FENG SHUI

[sinanju]

So my lovely and talented wife, snippy, wants to play Joey the Werewolf again.  He's a character she played some time back in a GURPS Mage/Werewolf/Etc game I ran.  He's her favorite character that she's every played.  But our gaming group has been becalmed in the Sargasso Sea of nobody really feeling motivated to run an RPG for two or three years now.  We've been playing cards or card games or board games, but no real role-playing games for far too long.

I participate in the Hero Games Forums where Champions and other Hero System games are discusseed.  I often see people asking how to replicate this, that or the other thing for a game under the Champions rules.  How do I build a polearm to keep people at a distance using the champions rules?  How do I simulate this Plot Device for an adventure I'm gonna run?  And my reaction 9 times out of 10 is "Dude!  Just wave your hands and make it so!  You're the GM.  You don't have to design everything with points!"  Maybe I'm just burned out after so many years of GURPS, but the simplicity of Fudge appeals to me precisely because it dispenses with entire rulebooks full of rules--just apply some common sense and fudge the rest.  As long as all the players are having fun, you're doing it right.)

So I decided I need to start a game again, and I decided to resurrect my Santa Carla* game so she can play Joey again.  But instead of GURPS I'll be using Fudge.  And I'm going to change the focus of the game so that rather than run mostly Mage/Werewolf oriented adventures, I'm going with the time-traveling, ass-kicking temporal wars of FENG SHUI.  The PCs will be participating in the battle to seize control of key feng shui sites in the past, present and future in order to impose your preferences on the world.  He who controls the most (and most powerful) feng shui sites controls the flow of Chi; he who controls the flow of Chi, controls the world...at least until some other group travels into the past and seizes control of said feng shui sites and wrests control away from you, changing history and shaping it to his specifications.  As various factions gain the upper hand, history itself can change--though only those in the know will realize it.  Which opens up the campaign to play with any sort of past, present or future I want to use.

I'm also considering what groups I want to have busily trying to alter the world.  I don't care for several of the official groups, so I've been thinking about whom I can add.  So far, I've tentatively identified:

• The anarchists of the North American Confederacy (from L. Neil Smith's fiction); theirs was a low-probability timeline that resulted from battles between more in-the-know feng shui factions, but a few of them still reside in the Netherworld and haven't given up hope of restoring their vision of the world.  They'll be running around bearing ungodly powerful personal weapons and smartsuits, causing a lot of trouble, but accomplishing fairly little, I suspect.
  
• The Draka (S.M. Stirling's nasties); another low-probability timeline, and a much bigger power in the Netherworld, where they maintain a very large base of operations full of serfs overseen by genetically engineered supersoldiers.  More organized than the anarchists (go figure...), but their ideal world is so repugnant that even "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" only gets them minimal cooperation from other factions.
• SKYNET (and/or GUARDIAN and COLOSSUS) and their Terminator minions.  Terminators would make nifty-keen Men In Black, don't you think?  SKYNET, like the Jammers in the actual Feng Shui books, are probably intent on destroying feng shui sites to minimize the influence of magic and chi on events.
• I gotta throw in the Weird, Weird West of DEADLANDS, wherein a Native American shaman unleashes cthulhu-esque nastiness on the world not long before the Civil War.  It goes...poorly for everone.

No doubt there are other amusing timelines I could use.  Any suggestions?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

*My Mage/Werewolf/Etc game has traditionally been set in Santa Carla, the town in which The Lost Boys was set, sort of Buffy's Sunnydale writ large.

Comments

How about...

[seawasp]

... stealing from other sources? One that would be appropriate for Feng Shui and leave many opportunities for other sorts of adventures and occasional slapstick would be to steal the basic concept and background from "Jackie Chan Adventures". Despite the kids' approach used, there's some serious RPG and dark gaming potential in that one.