In Other News…

I’m on a small break from writing right now as both the stories I’m working on have sort of come to a fizzled end while I try to work out a couple of plot snags that have cropped up. I’m going to set them aside for a day or six and let them lay fallow in the hopes that when I pick them up again I’ll see them with new eyes and will be able to take things farther than before. It has worked in the past, so I’m not too worried that I’ll never pick them up again type of thing, but I just have to keep myself in the habit of continuing to write stuff even if it isn’t part of what I’m working on.

To that end I’ve started to flesh out a new campaign for Gurps that I hope to eventually run at some point. I don’t know if I ever will run it, but I’m at the stage now that I’m just going to toy around and tinker with ideas and see how far things go. I’ve been toying around lately with a number of ideas revolving around the Infinite Worlds concept that has become the base setting in the fourth edition of Gurps but with a number of changes that would deviate enough from that setting to make them unique.

My original focus was on something similar to the TV show Sliders, but after thinking about it some, I realized that to really be a good campaign it would have to have a lot of detail, even if it wasn’t visible to the players, to be truly immersive and realistic. The more I thought about it, the more it drifted from a very cool campaign idea to something I’d love to do if I had the inclination, background material or the properly receptive audience.

My next idea was possibly running a pure Space campaign, but Space/Sci-Fi/Futuristic campaigns are another one of those genres where accuracy is imperative, and numbers and number crunching are next to godliness kind of thing. Or they would at least be in the framework of the campaign idea that I wanted to run, and right now it is a little more detail/effort than I wanted to concentrate on. Plus, in all honesty we already have a solid and good Space campaign (and GM) in our gaming group so why try to compete with something we’ve already done type of thing.

Finally I came to rest my fevered brain on a concept that was a nice generic amalgam of the previous two ideas but was still unique enough to be something new for us campaign-wise. It was an idea that would give me enough leeway to blur the lines of history and mythology if need be and also be something that didn’t have to be too technically accurate every step of the way. To top things off, the idea already had a movie, 8 seasons worth of tv episodes, and a spinoff series in the works for me to plagarise and draw plot ideas from…

And so… GURPS: Stargate was born.

So far I’ve decided that it’s going to be a retelling of the whole story from the beginning, but from a different perspective, and with different protagonists/antagonists. That way I don’t have to worry about the stuff like “what did/would Jack O’Neill do” or “but Apophis died in such and such episode…”. The players are the first ones going through the wormhole for the first time and they won’t end up on Abydos and it won’t be Ra or Apophis that they run into. There will still be System Lords, Goa’uld, Tok’ra and the Asgard and so on and so forth, but it’s all up in the air as to how they fit together

I really haven’t decided yet whether I’ll try to run the game as a 4th edition campaign or just stick with 3rd for now out of sake of ease. Once I start to firm up the campaign plot and background info I’ll work out the hard rules details and go from there.

After that I guess it’s time to see if anyone in the group wants to play kinda thing or even if they have time to do so.