Tuesday 18 August 2015

RPGaDay 9: A Piece of Media I wish there was an RPG for


Image result for Merchant Princes

There aren't many things that I want to be RPGs, either because there are already games that can do them (Tim Powers' Fault Lines trilogy and Unknown Armies), or because I think they'd make terrible games (Possession by A.S. Byatt, because academic scholarship isn't that sexy). The exception to this is Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series; a trilogy of fat SF novels featuring multiple Earths, real politic and the drugs trade. Spread out across a number of worlds, the novels detail how a secretive cabal of reality hopping traders come to the attention of the American government and things spiral out of control; eventually leading to a nuclear war on the world the cabal calls home, one that leaves the Eastern Seaboard as little more than a desert of black glass.

In RPG terms there's a lot of opportunities, from different Earths, hunting down the cabal, or flipping it about, being world hoppers who are on the run and trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities. That's before you consider that the original version of Earth has gone nuclear, which always creates plot opportunities, with tension ramping up from the political situation. Pushing past what Stross has detailed already, you could even introduce new groups of world walkers,  new powers that are aware of them and are either aiding them or acting to shut them down. 

All in all, I think it could be a great game though.

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