Strange Premises, Settings, Ect

Resources GM
1

What are some of the strangest things you have used Open Legend for? What’s some strange things you are hoping to use it for?

Perhaps you have participated in a campaign where the players were microorganisms inside of a body, ala Osmosis Jones?

Maybe you hope to do a space story where the players play as entire ships instead of individuals?

Might you have ever done a run where you and your compatriots were gods?

Perchance you plan a tale where the end goal is to form a dungeon to guard something that mustn’t see daylight again?

What strange things have you done thus far? What strange things do you hope to do?

1 Like
2

I’ve mostly had strange events rather than strange premises… There was, though, my recently concluded Star Wars game.

I was running a sandbox, set in the lead up to Episode IV, but I planned a fairly scripted first session; where the players were bounty hunters hunting a target, when they see something the Empire didn’t want them to see and ended up with a bounty on their own heads. I was thinking this would lead to the players going into hiding, setting up a campaign in the criminal underworld, but players can always surprise you…

Upon finding out that they had a bounty from the Empire, the players went straight to the Empire and handed themselves in. They convinced the local garrison that it was all a big misunderstanding, and even got some hush money to keep quiet about what they had seen. A couple of sessions later, they were running contracts for the Empire. Another couple of sessions, they had bought a spaceship factory. By the midway point of the campaign, they had an orbital shipyard with 3 more on the way; they were selling the Empire a replacement for the TIE Fighter and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.

What had been planned as criminal underworld sandbox ended up as politics and economic manipulation on a galactic scale. :sweat_smile:

7 Likes
3

That. Sounds. Amazing. Good work on rolling with it! I can only imagine what else had gone on.

2 Likes
4

One that I recently thought of:
The players are a Black Ops force for the kingdom’s queen, a powerful sorcerer who managed to get a good reputation and can’t really risk sullying it. At midnight each night, she casts a telepathy spell on a random player, asking for progress updates on the mission, which, let’s say it’s killing another kingdom’s ruler in some way.

The queen knows greatly of the king and kingdom, but publicly, as it seemingly materialized quite recently, her subjects assume that she knows little of it, and to show otherwise would be to admit to having kept rather large secrets from the populous, which they’d most certainly not appreciate, to understate what would occur.

Her rule wouldn’t last a week if the truth got out.

She is also able to share advanced arcane knowledge with the players (I.E. knowledge that players could figure out on their own, but would be difficult to discover, sometimes required knowledge and sometimes merely useful knowledge), but they’d need to ask the right question, and it might take her time to get back to them depending on what they have asked. Should the players have sufficient arcane knowledge amongst themselves, she is also rather knowledgeable about the kingdom the players are going to, having the only records of said kingdom’s history from before it’s mysterious cessation of it’s existence it came back from, and may be able to aid in that way.

Sure, the players could figure things out plenty on their own, but should they be particularly stuck, perhaps their boss has a map or a history book of some sort with some clue as to what could help.

A sort of time-sensitive help line on their quest to go somewhere that wasn’t there a couple weeks ago and kill their king, who they know nothing of, as even they are only permitted to know a much as they can convince her that they need to.

Needless to say, there are questions she’d not answer.

Also, perhaps if the players happen to be in the middle of something important when midnight hits, the call could very well still come, and the queen might not be somebody you get to ignore…

Not perfect, not by a longshot, but a potential jumping point for better ideas.

1 Like
5

Have any of you ever watched Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. My friend ran a game loosely based on it. It was ran in Pathfinder long before I even heard of Open legend but it was a great game. I ran a Jedi, a friend ran a character based on the Question, There was A D&D based cleric and even a shadow run decker in the group. Traveling between worlds for different missions was great.

6

I think this tops the weirdest but I ran a campaign where my players where silver where who had accidentally been enchanted by a wizard. He had planned to destroy them so they ran away from the castle and eventually led a siege on the wizards castle with the villagers of the surrounding village.

1 Like