I’m thinking about some game ideas for next year, and here are a few I’m pondering. I don’t really get the urge to properly hack games, as there are just too many games still to play, but I do like the idea of a quick shift in emphasis to give a game a different feel. Here are three that I’m pondering where I think a slight tweak in emphasis would change the game in a positive – or at least interesting – way. 

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And, in the interests of a bit of workflow sharing, I’ll give you my initial steps to tackle these as well. Feel free to encourage / discourage me as you feel!

Monster of the Week Trail of Cthulhu

There are so many good scenarios for Trail, but I’ve not got enough love for the standard Cthulhu investigative models, and the d6 Gumshoe system doesn’t really excite me. 2nd Ed Trail is in development, and I’m hoping it’ll add more fancy stuff like Nights Black Agents or Yellow King that might pique my interest a bit more..

So, I’d like to take some of the published adventures (the puliper ones, like Shadows Over Filmland or Mythos Expeditions) and see what they’d feel like with a more flexible PBTA system around them. First steps are probably to half-gen up some cthulhu-appropriate 1920s investigators for MOTW, and then rehash using the MOTW process (which is excellent by the way) the plots and ideas of one or more of the adventures. So not too much work, given that I’d be entirely ready to run at that point.

Unknown Armies Street-Level Supers

Unknown Armies remains one of the systems I’m most interested in – might sound like big words, but it’s a bloody masterpiece of surreal horror design that also contains loads of ideas that keep coming back to me. But I find it hard to get my head around hermetic modern-day creepy stuff, so how about this? The PCs have decided (in a supers-adjacent world, sort of Watchmen without Dr Manhattan) to clean up the streets – but the gangs and other lycra-clad villains they fight all lead back to a sinister invasion of Earth by deadly cultists.

First steps involve, well, following the Unknown Armies session zero sequence – not too much trouble once the players are together, but I’d want to do this ‘live’ so there’s more of a risk if it comes to nothing. Although I know loads of people who’d want to play UA, so who knows…

Theatre of the Mind Pathfinder 2e

I really like the setting for 2e Pathfinder – they’ve managed to get lots of fantasy subgenres in with some cool twists and turns. And the crunch I can deal with – I like the 3-action economy, and the way they make choices interact.

But I can’t deal with grids and minis. Too many times they are the enemy of roleplaying, and we end up moving pieces instead of describing cool shizz. So why not ignore them? There’s a table in the 5e DMG that everyone forgets about about playing 5e theatre of the mind (basically gives effects for area effect attacks – p249 in Chapter 8 will tell you, for example, a Burning Hands spell can affect 2 opponents – I might house rule some of them to be, e.g., 1d3 like 13th Age spells) – and a lot of the rest I’m sure we can hand-wave.

Will it work? Who knows. I did play a few sessions of 1e Pathfinder map-free and it worked absolutely fine, with only a few table rulings. We didn’t miss 5 foot steps. My first steps for this are probably to get a set of pregens together, which is no mean feat as I’m not dropping cash for a character generator just for this – so we’ll see.

So, three drifted systems that I’d like to try soon. Which should I look into first? And are there any more ideas you’ve had? Let me know in the comments.