Without further ado, except for my apologies for the delay, here are the five six best ideas I received!
Game I Most Want to See On the Shelves
Some starships have mood lighting, spotless matching leotards for an elite crew, and AI targeted terawatt lasers. Then there’s your kind of starship, which looks like somebody lashed a bunch of boxes together (you did). Sure, your antiship lasers are really just scruffy dudes with laser rifles, but you’re a scrappy bunch of survivors!
Boarding Party is what happens when two of those ships run into each other. Each boxed set is enough for a complete two player game, and contains a rulebook, foldout grid, 182 laminated cards, unit tokens, and a dry-erase marker for drawing little explosions on destroyed cards. Ships are represented by cards placed on the grid, and players move units to explore each other’s ships and destroy the power core.
The catch is, the enemy ship is unknown until explored! Cards are two-sided, with a picture of corridors on the back and a ship module on the front. Once you’ve designed your ship (and written down what goes where), place your cards onto the gameboard face down, with the exception of the face-up power core. Units, and some cards, are moved or used on a turn by turn basis, but you may activate your modules by flipping them face up at any time. These range from upgrades (Really Big Armory, Jetpacks!) to deathtraps (Solid Steel Wall, Corridor of Acid Covered Spikes), to situational tricks like the Monster Closet, Teleporter Room, and Energy Sink.
Don’t forget the Alien Assault expansion, with new cards and Infested Ship rules!
Let’s start with the bad: this idea has mostly been done (in different genres). It’s kinda ZOMBIES!!! meets Space Trucker. It’s well-trod territory, and that bumps you to the bottom of the list.
That said, I would buy the fuck out of this game. It’s my kind of genre: space, ruffians, piracy, and hilarity. I dig games that don’t take themselves seriously, and I love the idea of each ship being randomized. I think my friends and I could have a really fun time.
As with many of the other ideas, you’re going to have issues with costs and production, like all other game companies. What’s more, you’re going to be diving into a saturated board game market. Good hunting.
Most Interesting RPG Supplement/Setting
Title: Aztlan
Outline:
The land is dying. The caves of Chicomoztoc, where the Seven Tribes arose, are falling to the forces of death. Mictlan’s forces claim more each night. The people must find a new home. Some look to the mountain jungles, or would follow the eagles to a new land. Some would cross the waters or even want to go back to reclaim the caves in battle. The arguing wastes time and lives.
But there are heroes. You, who resist Mictlan’s power, can save them. Jaguar Warriors, who trade their souls to the night for the power to resist death by being beasts. The Birdmen, who take mystic herbs for the strength to escape Mictlan on wings of light. The Smoke Mirrors, who seize Mictlan’s power and use death to conquer death. There are these methods and more. You are immortals, who have fought free of death, and it’s your job to lead the people home.
Each PC in Aztlan is immortal. However, that doesn’t mean they’re invincible – defeating death has a that price must always be paid. Aztlan is a game of heroes leading their people to safety or destruction, with each PC wielding great power and the responsibility that comes with it. Characters succeed far more often than they fail, except when opposed by others of power. Their followers, though, are less capable. What will you do to ensure that your people survive and find a new homeland? What price is too high when your enemy is death itself?
Well, I mentioned for Anthropological Fantasy, and I got it. This is an awesomely themed idea in line with Maztica, except better (of course, Maztica sucked ass). I can see this being a very attractive setting book, with maybe a few subsequent books and adventures to flesh out the setting and characters.
The biggest draw away from it would be the general unfamiliarity of, well, most people with early Mesoamerican history/prehistory. Most people pretty much see it as blood sacrifices and calendars. Maybe this could be an opportunity for education!
Most Challenging to the Notion of “Tabletop Game”
Vessel of Pure Conception
An RPG by Sulecrist!
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The players are Searchers pursing Primal Truth. The Primal Truth is held in a Vessel of Pure Conception (VPC), which all can see but no one wants to experience.
Anyone may use Reason (which is ice). Each Searcher brings Weaknesses (in bottles) and his own cup-sized Vessel.
There is Iblis, the GM. He chooses the VPC (coffee-cup-to-soup-bowl-sized) and describes the Searchers’ obstructions. Iblis also has Insights (in bottles). Insights should mix nicely with Weaknesses but not brace terribly by themselves.
At any time, a Searcher may add Reason to his Vessel, or Insights or Weaknesses to any Vessel on the table. If he’s caught adding anything to any Vessel but his own or the VPC, he must add its contents to his own. If his Vessel overflows, his character dies.
Turns, starting with Iblis, circle the table. Iblis recites a ten-syllable Cryptic, but otherwise acts like a Searcher. A Searcher’s turn is one of the following actions, with in-character description:
-Drain his Vessel AND order someone with a Vessel to drain it, or
-Drain his Vessel AND claim an Insight (if he has one, he trades one Insight for another), or
-Drain the VPC. His Vessel then becomes Iblis’s.
He then repeats the Cryptic. If he fails, his character dies, unless he’s Iblis, in which case he drains the VPC.
If a Searcher has no Vessel, he must, on his turn, drain the VPC.
Only one Searcher–the last to correctly recite the Cryptic–survives.
Sulecrist, congratulations; The structural integrity of my mind is certainly suffering! This is like a storygame drinking competition with Telephone mixed in (no pun intended). Holy fuck; this could be fun for the right group of people.
Obviously, your explanation suffers from the word limit, but a full game would probably do a much better job. I love the idea of making these sorts of in-game choices with very real (and potentially dire) metagame consequences. The philosophical decisions echo in the physical world.
On a marketing standpoint, this game is…difficult. I mean, who are you marketing to? RPG Party nerds? That’s a market, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s an especially lucrative one. I can see some cross-genre appeal with LARP kids.
Most Ambitious Idea
Earth’s Eternal Night
In the future eternal night is falling, and the world’s monsters are at war. The demons of humanity’s soul – the Dragons, Vampires, Werewolves and other monsters – now do battle with the remnants of once advanced civilizations. Humanity is not without its hopes, however. With the advent of monsters there also arise human powers. Ancient orders of knights, advanced special forces and long-hidden wizards hold the darkness at bay.
The player will take control of a character of one of the available factions, divided into the monstrous races and the human factions. Who will rule over Earth’s Eternal Night?
The core concept of this game is a card game playable on multiple levels. It can be played as a “pure game” or with roleplaying, ranging from solitaire play to two-player versus matches to cooperative or competitive group games. Each player generates their character using a small side deck of statistics cards and equipment, then creates their own unique action deck consisting of things their character can do in the game. There will be some faction mixing, allowing for a diverse array of strategies.
Most important is accessibility. The complete rules for the game should be contained within the basic decks plus at most a small booklet, allowing anyone to buy a deck and jump into a game as quickly as possible. The multiple levels of play will hopefully make finding people to play with as easy as possible.
This blurb is spectacularly written; I want everyone to look at the structure: lead-in with story, explain the player’s role, go into system and design aspects. I am sold just on the idea that it’s designed to be simple, accessible, and consistently interesting. Plus, the setting rules.
However, this game is ambitious as fuck. I’m reading a game involving design for thousands of cards, balancing “simple” rules for all of the mechanics included on these various cards, and integrating a real multiplayer into a genre that traditionally stumbles in that area. You’d need a really solid design team, and a lot of fucking money, to make this work.
That said, if it did work, you could have something that competes on the level of Game of Thrones or World of Warcraft (the LCG/TCGs, of course). The unoriginality of the genre is overshadowed by the fact that this game has very concrete design goals designed to make it stand out.
Okay, these next two entries require some explanation. Well, not a lot; it comes down to the idea that I decided I wanted two winners. The first is a winner because it’s the most absolutely original idea that I had, but is virtually unmarketable. The second is a winner because it’s really original and appeals to the real subject of this blog: how to make a good RPG business. What? How can this be?
FOR HE IS THE KWISATZ HADERACH!
Co-Winner Number One!
Trapped in a Dream (TriaD)
TriaD is a party game RPG inspired by Everyone is John and the like, but fixes the major problem with EiJ. In TriaD, everybody plays. Since seeing this picture http://i.imgur.com/DbEP9.jpg I wanted to play it.
One player is the dreamer and the others collaboratively make the environment, essentially one PC with several GMs. The protagonist is a person caught in a dream, trying to escape to consciousness. Before playing every player writes down events, thoughts, and people from their day, (at least one each) and puts them in a hat. The first ‘player’ is chosen and two others draw slips for the setting and antagonist of the scene. If the setting is Grandma, be allegorical and run with it! You’re dreaming! Other players are encouraged to draw a slip and add wrinkles, or portray things the first two introduced from theirs. The current protagonist narrates how they overcome or escape the situation, and anything straining the dream reality requires a coinflip of heads to succeed. Notable creativity is rewarded with the used slips balled up as counters that can buy re-flips. Players can give any counters they have to one another freely, eventually encouraging a cascade of reality-breaking. Play rotates until there are one or fewer slips remaining, at which point the current dreamer must overcome all undefeated antagonists. TriaD lets you play anything from Inception to David Lynch and beyond, and can be played anywhere. It’s exactly what you make it, just like your own dreams.
Once I get past my inherent, reactionary hatred for storygame-type games, I am absolutely in love with this. The idea of four people collaboratively creating a surreal dreamscape for a single player is such a delicious inversion of the standard RPG dynamic, and it’s a concept that anyone, anywhere can immediately understand. What’s more, it allows people to legitimately flex their own creativity with virtually no rules.
It is, in fact, exactly what you make it, and you can make it anything. This is the heart and soul of RPGs, captured in a new and invigorating way. I want to play this, and I want to play it right now.
Co-Winner Number Two!
RPG in an App
You purchase this game as a mobile phone app. When you sit down to play it, you get some friends together in the same room and start up the app, and it proceeds to walk you through a series of prompts, often for role-playing short scenes, but sometimes asking you to read something aloud, sometimes telling you to pass the phone to someone else, sometimes asking for input such as a character’s name, and possibly using the phone’s camera or other features. Behind the scenes it is walking you through the procedures of play, and where appropriate generating random numbers, pulling random story elements from tables, slotting in data you’ve input or that the app gets from the phone (time, weather, etc.), and so on. Only one person has to have a compatible smartphone to allow a whole group to play the game, and like most apps it’s at an impulse buy price. The game is designed to have a decent amount of replay value, but there would be other apps adapting the basic structure to other kinds of subject matter and gameplay.
This idea preserves the “social” aspect of gaming, all while integrating technology in a manner that every single game publisher has pretty well refused to. This could be a real killer app, no pun intended: take all of the potentially arduous parts out of gaming, and make it a purely automated, social experience, sort of like a multiplayer, customizable choose-your-own-adventure. Who wouldn’t be sold by that?
What’s more, it’s infinitely expandable; you aren’t tied to any one setting or system. Your branding is based on the methodology, not anything specific, so you can sell a Fantasy and SciFi and Crime Scene and anything you like.
Additionally, this is the sort of endeavor that a small group could accomplish. A good mobile coder, a good writer, and a good artist are all you’d need. It would be a significant investment in time and money, though; but I can see that investment paying off. Good job!
Congratulations to our winners, “General Ironicus” and Ewen! Both of you have earned a TEN DOLLAR BOUNTY for your idea. I will email you shortly with details. Thank you to everyone who participated!
