I did up a little post this evening, because I was bored mainly, creating a pulp/comic style vigilante class for the Hulks and Horrors system. I thought it would be great fun to do something wildly out of type with the core assumptions, and indeed it was.  

Take a look: http://www.bedroomwallpress.com/2013/03/alternate-concepts-vigilante.html

What sorts of really off-concept house rules and homebrews have you come up with for games?

I've done lots of out of the ordinary, but not entirely off-concept, class or race write-ups, like the smith class and the miner class and the weather-worker class and the chesire cat race (basically, feline halflings with prehensile tails and illusionist spells.)

About the only truly off-concept class I remember doing is the tourist. They're basically thieves without backstab, open locks, or pick pockets, inverted Wisdom as prime requisite (i.e. low Wisdom = faster advancement,) a +4 level save bonus vs. fear, no knowledge of Common, and triple starting wealth (and access to special shopping lists.)

I did a half-orc race that was pretty weird. They are half orc, half NOTHING. They can choose to not exist at any moment, popping back into existence several days later.

Most of the off-concept stuff I did was monster related rather than class and race related.

Quote from: talysman;637884About the only truly off-concept class I remember doing is the tourist. They're basically thieves without backstab, open locks, or pick pockets, inverted Wisdom as prime requisite (i.e. low Wisdom = faster advancement,) a +4 level save bonus vs. fear, no knowledge of Common, and triple starting wealth (and access to special shopping lists.)

The "Tourist" is a class from Hack (and its descendent Nethack), one of the oldest Roguelike games. That has to be where they got it from.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;638168The "Tourist" is a class from Hack (and its descendent Nethack), one of the oldest Roguelike games. That has to be where they got it from.

I don't know who "they" are, but I got it from Nethack, plus a little bit of Discworld. Actually, Nethack's tourist comes from Discworld, so I guess that's superfluous. But Nethack's tourist doesn't mention anything about language barriers, which was a big deal in Discworld, so I added that, and the inverted Wisdom/bonus to fear saves idea.

Quote from: talysman;638203I don't know who "they" are, but I got it from Nethack, plus a little bit of Discworld. Actually, Nethack's tourist comes from Discworld, so I guess that's superfluous. But Nethack's tourist doesn't mention anything about language barriers, which was a big deal in Discworld, so I added that, and the inverted Wisdom/bonus to fear saves idea.

Ah, I see! I didn't realize you were talking about your own design.

I tried adding cheap Resurrection to Exalted once, which had some interesting results given the setting and a rather mean GM.  Only matters with unoptimized characters.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse without Fury/Fox/Thrall of the Wyrm does fine.  Trying to completely remove the Captain Planet themes didn't: changing things up into fighting the Wyrm-as-the-Wyrm eventually turned into a snarling beastman version of Sailor Moon.

Someone tried Continuum without Frag or the Inheritors, having heard of the Crash Free/Narcisist beta.  It kinda petered out before anything too interesting; the Continuum ruleset was more clunky than we were interested in.