Multi-Crossover RPG Settings

[Simon Hogwood]

So over in the "What IP would you like to see?" thread, Voros brought up the Anno Dracula series. For those who don't know, the books take place in a world where Count Dracula defeated Van Helsing and his group and went on to take over the British Empire. It's a terrific series, but a large part of the fun (at least for me) is the way that the author, Kim Newman, manages to fill nearly every speaking role and walk-on with an obscure, disguised, or public-domain pop-culture, whether they were originally a vampire or not. It's the same sort of thing that I enjoy about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Phillip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton books - admiring the cleverness in drawing the connections and having the fun of spotting them.

However, for some reason I'm skeptical that the full effect of this kind of fiction will transfer well to the tabletop. I know of one published RPG that attempts it, Rippers, but even that doesn't go very far with the concept. My suspicion is that to really get the flavor would require the GM and players both to have the sort of far-reaching trivia skills as the authors of the works the game would try to emulate.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and there's something simple I'm overlooking. What are your experiences with this kind of setting?

 

[The Butcher]

I did this a lot with my Day After Ragnarok campaign. We kicked it off with a well-reputed English-born South African businessman and WWII veteran (in my game world, secretly the head of SIS/MI-6 in South Africa) putting the team together to investigate the disappearance of a famous South African scholar of Germanic languages.

Their investigation revealed the kidnapper as a Nazi linguist turned two-bit völkisch sorcerer, who the PCs quickly defeated and debriefed, finally extracting the Professor en route to Fernando Pó, where Otto Skorzeny and his ODESSA cronies planned to enact a new ritual to conclude the abortive Ragnarok.

They found out about, but never did investigate, the backup site at Isla Huemul...

I used pregenerated PCs for the starting adventure, which included such luminaries as big-game hunter (and protagonist of the failed Operation Foxley) Sir Robert Thorndyke, Czech RAF ace János Proháska and dauntless archaeologist and exorcist Lankester Merrin.

I miss this game.

 

[Dumarest]

I thought Blackhawk was Polish, not Czech.

 

[The Butcher]

I thought Blackhawk was Polish, not Czech.

In the comics, yes. But the birth name is Hungarian, and the surname Czech — in fact it’s lifted from a Hungarian stuntman — so I made the character a composite of DC’s Blackhawk and real-life Czech ace Josef Frantisek, one of the many Czech and Polish pilots to flee their home country and join the RAF’s 303rd Squad in WWII.

 

[Doc Sammy]

I'm sort of actually planning a crossover game of sorts that blends all sorts of media from my childhood in a Toy Story-esque Imagination-land scenario.

 

[Dumarest]

There's no game for it, but I was telling my wife last night that I want to see Dolph Lundgren He-Man team up with Sam Jones Flash Gordon against Skeletor who has revived Ming the Merciless through necromancy. Eternia and the moons of Mongo go together like chocolate and peanut butter.