damage. The Cthulhu Mythos would fit well here, if you wanted to reward characters for willingly going insane, and so would Neon Genesis Evangelion, if you didn't mind drawing up some loose mechanics to account for the mechs.

Slices of Life The characters are "faeries," constructs of stolen Passion transmuted into magical energy and woven into physical form. Passion must be burned every day in order to survive and can be spent in order to provide attributes, but only so much Passion can be contained at any one time. Characters must also maintain relationships with entirely human individuals, whether they be lovers or bloody enemies or something else entirely, in order to hold Passion, and these relationships will provide much of the driving force of the story. Characters might angst should their feeding habits cause permanent harm to a friend, but players are encouraged to remember that faeries are well-used to the idea that humans are, basically, intelligent sources of food who can be individually endearing.

Discount Salsa The characters are the handlers for their agents, and monitor and oversee those agents as they undertake missions of a nearly endless variety. The agents, however, are no mere human specimens, but instead have been altered through rediscovered sorceries, genetic manipulation, and drugs concocted from the blood of dead-yet-dreaming gods. Half of the game is making sure that the agents undertake their missions successfully, while the other half is maintaining a strong enough relationship that those agents will trust them and more often than not act not as they wish or think is best, but as the agent orders them to do so. Unfortunately, handlers must figure out the finer points of their agents' personalities over time, before they can take those into account, and keeping a good, close, trusting relationship with the equivalent of a Lovecraftian Hannibal Lecter has never turned out to be conducive to long-term mental health.

4-Color Four forces called the Yellow, the Black, the Red, and the Blue have chosen this world as a battleground, and empower champions for their cause, who quickly become reminiscent of superheroes. Each of the four forces provides different types of abilities (Black Champions manipulate energy, for example, while Red Champions are physically enhanced, whether in speed, senses, strength, durability, or something else entirely) and as they reach certain levels of alteration, the changes become more pronounced, even slightly detrimental, and the force which empowers them begins to influence their minds.