Occult Politicking Fantasy Kitchen Sink

[Prak]

I was led to Kill Six Billion Demons through Angel's Created World thread, and Throne looks like a hell of a lot of fun to play in. It seems like it would be sort of similar to Planescape, and got me thinking about a game in that sort of milieu.

It seems like what you want in that sort of game is total flexibility in what player characters look like- one character that pops up is "a goddess who thinks she's a collection of birds, or a collection of birds that think they're a goddess," another is a blue halfling sized imp, and background characters get even stranger. Hell, look at the Faerie Market from Hellboy 2, that's a good visual of the sort of environment you need to try to accommodate. Basically you'd want to embrace a World of Steves mentality.

Also, combat, while it certainly happens, would likely be pretty de-emphasized in favour of politickal maneuvering.

So, basically, instead of your race and class mattering, like in D&D, what matters is your social niche and political agenda. And if you're a 12 foot tall fiery androgynous being, that's mostly flavor.

A tweaked d20 could accommodate this if you doubled down on what Tome of Fiends did, but I was thinking maybe After Sundown's system would be better?

You might need to make the argument system more robust, and you'd have a lot of world building to do, especially since people would need even more help coming up with Backgrounds in a completely fictional world, but otherwise it should work out, right?

[Blasted]

I've been mulling over this for a while, but at the moment, the world doesn't seem fleshed out enough for a d20 style game. A Fate base is my current idea, because it makes it easier to group a reasonable amount of disparate character types.
As for world building, I'm waiting until the end of book 2

[Prak]

Well, yes, for K6BD specifically, yeah there's not enough known to the reader.

But for the thread, I meant something more general, inspired by K6BD, Sigil/Planescape and the Troll Market of Hellboy 2.

Basically, you want a game about a central truce world that is used and inhabited by beings from tons of different worlds. Earth as we know it might be one of those worlds. In K6BD, it's at the center of 777,777 other worlds, which seems like too many, but this is kitchen sink, and action happens in the truce world, not on any of the 777,777 worlds, so people can basically makeup whatever they want for their native world because you don't actually care about whether you can play there.

In Hellboy, there's only a few worlds (earth, hell, maybe heaven, limbo), and the Troll Market is just a sprawling market in some extradimensional space, and most action takes place on Earth outside the market, but it seems, what with being a haven for those who could not fit into mortal society, that is should be large enough to serve as an adventuring location. At the least, it likely has enough connection to other extradimensional spaces that it might as well be the town promenade for a continents' worth of supernaturals.

Sigil's sort of in between, but there's not a lot worth saving beyond the concept, so it doesn't really matter.


Basically it's a game about politics in a kitchen sink fantasy realm where the inhabitants look more like weird religious statues given flesh and life than humans and elves, and because they're supposed to vary so much, you don't bother to make races or splats. You might make a few factions like Angel, Demon, Fae, Daeva, but they're more about where they come from and who your friends are likely to be than what you can do or what you look like, because we're embracing the old tales here where the guy you're having drinks with might seriously be a seven-headed dragon that is conveniently human sized, or a wheel of fire. Hell, I see no reason to rule out tsukimogami, so your drinking partner might even be a fucking sapient paper lantern with an eye and a mouth and no discernible stomach, and all it really means is that you know who to ask about self-aware house wares.

More important is that that your 12 foot tall fire wheel drinking partner can look into the future and dominate minds and uses this to play the market.

If you decide to emulate Sigil/Finality with the various factions, they take the place of AS's cults, describing the sort of work you do and what kind of magic you can find a teacher for easily.