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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Cthulhu]

For the last couple years I've been noodling on a steampunk setting where magic oil is discovered during the scramble for not-africa and kicks off the steam revolution.  Extraction is horribly dangerous, prone to blowouts of volatile flesh-eating impurities, also gives prophetic visions and magic powers when properly prepared and consumed as a drug.  It's also the blood of god, and burning it for fuel is polluting reality on a metaphysical level.  Basically a prequel to bloodborne, is the kind of situation I'm thinking.  Will probably never make a game of it though.

I also mostly prefer low fantasy, but the best RPG setting of all time, Glorantha, is extremely high fantasy, where any warrior worth the term can enchant his arms and armor at the absolute minimum, the moon is an incarnate goddess, and your character lived through a war between demigods and demonic WMDs and ended when a mile-long dragon burst out of the ground and devoured the entire enemy army.

[Jimmy]

For extra fun, magic oil/god blood contains parasites that spawn from the wells, releasing monsters into the world. Sounds like a good story that writes itself, though that'd be a lot of legwork crafting a full campaign world beforehand, with maps, cities, notable historical figures and whatnot.

[Iduno]

Guilded Age (webcomic) had a version of that where the Sky Elves used conjuration to feed and supply their mysterious flying cities.  Eventually the other peoples figured out that conjuration doesn't make, it takes.

A bit like Battle Angel Alita, then?

[Mephisto]

And now I want an official Death Gate Cycle product despite not having read it in years and it probably not holding up well.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

One of the magical civilizations was trying to figure out why they were dropping dead in massive numbers. Through the protag, we discover that the denizens of an inhospitable hellworld were using necromancy to survive. Not, like, raise a zombie army and take resources by force, but raise people to do manual labor. Necromancy doesn't just bring a corpse to un-life - the spark for that gets taken from a random living person somewhere in existence.

In the cosmology, this hellworld is where all metals came from. Another less hellish world was the breadbasket of this particular civilization. Combine the whole "randomly kill civ members" thing with the low-ish pop of the hellworld and you construct a doomed situation from which there is no escape.

[Jimmy]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

One of the magical civilizations was trying to figure out why they were dropping dead in massive numbers. Through the protag, we discover that the denizens of an inhospitable hellworld were using necromancy to survive. Not, like, raise a zombie army and take resources by force, but raise people to do manual labor. Necromancy doesn't just bring a corpse to un-life - the spark for that gets taken from a random living person somewhere in existence.

In the cosmology, this hellworld is where all metals came from. Another less hellish world was the breadbasket of this particular civilization. Combine the whole "randomly kill civ members" thing with the low-ish pop of the hellworld and you construct a doomed situation from which there is no escape.

And now my inner min-maxer is constructing mental images of massive fetus factories producing millions of souls for the purpose of buffering the surrounding population, and all the theological implications of that method on identifying when a soul forms.

Where there's a problem, there's a morally ambiguous hack to get around it.

[Loud Whispers]

Sounds like the plot of Doom

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Current, living humanity versus the dead.

All 100+ billion of them.

[Loud Whispers]

Current, living humanity versus the dead.

All 100+ billion of them.

Living humanity wins, but is betrayed by dead (inside) gang at the final hour

[IcyTea31]

Current, living humanity versus the dead.

All 100+ billion of them.

How would the ancient dead returning actually work? Dust to dust and all that, pretty much every atom in their bodies has completely suffused into the biosphere, including into the bodies of all who came after them, both living and dead. Returning them into their old bodies would spell the immediate disintegration of all life on Earth, while building fresh bodies would require more nonliving biomatter than there currently is. The thermodynamic implications would be great.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm thinking literal gates of hell and they're like antiseptic walking corpses, so they don't have any military equipment but they could appear anywhere and they can just walk on the bottom of the ocean. Gates of hell are too hot for living humans to pass through, not sure what happens if you send in a hellprobe though.

alternatively

The dead are literally alive and not dead. Time-traveling aliens/humans have been snatching people from their deaths, replacing them with empty clone bodies (no biomass issues), and bringing them forward to become the Grand Army of the Living Dead. And brainwashed to fight us I guess.

Before you call it an instant loss remember how few of these people know what a machine gun is or what to do about a machine gun.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, it greatly depends on where and how the dead appear. Can they be reasoned with? Frankly, any pre-civilization cave-man would probably drop to their knees and worship us as gods. Especially the fat people, who to them would probably appear as the apex of all humanity could create.

First, where are they all appearing? I'm assuming it's not 100 meters above Point Nemo in the pacific ocean. Are they returning to the closest point where they died? If so, sucks to be in Africa and the Middle East, but what else is new? Are they spawning out of static locations at a set rate? Seems kind of easy to just send a guided missile every thirty seconds or so at that spot and wait for the survivors to drown in a crater filled with a slurry of human body parts.

Assuming they're brainwashed, then we're just talking about a zombie apocalypse style horde, but made of frail, living people? Tear gas the lot to take the fight out of 'em, then send in the machine guns. Unless they're waging guerrilla warfare, modern militaries care not one whit for the struggles of untrained masses of rabble armed with melee weapons. They'd run out of bodies long before we'd run out of bullets.

Honestly, the greatest damage would not be their ability to attack us, but their ability to disrupt the fragile network of supply chains that keeps modern society fed and warm. Adding 1,500% greater resource strain overnight on food, water and basic survival necessities would see towns stripped bare of all consumer goods within days. Then, those outside of the reach of government held stockpiles would simply starve to death in the coming weeks.

So yeah, probably we'd see a critical global resource collapse, but the strongholds of modern civilization would survive, and eventually reclaim their territories. Not because the masses of dead humans are dangerous, but simply because they could get hungry.

[Maximum Spin]

Especially the fat people, who to them would probably appear as the apex of all humanity could create.

This part struck me: WOULD they, though? Sure, the idea that plumpness was seen as a correlate of economic power is a trope, though scholars still dispute it, but, more importantly, the morbidly obese we have today would fall completely outside the scale of anything the majority of history's humans had ever experienced — they may not even recognise them as human. At that point it's a tossup between "HAVE MERCY, NEW ROUND GODS" and "Oh, what an exciting new kind of prey animal for me to spear."

[Cthulhu]

Speaking of undead, here's one I've been wanting to do.  The players have to go to an ancient ruined city to retrieve a mystical artifact, the usual shit.  When they get there, it's guarded by undead, bound to protect the artifact until the fated heroes prove their worth in the vault's deadly trials and retrieve the artifact, the usual shit.

Complication, they don't know they're dead.  There's thousands of skeletons, all still thinking they're alive, still doing normal city shit.  Chances are the players' reaction gives the game away and the city goes apeshit.  Riots in the streets, political upheaval, factions coalescing around differing approaches to the "holy shit we're skeletons what the fuck" revelation.  Worse, if the players complete their quest the spell will be broken.  Some people are still friendly to the heroes, some are hostile to these dickheads who turned their society upside down, some just want to die for real, some are trying to sabotage the trials and preserve their immortality, players have to survive a city in chaos and navigate cutthroat skeleton politics while deciding what to actually do about the macguffin.

[Kagus]

So y'know that game I mentioned earlier, with the dude planning on going Full Bard and providing his narcissistance to the group (with Gilderoy Lockhart being the driving character inspiration)? Well he actually mellowed out really well and changed his dude into a kinda overly fanciful bard who was starstruck with the party's barbarian and was determined to write the most epic biography of this musclebound fellow, glossing over any inconsistencies about not always being 100% Best and Glorious Supreme Champion.

...which ended up being particularly entertaining, because said barbarian had godawful dice rolls and ended up whiffing almost every attempt at everything


My non-combative-personnel rogue ended up machine gunning down the majority of enemies we encountered, and we eventually leveled up to 2!

...and then the DM left and cut off all contact with us without a word. So yeah, fun!

Speaking of undead, here's one I've been wanting to do.  The players have to go to an ancient ruined city to retrieve a mystical artifact, the usual shit.  When they get there, it's guarded by undead, bound to protect the artifact until the fated heroes prove their worth in the vault's deadly trials and retrieve the artifact, the usual shit.

Complication, they don't know they're dead.  There's thousands of skeletons, all still thinking they're alive, still doing normal city shit.  Chances are the players' reaction gives the game away and the city goes apeshit.  Riots in the streets, political upheaval, factions coalescing around differing approaches to the "holy shit we're skeletons what the fuck" revelation.  Worse, if the players complete their quest the spell will be broken.  Some people are still friendly to the heroes, some are hostile to these dickheads who turned their society upside down, some just want to die for real, some are trying to sabotage the trials and preserve their immortality, players have to survive a city in chaos and navigate cutthroat skeleton politics while deciding what to actually do about the macguffin.

Sounds like that city is...

(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

...boned

[Loud Whispers]

Speaking of undead, here's one I've been wanting to do.  The players have to go to an ancient ruined city to retrieve a mystical artifact, the usual shit.  When they get there, it's guarded by undead, bound to protect the artifact until the fated heroes prove their worth in the vault's deadly trials and retrieve the artifact, the usual shit.

Complication, they don't know they're dead.  There's thousands of skeletons, all still thinking they're alive, still doing normal city shit.  Chances are the players' reaction gives the game away and the city goes apeshit.  Riots in the streets, political upheaval, factions coalescing around differing approaches to the "holy shit we're skeletons what the fuck" revelation.  Worse, if the players complete their quest the spell will be broken.  Some people are still friendly to the heroes, some are hostile to these dickheads who turned their society upside down, some just want to die for real, some are trying to sabotage the trials and preserve their immortality, players have to survive a city in chaos and navigate cutthroat skeleton politics while deciding what to actually do about the macguffin.

I'm doing something similar for a quarantined city, but they're all bodaks. The outside gov has just sealed all the gates into and out of the city until they can figure out how to actually deal with millions of powerful, replicating undead. Complete with doomsday style magic sunlight to keep the bodaks away from the walls at night. The bodak city folk don't understand why the whole world has turned on them, and are desperately working day and night to break free.