Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I sadly suspect that my planned upcoming Burning Wheel game set in our homebrew “Undiscovered Countries” setting will never see the light of day. The game has been doomed from the start, and I’ve been fighting it. Three player drop-outs so far (two replacements acquired), and one no-call no-show. I really want to run this game, but fate seems stacked against it.

Grrr.

- NPC

I’ve got a hankering for a different kind of Dungeon Crawl. I’ve got a hankering to play one in which the characters are not warrior-robbers trying to kill everything and take their stuff, but instead scholars, explorers, archaeologists, and cave-crawling experts seeking information and relics from ancient cultures. Maybe they have one or two weapons among the lot of them, but mostly be pretty non-combat. A game where the characters get extremely excited about discovering intact flower pots and eating utensils from a bygone era. There would be a lot of game focus on history and culture, and a lot of time spent surveying areas, studying the flora and fauna, etc.

Have any of you run or played in games like this? Are there any published adventures or modules which specifically focus on this?

EDIT: Yowza! Somehow, this became a heated topic on a livejournal community where I cross-posted. Regardless, there are a lot of damn good ideas in there that I hope to steal in the near future.
- NPC

After the last playtest and a lot of deliberation and fiddling over the weekend, I’m making some big changes to the rules, mainly in the form of mechanical consolidation. Essentially, I’m modifying the Infection and Crazy-go-Psycho rules to bring them more directly in line with the rest of the system, so they feel less like modifications and more like integral chunks of the core rules. Read more

Yesterday afternoon I met with Jake, Nathan, and Tyler at Empire Games, down on SE Foster. I’d never been to this place before, nor did I even know it existed, as it has a pretty low street visibility (and I never find myself that far down in the SE, really). The game of the day was to be Cannibal Contagion, and I brought along a fresh print of the rules, a deck of playing cards, some tokens, some pre-cut blank NPC cards, and a fresh scenario idea involving planes, snakes, dingos, lost islands, velociraptors, reality-television cults, and infectious cyber-psychosis. The idea was to merge Lost, Snakes on a Plane, Fantasy Island, and Land of the Lost all into a comic survival-horror game. Read more

From The Screg:

“Also, you will be happy to know that I have spread the holy “No more D&D” word to my gaming group. My DM wants to switch to Dogs in the Vineyard when I am done with Savage Worlds.”