3 RPG Campaigns I'd Like to Run

 I've run several RPG campaigns across several systems. As I have gotten older, it seems more and more difficult to run campaigns, partly because I am a player in an ongoing weekly AD&D 2e campaign and an intermittent (usually every few weeks for me, to be honest) DCCRPG campaign. With Life(tm) responsibilities such as they are, that's really all I can get in on a regular basis. I try to attend two conventions a year (Gameholecon and Garycon), which is great for one-shots, but not great for campaign play. So, suffer an old man to dream for a minute or two about a trio of campaigns I'd like to run in my lifetime. They need not be long and for at least one of them, there would be a definite ending point. But something more than, say, twenty 4-hour sessions appeals to me. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. I recently discovered Troika RPG I've only played in one session (at this year's Gameholecon) and absolutely loved it. The adventure I played in was actually a converted Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure, but I got a good feel for the simplicity of the game and its shunning of musty old fantasy tropes in favor of something more expansive, something more along the lines of the New Wave of '60s and '70s science fiction and fantasy (Moorcock, Harrison, et al) than the '50s pulps. Elric instead of Gor, The Pastel City versus Cimmeria. You get the gist. In my mind, the absolutely perfect setting for this is The Ultra Violet Grasslands by Luka Rejec. An explicitly psychedelic setting like this is just the thing to riff off of the (slightly subdued) wackiness of Troika. This could spiral completely out of hand in short order, depending on what the player group is like. And "out of hand" would be precisely the goal with this. Throw on some good psych-rock, generate those half-crazed Troika characters, drop them in the world and GO!
2. I've played lots of Call of Cthulhu one-shots and even dared to run a few (3 = a few, no?) in my day. One of those three is a scenario which I wrote up and which I am now trying to get into publishable form to foist it upon the masses. I don't want to spoil much, but it involves rabbits, Pan, a mysterious hill above a small English village, and the BBC. It is possibly the most "me" RPG scenario I've ever written (though most who know my work probably think that Beyond the Silver Scream is "that" scenario, and while I do still love it and am awfully proud of it, I think what I have for this CoC adventure is going to be much better. Sorry to disappoint, but this one is closer to my heart.). In my mind, and vaguely outlined on paper, I have a whole campaign that can arise from this scenario. For the time being, I need to focus on getting this first bit publishable and published, but after that, you can expect a decidedly non-Mythos campaign (though chock FULL of cosmic horror - just not the kind of Derlethian stuff that has been hackneyed to death) that eventually ends at the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. I am leaning heavily into pagan European tradition both for this scenario and for the eventual campaign as a whole. Forget all you know about tentacles and oozing creatures from another dimension - rather, you should be very, very wary of those hares in the hill!
3. I love Traveller. I've called it "the simplest RPG system out of this world," and I mean it (PS: is it gauche to quote yourself? Probably . . .). And, though I truly believe that the Traveller system is adaptable to just about any kind of scenario you can concoct (high fantasy, cosmic horror, whatver), I also love the setting. So my overly simplistic idea is this: A band of mercenaries are making a jump that goes suddenly wrong. They end up deep in Zhodani space (maybe in the Eiaplial sector?) with their jump drive inoperable and effectively destroyed for good. They have to find their way back to the Imperium through or just around Zhodani space. This could be a campaign that could go on for many, many years, should the players play it right. Or it could be done in one session if they are foolish.

So, there you have it. 3 campaigns that I want to run, but need to find the time (and the right players) to run. Maybe when I retire I can run all three at once, who knows? Come to think of it, it could be interesting if they somehow intersected each other. Hmm . . . ideas, ideas . . .

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Addendum: Looking at my shelves, a Call of Cthulhu campaign that mixes Berlin the Wicked City with the Trail of Cthulhu supplement Bookhounds of London suddenly sounds very, very tempting.

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