New Year, New Obsessions

The holidays have flown by and with them have gone some of previous notions and projects... at least the enthusiasm for them.

The marbles have shifted and I have to admit I pretty much burned out on the Mythras/Classic Fantasy/World of Warcraft project. In the end I was put off by the same aspects of WoW that drove me away from playing the game. It's a commercial product where choices were made, increasingly, from commercial viewpoints. I'm really much better off 'borrowing' liberally from it than trying to re-create it. Not that re-creation was my original intent anyway.
What will work best, I think, is to... eventually... just run some small-scale games in that setting and see what happens... if it feels like it's working or not. No need for a lot of work up front.

Anyway, most all of that blew out of my headspace before Thanksgiving.

What came in to replace it was a sudden surge of interest in running a science fantasy game... very much inspired by first edition Rogue Trader 40K, Laserburn, and the parts of Star Wars that I still enjoy. Something wild and weird and not so well-mapped out.
I've no interest in what modern 40K has become... too narrowly focused on military antics, to self-serious (though I detect some improvements there... such as the advert for Kill Team: Rogue Trader).
But old school 40K, in the first book that established the setting (and Laserburn, which also provided a lot of 40K canon) the setting is pretty wide-open and borrows from all sorts of seemingly contradictory inspirations.
You've got a lot of Star Wars influences, Dune, 2000 AD, Tolkien (via Warhammer Fantasy) and lotsa bits of re-purposed historical stuff.
The trick of running a game in such a setting, for me, would be keeping it properly 'pulpy' and keeping certain tendencies I associate with scifi games at bay.
Those unwanted tendencies are what I've seen creep into just about any Traveller game I've played. Players who want to bring their real-life knowledge of technology or the military to bear on the setting... pixel-bitching about the combat mechanics or the gun stats or something. Complaining that the communications technology doesn't line up with what they know from being tech support agents at a phone company...
Whatever that impulse is, I want to kill it with fire.
One way is to be a firm GM. The other is to be cautious in choosing who I play with. Gun-fondlers and 'preppers' need not apply. I need to stress the FANTASY in science fantasy to them as well... that none of this is meant a serious extrapolations/speculations on the future... no more than any D&D game is a serious exploration of history.

So anyway, diving into original 40K and sucking out the marrow... boiling it down to get the gist of what inspires me about it, as well as Star Wars/Laserburn and old issues of Heavy Metal... then mixing them into a big bowl of something...
I'll probably mix in some of Warcraft's screwy cosmology as well... and maybe drop those worlds in as potential travel stops.
If nothing else, it keeps me off the streets.

Now, as to what system to use...
Well, I own most all of the books for FFG's Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader games... which are happily based on D100... making a conjoinment between them and BRP fairly simple (and there is a fan-made 40K BRP write-up available already). But those books are still, largely, in modern 40K's po-faced mindset... VERY serious.
I need to shove some more of the original Captain Harlock into the Haarlock trilogy.
I could also use Traveller, which I've always liked but wanted to bend towards more gonzo sentiments... but Traveller fans can get really uptight about stuff. There'd be another set of expectations to squash (no, this is not set in the OTU).
Really, BRP seems like it would be easier for me and has a LOT of elements I could drag in from various sourcebooks... Call of Cthulhu being an obvious fit for Dark Heresy.

And yes, I know I'm supposed to concern myself with what my Players would want... but really, if I'm going to run the game, and run it well, it's important that I'm in love with it as much or more than they are... that I have a solid handle on what I want out of the experience. You have to take care of yourself, first and foremost... otherwise you're no use to anyone else anyway.