The Grand Tour - A Game About Theoretical Magicians
This is something I had been fiddling with earlier in the year. I tried running it as a PBP and it honestly didn't go very well, so consider this more a proof of concept: a game I tried to will into existence but didn't quite materialise correctly.
It is heavily based on the Empire games Beat to Quarters and Duty & Honour, and highly brainstormed with many people from the OSR Discord which I shall not name so as not to exclude anyone. This is how it goes:
What the game is all about
The premise is heavily inspired by Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Jane Austen, Fathers and Sons, and the videogame 80 Days.
It's the year 1862, in London, and the Learned Society for Theoretical Magicians has just announced that, in the next World's Fair of 1867, they will be sponsoring an exhibition for the best work of theoretical magic presented! And so, you and your frenemies have decided to embark on a Europe-trotting adventure in search of proper magical books, phenomena, and creatures.
Just one small problem: magic can't be done for about 400 years now, so you'll have to rely entirely on second hand books, and you're half sure that no one actually cares about the exposition. But hey, it's a great chance to rub elbows with rich people, get involved in drama, and maybe investigate some paranormal phenomena.
The basic gist was to give the players something to work towards with a wink and a nod, knowing that the game is actually about mixing with people, getting involved in romantic plots and the like. More Tolstoy than Harry Potter.
I had a pointcrawl of Europe prepared with the main cities, ranked from 1 star (the main nodes, with actual stuff happening) down to 4 stars, which are just transitory nodes or may be necessitated to break up long voyages. Each node also contained a bigger area than the city itself where adventures could be set. If you're curious, I had divided them as such:
1 Star: Belgium, Berlin, Constantinople, Firenze, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, Venice, and Vienna.
2 Stars: Budapest, Cologne, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Geneva, Lisbon, Milan, Moscow, Naples, Stockholm, The Hague, Warsaw.
3 Stars: Athens, Belgrade, Bordeaux, Bucharest, Dublin, Edinburgh, Genoa, Hamburg, Helsinki, Kiev, Koblenz, Marseille, Messina, Porto, Prague, Split, Turin, Valencia, Vilnius, Wroclaw, Zagreb.
4 Stars: Basel, Danzig, Hotel Adriano (from Porco Rosso lol), Odessa, Oslo, Riga, and Strasbourg.
The actual game
I have chopped it up in parts for ease of reading.
Part I is about the actual character generation, resolution mechanics, and some spot rules like combat (which I initially omitted from the players, as I didn't want them to know they had such a procedure available). This is the most derivative part, as it is mostly a collage of different systems.
Part II is the real meat of the game, and the part I was most interested in developing. My idea with it was to develop a game structured around procedures but with social mechanics in mind, rather than combat or exploration. This is the one I recommend actually reading.
Finally, in Part III I deploy the itinerant NPCs I had planned for the game, which may or may not be gameable for yourself. These were meant to be recurring people in their lives, with points of injunction pre-scripted. I would likely also track them on the map to some degree and figure out what happened when they met other NPCs, whether the PCs were around for it or not, thus being a source of letters and interesting happenings in the background.
I hope you can find in these pages something of value.