So I have been enamored with Highlander (The First Movie and the Live action TV Series) especially as a Tabletop RPG setting. I am curious if any of you have played a game using Highlander as a setting. I seem to recall that one of you ran a Highlander game using True20. Hopefully you lovely folks can tell me your ideas on this.

So you're more or less talking about Immortal (http://invisiblewar.com/immortal/index2.html), I can not believe that web site even exists still. Looks like the core books might even be free downloads on the site.

Quote from: arcanuum on December 09, 2020, 01:07:19 AM
So I have been enamored with Highlander (The First Movie and the Live action TV Series) especially as a Tabletop RPG setting.

How would such a game work when the goal of the game is for the PCs to kill each other until only one remains?

Quote from: hedgehobbit on December 09, 2020, 08:41:47 AM

Quote from: arcanuum on December 09, 2020, 01:07:19 AM
So I have been enamored with Highlander (The First Movie and the Live action TV Series) especially as a Tabletop RPG setting.

How would such a game work when the goal of the game is for the PCs to kill each other until only one remains?

Immortals can have friends and -not- be trying to decapitate each other.  For every murderous sociopathic immortal presented, there's usually one or two pleasant enough folks.  This is canonical to whatever version you want to call "source material" too.  ("Dark Quickenings" that make nice immortals murderous are also canon, per the main TV show)

Edit: that's not very helpful, and I see what you're saying.  While I doubt a campaign would last long enough for the PCs to be the last immortals in the world, the question of "what do they do" is a valid one and doesn't have a good answer if they work together.  There were the Four Horsemen on the TV show who went around killing other immortals as a group, but that would seem to get rather "meh" in short order as a PC-based RPG campaign.  Personally, I'd skip Highlander and instead focus on a game like Nephilim or even Fireborn, which has factions and goals and such baked into the setting, along with the premise of "you live for a really long time and gain all sorts of skills and powers because of it" without feeling like a Vampire: the Masquerade/Requiem campaign.

As for RPGs...

I'd argue Immortal: the Invisible War is it's own weird critter, and has nothing to do with Highlander other than calling its protagonists "immortals".

Legacy: War of the Ages is pretty much a straight "homage" to the Highlander movie, with a few minor tweaks to give immortals extra "k3wl p0w3rz" as was the custom of the time.  Very much influenced by 1990 White Wolf design goals, but with less budget (or talent).  Probably worth skimming a bootleg PDF for ideas, or buying if you can find it for dirt cheap..

There's also a fan-made Highlander: the Quickening supplement for the WoD.  Never looked at it though.  (There's also probably another dozen or more options out there)

I actually think it would be pretty difficult to play a Highlander-type setting well, although I'd be interested to hear of anyone's experience showing differently.

Basically, I see the same problem that I do with "elder" campaigns in Vampire: the vast majority of stories about immortals have them living in the present day and then flashing back to points in their previous history throughout time, which seems like it would be very difficult to play as a game because it means any characters still established as alive in the present day are essentially immune from death in any of the flashback scenes -- this is a big tension killer.  It also makes continuity very difficult to establish and maintain, as players can reasonably object that any information their characters are established as having acquired in a flashback scene, but that they (the players) didn't know until that scene played out, should have been factored into the characters' decisions before then.

Now it's not that there aren't ways around this, and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who's made it work. (You could basically just do scenes in strict chronological order over several pre-chosen periods, for example, and give everyone who survives each "phase" a major power up for the next one to reflect the "skipped-over" centuries.)  But as when we were talking about romantic fantasy last month, I think there are some literary devices and conventions which just don't work as well in the context of a game as one might think.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 09, 2020, 09:58:59 AMBasically, I see the same problem that I do with "elder" campaigns in Vampire: the vast majority of stories about immortals have them living in the present day and then flashing back to points in their previous history throughout time, which seems like it would be very difficult to play as a game because it means any characters still established as alive in the present day are essentially immune from death in any of the flashback scenes -- this is a big tension killer.

Yes, doing flashbacks as a group would be very difficult. However, one possibility is to take turns and do a flashback for each character. That player will play as his immortal while all the other players would play as companions; the goal being to keep the companions alive throughout the session. Sort of an origin story. Of course, you'd need some sort of narrative rules to reflect the sort of personal anguish of watching your friends die if you fail. As you said, you'd have to do the flashbacks in chronological order to keep from getting stuck in some sort of paradox. It would be difficult to run but doable.

[EDIT] Thinking about this, the first couple of these origin story session, the players wouldn't need to know who is the Immortal. Each player generates a character in, say, feudal Japan, and one of them secretly can't die. Then the next session, a random character from the remaining players will be picked. Up until the last session where the remaining immortal character starts out dead (since there's no mystery left).

Quote from: hedgehobbit on December 09, 2020, 08:41:47 AM

Quote from: arcanuum on December 09, 2020, 01:07:19 AM
So I have been enamored with Highlander (The First Movie and the Live action TV Series) especially as a Tabletop RPG setting.

How would such a game work when the goal of the game is for the PCs to kill each other until only one remains?

How did the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG work? I think they only allowed one player to be a Slayer and the others took support roles.

I don't remember the Highlander TV show much, but I think there was one main Highlander for the series and other characters mostly had support roles. I would imagine that this is how a Highlander RPG would probably work.

I imagine that for Highlander to work best is to have it start in a Historical Period like say the Roman republic or something. Also for flashbacks, what if you got a number of flashback points for each century you lived. Then you can spend them to explain skills or background details that happened to your immortal character. As to the idea of a group of Immortals working together there are quite a few immortals in Highlander who don't kill each other automatically. Duncan MacLeod and Connor MacLeod. Connor MacLeod and Sunda Kastagir Amanda and Duncan, Duncan and Fitzcairn you get the idea. However placing Immortal characters before The Gathering should work better for a group. Conversely the idea of Highlander is more or less a battle between good & evil. This means that even if you play during The Gathering you can have the Good characters go against the Evil characters. Though that would only work if it was the TV version of The Gathering.

Quote from: finarvyn on December 10, 2020, 07:50:27 PM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on December 09, 2020, 08:41:47 AM

Quote from: arcanuum on December 09, 2020, 01:07:19 AM
So I have been enamored with Highlander (The First Movie and the Live action TV Series) especially as a Tabletop RPG setting.

How would such a game work when the goal of the game is for the PCs to kill each other until only one remains?

How did the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG work? I think they only allowed one player to be a Slayer and the others took support roles.

I don't remember the Highlander TV show much, but I think there was one main Highlander for the series and other characters mostly had support roles. I would imagine that this is how a Highlander RPG would probably work.

I never watched the show regularly, but I remember that one of the supporting cast was also an immortal - though a very young one (he filled the "outsider" role for the audience as McCloud showed him the ropes) - though I think he eventually died.

Quote from: finarvyn on December 10, 2020, 07:50:27 PM
How did the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG work? I think they only allowed one player to be a Slayer and the others took support roles.

To be fair, if you just set if after the finale, you could have as many Slayers in a group as you wanted. That said, powerful witches and various more benevolent demons could probably outdo a generic Slayer in the raw power category (Buffy is almost the exception that proves the rule on Slayers; she survives and overcomes so much more than any previous Slayers did precisely because of the ways she's NOT like them).

So between the post-finale "there can be more than one" and the existing of countless other supernatural entities, Buffy actually isn't that great a model for a Highlander based campaign.

Honestly? Probably the simplest solution is just to treat the whole "There can be only one" element as a myth and throw out an alternative explanation that allows for more party cohesion.

For example; Immortals can sense other immortals even before their first death and some Immortal who's more into science than religion comes up with a theory; he reasons that a certain percent of humans have the immortal gene/mutation and so there will always be more born.

Since that means there will never be only one (or at least not for long) then The Prize must also be a myth; a justification for murdering other immortals to experience The Quickening because it is just THAT addictive (it adds some power too, but according to this immortal scientist's theory that's secondary to the addictive high).

So to both test this theory and perhaps break this cycle, this immortal manipulates a bunch of potentials into becoming friends and associates before setting up a situation where they all get killed (maybe a plane crash).

Then he gives them HIS explanation for immortals, explains that there is also a crazy cult of immortals out there who are addicted to killing and he brought them together for safety in numbers and to be each other's Immortals Anonymous support group.

He promises to explain more fully, only to get killed by a "crazy cultist" immortal before he can actually do so, leaving the PC band of new immortals on their own.

It doesn't even matter if the immortal scientist is right or wrong; the PCs group has a specific counter-narrative to resist the whole Prize/fight to the death element and explain why they don't just kill each other.

This could either be a modern event (i.e. they're all basically Richie from the series) or it could have been done at some point in the past (ex. a proto-scientist/natural philosopher from the dark ages/medieval/Renaissance era) in which case you could do flashbacks to previous points when this band with a shared origin were all together.

Another way to do this is for players to start their characters at a point in history when they met up and "did a thing" and then skip some time...a few decades, several centuries or whatever (maybe with some character improvements or adjustments depending on what they were up to in between) when the next "adventure" or series of "adventures" happens all the way up to, eventually, the present day.

I think you'd have to alter the lore quite a bit. For one, a lot more immortals running around, maybe factions. Perhaps mythological creatures.

The film was based on a fun premise that was suited for, well, a film, not an RPG. Lots of great books would make poor RPGs. I just re-read the wonderful Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, one of my all-time favorites, and the setting is just too tightly thematic to make a good RPG world.

About..oh, 15 years ago now, I ran a long "Highlander" campaign set in ancient Rome. It was combination of a historically-authentic roman campaign with all the highlander setting, where the PCs played immortals.  The campaign started at the time of the rise of Augustus, and ended at the end of the reign of Hadrian.

Want there at least one official Highlander RPG?

Also wayyyyyyyyyy the hell back Dragao Brasil did a conversion for the Highlander setting to WoD I believe.

Quote from: Omega on December 15, 2020, 11:04:14 PM
Want there at least one official Highlander RPG?

Also wayyyyyyyyyy the hell back Dragao Brasil did a conversion for the Highlander setting to WoD I believe.

I checked it out. Apparently not: https://rpggeek.com/rpgsetting/62360/highlander

If I was going to make a Highlander RPG, the one thing I would need to figure out would be:
Other than death, what else could the PC be punished with, which would make the player think twice about being stupid or acting stupid during play. Why is it that PC DEATH is the be-all, end-all, punishment/loss condition? There must be a more nuanced way...