Ideas for a new game: Walkers in the Iced Deserts

[Judging__Eagle]

I'm honestly not really sure where to go with this.

I want to make this as an idea for a semi-futuristic setting, but have some ideas that I want to use some cute cartoony characters that I drew yesterday and want to make a game that uses them. Whatever. I want to play or run a more modern game myself.

Premise:

Global Warming kept going. Temperate/Artcic latitudes suffered the most.

India and China decided that the rest of the middle east looked like a fun place to expand to.

Pakistan doesn't like this, war were declared. Missles were fired, but missed, sand and dirt got powdered, the middle east and the territories that broke off from the former USSR.

A lot of people all over the place get uber-pissed, but the territories that get torched are pretty much 'useless' to most of the global economy and nothing is really done.

Sino-Indo colonists move north into these new terriotories. Most of them are forced there, think American and Australian labour colonies, plus some extremely ambitious independents that want to exploit natural resources.

Northern latitude nations looked at these new 'cooler' areas that were now starved of life, but were able to set up shop in and have started to move in by travelling south.

This 'new temperate' region is still irradiated in areas, but the cooling effect is much wider than the irradiated areas. So you carry a geiger counter or at least a plastic badge that changes colour as it absorbs more radiation.

The region is now full of small farms and factories that produce some good that they ship back to the 'hot' zones to the north or to the 'crowded' zones to the south.

These 'business bases' were set up by different corps and governments as a way to set up safe production facilities in isolated areas that can't be easily raided by depserate people in more crowded or desperate regions.

The 'Factories' are nearly exclusively nano-factories; they take local materials and produce products that the factory owner has 'plans' for; anything from firearms to sex toys to electronics to machines for extracting resources from the ground.

The Farms are either vats that grow food or stacked up greenhouses or feeder pens for cattle or all three.

This is where the PCs come in, they're sent to do a variety of tasks for their local factory/farm:

-Clear out locals that weren't killed by the initial missles or later invasions and wars. Yes, this could mean killing women and children, or killing their fathers and letting them then starve or get preyed upon by neighbouring tribes or an other group

-Scout out new routes between farming/factory installations that have low radiation levels

-Find an installation that has a food or product that your base wants; this can involve going into an 'enemy' base to trade them something that might want, for something that you want from them

-Raid an installation for plans for a product that your base has the resources to manufacture.

[Maxus]

If you wanted to be truthfully futuristic, in five hundred or a thousand years--a pittance of geological time--the glaciers are probably going to be advancing again and we'll be back in Neanderthal-ish weather for most of the temperate latitudes. In accordance with the Vail Curve and all that.

Oddly enough, humanity probably could live with some serious glaciation going on.

[Judging__Eagle]

True, on the whole 'global warming will lead to an ice age'.

It's a joke that I've been talking about with a friend of mine after reading Bill Byrson's "a brief history of nearly everything".

Five hundred years; man I have no fucking clue what tech would look like at that point.

Maybe I could use powered armour and use monsters and mutants and robots out of the Omega Worl book from a polyhedron issue that I have kicking around.

Toss in glaciers that crawled down from the mountains and some really high tech gear (aka, 'magical' gear).

I'll probably keep everyone on the same class that gives RoW combat and Skill feats; and maybe use the Cannonball Run polyhedron rules for Vehicle maneuvering and combat to incorporate vehicles into the game.

Yeah, that could work.

I just want to run a game where guns can kill people and PCs can die.

[Maxus]

If you wanted to be scientifically accurate, we're in an ice age.

Right now.

What's unusual about the planet right now is not that it's heating up, but that it actually has continental ice on it right now. This is only the fifth time in the planet's history that it's done this--and it's only been doing it for a couple of million years, when the previous ice ages lasted for a hundred or two hundred million years.

My quibbling aside (I'm a geology major. Third year. Getting this stuff right is getting to be a habit), I know someone who runs very action-movie-esque d20 Modern games by resticting HP growth to the first two levels, and then every third level after that. Or something like that.

It generally means you *do* pay attention to cover when he offers it.

[Judging__Eagle]

Yeah, I know how you feel about 'getting stuff right'. My problem is that honestly, there is too much for my little human brain to contain without exploding.

Restricting HP growth could work; weapons won't really change or get better.

What I plan on doing is having everyone play one 'generic' class.

I'm thinking:

BaB: Medium BaB;
HD: d8 HD;

Skills: Choose any 10; those you can have max ranks in (level +3); everything else is limited to cross-class max ranks ((level +3 )/2).

Skill points: 6 Skill points a level; and all saves are moderate (d20 moderen saves I guess?) that or you get to pick one good save at 1st level, one save is moderate and the last one is poor.

Every level you pick a feat; that's your class feature, you get a Feat a level.

[Maxus]

You may want to rethink just giving them feats. I mean, feats *are* usually conservative.

[Prak]

1204322169[/unixtime]]True, on the whole 'global warming will lead to an ice age'.

It's a joke that I've been talking about with a friend of mine after reading Bill Byrson's "a brief history of nearly everything".

Five hundred years; man I have no fucking clue what tech would look like at that point.

Maybe I could use powered armour and use monsters and mutants and robots out of the Omega Worl book from a polyhedron issue that I have kicking around.

Toss in glaciers that crawled down from the mountains and some really high tech gear (aka, 'magical' gear).

I'll probably keep everyone on the same class that gives RoW combat and Skill feats; and maybe use the Cannonball Run polyhedron rules for Vehicle maneuvering and combat to incorporate vehicles into the game.

Yeah, that could work.

I just want to run a game where guns can kill people and PCs can die.

Ha, Polyhedron, I used to grab those up... I've actually got the Cannonball run issue, as well as, I think, the Gamma World issue. I'd love to try this out.

While we're on the subject.... what's up with Planar Raiders!?

[Judging__Eagle]

School killed me when I got back and still is (reading week was hardly the 'break' that it is for most college or university students; I only got to relax on the thursday and friday of coming back to school), plus I'm having some other things occupying me. I haven't even been on these boards more than once every two weeks until now.

I think that I've also burned myself out on running fantasy games; mostly because when I run them I think about far too many things that aren't 'normal' and how to account for them and integrate them into the world.

As it stands I've been developing more ideas for games and settings than I have time to even think about running; mostly because I can write a bunch of ideas down in less time than I can flesh them out enough to run them, let alone find the time to run them. Any free hours that I get in a week I spend just sitting down with my friends; last time that happened was... more than a month ago for 3-4 hours?