Joe's GM Wish List

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Hello.

This is a collection of write-ups on a handful of the sorts of games I'd love to run, given the opportunity. I have probably pointed you toward this page, in hopes of figuring out what it is that I'd like to run next. So, without further ado:

Eldritch

Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition Campaign
The PCs are all magicians, former apprentices of the Archmagus of their dimension. When her current apprentice comes seeking their help, they discover that the Archmagus is in some kind of mystic trance-coma, and cannot be awakened! Worse yet, it seems to have been caused by the beginnings of a dimensional crossing by a realms-spanning warlord, who intends this world to be the next in his system of conquests. It is up to these magicians to defend our world and try to find a way to cure the Archmagus before it is too late!

Sacred Band Setting

Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition Campaign

  • All Upon the Watchtower: The PCs are agents of the Watchtower, the newly-founded international organization established by Alchemy and an elite consortium of financiers. Intended to be the last word in superhuman problem solving, the Watchtower sends its agents in to deal with the problems its subscriber nations need assistance with: super-powered criminals and terrorists, natural disasters, and relief efforts.
  • Long Arm of the Law: The PCs are a team of the Changed who are part of state-level law enforcement working in cooperation with the Department of Transformed Persons Affairs. Their job is simple: to deal with criminals that exhibit super powers, investigating, tracking and aiding in the prosecution of those criminals. They're the so-called "super cops" that the media loves to tell stories about, struggling to do their jobs under the hot lights of public scrutiny.
  • Masks: The PCs are a small group of super-powered individuals. Despite the efforts of the DTPA and local law enforcement, they are doing the impossible: coming together, in costumes and masks, to right wrongs and stop criminals. They each have a reason to do this, but one thing is for sure - they're not going to let a little thing like the law keep them from doing what's right.

City of Splendors

A D&D Next Forgotten Realms Campaign
The legendary Waterdeep, Jewel of the North. It is home to many stories, within its walls and otherwise. Some of the kinds of possible games I'd be interested in running here:

  • Nobles of Waterdeep: The characters are all young nobles joined only by a shared background as some of the richest denizens of the city, and an interest in adventuring. Though they may not be the best of friends, their alliance is rooted in their shared interest and the need to keep their activities secret from their families.
  • The House of Wonder: The church of Mystra is a center of magical lore and learning. Characters are wizards, clerics and paladins of Mystra and other allied individuals (multiclassing is definitely an option).
  • Company of the Portal: A recently-formed adventuring company who has taken up arms to do what so many have tried to do in the past: explore Undermountain! Taking rooms in the Yawning Portal, the company uses it as their base of operation for daring raids to explore, map and clear the dangers of Undermountain.

Forgotten Realms Faction Game

A D&D 5e Forgotten Realms Campaign
Organizations in Faerûn work to achieve their myriad aims through bold and brave agents of all kinds. The player characters are all members of one of these factions. These are the following options:

  • The Order of the Gauntlet: “The gods are with us. When evil strikes, we strike back.” The Order of the Gauntlet consists of faithful and vigilant seekers of justice who protect others from the depredations of evildoers.
  • The Emerald Enclave: “We preserve the natural order.” A widespread group of wilderness survivalists, the Emerald Enclave preserves the ways of nature while rooting out unnatural threats.
  • Zhentarim: “Join us and prosper. Oppose us and suffer.” The Zhentarim are a network of unscrupulous mercenaries constantly expanding their influence and power throughout Faerûn. The group walks a fine line between outright villainy and merely shady activities, and neutral adventurers might find that the benefits of association with the Black Network outweigh any moral qualms about abetting the organization’s evil activities.

End of Days

A Scion Chronicle
These are the end times, the End of Days.

It began with a small rumble, a disturbance that no one noticed in the frantic information glut of the early 2010s. In the middle of political outrages, class conflict between the haves and the have-nots, fears over misogyny, racism and homophobia, concerns over First World freedoms, the latest memes to crawl across the information networks of the world and the thousand-thousand shrieking voices vying for attention at the end of 2012, it happened. The prison shattered.

At first the reports were dismissed as attention-seeking pranks. No serious journalist credited them, and even if they did, the shareholders in the media conglomerates weren't about to risk their credibility and good name reporting nonsense. Giants in the Alps, fiery serpents in the hearts of newly-active volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, great thunderbirds swooping through the hearts of storms that rumbled across the Midwest.

By the time the reports garnered any kind of actual attention on a world-wide scale, it was too late. The governments of the world were the first to take them seriously, of course. As it turned out, the world's governments had known of the strange men and women throughout history who occasionally came to their attention. Indeed, they were complicit in helping these occasional heroes with the blood of gods to hide their existence from the rest of mankind.

For at least three mortal generations, the warnings had been there. Since World War II, possibly since the igniting of the first atom bomb. The gods were paying attention once more, sending their herald to awaken the divine blood in their children, to take up celestial arms and fight the minions of the Titans while the gods themselves engaged the Titans themselves in the realms beyond the ken of mortals. Such battles were waged in secret, covert wars between godkin and titanspawn, with mortal intelligence agencies and corporations doing their best to keep everything hidden, so as not to shatter the very understanding the world had of itself.

Perhaps they should have bent more of their efforts at winning that war than hiding it.

No one knows which Titan broke loose first. With the strange deathknell of the year, marked in the Mayan calendar so many centuries before, the prisons were at their weakest. The world descended into terrible madness. A sun erupted over the sands of Egypt, turning the sand for miles around an ancient necropolis to glass. Ships all throughout the Caribbean were lost in a strange mist that rose up, spewing the dead from the waters. The smouldering ground of Centralia, Pennsylvania cracked and split in an inferno that birthed tall terrible towers of black basalt, which rose high into the air, a deadly cathedral to that which burned.

Tunnels and mines the world over spewed darkness itself into the world around them, clutching at all that was living and pulling it into the suffocating darkness below. A great hurricane blew into the Gulf of Mexico, and grew, and grew, and grew, until it encompassed the whole of that body of water, throwing smaller hurricanes onto the lands around it like a child scattering flower petals around it.

Across the world, horrors awoke, and mankind died by the cityful.

It has been five years since the End of Days, and mankind is a hunted, harried thing. Most humans dwell in tucked-away places, having learned that fighting the spawn of the Titans brings only escalating deaths. Thus, men flee and hide. Occasionally, the heralds still appear, to give men hope. These demigods are not the aloof, hidden secret masters that once fought the secret god-wars before the End. Now they are bright and shining champions, and humans rally around them in desperation.

You are one such hero, gifted with the blood of the gods. People rally around you, seeking your help, begging for your protection, for you are one of the few in the world who can defend them from the death that awaits them in this Titan-haunted wasteland that was once man’s world.