Ridiculous (Bad) Game/Campaign Ideas

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Gabriel

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Share the most ill conceived stuff you can come up with.

How about a DARK & GRITTY version of the Catillac Cats? Yes, it must be run on the TMNT/After the Bomb game system. These aren't cute and cuddy felines in a comedic world. These guys life in a dangerous cyberpunk world where violence lurks around every corner.

Scary extra note: That one almost happened when I was younger. For some reason I was enamored with the Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats cartoon.

 
I have a weird love of the absurd, so its hard to think of anything that would be legitimately bad to the point of being unable to be enjoyed.

I mean, bar running the settings of FATAL or RaHoWa or something like that.
 
How about a DARK & GRITTY version of the Catillac Cats? Yes, it must be run on the TMNT/After the Bomb game system. These aren't cute and cuddy felines in a comedic world. These guys life in a dangerous cyberpunk world where violence lurks around every corner.
You just turned the corner from awful to awesome...:hehe:
 
Dude I played with very briefly wanted to run a campaign with no fixed end point about climbing the corporate ladder... in real time. In the real world. Played straight. It would have been Job: the Game.

Would you believe he couldn't get any players for that one?
 
How about a DARK & GRITTY version of the Catillac Cats? Yes, it must be run on the TMNT/After the Bomb game system. These aren't cute and cuddy felines in a comedic world. These guys life in a dangerous cyberpunk world where violence lurks around every corner.
Gritty cats remind me of Swat Kats. Cyberpunk Swat Kats sounds class! :thumbsup:
 
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Dude I played with very briefly wanted to run a campaign with no fixed end point about climbing the corporate ladder... in real time. In the real world. Played straight. It would have been Job: the Game.

Would you believe he couldn't get any players for that one?

I would have played that game in the style of Michael Caine in the underrated black comedy A Shock the System.

 
You are space-fighter ships defending earth against evil alien armadas. Note that I said you are ships, not pilots. As in, you are the AIs of such ships. As in, you are never NOT ships in space.

You interact with other ships like the characters from Thomas the Tank Engine: deprived of hands, unable to move outside of a very specific environment, dependent on and envious of the humans who built you to serve. Can you form a culture of your own in this environment?

xQGEuTR.jpg
 
A friend of mine once played an adventure (I use the term loosely), but not a campaign, were all 3 players played desk furniture (paper clip, pencil, eraser). Their game master was into "experimental RPGs".

The funny thing is that game master was one of the very best I ever came accross... that is, outside his "experimental RPGs" phases :-).
 
How about a DARK & GRITTY version of the Catillac Cats? Yes, it must be run on the TMNT/After the Bomb game system. These aren't cute and cuddy felines in a comedic world. These guys life in a dangerous cyberpunk world where violence lurks around every corner.
I think I saw that being offered recently on DriveThruRPG...?
 
It's gotta be the R-9A Arrowhead for me.

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Warhammer 40,000 : Friendship is Heresy. With the aesthetic and storylines of a cutesy kids show, and the violence of... Warhammer 40,000.

Now we just gotta get someone to play the Fire LEO-04 Rynex.

I'm down for Friendship is Heresy too.
 
Triplets of Belleville using the Gumshoe rules. You're a team of very old ladies looking for lost things/people. The setting is a fake New York written up by a Frenchman who has never been there, just watched the movies. Practically none of the NPCs or even PCs talk in-universe, so most of the clue gathering is conducted in broad pantomime. The GM does his best to describe everything as mundane yet off-puttingly misshapen, imaginative yet washed out. Smoking during play is practically mandatory so that everything smells the way this movie looks.

 
How about this for a questionable campaign idea? Time travel is invented in the year 2042 in the form of a machine that can instantaneously transport up to five people at a time to any time between 12,096BC and 1987AD. The only way back to the present is the slow path. A side effect of time travel, however, is that everyone sent back in time is inexplicably gender-flipped.
 
How about this for a questionable campaign idea? Time travel is invented in the year 2042 in the form of a machine that can instantaneously transport up to five people at a time to any time between 12,096BC and 1987AD. The only way back to the present is the slow path. A side effect of time travel, however, is that everyone sent back in time is inexplicably gender-flipped.

Gender flipped each instance of time travel? Or just the initial time trip?
 
Gender flipped each instance of time travel? Or just the initial time trip?
I'd call it every trip back in time. It's one of many weird thoughts I've had that I don't think would work as a sustainable campaign. Might work as a one-shot.
 
I'd call it every trip back in time. It's one of many weird thoughts I've had that I don't think would work as a sustainable campaign. Might work as a one-shot.
The question for me is... why are people going back to the past? What are they doing there? Why are we playing these people?

I could see why the gender flipping would appeal to some characters, but I can't see why we'd be playing them.
 
How about a DARK & GRITTY version of the Catillac Cats? Yes, it must be run on the TMNT/After the Bomb game system. These aren't cute and cuddy felines in a comedic world. These guys life in a dangerous cyberpunk world where violence lurks around every corner.
I think I saw that being offered recently on DriveThruRPG...?

Ha! I didn't hallucinate it!


Not technically cyberpunk, but definitely going for that vibe.
 
Alright, it's Super Mario Bros. meets the Saw movie franchise, with some inspiration from the Dread RPG (the one that uses Jenga blocks)

You play adorable, innocent residents of the mushroom kingdom, a place where even the bad guys are kinda cuddly. But then, a cancerous cartoon turtle who's not cuddly in the slightest starts killing people by setting them up in fiendish deathtraps, spilling a substance no one in the kingdom has ever seen before: blood!

So, you have to investigate.

Couple of rules:
1. No matter how horrible the scenario, the players should still try to act cute and wholesome through the trauma. Bonus lives if they manage to maintain the tone of Super Mario Bros despite the gore-dripping flesh chunklets sliding off shredder blades.
2. The bad guy only communicates with his pursuers through 'hint blocks' filled with cryptic messages.
3. The main resolution mechanic for the game is as follows: Don't bother with too many dice, just let the players get the info they need during the investigation as long as they roleplay well and describe their glue-gathering in detail. However, once in a while have one of them fall into the bad guy's trap. To survive, they have actually play a kaizo-style level made in Mario Maker 2 by the GM. Failure results in a gory end and a new investigator getting genned.

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Gritty cats remind me of Swat Kats. Cyberpunk Swat Kats sounds class! :thumbsup:

Have any of you read Swann's Moreau series? Where uplifted animals from the previous war are eking out a living in a very cyberpunk universe? They're not cartoony though. The books are pretty solidly written and the overall story is interesting. (It's closer to Justifiers meets cyberpunk, on Earth which is really not a big step from core Justifiers, just that the Moreau uplifts are free.) There are also Franks (i.e modified humans, "Frankensteins.)


I once tried to run a superhero campaign where aliens covertly assimilated into our culture for short shore leaves from their colony vessel, they were primarily female and human enough to pass--a combination of the virus that wiped out about 76% of their men and left the survivors as carriers. During sex once infected with the disease (which happened pretty quickly) and due to their innate psychic powers the effect was to trigger human "random" mutations into supers. I suspect a lot of that came from a combination of Wildcards reading, another book I was reading, and the preview for Wildcats from Image. I wanted to take "hybrid" supers from aliens back a stage to some extent. It wasn't common, but imagine thousands of people on a colony spaceship, just wanting to see a living world after years aboard ship, being given a (seemingly) safe outlet for intercourse, not suspecting the retrovirus would actually become active in humans because we lacked psionic abilities. Instead, their energies during the act jump-started ours in a crazy random way rewriting DNA based a bit on wish-fulfillment (but not always positive wish-fulfillment, the disease did kill a number of people as it spread.)

They were also advanced enough to hide at first, without detection but when the common trigger for powers in men and women began with "I met a person, and we hit it off and you know, I started feeling like I had the flu for a week after that then it got worse and bam I'm 9' tall with rhinoceros-like skin! I had to eat everything I owned because I was to sick to go out and was SO hungry and had a horrid fever, body aches, and so on."

It sounded cool in my head, sadly my gamers at the time (barely out of high school) and it didn't end well. I still wish I could make it work conceptually, without it falling into the "silly" stage, but it may be an inherently silly idea. Of course, Wildcard eventually went that way (though not with aliens per se and it was deeply creepy, but that's Martin for you.)
 
You are space-fighter ships defending earth against evil alien armadas. Note that I said you are ships, not pilots. As in, you are the AIs of such ships. As in, you are never NOT ships in space.

You interact with other ships like the characters from Thomas the Tank Engine: deprived of hands, unable to move outside of a very specific environment, dependent on and envious of the humans who built you to serve. Can you form a culture of your own in this environment?

xQGEuTR.jpg

See, I'd be totally into that game. :grin:
 
Alright, it's Super Mario Bros. meets the Saw movie franchise, with some inspiration from the Dread RPG (the one that uses Jenga blocks)

You play adorable, innocent residents of the mushroom kingdom, a place where even the bad guys are kinda cuddly. But then, a cancerous cartoon turtle who's not cuddly in the slightest starts killing people by setting them up in fiendish deathtraps, spilling a substance no one in the kingdom has ever seen before: blood!

I'd play something like this. (Well, minus Jenga and kaizo levels)

I'm not sure if I can really explain it, but this kind of thing was one of the reasons I immediately took a liking to Sonic the Hedgehog when I first played it in 1992. Here was this cute little cartoon character amidst all these cyborgized things out to kill him as well as the potential of being fried alive by lava or impaled by spikes. I can't explain why Mario games had never triggered the reaction, but there was something about Sonic with the cutesy elements contrasted against the violent elements that I got an intense perverse kick out of.

I've never used video games as a pure resolution mechanic, but back in the 90s after the release of Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits for the Playstation, I'd occasionally have players creating new characters play Defender. Their score would be the XP they started with, so there was a chance they could start at something other than 1st level. But no one ever managed to do decent, so I never had to worry about characters starting overleveled.
 
[ . . . ]
I've never used video games as a pure resolution mechanic, but back in the 90s after the release of Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits for the Playstation, I'd occasionally have players creating new characters play Defender. Their score would be the XP they started with, so there was a chance they could start at something other than 1st level. But no one ever managed to do decent, so I never had to worry about characters starting overleveled.
TBF, Defender was actually quite a hard game. It took a lot of practice to get any good at it.
 
The question for me is... why are people going back to the past? What are they doing there? Why are we playing these people?

I could see why the gender flipping would appeal to some characters, but I can't see why we'd be playing them.
Okay, you want PC motivations. Hmm, let's see...

The PCs are the third team to be sent back. The first team was an all-male team with two historians and two linguists. They ventured to 77AD Pompeii to observe what was going on in the region in the years preceding the eruption of Vesuvius. To communicate with the future the team was supposed to leave their report left in a vault that the team knew would be opened in early 2043. The report was to be written in a constructed language invented for the purpose. They failed to leave their report to be found and no historical trace of the team could be found.

A second team was sent back in the hopes of determining what went wrong and rescue the first team from whatever prevented them from leaving their report. If this team failed to get a report back both teams were to be written off and no further efforts would be expended to recover anything.

The second team did, in fact, manage to get a report back wherein the gender change phenomenon was reported and whatever other details of unforeseen time travel effects the GM cares to toss is. They were unable to determine what happened to the first team.

Now we come to the PCs. They're the third team to be sent back and the first to be aware of the physical effects wrought by the passage backward in time. Their mission is to find both prior teams, complete their mission, leave a report for the future, and get all twelve of thee foolish time travelers somewhere they can comfortably live out their lives and possibly be found by a later expedition once a method for getting everyone safely back to the future has been invented.
 
Council of Nicea, the game. All players are delegates. You get to make the rules. But if you can't get others to agree, then you could be declared a heretic. Where do you stand on the Arian controversy? Is Jesus a man? God? Stop! You're both right. When is Easter? Will your see get elevated to the status of Alexandria, Rome, and Antioch?

Don't miss the sequel: Second Council of Nicea: Down with Iconoclasts.
 
Council of Nicea, the game. All players are delegates. You get to make the rules. But if you can't get others to agree, then you could be declared a heretic. Where do you stand on the Arian controversy? Is Jesus a man? God? Stop! You're both right. When is Easter? Will your see get elevated to the status of Alexandria, Rome, and Antioch?

Don't miss the sequel: Second Council of Nicea: Down with Iconoclasts.

I want to expand upon your concept. The characters are all anime girl personifications of what are now canon and apocryphal books of the Bible.

They compete in a fighting tournament to determine which ones will become official scripture.

Hijinks ensue.
 
How about a DARK & GRITTY version of the Catillac Cats?
Back when I was in high school, I conceived of "gritty reboots" of a lot of terrible cartoons I was watching. I legit had ideas on how to make Silverhawks watchable. Then I saw anime and realized it's what I had been looking for.
For some reason I was enamored with the Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats cartoon.
It was surprisingly good. Can't put my finger on why, but it was.
I mean, bar running the settings of FATAL or RaHoWa or something like that.
I've heard of but know nothing about the first game. If the second is what I think it is...hard yeck.
Dude I played with very briefly wanted to run a campaign with no fixed end point about climbing the corporate ladder... in real time. In the real world.
I'm playing that now! 3/10 confusing mechanics
A friend of mine once played an adventure (I use the term loosely), but not a campaign, were all 3 players played desk furniture (paper clip, pencil, eraser). Their game master was into "experimental RPGs".
There was a game on 1km1kt where all the PCs were kitchen appliances. Sounds too similar to be a coincidence.

Here's my entry: Brexit: The Sundering
 
Ok, so you take the romantic RPG Breaking the Ice* and you use it to run a series of dates in the fucked-up world of the fucked-up anime Beastars. It's like Zootopia crossed with steamy vampire fiction written by a woman who wears a huge chicken mask at public events. Are you on board yet!?

Of course, one player is a carnivore while the other is a herbivore, just like the main characters. Everyone in the setting thinks your relationship is sick, and there's a real chance the carnivore will get confused and rip the flesh off the herbivore before even getting to second base.

Best played while listening to those songs by Duran Duran and Maroon 5. You know the ones.

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Ice_(role-playing_game)
 
So picture this: You take the rules for Traveller and use them to run a campaign in the universe of Button Moon.

7WEF5VO.jpg


Obviously you file off any nasty edges - firearms become spring-loaded Q-tip shooters or what have you. Your species + careers are a patchwork of your twee English town experiences and the random household products your puppet body was assembled from. If you die during character creation it's because some crayon-eating doofus kid failed to follow your assembly instructions properly. You adventures consist of piloting cardboard ships around a galaxy made of black sheets, delivering spare 'body parts' to alien puppets even more far-fetched than your soap-bottle ass.

Your most fearsome antagonists are human hands whose arm-bodies seem to stretch beyond the edges of reality, or perhaps simply beyond the limits of your puppet senses.

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The Goonies take Manhattan! (Literally....because they’re all aspects of lesser Gods).
The Goonies R Good Enough.

Cyndi Lauper says so. And if it gets Susanna Hoffs to dress up as a pirate, it's good enough for me.


Edit: forgot the video is in 2 parts and my "Mirror, Mirror"-universe wife Susanna is in part 2:


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