Quote from: Thanatos02Hey Lev. ^^ Isn't Synnabar the game with the laser-eye bears? That is awesome. I've got a real extensive background (I'm sure I'll post or link it sometime) already, but I'll try and see if I can find a copy real cheap. I'm broke, after all, but I can do ok for myself. (But now I've got a list of books - Tekumel, Synnabar, does anyone else have a favorite? I've already got Exalted, and Brenti over there has Burning Wheel. No Dogs in the Vineyard for this one, thanks...)

Tekumel has too much arts, culture and flowry stuff for what you want. Synnibar is is almost perfect for what you describe, and you should be able to pick it up on Ebay for next to nothing.

Quote from: Thanatos02How do you feel about True20 magic? I was gonna run it straight by the book, but I don't have any problems switching books. Mostly, I don't like Vancian magic either, and I thought about that when I was working on my concept, but I decided if I was going to go 80-90% RAW, I'd just go 100% this time and just roll with what I didn't like so much. What's your suggestion, though? I know you've got a good alternative somewhere. ^^ (You and your clever RPG knowledge, you.)

And, yeah. Virconium and what I've heard about Vance's (ironically, considering the magic) Dying Earth. But it started out as an excercise in "Where did all these abandoned wrecks and dungeons come from?"

Hey Lev. ^^ Isn't Synnabar the game with the laser-eye bears? That is awesome. I've got a real extensive background (I'm sure I'll post or link it sometime) already, but I'll try and see if I can find a copy real cheap. I'm broke, after all, but I can do ok for myself. (But now I've got a list of books - Tekumel, Synnabar, does anyone else have a favorite? I've already got Exalted, and Brenti over there has Burning Wheel. No Dogs in the Vineyard for this one, thanks...)

The magic system from Midnight is probably acceptable, but maybe lower-powered than you want for this setting.  I'll think on it and get back to you.

You can always find variants of the dungeon crawl all over the place. Some places, like //www.drivethrurpg.com and //www.rpgnow.com offer some for free.

Dungeon crawls can be disguised in various ways. Set one in a SF setting, for example. The PCs ship jumps to a station to refuel, only to find the station silent, dark and apparently completely shut down. The players have no fuel to reach another system and therefore must board the station, retrieve fuel and get it back to their ship. A little ingenuity and presto! The players are on a dungeon crawl without even knowing it.

If your players are leery of dungeon crawls, try the above suggestion and disguise one as somethign else. They might discover it can be fun after all.

Good luck and have fun.

Quote from: lev_lafayetteTekumel has too much arts, culture and flowry stuff for what you want. Synnibar is is almost perfect for what you describe, and you should be able to pick it up on Ebay for next to nothing.

Arts, culture, and flowery stuff are all pretty important, but those aspects will probably be more important in town or when PCs make treks to the cities. The difference between this game and the rest of mine is that there's dungeons at all, pretty much, and the player's play people interested in spending time in them.

I'm not really planning on disguising the dungeon aspect, though. If the players arn't keen on the mechanical aspects all that much, then this'd be a huge pain, and nothing'd be able to hide that.

spike's "sunken skyscraper" sounds really cool.  you could have the "boss fight" in the huge lobby/atrium.  it could be some kind of cyborg dragon or something, like ED-209 combined with the final t-rex scene in jurassic park.  just have a bunch of the floors collapsed (a "skyscraper" would really have too many levels) and a anti-grav lift system like in the old "barrier peaks" module.

i agree with the one-shot idea, too.  just do the dungeon, a touch of background info, then run it.  if they like it, then go ahead & flesh it out some more.

I like Spike's idea, too.
Yeah, and I think my plan is kind of to make the game a series of one-shots. Like, if the regular's game got cancelled or we're just not doing anything, I can be like, "Hey, wanna play the dungeon-crawl?".

What can I say? I have a cool brain. Only cost me 19.95 before taxes from Igor's Brain Emporium (level 23...)

Of course, imagine the player's confusion when they realize the dungeon's levels are actually numbered.... in reverse.

Note: I misread the OP and didn't realize this is possibly for publication/release of some sort. That being said,

Quote from: lev_lafayetteTekumel has too much arts, culture and flowry stuff for what you want.

Only IMO if you let it, Tekumel works just fine as layered dungeoncrawl with depth above & below. The history, culture & locales tend to read as campaign transcripts and adventure seeds.

There's places like the Crater of the Unstraightened City in the middle of the Plains of Glass*, unrusting starships still waiting for somewhere to go to, still automated port cities, sunken subways, and most cities (inhabited or not) rest on 2+ earlier layers.

Crib liberally from all over the solar system, timeline, and dimensions.


* in otherwords a high tech city that was upheaved, turned on its side, and partially buried. At some later point a lot of the area around it was hit by possibly the last human atomic weapons in a war for resources held by cat-people shapeshifters, which also wiped out (or mutated? ) the humans

Casey, the more you post on Tekumel, the more I realize that the version released by GoO was the absolute worst way ever to present the setting.  Just bad all around.

Bah. You shoulda picked up the liscense and done is. Ida bought it... wait... I bought GoO's version.... so much for that compliment