What IP outside of RPGs do you think would make a good RPG Setting?

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EmperorNorton

EmperorNorton

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I've been playing the video game ARPG Grim Dawn lately, and I realize that I really liked the lore, and think Cairn, the world in the game, could make a really fun tabletop RPG setting.

For those who haven't played it the lore is basically: kind of a mish mash of 1800s level technology with firearms fantasy realm, and then there is an apocalypse. Humanity is caught in a war between two main opposing factions:

The Ch'thonians: Ch'thon is known as the Dead God. He was once an Elder God (not in the Cthulhu sense, but in the "old/powerful" sense), but his children betrayed him, tore his body apart and used his blood to breathe life into their own creations. They then cast his spirit husk into the void. He is technically the source of all life in the Grim Dawn Universe, and though cast into the void he cannot die. He can feel all the suffering of anything made from his blood, and eventually went insane, wanting to destroy all life to stop his suffering. Human cultists who worship him are attempting to revive him, and can call on his spawn from the void to help them.

The Aetherials: The Aetherials are old servants of the gods that were tossed aside into the Aetherial plane and abandoned. They wish to fight a war against the gods who abandoned them and are basically gearing up for that. Due to sorcerors in Cairn experimenting with the Aetherial plane, they were able to make contact with humanity, and found they can cross over and possess them. So they slowly took control of the political/economic/religious structures of the world, and then brought them all toppling down at once, creating the apocalypse of the game (when they destroyed all of organized society was the titular "Grim Dawn"). They see Ch'thon as another of the old gods that abandoned them and a threat to their plans.

There are other factions and gods, and a lot of other stuff going on in the background, but it is a world that could definitely have a whole lot of adventure in it. Plus I like the idea of a non-modern apocalypse world. So what non-RPG setting do you think would be a cool RPG setting?
 
My main answers are properties that used to have RPGs associated with them.

Marvel Comics - Give it back to Cam Banks. Fire with prejudice anyone who tries to take it away from him again. I want Age of Apocalypse, and I want at least one Event and one Sourcebook per year.

Masters of the Universe

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Street Fighter (and associated properties)

Doom - Prefer this as a setting for everywhen.

Krrish - kind of a dream project. I wouldn't know how to implement the song/dance breaks into the gameplay. Love to see Tim Kirk tackle this as a licensed adaptation of his Hearts & Souls system.
 
Fables could work well, although its very WoD Changeling

Fallout is nice and gritty, it could work

The Last Airbender might be fun with something like Fate or PbtA, although SW could prob do it justice as well

Witcher also might be good with the right system, BRP (Chaosium or Mythras) would be my first choice, but perhaps a specific D&D 5E hack could also work well.

Bas-Lug springs to mind as well.
 
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Babylon 5 would be nice. It's already been done three times by Mongoose, but it'd be nice to see the setting done by an actual decent publisher and one that won't seriously honk off the Babylon 5 creator. :tongue:

Horizon Zero Dawn. Post-apocalyptic primitive tribal humans vs. giant robots shaped as animals. 'Nuff said.
 
It's a wonder that some of the more recent settings for the younger crowd hasnt been suggested, stuff like His Dark Materials, Shadowhunters, Hunger Games, Mortal Engines, etc

Also Wizarding World. That could be a biggie, given the franchise monster surrounding it
 
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Bloodborne. PCs are hunters in the night of the hunt, trying to stop the scourge of the beast, from dusk till dawn. Downtime between nights where years/decades/centuries pass and they prepare/build in their workshop (each player picks a different Workshop or faction, with different boni and outlook). Have insanity and insight meters allowing PCs to interact with eldritch truth and becoming changed by it.
 
I will cheat and suggest Defiance, the TV show. Defiance is a very tabletop friendly setting. It has the combination of "stuff" (artifacts, different player races, mysteries) commonly found in game settings and, at least for first season or so the setting did not revolve around the protagonist being special. A lot of settings (from Dune, Buffy, Dr Who and so on) are based around a protagonist's special destiny, adapting the setting and expanding the premise to make room for the player characters can be challenging. It is not a deal breaker, gamers have been addressing since the dawn of the hobby, but it is a thing.

Of course Defiance being a very tabletop friendly is not an accident, as it was build ground up to be both a TV show and an online game.
 
Mankcam said:
It's a wonder that some of the more recent settings for the younger crowd hasnt been suggested, stuff like His Dark Materials, Shadowhunters, Hunger Games, Mortal Engines etc

Also Wizarding World. That could be a biggie, given the franchise monster surrounding it
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This may be because we skew out of the age range for those...

Anyway. The Bible, either one. The settings are going through great upheaval, plenty of space for players to pick fights or get involved in the politics, etc.

EmperorNorton said:
I've been playing the video game ARPG Grim Dawn lately, and I realize that I really liked the lore, and think Cairn, the world in the game, could make a really fun tabletop RPG setting.
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I would be inclined to open this just like the video game, with the PC's in the process of being hung.
 
I've seen a number of anime in the last few years that seem almost tailor-made to gamification. I've often mused about the Japanese superhero genre, which is pretty much based on the American genre but with a few changes. I'm thinking in particular of One Punch Man and Boku No Hero Academia. In both properties, there is a professional superhero association, and the relationship between heroism and celebrity is often explored.

In OPM, there is the idea of different classes of hero (A, B and C, with less than two dozen in the supreme S tier), and they are generally paired with appropriately-rated disaster levels (i.e. wolf, tiger, demon, dragon and god). It really foregrounds the idea of "street-level" heroes versus cosmic-level supers. All this makes it quite understandable why your characters might chase purse-snatchers and Peeping Toms in a world teeming with nuclear hellbeasts and flying Übermensches.

That reminds me of another anime that foregrounds genre conventions: Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Characters have explicit and public level ratings, and they form guilds to explore the one mega-dungeon (I forget the name) in groups. I won't vouch for the show itself (or its name), I do like how it breathes life into these cliches by putting them in your face and making their particulars a part of the story.

I've been toying with the idea of a fantasy campaign set in a world that combine borderlands/points-of-light with this kind of Japanese-style leaning into the conventions, even dragging the mechanics into the setting. There's something amusing about the idea of an NPC introducing himself with "Blevins the Mysterious, 6th level magic-user, at your service!"
 
A few thoughts from anime that I haven't seen as a RPG yet:
  • Ranma-1/2 might be a good base for an anime-based teen hijinks setting. This has had video game adaptations but I can't see concrete evidence of a tabletop version.
  • Full Metal Alchemist would work as a steampunk-urban fantasy setting. If not the 'verse itself, the alchemy tropes would drop nicely into a RPG setting. There might be a tabletop RPG based on this.
  • Black Lagoon for a moderns based 'scum and villany' genre.
  • Lupin III. Although I had some idea this had been done a little google-fu doesn't turn up anything concrete.
  • Porco Rosso - inter-war air pirates in the Adriatic.
A couple of other genres might be:
  • For an early 20th century setting, perhaps Leslie Charteris's The Saint books, or Richard Hannay (The 39 Steps). There were TV adaptations done of the former in the '60s and '70s and the latter in the 1980s.
  • Another one might be a Life On Mars/The Sweeney mashup - gritty 1970s London coppers, see also The Professionals or Callan. I've actually done stuff based on The Professionals in the past.
 
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Half Life. Play as rebel anticitizens in a grim near-future Earth; a setting like Nineteen Eighty Four meets Children of Men, where humanity has been overrun by the horrible Combine, Earth is being harvested for its resources - including its oceans - and where dissent means death, or worse. Fight against human turncoats in the guise of the Civil Protection Force, the the transhuman Overwatch military, or the dreaded Combine Elite, now barely human shock troopers who'll suppress an entire city sector just to root out a single cell of Resistance personnel. Using your wits, weapons cobbled together by a secret group of heroic scientists, including Dr. Isaac Kleiner and Eli Vance (both survivors of the Black Mesa Incident, the scientific disaster that preceded the Combine Invasion, the Seven Hour War wherein the militaries of Earth were defeated and control of Earth was seceded to the Combine by the traitor Dr. Wallace Breen), and perhaps your most powerful weapon: free will, fight against the invasion to save what's left of Earth's teeming masses, forced into concentration-camp like eponymous Cities, clustered in the few areas not blighted by Combine strip-mining, alien horrors like Ant Lions, or the terrifying, wretched "headcrab" zombies: fatally parasitized remnants of humans unlucky enough to be caught outside of City "protection".

With your allies, the mysterious but benevolent Vortigaunts (themselves forced to participate as an invasion force by the Combine during the Black Mesa Incident), wrest control of Earth back from Dr. Breen and the Combine, before it's too late!
 
Ladybird said:
Anyway. The Bible, either one. The settings are going through great upheaval, plenty of space for players to pick fights or get involved in the politics, etc.
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Seconded. In fact, I'm prepping a heavily modified Dungeon Questing/Swords & Wizardry hack set in the Antediluvian era. Season with the apocrypha (Book of Enoch, Book of Jubilees), Aronofsky's Noah, and Jason Aaron's The Goddamned, and I have high hopes that this will be an absolutely freaky and fun era in which to play.

A few others (admittedly kind of fringe-y for big-ticket IPs, but perfect for niche products):
  • Clark Ashton Smith, Zothique setting. Honestly, this is pretty much archetypal OD&D, to the point I can't believe Gygax wasn't familiar with stories like "The Weaver in the Vault," but I could see a Zothique OSR hack along the lines of AS&SOH or Crypts and Things. Also Hyperborea: Again, "The Seven Geases" and "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" pretty much exemplify the dungeon raid. Both are in the public domain, I believe.
  • William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land. Pretty much the ultimate crapsack world to end all crapsack worlds. You'd start as a high-powered telepathic chainsaw-wielding badass and... well, die anyway. Horribly.
  • Tsutomu Nihei, BLAME! Megadungeon to end all megadungeons, in SPACE!!!, with your character trying to survive in a Dyson Sphere-sized warzone contested by Lawful Neutral murder-constructs (Safeguard) and Chaotic Evil aberrations (Silicon Life).
  • Iain Banks, Culture setting. You'd have to have some legit antagonists for the otherwise unopposable Culture, and of course you'd have to keep it at the (trans)human-agent scale, with the Ships and Minds as background NPC patrons, but for true giga-scale settings it doesn't get much better.
  • Hannu Rajaniemi, Jean le Flambeur series (The Quantum Thief, etc.). Transhuman-y goodness along Eclipse Phase/Nova Praxis lines, but IMO more interesting.
 
This one leaves plenty of room for the author to add artistic license because there isn't a whole lot of back story to it beyond bad guys have a colored hood ranking system.

I've always wanted to base a game around the 1980s video game Rolling Thunder. Nothing in the game sets the time period but I've always thought it has to be set in the 1930s. The bad guys uniforms just say 1930s pulp villains to me.

 
Dragonriders of Pern

The Expendables (Like the Stallone movies)

Alien vs Predator (Like the old arcade game)

World of Warcraft (A proper RPG that holds to and expands on Lore as opposed to makin up a bunch of new non canon stuff)
 
Normally, my answer to this question would be "Jack Vance's Lyonesse," but thankfully The Design Mechanism is already at work!

Here's one I've been thinking about lately: NARNIA! I know the books get a bad rap because of the Christian symbolism and allegorical elements, but as a setting for fantastic adventure Narnia has a ton of potential. Give it a relatively-rules-light system that's easy for kids to learn but has potential for added depth (via traits, skills, etc.) and longer campaigns. Magic should reflect the setting, with nary a whiff of "Vancian" elements.
 
Narnia is a good and easily-overlooked choice. You could run a straight-up Wardrobe campaign for kids. I have to admit that the heavy-handed allegory is a bit much for me, but imagine a reverse Satanic Panic with the Narnia RPG as a gateway drug - youth groups throughout the nation rolling dice and saving Aslan. Hmm, now that I think about it, this could have unintended consequences...
 
King Ghidorah said:
Tsutomu Nihei, BLAME! Megadungeon to end all megadungeons, in SPACE!!!, with your character trying to survive in a Dyson Sphere-sized warzone contested by Lawful Neutral murder-constructs (Safeguard) and Chaotic Evil aberrations (Silicon Life).
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Have you seen the Netflix film? While not so good as the manga, I thought it nailed the atmosphere and grandeur of the city really well.

By the way, there IS a rpg based on it. I'll try to find more and post here later.
 
... Man I didn't think of BLAME!, but that would be a good setting.
 
Gronan of Simmerya said:
Lois McMaster Bujold's "World of the Five Gods."
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I would have also recommended Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, but there was already a GURPS setting book for it. Granted, that was a couple of decades ago so it's a bit out of date.
 
I'd be interested in a Doom RPG. Human survivors fighting against invading legions of Hell would be a fun premise.

An RPG based off the current Wolfenstein games could be a lot of fun 'cause punching Nazis never gets old.

I've often thought a game based off the Borderlands games could be fun if you can hit the tone.

The fact both Fallout and The Elder Scrolls have never gotten an official RPG treatment baffles me.
 
Chronicles of Prydain
Legend of Zelda
Most '80s cartoons - Masters of the Universe, GI Joe, Transformers, Jem
 
TristramEvans said:
Chronicles of Prydain
Legend of Zelda
Most '80s cartoons - Masters of the Universe, GI Joe, Transformers, Jem
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I ran a RuneQuest 3 game drawing heavily on Prydain, the Mabinogion and Brave one time. On fact it was the last face to face game I ran.
 
The tough thing for me is that many of the settings I like are either orphaned RPG systems (such as Amber) or ones currently being done in a rules set I don't like (Barsoom). I would like to see a lot more settings in a system like 5E so that I could learn one rules set and then use it however I like. My go-to used to be OD&D because it's so flexible, but 5E is my current system of choice.

I'd love to see Dune, Barsoom, maybe Honor Harrington or Dorsai, stuff like this all done for 5E.
 
Bashere said:
I've often thought a game based off the Borderlands games could be fun if you can hit the tone.
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On a similar note, Splatoon has a really fun post-apocalyptic world - humans all went away somewhere and various sea species colonised the land; in the past the Inklings - squid people - and Octolings - octopus people - were at war, which Inklings won by accident, but now the barriers between the two species are kinda coming down (Although personally I think Inklings are just too stupid to realise Octolings aren't the same species...) and they're starting to live together. Plenty of potential for hexcrawls into lands away from the coasts, or for ancient evils to reemerge, or just for showing off who is the most fresh. There's also a high feeling of joy in anything to do with it; everyone is just happy to be taking part.
 
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