What’s the campaign you REALLY want to run to conclusion but haven’t yet been able to do?
I want to run a full Wield game that uses Microscope to build the Age of the World and then the players get to wreck it. The game we played of this ended a bit prematurely but was amazing.
I want to do another Ars Magica game and a Deadwood inspired Western.
(Gamma World/Mutant Year Zero using these incredibly giant and detailed soviet maps (7 in total) I have of the city of Chicago. Everyone is a convict and they can only win their freedom by pulling artifacts from the Stalker-like irradiated ruins of the ancient city. Many rival teams of adventurers (3-4) run simultaneously in competitive fashion in a city wide hexcrawl/megadungeon.
Mikel, sounds cool! How did/would the players wreck the world?
My dream campaign:
Indiana Jones with the serial numbers filed off (or not filed off).
Globe-trotting pulpy adventures.
Real-feeling mysteries of deep time to explore and solve!
Wield is a game where you play sentient, ancient items of power and the wielder of another player’s item. The wielder has a Destiny they are supposed to accomplish but the item is able to override that. The unspoken assumption of the game is that the items (Vatcha) wreck destiny.
I’d create 10 wielders at a time. Half of them would tie into the part of the timeline we were in. The other half wouldn’t. The players would roll for the Wielder and every time a Wielder died, I’d fast forward 50-70 years. (Wielders are disposable.) As you move forward, small changes start to demolish the timeline.
In the campaign I ran, they literally wrecked the entire tiimeline in the 2nd session because a lot rode on an early event. It was awesome. We went back to the Microscope and rewrote what was supposed to happen no sow they could continue to wreck things.
Monster of the Week, say 4-6 sessions, then discuss an epilogue.
Based on the epilogue discussion make love letters to start part two.
Then do the same characters 3-6 years later with Urban Shadows.
That’s so metal.
You guys (Blake and Mikel) are finding cool RPG combo’s the way some tactical players find cool feat/ability combo’s.
Run a campaign of Night’s Black Agents with one group concurrently with a campaign of Undying with another group, and figure out some way to make them collide in a way that doesn’t make my head hurt.
I have a few.
Adult gamer schedules put the kibosh on all of these so far.
okay a few thoughts -
1-Nights Black Agents deal with vampire coven, and then the NBA go elsewhere. But back in town the Undying group are asked to move in to find out what happened/increase their turf.
2-Undying group are part of a coven who setup other supernaturals and the NBA end up unwittingly working for them. Will have to watch out for metagaming with this one.
3-there is some weird magical disease/supernatural phenomena effecting mortals or supernaturals, and one team is dealing with the effects, the other is trying to find a cure/the source.
Wow, you folks are really thinking out of the box!
I want to take my lame-ass answer back… 
Any of those could work! But the real risk of headaches as I see it is getting two campaigns’ worth of players in the same place at the same time, and figuring which rule system to use for their climactic final encounter. 
I have a partially prepped Fourth Age of Middle Earth epic campaign that I’ve wanted to run since before the movies came out (I think I initially started prepping with the Decipher Lord of the Rings RPG or MERP shortly after the films). Adventures in Middle Earth has re-awoken that desire in me, I just need to find the right group. I need to find the right group of Tolkien fans though to run it for, because it’s definitely a love letter to the Silmarillion, the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game/Middle Earth CCG, and the BBC radio drama of Lord of the Rings that were so formative in my young years.
My dream campaign so to speak is some sort of fantasy game that has more emotional stuff attached to it. So something like Monsterhearts in terms of play, but in a different setting. In no particular order:
first thought that comes to mind is Harry Potter - Monsterhearts, so keep the hogwarts stuff, but say 20 years before Harry got there a group unusual teenagers went through…
My collaborative creation of a cosmology hack of The Quiet Year…
…lead into a long game of Microscope about an Atlantis-like archipelago world spanning empire’s rise and fall (I mean sink!)…
…lead into a 30+ session of Burning Wheel about a province on the mainland and how it deals in the power vacuum left behind…
…lead into a game of Godsend that plays out the following ages and end of it all…
…lead into a game of Polaris about the last bastion in the ice long after…
…lead into a game of The Cold Ruins of Lastlife to play in the ruins of it all.
Maybe sprinkle in a campaign of The Sword, the Crown and the Unspeakable Power during the end days of “Atlantis” or a game of Follow or AW: Fallen Empires here or there to glimpse other places during the Burning Wheel part to mix things up.
A full rebellion, start to finish + epilogue. Setting doesn’t really matter, but preferably something fantastical.
I really want to do something in the vein of Doom Patrol (the Morrison and Pollack runs and current show) maybe with MASKS or build a BelongingOutsideBelonging game about it.
Other than that thanks to the Gauntlet I have been able to run a lot of games I have had the hankering to run.
Nothing particularly wild on my wish list. For me, the dream is largely about campaigns that I don’t have the time or resources to run, because of real life getting in the way.
I’ve always wanted to run something in the vein of the Great Pendragon Campaign (though maybe not literally the Great Pendragon Campaign) — epic, multigenerational, and set against the backdrop of sweeping change — but it’s hard enough to manage scheduling and people’s short attention spans (mine included) just for short campaigns or one-offs. Something that might last years feels impossible.
My other dream is a proper West Marches-style campaign with dozens of players exploring a territory. I love the idea of stretching my worldbuilding muscles and creating something huge, cohesive, and mysterious. But I’ve had trouble getting the large and self-motivated group of players that requires, and I can’t imagine having the free time to spend creating the sort of world that would make running a West Marches-type game fun for me.
I think as a designer and player, I’m almost always trying to find ways to generate the feeling of these two ideas in a lighter, more accessible package.
There are so many. (if any of my players find this, DO NOT READ!)
I am happy to say that I am running one just now and it’s going great. A fantasy campaign set in Yoon Suin populated with all the most interesting OSR adventures. The Apocalypse happens half way through the game and play continues in a style similar to the Bastion videogame.
Others include…
Running the Tribe 8 story arc (with Whitehack)
A Groundhog Day fantasy campaign looping the same three days as the PCs level up and find new shortcuts to travel further and further from their starting point.
A Dawn of Rebellion Star Wars campaign in the style of Rogue One. Desperate rebels fighting an ever stronger Empire. When the timeline reaches the Battle of Yavin, chuck canon out the window and have Luke die failing to destroy the Death Star. Now whoever is left has to fight the Empire without Luke, Leia and the rest.
That should keep me going for another decade or so.
Two dual campaigns in the same world:
I’d also love a big sprawling Mecha War Anime game using Beam Saber as the primary game and a bunch from the Sad Mech Jam to worldbuild and flesh out other parts of the galaxy.