I have always wanted to see a Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell style game about the rediscovery of magic. Ars Magica’s core systems always felt like a good fit but hard to translate into a more modern setting, and does not do justice to the core element of social status.
What piece of media do you wish was an RPG?
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The expansion to Good Society does Norrell & Strange: https://storybrewers.itch.io/good-society-expansion-bundle
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I love this book called Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. It’s about a family of itinerant carnival workers and sideshow performers in the waning days of an era in which traveling carnivals could work.
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And just yesterday I discovered there’s a board game…
Welcome @Dan_the_Human - there’s a PbtA games in development called Crossroads Carnival that might work though it has a supernatural edge.
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Nice. I’ll have to look that up. Thanks:jack_o_lantern:
Yup, Crossroads Carnival can definitely do Geek Love. Geek Love has a telekinetic kid in it, after all. 
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Oh I’d be so into a Charm of Magpies game! Or a game based on any of her books, really! I’m thinking Spectred Isle would be a fun way to play with mythology/legend/magic while also dealing with a society in the aftermath of war.
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From what I here, The Sandman can be handled by Nobilis. I have never played or read it but according to everything I have seen, it is well regarded.
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The Night Circus…
Interstellar…
Ex Machina…
Arrival…The Day the Earth Stood Still… Iron Giant (I am working on these last 3 currently)
Pysch or Chuck the tv shows
Continuum
Orphan Black
Gargantua and the Verdurous Planet
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Having just finished Blame! I have an intense desire for a somber, wandering sci-fi/apocalypse game. Something like Trollbabe with wandering NPCs that aren’t necessarily working together and the dreariness of a transhuman existance.
Of course, there is The Song of Fire and Ice Rpg based on either the movie or books
There are a bunch that I’d love to see:
Any film by Jeunet, especially Delicatessen or City of Lost Children
various Italo Calvino works, especially the Cosmicomics stories, or (although I’m not sure how it would be done) Invisible Cities–something using Tarot cards inspired by The Castle of Crossed Destinies could be fun
Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things
The Lost Room, although it basically feels like a low-level Unknown Armies campaign already
The Tanis or Rabbits podcasts
Jeff Noon’s Vurt books
I could go on for a while
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My choice is Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing (or more broadly, the entire Canopus in Argos series).
Cosmic forces vying for the hearts and minds of a planet’s population, and cosmic (or angelic) messengers intervening in the lives of ordinary people are not unusual themes. But I think that deciding how to represent the psychic, religious, and cosmic forces at work, as well as how these various galactic empires and bureaucracies might function, would be a really intriguing part of the game.
I could imagine using Microscope to run a game in this setting, but I feel like a custom set of rules that help evoke the feel of the novel would be more interesting (to me at least).
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Such a perfect question.
There are so many things but what I can’t stop thinking about lately is something like Cthulhu Dark that captures the best of r/thalassophobia, r/submechanophobia, r/TheDepthsBelow, r/HeavySeas, etc.
Basically: exploration, wonder, awe, horror, and then helplessness.
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I’ve always wanted a “House of Cards” style politics game. Where you can do purely social and political attacks to pushing a rival in front of a train. I just have no idea how to do it
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Sounds like something that wouldn’t be too painful to mutate out of Dogs in the Vineyard
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I think played right you could do this with Urban Shadows. Might have to hack the hell out of some of those moves though.
I did just that with Smallville (Cortex Prime) and it worked like a charm.
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