Thursday, July 11, 2013

Campaign Seeds: Torg morning in America

Torg was an interesting game that I really never got a chance to check out.  There was just so much to it that you would go broke trying to collect it all.  The idea was to react a multi-genre system, very popular at the time, were all the different areas of earth were transformed by a Reality War.  Each section was under control by a particular Dark Lord and was reworked to fit their vision of a perfect world.  That is a bit of a stretch but there was a fantasy setting in England and a cyber setting in France, in any event. 

Through a series of plot line advancing modules they resolved the game with the characters winning the Reality War and earth being returned to it original state.  Which is all cool and wrapped up but it  doesn't allow for a lot of further role play.

What would excite me and provide for some further role playing, is taking the idea and warping it a bit.  Perhaps the players did win but not for themselves, rather they just put another dark lord in power.  This one with a vision of the present Earth as his domain.  The thing being that our history post 1994 or 95 has all been on hold, as the dark lord maintains his grip.

This give the character a new dark lord to fight with people who have no idea about the Reality Wars.  They assume the heroes are dangerous insane folks that should be locked up.  The Soviet union could be still in place with a lingering cold war.  It would allow for turning the 80's cold war US into a setting of its own.  Which creates for some rather nostalgic gaming.  

I am unsure of whom I would suggest as the Dark Lord, perhaps Bush the elder or some figure behind the scenes wanting the status quo to remain.  I am sure the next question is why the time frame?  Mainly because that is when Torg was all washed up.

The players would have no internet or a most a very difficult to access one.  Bulletin Board Systems would be all the rage along with party lines.   Guns and equipment would be limited to those in the basic boxed setting for the non effected earth.  If you really wanted to get weird let the history advance to modern 2013 tech and then have this 80's revision of the world start intruding that is cool too.  Things that are happening in the news could be modified to be ushering the change.  PRISM and the conflict in Afghanistan could be working their way back to the 80's.  A massive cyber attack could bring down the internet such that though it is up it is constantly being hit by a global denial of service attack.

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