Games I want to play: Geiger Counter scenarios
There are just not enough hours in the day to play all the Geiger Counter games I want to try. I’m particularly interested in using the system in less obvious ways (not just another slasher/aliens movie). These are a few of the ideas we’ve got queued up, just waiting for a chance to play. Maybe you’ll beat us to it and try them first…
Fall of Troy — The protagonists are the heroes, kings, wives, etc. in the walled city weathering the Greek assault (the menace). Not literally Troy/the Iliad since that would encourage playing out the events as they happened, but a Troy-like situation. Characters are defenders not attackers because that works better as a menace — the attackers could always just decide to go home. Can the defenders defeat the invaders on the broad fields of battle or do the last survivors flee as their city burns? (kudos to Jem for this one)
Reverse Dungeon — What mysterious terror is marching into our dungeon and killing us poor monsters? Can kobolds, otyughs and ettins join forces and defend their lairs from the menace of the adventuring party? Talking monsters could veer towards the cartoonish, but if you envision the adventurers as a powerful yet mysterious enemy from the unknown outer world it could work. It’s obvious to think of the more powerful monsters as possible survivors, but maybe it’s the plucky wererat who survives, not the raging minotaur?
World War II — Straight Normandy Beach and pushing on to Berlin, losing guys as you go. Will the squad survive or get wiped out? If you want a twist make the whole thing a virtual prison: it’s World War II: the Matrix. Win the war or escape the illusion.
Necronomicon — The menace is an accursed book man was not meant to read. No monsters, just people going insane from reading it and possibly becoming dangerous themselves (in-game “dead” people may become expressions of the menace). More madness and unspeakable horror than shotguns & tentacles — slow-paced drama/mystery focusing on the human relationships.
Voyages of the Dauntless cross-over — Geiger Counter meets InSpectres in Spaaace! The game would actually be a flashback of events the Dauntless was investigating. What happened on this abandoned space station? Where’s the crew of this ghost ship? What happened to the survey team that went into the alien ruins? It would all get played out in Geiger Counter, with a brief narrative wrapper of the Dauntless crew finding the clues at the beginning and learning the outcome at the end. If the protagonists survive, we get to explain how they escaped and can be tracked down and rescued (or maybe this was decades ago and they’re dead from natural causes). If not, all we have are their final log entries to tell the tale…
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Mark — no, it’s not like that at all. You roleplay the whole time.
Most of your posts are so interesting — I’ve always looked forward to finding one I haven’t read yet.
This looked interesting until I read Geiger Counter itself and discovered it’s one of those boring, lifeless anti-GM things.
I used to belong to a group that played poker, pinochle, Uno, that sort of thing, and they might have enjoyed Geiger Counter as a strategy game with a sheen of color fluff that has no value or impact whatsoever on the set played.
However, my RPG group would hate this game. We come together in our RPGs to ROLE-PLAY (I’d think it was obvious the notion of *roleplaying* is important to RPGs since it uses two of the three letters) not to play at storyboarding. Geiger Counter is like telling people, “We’re playing the movie version of Lord of the Rings — Bill, you get to play the 3rd unit camera man; Michelle, you get to play the best boy; Jack, you get to play the continuity gnome. Now, no one get attached or committed to Frodo or Legolas or any of the characters, and don’t make the mistake of immersing yourself in any of them, because we’re just going to pass them off to each other as we feel like it, just like they were lifeless pawns or shared dishplates. Some fun, huh?”
Yawn.
However, I like some of your ideas, and in a game which understands the importance of roleplaying and game mastering, I think they could work quite well.
Having now played Geiger Counter, how about this one?
Wanted Men – The characters are a gang of train robbers, fleeing after a semi-successful robbery. They got the gold they were after, but now there’s an implacable lawman and his posse after them (the menace) plus probably conflicting goals about getting away and who gets the loot.