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Tomb Raider RPG
Apr. 23rd, 2008 08:42 pm I recently read about a paid of engineers who have manufactured instant concrete shelters (essentially their tents impregnated with concrete mix - you set up the test, wet it and give it 12 hours to dry into a permanent building), with an eye towards being able to use them in refugee crises. Since they only weigh a few thousand pounds (1000 for the smallest, 5000 for the largest) they can be quickly moved to situations where people need housing that is more secure than regular tents but where normal building materials would be too difficult and time consuming to deploy, such as earthquake zones. It's fascinating and useful stuff - the sort of engineering that seems obvious once someone does it.
It's also the sort of thing that makes me think about modern-era treasure hunting games. OK, most things make me think about gaming one way or another, but this you knew. There's so much new, neat stuff available now that I'd have an urge to run a contemporary treasure hunt/dungeon crawl where the PCs have access to bleeding edge modern tech. (This would be instead of magic, in an urge to limit the wackiness.) The best example I can come up with is Tomb Raider, but perhaps with reasonably sized breasts.
I figure the world would have to have a pre-ice age human history that produced advanced tech (to the nanotech levels) and many underground vaults for various purposes. Over the years the discovery of any vault would give the country that found it a massive technological edge - even if they couldn't figure out a fraction of what was in there. In the contemporary period there are corporations and nation states hunting for them - along with private reclamation companies like those that hunt for treasure-laden shipwrecks - combining research in dusty old archives with satellite imaging and GIS cartography to find them, and then teams of highly trained experts to enter them and uncover their secrets. Of course, if the location of a tomb is leaked it becomes a race to see who can claim it first.
This may have to end up on my next prospectus, assuming that I can find a mechanic that captures the feel. Anyone have any experience with d20 Modern to let me know if it's worth considering?
It's also the sort of thing that makes me think about modern-era treasure hunting games. OK, most things make me think about gaming one way or another, but this you knew. There's so much new, neat stuff available now that I'd have an urge to run a contemporary treasure hunt/dungeon crawl where the PCs have access to bleeding edge modern tech. (This would be instead of magic, in an urge to limit the wackiness.) The best example I can come up with is Tomb Raider, but perhaps with reasonably sized breasts.
I figure the world would have to have a pre-ice age human history that produced advanced tech (to the nanotech levels) and many underground vaults for various purposes. Over the years the discovery of any vault would give the country that found it a massive technological edge - even if they couldn't figure out a fraction of what was in there. In the contemporary period there are corporations and nation states hunting for them - along with private reclamation companies like those that hunt for treasure-laden shipwrecks - combining research in dusty old archives with satellite imaging and GIS cartography to find them, and then teams of highly trained experts to enter them and uncover their secrets. Of course, if the location of a tomb is leaked it becomes a race to see who can claim it first.
This may have to end up on my next prospectus, assuming that I can find a mechanic that captures the feel. Anyone have any experience with d20 Modern to let me know if it's worth considering?
