Game WISH 84: Five Games
Game WISH 84 asks:
What five games would you love to run/play if you had a willing group and a weekly time slot?
Transhuman Space
This is the 'Powered by GURPS' game set in the year 2100, and supported in depth. It's 'realistic' hard SF rather than 50s space opera. There's no FTL space travel, but mankind have colonised the solar system, Mars is being terraformed, and there are a host of habitats both in the asteroid belt and in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are no aliens, but there is a plethora of genetic modifications, Bioroids (think Blade Runner replicants) and AIs. There's also plenty to do on Earth, as if the lawless frontier of space wasn't enough. In many ways, it's very cyberpunk, especially in the 2100 equivalent of the third world.
Hero Quest
I greatly enjoyed the Runequest campaign I played in a few years back, which sadly fell apart when I moved north. Glorantha is still the most richly detailed fantasy setting out there, and blows the formulaic Forgotten Realms style pabulum out of the water. While Runequest was a good, innovative system in it's day, it's rather dated twenty years later. HQ is a much more streamlined system, one for the Noughties rather than the late 70s.
Alternate Earths
I love the alternate histories in the two GURPS Alternate Earths books, with a secret struggle between dimension hoppers from rival parallels across dozens on different worlds. If I was GMing, I probably wouldn't use the Homeline/Centrum setting 'straight'. I'd be tempted to make it a little darker, perhaps introducing a third, more sinister set of bad guys, and I would certainly toss the cheesier elements like the ridiculous "Time Tours".
Traveller Scouts
This would be favourite option for a game set in the Traveller universe. Travel to strange new worlds, encounter weird and wonderful societies, and get into all sorts of problems. While you may be in the pay of the mighty Third Imperium, once on a remote planet, you're really on your own, and have to solve problems using your own initiative.
Kalyr
My own homebrewed gameworld in which I not only run two online games, but several convention style oneshots as well. Despite all this, it's still not worn smooth from overuse. Two ideas I'd still love to try are a pair of high powered games, one centring on a party of high level psis, the other a political intrigue game of scheming nobles set in the Vohrleyn empire.
That's the top five. If I had to choose even more, I'd include In Nomine, one of the few 'high powered' games I really like, Call of Cthulhu, although it's more suited for convention one-shots, and some sort of historical fantasy combining supernatural elements with 'real' history; possibly along the lines of Mage:Sorcerer's Crusade. (but definitely not 7th Sea!)