A game set in the fictitious country of Rokugan, L5R mixes historical Japanese samurai honour with legendary Chinese sorcery. Ed, Steve, and I were planning on playing it as a sequel to a Mutant Chronicles game in which we played from a similar, but "futurized", background. It never happened, but I wrote a story to introduce my character's new incarnation to the L5R setting.
Set in a dark reflection of the present day, this game sends its characters on a quest to revive a world calcified by the scientific paradigm. Through "True Magick", the willful alteration of reality can proceed, allowing the Ascension of the Mages and, through them, the sleeping masses. Opposing them, of course, are those who made the world what it is today: the Technocrats, who would prefer that the people remain ignorant of the many possibilities reality can be steered toward. But they have just as much opposition from within their own hearts.
Many questions must be answered by those who would command the nature of existence: If the world is to be taken off of its current path, what path will it be placed upon? If this is even possible, is it ethical? And, most importantly, can one wield such power and remain devoted to the cause of those who do not? Certainly the Technocracy did not keep the lofty goals of their Renaissance predecessors, the Order of Reason; who can say that the Mages of the Traditions can do better?
I ran this game for quite a while with my friends, Denzil, Brian, Greg, Dan, Tina, and Michael, before moving on to other games, eventually settling on Over the Edge. We still may come back to it; I loved some of the characters, and the plot was quite riveting at times. The only gleaning I have for you from all those hours of excitement and tragedy is a story I wrote from the perspective of one of the non-player characters, but it's very representative of the insistent, violent, philosophic, and eerie nature of our sessions.
This game is set in the Renaissance, and features the clash of minds and wills, as the rising Order of Reason clashes with the aging magick of the Traditions to reconstruct the world under the control of men. The Order of Reason have set out to rid the world of stagnant superstition and dangerous mythic beasts, and eventually will create the mechanized world we live in today. In this game you are free to weave an alternate reality, a different future based on your own vision. You just have to do what the Order of Reason accomplished so thoroughly during our Renaissance and get everyone to believe in it…
The Roleplaying Game of Surreal Danger. This is what I spend nearly every one of my Monday evenings directing, and most of the rest of the week thinking about. The setting apparently borrows heavily from Burroughs' "Naked Lunch", a book I have not yet read, but I expect to love. The game as I run it is truly bizarre, with not one of the stars of the show being a normal human being (at least not twenty-four hours a day). The rules are simple and elegant, leaving plenty of room for dark and bizarre storytelling.
The setting for this game is a post-apocalyptic Earth, in which the surviving denizens (well, the humans), form tribal cultures. What makes it even more interesting is that the apocalypse was not nuclear, it was a psychic holocaust brought on by our own neglect of our inherent spiritual side. The tribals have rediscovered their connection to the goddess via seven of her avatars, known as "Fatimas". Unfortunately for the main characters, played by myself and Steve, they have, for one reason or another, been banished by their tribe and Fatima, bound to find the path to the goddess by themselves. Not an easy task, given that the monstrous nightmare creatures responsible for the apocalypse are still around, and only held at bay by the Fatimas!
I'm a big fan of White Wolf's roleplaying games. All of them. I recently had the pleasure of seeing my ongoing Werewolf: The Apocalypse chronicle to a conclusion after over four years of play. For any werewolf character, the phase the moon was in at his/her time of birth is extremely important. A while back, I ran across a New Age book called The Moon and You *for beginners* by Teresa Moorey (very interesting). I converted the tables she included for calculating your birth moon into a JavaScript application for calculating auspices. Try it out!