Alien invasion. You can have the black cop and white cop argue over the radio, but with funnier accents and hats.

I like this idea because given deadly guns, long reload times, and bayonets, you could make a pretty good decision system. Have everybody shoot once and then rush? Hide in cover and get one shot off per turn between your three dudes? All viable, all prone to catastrophic failure.

Aliens need to be this.

You can justify having aliens that can transport people from Mars to Earth not being able to completely steamroll the 1800s by saying equipment, especially big things (tanks, etc), are really expensive to transport and thus rare, or something. Alternatively, aliens successfully take shit over, and the players are doing hit and runs on their weak points.

>>15105636
Wasn't a martian walker taken out by cannon fire or a warship in War of the Worlds?

Why does it have to be steampunk?

Look at Cowboys vs. Aliens. That was regular 18th century tech vs. x-com tech.

>>15105726
Could say that that kind of thing happened early on and humans almost got control of it, so they're highly reluctant to send more.

>>15105726
Yeah, but realistically it shouldn't have been. I mean, the USA can't put people on Mars, but we can blow up literally anything on the planet pretty much instantly. The Martians should have had ridiculous air superiority and range advantages to the point that the humans never see what is exploding them.

Also, seconding real-ish technology vs goggles and gears on everything.

>>15105726
You're thinking of the HMS Thunderchild.
She took out one of the Martian Tripods by ramming it.
Of course, the only reason that they got close enough to do so was because the Martians had never seen a warship before.
As soon as they figured out "oh shit, this thing is hostile", it was heat-ray, zap, and down she does.

>>15105893
>She took out one of the Martian Tripods by ramming it
>Fucking H.G. Wells ripping off Lovecraft

>>15105981
>The Call of Cthulhu: Published in 1928
>The War of The Worlds: Published in 1898

>>15105766
Well, otherwise research isn't very dramatic. And what'd be the justification for being able to zip from Portugal to Moscow as soon as receiving a telegram that aliens are attacking? Hot air balloons?

>Well, otherwise research isn't very dramatic.
"We killed one of their dudes, let's figure out how the gun he was carrying works."

>And what'd be the justification for being able to zip from Portugal to Moscow as soon as receiving a telegram that aliens are attacking?
This occurred to me, and since it's kind of vital to the concept, I'm ok with ULTRA-TRAINS or whatever. But I urge OP to go easy on the steam-mechs and robo-monocles and whatnot. It's a lot more in line with X-COM to have ordinary bullets be scary as fuck.

>>15106043
>that'sthejoke.jpg

>>15106058
Having one crack team of operatives rushing out to all corners of the globe to fight the alien menace would probably be impractical, and hand-waving the distances away with some sort of magic transportation system just doesn't feel right

Instead, you should have a handful of main bases set up near the major cities (London, Paris, Moscow, ect ect) and have the rest of the landscape be protected by a network of local franchises, manned by town militias and trained and supplied by (whatever you end up calling the 19th century X-Com).

The franchises would be able to deal with any minor threats on their own, (and ship back the loot, of course) and if worst comes to worst, hold the line until the PCs get there.

Travel should still take a bit of time, probably in the neighborhood of a couple days if it's any great distance. The rail network would take care of any overland transport, and it would also be a good excuse to give your players their own private train. (armed to the teeth and decked out with the latest technological advancements, of course)

>>15106387
This raises more questions. Are we going for the XCOM thing where everyone starts as rookies? If so, why do we need to ship in rookies at great expense from another area as opposed to local rookies?

Actually that doesn't really make sense in XCOM either. Never mind.

>>15106511
I'd assume that the PCs would be the co-founders and/or commanders of the organization. Distinguished Generals and War Veterans, wealthy industrialists to provide financial banking, mad scientists and engineers and the like, stuff like that.
Rather than BEING the redshirts, they'd be LEADING the redshirts. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that every NPC is just cannon fodder, or you couldn't have a low-ranking squaddie as a PC.

>>15106651
Yeah, but same problem: Why are wealthy backers not either sending telegrams to local mercs, or shipping out the era equivalent of a kick ass swat team?

OP are you running this for the internet? Because if so I want in.

>>15106960
Erm.

Well, no. But the thought does occur to me that this would be better run online.

The only problem is though, well, how to do it.

>>15106716
I suppose an answer could be for that is that players could stat up bases, and have it be basically all war game.

Don't devote funding to London, and put them at risk of signing a treaty with the Neptunians out of irritation? Or take valuable resources from Austro-Hungary to spend there to mollify the royal family?

It does remove the personal touch though, which is what appeals to me more. I suppose I could just set the players up as a local team somewhere in Europe, but I'm far too attached to overmaps. I guess I can't have my cake AND ice cream.

>>15107155
Like you said. Post the big map at a consistent location, have a blog for big updates or something. Maybe an e-mail list?

Battlemode would ideally not be pbp, but I dunno how hard that is.

>>15106716

The issue I think would be they ARE sending a kickass team. It's just what a team of rookies with modern guns can manage, it takes a team with the best that time period can make to match up.

What rules system would this use?

>>15107155
Assuming that the game is run on-line, you have another volunteer. I'd love to be a part of this, even if it's just helping out with the logistics of running the game.

>>15107264
Well, that's very flattering, but to be honest, this is still so high up in the air, it's probably escaped the earth's gravity well.

I imagined this as a little event for my friends, and so, less pressure for things fucking up. I would not know where to begin, to make this thing accessible to others, and then to keep it from running off the rails or death by trolling.

I did also have the dream to one day convert this to a videogame- get things hashed out on the tabletop to get a feel for the mechanics, and understand what should be addressed through the course of it, and then slap something completely awful and sloppy together on my computer.

But basically, what I'm rambling to saying is that if anything happens with this, it's probably going to be happening at the beginning of July, and I doubt that interest will be held through to then. But thanks for the offer, really, it's flattering. I just want to have something of substance enough to deserve it.

>>15107367
I still want in, but if that's not possible, post system/ideas/results and archive them tagged with XCOM.

Do you have anything so far and any specific points you need expanded on?

>>15107877
Okay, quite a bit actually.

I'm most familiar with WoD style storyteller systems. Research rolls are based on scientists- every 10 Funds Unit That Remains Unspecified gets you a die. This is less hiring scientists, and more providing them with money and equipment for research. Roll an 8 or above on that die, and you get a success to researching something. To simplify matters, I've decided that anything that would push the pool beyond ten lets you have a reroll per die. Events may increase cost of dice, decrease number of successes required to research something, etcetera etcetera, drawn from a table I'll be rolling on a bunch. I fucking love rolling on tables.

I intend to apply basically the same system to two other aspects of the game- manufacturing, and lobbying. I decided that, for a bit of fun, that players may be able to lobby their government to change policies or make decisions- like to increase the pool of potential recruits, gain permission to recruit from prisons, to suborn army units under the command of Institute members (I dunno what to call 1800s XCom, the Institute works)-

I have more ideas, but I'll have to write them later. I gotta catch a bus.

>>15108099
You know, one of the big aspects of the original X-Com was getting and maintaining the proper financing for the enterprise -- trying to keep all of the involved nations happy, lest they decide to cut your funding and leave you with even LESS resources with which to fight the aliens.
Or, you could always just build laser cannons by the trainload and sell them for massive profits, but that's another story.

You should try to implement something like that -- every in-game month, have your players called before a board of representatives (one from each funding nation) to justify their spending and actions. Hopefully this will be more involved than just a single lobbying role. Politics! Schmoozing the representatives! Bribery?

I'm interested to see how you're going to cover the sale of manufactured goods and captured alien tech. It was strongly implied in the game that there was a lot of black-market and under-the-table dealings going on.
I'd love to see a situation where the players, desperate for money, offload some alien gadgets to a rather shady customer, only to have it come back to bite them in the ass later.

>>15108459
Oh, but of course. I already theorize that many traveling circuses and freak shows will have a great deal of new ghoulish exhibits soon enough.

I want it less of an organized and automated front as far as fund raising goes though- I want the players to throw grandiose feasts for padishahs, balls for ambassadors, and send compromising photos to MPs. The question is though, how much of that is justifiable when there's an alien friggin' invasion.

The XCom aliens were terrorists, up to mysterious deeds, occasionally even striking out against cities on terror missions, but with no real military goal or war aim other than to weaken humanity's resolve.

Somehow, having that kind of attitude in a game set during the 19th century seems almost too modern. I'd imagine that the governments of the era would be all for building giant cannons to add some significantly larger craters to Mars.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Just trying to imagine how the governments of Victoria's Europe, in the midst of colonial ambitions, being targeted for alien colonial ambitions is something that I have to admit I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. It'd almost seem farcical to have players forced to beg medal studded, monocle wearing, puffy ex-colonels and Important Men of State for more money to fight the aliens that were ravaging the continent. Maybe if they were competing against other parallel alien fighting forces? But that seems, again, too comedic.

>>15110210
Well, (as far as the original game is concerned) it's been theorized that X-Com was no more than a token effort to stop the invasion, and that each nation was planning on fighting the Martians themselves.

Given the rampant nationalism and colonialism present in the 1800's, this would only serve to make that explanation all the more likely.
Each funder would be too busy raising their own armies and working on their own outlandish military projects to think about letting The Institute have a go at the coffers.
They're all just waiting for you to fail, so that [Great Britain, The French Empire, The German Fatherland, The Russian Motherland, ect ect] can rise up and save the day!

>>15110542
This is good.

Are there fighty mechanics/concepts yet?

>>15111365
GURPS Napoleon?

You might want to read Scarlet Traces.

>>15111365
If this game were to be run in-person, the only proper way to do the actual UFO battles would be to use miniatures on a grid-based map. You would probably lose the X-Com "feel" any other way.

Problem is -- the idea of doing this on the internet has been thrown around quite a lot, and I'm not sure one could make such a system work in that medium.

>>15111557
VASSAL?

There's some other RPG online program...Thingy... Can't remember the name of it though.

Stepping up to the 20th Century and the world of Diesel you find alien fighters circa WW@ with the anime Kishin Hedan /Kishan Corps where they have Giant Mechs to fight the alien powered by strange alien modules. problem is they take a hell of a lot of power(popping vacuum tubes everywhere! ) and when active actually *attract* the aliens. Although it's the wrong time and tech you could get some ideas from this.
Ditto League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (volume 2) deals with the menace of the Red Planet.
>>15105636
not an entirely bad idea..
They could be sort of based on Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers villains. Or they could grey brain slugs with tentacles.
>>15105839
They may lack air superiority as they might never have really developed flight on their atmosphere thin world.

Sticking with Wells for a bit

a little lest retro as a spacesuit design....

and of course a vintage diving suit to protect in all the best ways

They come in peace.

not an alien but threw it in anyway.. circa 1910

Seriously - so much like a big Daddy it hurts.

a lot of diving suits I know.. but what else would aliens wear (if they had space suits.)

oh shit this is awesome, OP, don't give up

from "The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne"

>>15111885
not actually OP..
but I REALLY like Wells and Verne and happen to have some *stuff*
(I'm currently working on getting minis to play the X-com boardgame.)

Would a 19th C have aeroplanes?
if they were "high tech" possibly...
or blimps n rocketpacks.

>>15111922
I think we could afford a little anachronism here and there. Having early planes as high-technology or the creation of some mad tinkerer with Government or Institution funding shouldn't be a problem.

Of course, once we get our hands on and manage to reverse-engineer alien technology, all bets are off. I was personally thinking about a flying battleship built around an alien anti-gravity device.

>>15112009
this and this are more pulp-era...

1933 deep sea madness

kill him my robot!!!

>>15105893
An artillery brigade takes down a tripod earlier on, and Thuderchild kills one with its guns and then another by ramming it whilst sinking (after getting heat ray'd)

Am tempted to start posting E.R.Burroughs version of Martians (eg sexy n red or multi-armed) so going to bed now.

>>15112061
okay one.. and it's even "worksafe"

>>15105436X-Com style gameplay set in the 19th century. With (And I realize this is just begging for scorn) steampunk elements to fill in for skyrangers, heavy plasma, etcetera etcetera. Essentially, to allow any sort of dynamic technology increases.


IF IT WAS MAYAN-COM AND YOU HAVE TO LEAD YOUR JAGUAR WARRIORS AGAINST THE ALIENS FROM ACROSS THE OCEAN, THAT WOULD BE COOL

IF A HORSE BITES U U TURN INTO HOERS!

>>15112134
as I mentioned when I started dumping and saying I wasn't OP that I myself was currently getting minis to play the board game
here's the boardgame geek link
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18206/x-com-tactical

.my questions about minis in a thread.
http://quest.lv/kusaba/tg/res/316653.html

a guy who has done some modeling based on the game
http://ljshobbyspot.blogspot.com/2011/02/15mm-x-com-farm-game-board-sectoids.html

a thread at TMP
http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=192417
and someone else s attempt to make a x-com like boardgame.
http://lasthussar.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/project-xenocide-a-xcom-style-wargame-campaign/