#this is embarrassingly dorky. autism fixation moment.

[gristlegrinder]

late night ttrpg gming thoughts about stuff i want to do (whining like a sad little dog)

Like, okay. It’s been way too long since I’ve played or run a game in the Chronicles system and I keep thinking about it. I have so many ideas (for both characters and campaigns) that I’ve been holding onto for years and I want to finally actualize some of them. It’s just, like— so games-wise, if I ever got over my nerves and started running stuff again:

1. The campaign I’ve come the closest to actually GMing but keep kicking my feet on is a Changeling chronicle— Changeling being a dark fantasy game about people reclaiming their trauma narrative from the faerie kingdom they were trapped in— with kind of a southern gothic spin. You know, that kind of folklore vibe, but set in the Blue Ridge Mountains and playing with family and place and being queer in a rural small town. This one’s near and dear to my heart, and I already have some people who’ve called dibs on being in it if I ever get my shit together, but I keep stalling out trying to connect some of the dots in my brain.

2. Likewise, my other big Changeling dream campaign is something that plays with the Briarnet lore— the Briarnet being a variant of the liminal faerie borderlands that takes a cyberpunk edge, quite literally being a web of unreality existing in the Internet itself. I don’t know how else to describe it. It rules. Do I have a specific campaign in mind? No! Do I want some y2k-flavored technofaerie bullshit occupying my brainspace more than it already does? Absolutely! And I think it would be a fun crossover with the Hunter books, as your local advocate for Network Zero (the forum guys) being the best monster hunter conspiracy. (Sorry, Knights of St. Adrian, you’re a close second in my heart).

3. Then there’s the Vampire game I’ve been sitting on. Vampires are probably the most self-explanatory of the group, and Requiem has less internal worldbuilding to introduce than Masquerade IMO, making it a decent introductory point for new players, but vampires are also vampires. My dream Vampire game, for years now, has been a murder mystery noir inspired by fuzzy 1970s giallo film aesthetics, where you and the rest of the group are trying to prove your innocence against the murder and diablerie of a prominent elder amongst the kindred. In a perfect world, I’d want this to have enough players where one PC would actually be the true killer, working against everybody else and gradually killing other characters the longer they’re left alive, but PvP campaigns are fairly difficult and prone to more emotional bleed (especially when Vampire is a game with a lot of direct mental manipulation skills) and I haven’t fully worked out how I’d manage it safely. But I want it so bad.

4. And Demon is the game I used to run for ~4 years, and I miss it so so much. It might be my favorite of the games? It’s an espionage thriller that puts angels and demons in sort of a dystopian Matrix conflict, with the God Machine and Its agents being operatives enforcing systems of reality and demons fighting for their independence and free will. The main issue is that I made the rookie mistake of using most of my good ideas for the first campaign, plus the most established canon setting (kisses Splintered City: Seattle on the cheek), so I’ve been struggling to think of what I want to do next.

I think a series of smaller, serialized-crime-show heists would be fun, focused on destabilizing infrastructure and completing one objective. Not my usual style, which leans more politicking and social deduction, but I feel good enough within the system to not be intimidated by a more action-heavy setup, and organized heists are REALLY fun to plan around.

Setting is the hardest part of this one, since I can’t default to Seattle again, but I’ve been considering something drenched in midcentury Cold War aesthetics, playing up those spy thriller angles— whether that’s white-picket suburban American hell or urban Eastern Europe on the edge of collapse. Knowing me, it’d be something grungy and Soviet, but it could go either way.

5. Wild card option— Beast is really unpopular as a gameline for various reasons but I can fix her. I like to advertise her as The Magnus Archives before there were The Magnus Archives: it’s a game about people who are possessed by archetypal embodiments of carnal fears, who are really also just themselves reflected in darkness, which then drive them to hunger. It’s kind of just a media match made in heaven, besides the families not really lining up right. This was actually the first chronicles game I played in, even if I’ve never run it, so I have a soft spot for it and I think it could be fun to do stylish supernatural horror set in 1920s Weimar Germany. Play up the Primordial Dream as a kind of Expressionistic landscape of growing social anxieties. I didn’t take multiple seminars studying German Expressionism and Fritz Lang in college for nothing, and this lets me recycle some, clears throat, unused concepts I was waiting to show off in my old Demon game.

6. And then finally. Sighs loudly. A Victorian-era gothic comedy(?) with Geist also speaks to me, with Geist being a game about should-be-dead people who bargain with Death for more time among the living, have buddy comedy shenanigans with the death spirit keeping their corpse functioning, and ideally do some kind of ghost socialism (I am not joking). This one ranks the lowest because I have absolutely no vision for the plot, just vibes. This is a really bad way of advertising Geist and I promise it’s cool and atmospheric and haunting but sometimes you just want gay dandies having seances and trying to dance around all of their zombie problems to maintain some social decorum.

And like those aren't all of my dreams (Mummy lives rent free in my brain thematically but plotting for Mummy is scary and intimidating; I’ve wanted to do a fucked up splattery survival horror for a while but don’t have a good system in mind; my more unweildy Geist vision is an Underworld campaign traveling to the Ocean of Fragments to find the end of the end; Oops! Aliens, Somehow! despite there not being solid or consistent alien rules), but they’re the ones I go back to most frequently. I really like doing tabletop stuff! I consider myself a solid GM for this system and have a lot of fun playing with it! I want to do it!

But arrrrrRRRGHGGHHHHHhhhhhhhhh manifestation is HARD and my untreated brain stuff has been destroying my wretched being and part of me keeps telling myself i should probably focus more on Curseborne once that all starts coming out for realsies and—