Weird, amusing, and overblown games

[kestrel404]

So, everyone's probably been in one of those games where everything turned completely wacky (or started that way), or the characters blew up the universe, or something. Most of these probably aren't aberrant games, so they don't belong in the Q6+ thread.

So if you've got a story of an overpowered campaign to share, let's hear it! They're usually the funniest kind.

[Singularity]

I've been aparty to two Methuselah games for Vampire. In the first one I decided to be a little nutter-butter and tore up all of the Holy Land in a search for the Holy Grail, just to piss off a rival.

The second one started in the Second City... oye, was that just wrong.

[kestrel404]

Most of the games I've had that fall into this category have been under a GM who dislikes rules that he didn't write himself. So the universes he created were all a hodgepodge of his imagination and sci-fi/anime references.

Example: A game nominally set in the universe of Amber, supposedly based on the Amber Diceless rules. Popular shadows included Amber and Chaos (of course), Star Wars (a player's home universe), Babylon 5 (my home universe, since I was playing a techno-mage), Niven's ringworld, Final Fantasy 6, and about a dozen which the GM came up with himself. Plus a myriad different universes we happened on over the course of the game.

The fun comes in when we begin to connect the dots between these universes, and learn that some of the players are Nobilis (with words like Creation, Time, Space, and Luck), I'm a timelord (a la Dr. Who, which incidentally entitles me to a Tardis with limited time-travel capabilities), one character is actually a living embodyment of the multiverse...

That game had one of the most horrendously complicated endings I've ever experienced. The simple explanation is that, after the battle against the beings outside the multiverse (who wanted Creation back so they could make new things), a never-ending war started between the courts of chaos and an insane artificial intelligence.

Yes, that's the short version. The long version includes the post-game actions of the 15 or so players who survived the final battle.

[Ghostwriter]

Umm, okay.

[kestrel404]

You know, everyone I try to explain that game to has had that same reaction. But everybody who played in it had a great time.

And considdering that there were just shy of 20 players and only one GM, running for a full semester of college, that's pretty impressive.

[Singularity]

One of the best games I've ever played in was also on a huge scale. It was a Hunter: the Reckoning game but the guy running it worked it a little differently. Instead of there being a limited set of "splats" a hunter could be, each hunter was the only representation of that particular viture. My character, for example, was the ONLY Martyr and I was the only hunter who had that power available to him (and it was the only power I had available to me). The whole idea was that each hunter was imbued with one of the virtues of Heaven, returned to Earth on their own because the rest of the Heavenly Host wouldn't get off their asses to deal with the coming Apocalypse.

Long story short, we ended up inciting the end of the world, attempting to "push the wheel" through the next, craptastic age as fast as possible. The climatic battle at the foot of the world (Antartica) of the army of virtues against the horde of demons from Hell then a desperate battle to reach the sleeping Leviathan was a real hard thing to top. And living up to his virtue, my character died after revealing the opening to stopping the "big bad" keeping us from reaching the slumbering beast.

In the epilogue, my Nazarene Rabbi character ended up being Metatron's right hand man in teaching the new entries to Heaven. Quite a funky ride.

Funny thing is the guy who ran the game was raised Jewish and is no longer practicing. Hell, none of us are exactly pious and faithful people. Definitely a cool game for those who enjoy theology, mythology, and other grandiose topics.