Hola, My name is Luis....and I am a Tabletop Fanatic. Folks, it happens: you are desperate for something new. You tire of the same old dungeon dives, the same old megacorporation battles in a grim dark future, and the same old "zombies iz coming fer yer brainz" shoot-em-ups. You tire of giving George Lucas, JRR Tolkien, and Phillip K Dick center stage, and long for a unique adventure to awaken your dulled imagination and truly astonish your players. I won't lie. Homebrews are my favorite campaigns to do. Why read your
adventures from a book when you can create something that is truly an
extension of yourself. But sometimes you create a campaign so different from the norm that you fall off the old sanity scale and land in a sea of wackiness and broken gameplay so tumultuous that you begin to wonder if you'll ever see the surface again. So, by way of introducing myself and so that we all have a good chuckle, I'm hoping we could all share our weirdest homebrew campaigns. I'll start: I made a GURPS campaign based on the "Puppet Master" movies. Yes. THAT PUPPET MASTER. Yes. I still love those damn Charles Band movies. Yes. I loved them enough that I made a campaign about it and got three of my friends to play it. It was...weird. The premise was simple: the players were living, killer marionettes (no more than 21 inches tall) brought into a new un-life by a Puppet Master (human beings who have, for various reasons and with varying levels of understanding of the process, acquired the fabled "Secret of Life"). The Puppets would then have to deal with whatever mission or threat faced their new master (or at least find an opportune time to murder them, should the Puppet Master prove to be incompetent or abusive). Players would create a puppet, and each puppet would have a unique "gimmick": a trait that is central to their design (IE: Tunneler's Head Drill, Six Shooter's Guns etc). The main problem with being a puppet is that simply charging around and stabbing things much larger than you was suicide (a simple kick from a human could kill or critically damage a careless puppet). Thus it became a stealth based horror game relying on team work and careful planning to either avoid foes or take them out. As a framing device, each time all the players ran out of the animating serum (represented by FP), were too damaged, or simply completed the mission/killed their puppet master. I would roll a series of dice, simulating the puppets being lost and then discovered by a new puppet master. The dice rolls would determine how much time had passed, the personality of the new puppet master, and the current threat level (ranging from 1-4 or oblivious human interlopers to demonic agents). I quickly ran into several problems. 1. The puppets can't talk. In the movies they can only make guttural mewling sounds and hisses, relying on basic gestures and stances to convey emotion or messages. As such the game quickly devolved into the world's most violent mime simulator. A fact which annoyed many of my players and made roleplaying a challenge. 2. Limited threats. You can only kill so many nazis, paranormal snoops, and demonic toys before you fall into a rut. 3. Power Gaming Puppets. In a game where you need to play off being smaller, weaker, but more vicious than your foes power gaming is a poison kiss. Even a less than talented munchkin could easily earn enough points to break the game and turn it from a game of tiny, stealthy terror to a hack and slasher that would make Robert E Howard blush. Its hard to build suspense when a creature less than two feet tall is able to mince a Nazi storm trooper platoon into sour kraut without much effort. 4. You. Are. A. Fucking. Puppet. It's great as a novelty, but for a long term campaign? It just becomes a drag. So after four sessions (in which the players fought a Nazi cult, two groups of horny teenagers looking to party in their house, and some small but deadly demons) my group had enough. Personally? I think they just got tired of hearing that theme song. So... how about you?
